Suggestions are simply alternatives for the author to consider. The author needs to know what's essential to address. Since thomas kuhn published The Structure of Scientific Revolutions in 1962, it has been well known that all disciplines, even the physical sciences, are structured and divided by competing paradigms that cause serious problems of mutual incomprehension for their respective advocates. This phenomenon frequently puts the reviewer in a quandary. A reviewer might legitimately hold that an author's entire line of research is meaningless, since the author fails to address what the reviewer sees as the critical issues in the field, and reviewers cannot take the relativist's escape that everyone has his or her own approach.
Many reviewers act as if they have privileged access to the truth.
But this stance is not philosophically supportable and, moreover, it is harmful-both for the reviewer emotionally and for a discipline. Reviewers who remain silent about their position when they disagree with an author's line of research either acquiesce in what they believe to be the author's error or disguise the' real roots of any criticism they offer. Thus both the editor and the author can evaluate the review and the manuscript in light of this acknowledged difference. I take the same approach in matters of taste. When reviewing manuscripts structured in this way, I state my position in a concise paragraph at the beginning of my review, where the editor will be sure to see it, and then let it pass.