The sad fact is that in our field the referee system has collapsed. (There are undoubtedly some exceptions and your journal hopefully is one of them.) It is bad enough that competent referees are impossible to find in sufficient numbers. The catastrophe is that the referees that major journals rely on do not act responsibly any longer. They do not try to understand the paper they are reading. Instead they are looking for excuse to form a recommendation without having to do any thinking.

Furthermore, those few referees who are using substantial standards normally belong to one of the numerous cliques into which philosophy and philosophical logic has split. The members of one clique do not know and do not care what adherents of the other cult are doing. The standards that a referee is using are those of her or his private club and hence idiosyncratic and ill-educated. The outcome is well calculated to guarantee that no new ideas are published.

I was not surprised to hear that Donald Davidson never submitted any papers of his to the refereeing process.

E-mail of Hintikka to JYB, July 1st 2011.

HINTIKKA WAS THE EDITOR-IN-CHIEF OF SYNTHESE from 1965 to 2002