Reviewer #2

The philosopher Neil Levy’s recent book about peer review is more than a book about peer review. Its first half is about bullshit, interpretive charity, and the hermeneutic circle.

Levy tackles a critique of the journal system that turns not on overburdened editors and reviewers or predatory publishers but on

the fact that papers subsequently regarded as groundbreaking were rejected multiple times before finally finding a home, and [on] empirical evidence that accepted papers do not fare particularly well when resubmitted with cosmetic changes.

Does peer review do a bad job of tracking the quality of research—assuming there is such a thing?

Against this inference, Levy contends that it’s reasonable to extend interpretive charity on the basis of circumstantial features of a text: who the author is, and where it was published, for instance.

The fact that three high-profile journals rejected work that subsequently appeared in an influential and important book is at best weak evidence that the…