Plato, in the
Symposium, was perhaps the first person to consider the question of the "unliked review". If a review never receives any votes, can it truly be said to exist? This problem has tormented many of the world's greatest philosophers. Bishop Berkeley's famous answer is that God reads and likes every review, hence they all exist. Even at the time, this was not universally considered satisfactory; Rousseau's reply,
le compte de Dieu est privé, is widely quoted as the standard objection.
The rest of this review is in my book If Research Were Romance and Other Implausible Conjectures