How People Cite Old Papers in Philosophy vs. Psychology

Philosophers and psychologists have very different practices when it comes to citing papers that were written decades ago. In philosophy, the norm is that you are supposed to carefully read those papers and accurately explain what they say. By contrast, in psychology, people typically make less of an effort to accurately summarize the ideas in decades-old papers, and it’s pretty common to cite something without ever having read it. (Of all the many psychologists who have cited Gordon Allport’s 1954 book The Nature of Prejudice, how many have read even a single page?)

Looking at this difference in practices, the obvious first thought would be that what the philosophers are doing is clearly better. After all, the philosophers are the ones accurately describing the papers they cite! What could be more obvious than the claim that it’s better to be accurate than inaccurate? I certainly see the force of this point, but in my view, the situation is more complex. There is at least something to be said on the other side.

As a first step into this question, consider cases where people go much farther in the direction of what psychology does right now. In talking about math, we might speak of a “Riemann integral,” a “Galois group,” the “Peano axioms,” but no one would think that this kind of talk needs to accurately capture what these mathematicians said in their original papers. It would be seen as absurd if someone tried to object to the content of an ordinary calculus lecture by quoting from one of Riemann’s original texts and arguing that the lecture wasn’t faithful to it.

It’s easy to see what is so important about this aspect of our practices. In many cases, the great insights of centuries past were giving us a glimpse of something that was only fully appreciated later. So it’s deeply important that we allow these things to be refined over the decades rather than forcing students to learn them in the form in which they happened to appear when first introduced.

The key point now is that something similar might also be said about the sort of ordinary workaday research that many of us do all the time. As an illustration: it sometimes happens that I wrote a paper on some topic twenty years ago, but then subsequent work by other researchers showed that I didn’t get things quite right. In such cases, my papers tend to be cited in very different ways in philosophy vs. psychology. Philosophers read my papers and accurately explain the view I originally defended. By contrast, psychologists do something else, which sometimes involves citing my old papers without reading them. This practice might appear to be obviously lazy or sloppy when described in that way, but I do think there is something about it that is worth considering.

Caricaturing just a bit, the approach works like this: Psychologists first try to figure out what is actually true; then they write a sentence that they think captures the truth; then, after that sentence, they cite various previous papers. Some of those papers literally defend the view stated in the sentence itself, but others are cited just because the authors want to give credit to previous work that they see as a helpful stepping stone that led up to finding the truth. So, when it comes to my old papers, they might think that something I wrote decades ago was one of those stepping stones, but given all the research that’s been done subsequently, they might think it’s not worth it to go back and read that old paper now. So they might cite the paper without knowing precisely what it actually says.

I totally get why people would think there is something weird or fishy about this. Strictly speaking, there’s a sense in which the citation itself is inaccurate. (It seems to be saying that an old paper defended a particular view, when in reality that precise view was only articulated many years later.) But it also feels like the drive to be accurate about this stuff is moving us away from what we really should be caring about. Perhaps what we see in the seemingly slapdash way that psychologists cite old papers is a kind of half-formed and not fully acknowledged version of the practice that we see so clearly and explicitly in the non-scholarly use of people’s names for mathematical ideas.

Imagine an ethos in which people had very different expectations. When you publish a paper proposing a new theory, you hope that other researchers will improve on your theory. Indeed, you hope that these improvements will be so substantive that after a number of years there will be no need to read your original paper anymore. So the outcome you hope for is one in which people keep using your theory (and maybe citing your paper) but in which almost no one has an accurate understanding of what your original paper actually said.

Now that we’ve talked a little bit about these competing considerations, let’s return to our original question. What is truly the best approach to citing old papers? Something more like the scholarly approach favored in philosophy? Or something more like the non-scholarly approach favored in psychology? I honestly don’t know. My main goal has just been to argue that it’s a difficult question. It is a mistake to think: “Obviously, the best approach is to focus on carefully and accurately describing what those papers actually say.” The correct view is that it is not obvious what we should be doing. It’s very much worth thinking more about the different possible options, and I’d love to hear any further thoughts people might have.