Shame on Philosophical Psychology

If you’ve been paying attention in recent months, you’ll be aware that a small but vocal group of resentful young men has been pushing various right-wing causes in philosophy. In most cases, they have been confined to message boards, social media groups, and blog comments. However, in December of last year, Philosophical Psychology, a well-regarded journal in the field, published “Research on Group Differences in Intelligence: A defense of free inquiry.” The author is Nathan Cofnas, a PhD candidate in philosophy at Oxford University.

If the title of the paper sounds a bit worrying, the abstract and the main body of the paper are worse. Cofnas argues that differences in mean IQ between racial and ethic groups (especially whites and blacks in the United States) are most likely due to genetics, and that philosophers and other researchers will soon have to come to grips with this alleged fact.

Cofnas’s argument is essentially an argument by elimination: if no plausible non-genetic cause for different group means can be found, then the only reasonable thing to do is infer a genetic cause. He asks whether any plausible non-genetic causes have been proposed and proceeds to try to debunk all of them. Leaving aside the quality of his argumentation for each specific debunking attempt, it is clear that Cofnas is not taking seriously the full range of proposals that already have been offered. To illustrate just one, consider ecological racism. For decades, the United States has been highly segregated along racial lines. That means that people who live in some neighborhoods may be subject to greater degrees of environmental harms than others. In particular, there are well-documented racial disparities in lead poisoning (see, among others, this, this, and this). Lead exposure, especially in utero and during development, is a known neurotoxin. It leads, in particular, to lower adult IQ levels (see, among others, this, this, and this). How much of the race gap in IQ scores is due to differences in childhood lead exposure? I don’t know, but I would be astonished if the answer were zero. And ongoing environmental discrimination such as the lead water crisis in Flint, Michigan indicates that the problem is likely to continue into the future.

Cofnas’s paper does not mention lead poisoning, not even in a footnote. Is he unaware of this entire field of research, or is he pretending that it doesn’t exist? I don’t know, but here’s a perhaps more important question: are the editors and referees at Philosophical Psychology ignorant of this entire field of research, or are they pretending it doesn’t exist? If I had to take a guess, they are unaware and therefore incompetently reviewed Cofnas’s paper. I hereby call on Philosophical Psychology to retract the paper and elaborate a plan to more competently review future submissions with such politically and socially explosive implications. Until they do so, I call upon philosophers to boycott both submitting to and refereeing for Philosophical Psychology.