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Jack comments on Epistemic Luck - Less Wrong
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I thought about this for a while and came up with a tight argument:
First, note that it is implausible to claim that academic philosophers are the only people doing philosophy. There are certainly private individuals engaged in the search for philosophical truth as well - Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Eliezer Yudkowsky are two such individuals whose names spring immediately to mind; there are doubtless many others. To claim that only philosophy professors can do good philosophy would be like claiming that only literature professors can write good literature.
Given that there are many non-academic philosophers out there, if we assume that academic philosophers (and philosophy journal editors) are disinterested truth-seekers who are not motivated by political and status concerns, then we should expect to see articles written by non-academics published frequently in philosophy journals, or at the very least we should expect academic philosophers to frequently cite the non-academics.
So, not knowing the actual state of things, since I don't read many philosophy journals, I will expose my theory (academy philosophy is not about truth-seeking) to falsification by predicting that philosophy journals almost never publish articles by non-academics (i.e. someone without a university affiliation and a Phd), and academic philosophers very rarely cite work done by non-academics.
I didn't realize journals of theoretical physics, biology, cognitive science and history were publishing a lot of non-academics.
Actually, quite a lot of articles are published by people in industry (e.g. pharmaceutical companies, biotech companies) for biology. Greg Cochran (a physicist by training, with no academic affiliation) publishes evolutionary biology articles in good journals, attends conferences, etc. You see more non-academics publishing when there are more people with the relevant skillsets outside academia, and fewer otherwise.
Cryptography conferences have published at least some articles from non-academics: both (or all four, depending on what you count) of my publications at the least.
Interesting. Do you work in a related field in private industry? I assume fields like pharmacology and chemistry publish a lot of non-academics because there is so much corporate research.
No, I'm pretty much a dilettante, a coder who takes an amateur interest in these things, though my employers are usually in favour and pay eg expenses to go to conferences. I haven't done much, but here's what I've done if you're interested.
It's not like no status seeking occurs in those fields.