Thou shalt not quote

Cross posted at Political Arguments.

Will Baude blatantly disregards an author's request not to have her Internet-posted article cited or quoted "without permission." The problem, Will alleges, is that people who ask readers to refrain from quoting their work shouldn't post it on the net for all to see, and especially for bloggers—antinomian mavens that they are—to take the prohibition as an invitation to post and quote at will.

I won't consider universalizability of the maxims involved in restricting permission to cite or in flouting such restrictions. My concern is the cultural analysis of "do not quote" clauses in the context of the academic profession.

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I have, on more than one occasion, asked readers of a text that I've posted online to request my permission before citing it. In some cases this is because the work is highly tentative and unfinished and I expect to change my mind about some of the statements I make. In other cases it is because the piece is not up to what I think are the more rigorous standards of scholarly publication, although it may be suitable for an introductory lecture. Similarly, some things I've posted are not especially original, and merely summarize the most relevant literature about a subject; in those cases I would rather the reader consult the principal works. In many of these cases someone has asked me for permission to cite the piece. Often I've given it (and sometimes I've provided an updated version of the paper or an indication of where I forsee that I might change my mind); sometimes I haven't, and I've directed the person to more authoritative texts. When approapriate, I've made a point of stating that the opinion I express in the relevant work is not final, and I ask that it not be represented as such.

Most respectable academics, I suspect, will honor a "do not quote" clause if only because quoting unfinished material without permission could potentially expose them as irresponsible and inconsiderate scholars, especially if the author of the original piece objects to the way that her ideas are represented. To quote unfinished work, especially in order to refute it, is little different from making a strawman argument; it's just not good scholarship.

Another concern is that, by and large, the Internet doesn't yet provide the kind of 'filters' that signal quality in other forms of scholarship. To post a text to the Web is not a significant scholarly act; there is no peer review, no editor worried about protecting the reputation of a journal, no reliable means of cross referencing a debate. Bloggers believe that they are part of a self-regulating community and indeed technologies like Technorati, comments and Trackback go a long way towards keeping people honest. But these mechanisms are far from perfect and lack many of the elements present in scholarly publication. Technorati is not peer-reviewd.

We may cite or quote anything we want in a blog, but twenty of our posts will not matter as much to Scholarship as a footnote in Ethics, Philosophy and Public Affairs, or Political Theory. The request not to be cited or quoted comes out of a professional culture that depends on gatekeepers like these.

I, for one, am fine with that. If I want to know what's going on in my field, it is far more efficient to walk into the second floor of the library and peruse the latest issues of five, ten, or even fifteen of the top journals, than to google "John Rawls" and pluralism and wade through 23,500 results.

As long as on-line postings in general—and blogger references to those posts in particular—are not taken seriously by The Profession, a disregard for "do not quote" clauses will be innocuous. No harm (to one's academic career or intellectual reputation), no foul. But if blogging ever becomes scholarly 'respectable', then I suspect that either academic bloggers will begin to acknowledge these clauses or that scholars will stop posting their work on the net, or move it behind firewalls. Informal scholarly exchanges will suffer for it.