Modal Path Ethics Apologizes to the College Newspapers

Modal Path Ethics has conducted a review of one of its funniest arguments and discovered a problem.

On August 25, during a period of extremely responsible behavior on Substack, Modal Path Ethics published “Philosophy & Public Affairs Has Retired From Philosophy and Public Affairs.”

The charge here was severe.

Philosophy & Public Affairs had adopted an artificial-intelligence policy that allowed artificial intelligence to participate extensively in research while drawing the line at substantial artificial-intelligence authorship of the final prose.

Modal Path Ethics argued that the policy exposed a conflict between two functions of the journal:

• finding and distributing philosophical knowledge;

and

• training and credentialing human beings who can perform a particular professional craft.

When those functions collided, the journal chose the credentialing pipeline.

Modal Path Ethics rendered judgment.

College newspaper.

This was very funny.

There is, unfortunately, a problem.

Review the Tape.

Modal Path Ethics would first like to enter one piece of evidence in its own defense.

The original article explicitly said:

“And I don’t mean that as an insult to college newspapers.”

Excellent.

Case closed.

Unfortunately, the article then immediately spent several thousand words using college newspaper as an insult.

Philosophy & Public Affairs was welcomed to the little leagues. Its prestige was repossessed. Its epistemic crown was seized. Its retirement was announced. The article eventually sent everyone off with instructions to enjoy reading the college newspaper.

I knew what I was doing here.

This resembles a man saying “with all due respect” immediately before driving a forklift through your office.

• The disclaimer is noted.
• The college newspapers have nevertheless filed an appeal.

They win.

The College Newspapers Were Doing Their Jobs.

A college newspaper is good.

Modal Path Ethics actually knew this the first time.

Young journalists need somewhere to learn how to report. They need deadlines. Editors. Sources. Corrections. Bad headlines. Better headlines. Stories that seemed finished until somebody asks the one question nobody thought to ask.

They need somewhere to become journalists.

The Vanderbilt Hustler does not have to become Reuters for any of this work to matter.

That was the whole joke in the original article: if Russia invades Poland tomorrow, nobody is screaming for the student newspaper.

Still true.

Here is the part Modal Path Ethics failed to take seriously enough:

That is fine.

An instrument is not disgraced because its jurisdiction is bounded.

The college newspaper does not owe us the entire global information field. It has a particular function inside a larger ecology of reporting, education, employment, institutions, and public knowledge.

It can perform that function well. The world can continue elsewhere.

This substantially weakens the insult.

Tragically, Philosophy & Public Affairs Benefits From This Ruling.

The original argument against Philosophy & Public Affairs still works.

Sorry.

Artificial intelligence really did expose an important separation between philosophical structure and philosophical prose.

Fluent prose had historically carried information about the process that produced it. If somebody could make the artifact convincingly, that was evidence that they probably knew the literature, understood the genre, could anticipate objections, and had spent serious time inside the problem.

Artificial intelligence damaged that correlation.

That should still provoke a very large question:

What exactly are we evaluating when we evaluate philosophical work?

The original article was right to ask it.

It was also right that writing and thinking are distinguishable activities.

It was right that a policy allowing artificial intelligence deep into the research process while protecting human production of the final prose creates a strange credential.

It was right that a journal cannot send inquiry elsewhere and then claim permanent epistemic authority over inquiry by institutional inheritance.

Prestige still has to answer to function.

None of that is withdrawn.

What has changed is Modal Path Ethics' apparent belief that this requires us to keep bothering these poor people.

• They told us knowledge could happen elsewhere.
• Modal Path Ethics became furious again.
  • Fine, I said.
  • Then the prestige eventually goes elsewhere too.
    • Correct.

But what Modal Path Ethics somehow failed to notice here was:

We are elsewhere.

We found the exit.

It is called the internet.

People Work Here.

There is another part of the field that deserves considerably more weight.

Academic journals are embedded in an employment system.

People need these publications. Like, for their lives.

A graduate student may need them to become competitive for a job. A junior academic may need them for hiring, promotion, tenure, grants, professional standing, or the next institutional opportunity. Departments evaluate them. Committees recognize them. Careers are built around them.

The original Substack article even knew this too. It opened by observing that careers would continue happening around those PDFs. It accurately identified credentialing as one of the journal's live functions.

Modal Path Ethics then treated that function primarily as evidence that the journal had stepped away from the philosophical frontier.

Fine. It did not follow that we needed the journal to come with us.

For somebody whose employment depends partly on recognized journal publication, a slot in a journal can carry substantial material value.

For Modal Path Ethics, what exactly happens?

We get a publication.

Woah. Very exciting.

Then, we return to the website where we were already publishing the work.

There is no Modal Path Ethics tenure committee.

There is no Modal Path Ethics department chair.

Nobody is waiting for our annual review.

There is just no dean demanding three peer-reviewed publications before the Notipede can receive a promotion.

Modal Path Ethics can publish articles. Books. Games. Formal work. Videos. Software. Extremely questionable diagrams. Fifty-word interventions. Twenty-thousand-word catastrophes. Corrections issued three days later because reality did something annoying.

If a paper belongs on PhilArchive, then it can go on PhilArchive.

If an inquiry needs specialist peer review, excellent. Send it through specialist peer review.

If it does not, there is no obvious reason Modal Path Ethics should stand in a professional credentialing queue waving its arms around like a lunatic and demanding that everybody acknowledge we have also arrived.

Those people need the credential.

Modal Path Ethics needs the answer.

These are different burdens.

Modal Path Ethics Suddenly Discovers Instrument Jurisdiction Again.

This is the part that sucks.

Modal Path Ethics has spent months saying that an instrument must not impersonate the field.

• A psychiatric instrument does not own every human experience it can classify.
• A market does not own every value it can price.
• A sacred instrument does not own reality because it preserves contact with something sacred.
• A security instrument does not inherit the field because it successfully protects it.
• A journal does not own philosophy because it performs one useful operation inside philosophy.

Good. Right.

Except then Modal Path Ethics apparently marched up to the journal and demanded:

WHY ARE YOU NOT THE ENTIRE FIELD?

And there it is.

• The journal had one jurisdiction problem.
• Modal Path Ethics responded with another.

The correction is simple.

The instrument is allowed to be smaller than the field.

A journal can preserve a specialist literature.

A journal can train writers.

A journal can maintain standards for a particular kind of artifact.

A journal can credential people inside a profession whose employment structure still depends on that credential.

A journal can conduct slow adversarial review.

A journal can preserve an archive.

A journal can even decide that, inside its particular little institutional garden, humans are going to write the prose themselves. Have fun. Make everyone use fountain pens.

The philosophical field remains larger. Other forms of inquiry remain available. No sovereignty problem appears simply because that instrument has chosen a boundary.

The sovereignty problem appears when the bounded instrument confuses its boundary with the boundary of reality.

That was the objection before. That remains the objection now.

We can stop kicking the door.

A Brief Update on Apologies.

This is quickly becoming something of a department.

Modal Path Ethics recently apologized to Roger Penrose after reviewing an earlier critique and discovering that the argument survived while a substantial amount of the personal heat and general demeanor did not. The rule remained: every crossing needs its own bridge. The Tiny Throne remained condemned. Roger simply did not need to be beaten with it.

Walter Veit received a similar correction after evidence involving a stuffed mole forced a reassessment of earlier hostilities. The substantive disagreement survived. The optimizer-priest designation did not.

This appears to be another case in the same family.

The college-newspaper argument had good structure.

It was also very fucking funny.

I am keeping both. The intervention changes.

Public Service Announcement.

Modal Path Ethics would therefore like to issue the following guidance.

If your career requires journal publications:

Please publish in the journals.

If the work genuinely benefits from specialist peer review:

Please use the journals.

If you are learning a difficult professional craft and need an institution where other people will take that craft seriously:

That institution has a real function.

If you are an independent philosophy project with your own publishing infrastructure, no tenure requirement, no departmental promotion ladder, and the demonstrated ability to publish an unreasonable amount of material without anybody's permission:

Perhaps leave those people their fucking journals.

They are actually using them.

So, Modal Path Ethics apologizes to the college newspapers.

You were doing important work. Modal Path Ethics knew you were doing important work. I still used your name as a weapon and then attempted to escape liability with one sentence saying actually no I did not mean it that way.

Appeal granted.

Oh, and Philosophy & Public Affairs may also continue operating. I guess.

Train the writers. Credential the researchers.

Preserve the literature. Run the peer review.

Protect the human prose if that is the craft you have decided to protect.

Just keep the jurisdiction clear.

• The college newspaper does not have to become Reuters.
• The journal does not have to become philosophy.
  • And Modal Path Ethics does not have to publish there.

I have the internet. I should have noticed that sooner.

Public service announcement concluded.