Do philosophers need to find relevant what they publish? The relevance norm of academic publishing

Recently philosophers have debated whether philosophers ought to have at least some degree of belief in the assertions that they put forth and argue for [Plakias, Alexandra. 2019. “Publishing Without Belief." Analysis 79: 1–10; Barnett, Zach. 2019. “Philosophy Without Belief.” Mind 128 (509): 109–138; Fleisher, Will. 2020. “Publishing Without (Some) Belief.” Thought: A Journal of Philosophy 9 (4): 225–306; Sarihan, Isik. 2022. “Problems with Publishing Philosophical Claims We Don’t Believe.” Episteme: 1–10; Buckwalter, W. 2023. “The Belief Norm of Academic Publishing.” Ergo an Open Access Journal of Philosophy 9 (54): 1485–1507]. This is presumably because philosophical claims usually are too controversial, disagreements too deep to merit full-fledged belief. This paper introduces an analogous question whether philosophers ought to find relevant what they publish and argues for a relevance norm of publishing according to which philosophers indeed ought to find relevant what they publish. I consider and dismiss certain attempts at interpreting the relevance norm of publishing in terms of substantial criteria such as being socio-politically relevant (Rorty) and not proposing concretely empty ideas (Unger). Instead, I argue that the relevance norm of publishing is best interpreted as consisting in adopting an epistemic virtue of self-scrutiny towards one’s publishing behaviour.