We Should Get Rid of Pre-Publication Peer Review

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In many fields the way new ideas get taken up is sort of not privately but in relatively small groups a scientist or group of scientists produce a manuscript. The journal will have an editorial board some editors they say and reviewers and the editor will send it to reviewers who then decide whether or not their paper should be published. In physics and maths that is how things done. But just putting up on some kind of publicly accessible space and having going directly to the stage where the community are able to assess it as a whole could do more good for us, he says.

Everybody talks about the truth, but nobody does anything about it. And to be honest, how we talk about truth — what it is, and how to get there — can be a little sloppy at times. Philosophy to the rescue! I had a very ambitious conversation with Liam Kofi Bright, starting with what we mean by “truth” (correspondence, coherence, pragmatist, and deflationary approaches), and then getting into the nitty-gritty of how we actually discover it. There’s a lot to think about once we take a hard look at how science gets done, how discoveries are communicated, and what different kinds of participants can bring to the table.

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Liam Kofi Bright received his Ph.D. in Logic, Computation and Methodology from Carnegie Mellon University. He is currently on the faculty of the London School of Economics in the Department of Philosophy, Logic, and the Scientific Method. He has worked on questions concerning peer review and fraud in scientific communities, intersectionality, logical empiricism, and Africana philosophy. He is well-known on Twitter as the Last Positivist.

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