Marsili, Rehren & Baumgartner, "Linguistic Inequity in Academic Philosophy"

30 January 2024
Linguistic Justice Society Webinars
Neri Marsili (UNED), Paul Rehren (Utrecht) & Lucien Baumgartner (Zurich), "Linguistic Inequity in Academic Philosophy: A Big Data Analysis of Publication Trends (1975-2021)"
hiw.kuleuven.b...
ABSTRACT: There is a growing worry that authors from Non English-Speaking (NES) countries face biases or unfair disadvantages in academic philosophy publishing. In our talk, we use a big data approach to investigate this worry. We collected meta-data from over 100,000 philosophy articles, published in 223 English-language journals between 1975 to 2021. We used two proxies to infer the native language of the author: the author’s institutional address(es) and the location of the university that granted the author’s PhD. We found that while NES authors are slightly underrepresented in philosophy journals overall, this disparity becomes more pronounced when focusing on top-tier journals, where NES philosophers are significantly less represented than their native counterparts. We propose and investigate potential explanations for this finding, including: active discrimination; publishing cultures and institutional incentives; and differences in productivity levels, language quality, and areas of interest. To conclude, we discuss the potential implications of our results for the discipline and the publishing industry.
SPEAKER BIOS:
Lucien Baumgartner is a PhD student at the University of Zurich. He works primarily in experimental and theoretical Philosophy of language. His research focuses on normative expressions in natural language, such as thick concepts, dual character concepts, and normative generics. He also works on integrating computational corpus analysis into experimental philosophy.
Neri Marsili is a "Talent Attraction" Research Fellow at UNED, in Madrid, where he is currently leading a 5-year interdisciplinary project on online disinformation. His primary areas of research include philosophy of language, epistemology, aesthetics, and experimental philosophy. His work has been published in journals such as *Cognition*, *The Journal of Philosophy*, *Philosophical Quarterly*, *Mind & Language*, *The Journal of Pragmatics*, *Philosophical Studies*, *Synthese*, and *Analysis*.
Paul Rehren is a PhD student in philosophy at Utrecht University. I work on various topics at the intersection of the behavioral sciences and philosophy, including moral judgment and reasoning, free will, punishment and moral progress. I'm also really interested in methodology (both in philosophy and elsewhere), and in the sociology of philosophy.
LJS Webinar convenors: Çağla Çimendereli (Syracuse), Filippo Contesi (Milan/Barcelona), Sergi Morales-Gálvez (Valencia), Yael Peled (Max Planck/Inland Norway)

[@rakeshnambiar6831]

Wonderful analysis.