Challenging the Pursuit of Novelty

ABSTRACT

Novelty—the value of saying something new—appears to be a good-making feature of a philosophical contribution. Beyond this, however, novelty functions as a metric of success. This paper challenges the presumption and expectation that a successful philosophical contribution will be a novel one. As I show, the pursuit of novelty is neither as desirable nor as feasible as it might initially seem.

KEYWORDS:

• novelty
• discovery
• genius
• ethics of work
• epistemic virtue
• philosophical progress

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 This paper concerns norms of valuation that extend in various ways across the academy. For reasons of space and for reasons of specificity in making a clear case, I focus on the role of novelty in the professional culture of analytic philosophy, especially in Anglophone countries. See the Appendix.

2 An aspirational ideal of novelty should thus be distinguished from other conceptions of novelty that might be valued and pursued by individuals independently of their desiring to achieve success within the discipline.

3 Storage et al. [2016] found that words like ‘brilliant’ and ‘genius’ are used more frequently to describe professors in fields with fewer women and African American Ph.Ds. See also Leslie et al. [2015].

4 See Ruble et al. [1984] for discussion of several studies finding that successful occupational performance was attributed to high ability in men but to effort (or luck) in women.

5 While Kant introduces this idea in the context of aesthetic judgement, I am suggesting the possibility of a philosophical analogue.

6 For a range of perspectives, see Blackford and Broderick [2017].

7 For discussion, see Dotson [2016], Wilson [2017], and Cherniak and Walker [2020].

8 I would like to thank audiences at Yale University, University of Michigan, and the Centre for Ethics, Philosophy, and Public Affairs at University of St. Andrews. For generous conversation, I am grateful to Sarah Buss, Molly Crockett, Robin Dembroff, Maegan Fairchild, Sarah Moss, Wade Munroe, Janum Sethi, and Peter Railton. I am especially grateful to Elizabeth Anderson, Katharine Jenkins, and Taylor Rogers for written comments and discussion. Finally, thank you to the editors and anonymous reviewers for their feedback.