The train of citations
Mon 14 Oct 2013 11:42 AM
Some philosophers have a general picture of things which has been developed across a number of separate articles such that, every time they articulate it further, they cite all of the previous places where they've presented earlier or partial versions of it. If the view is never pulled together in a book, the self-citation just gets longer and longer with each presentation or extension of the view.
The observation is prompted by this sentence, which I wrote in a paper that I was working on today: "In earlier work, I’ve distinguished retail arguments for realism from wholesale arguments. [MC04][Mag10][Mag11][Mag12, pp. 120–3]"
It makes me think that I should write a book that serves as a retail argument manifesto, before it gets any worse.