New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

The Future of the European Polity IV: Political Thought

At last I reach the end of a series of a posts responding to a few requests to expand on a post criticising the more centalisimg-homogonising aspects of the construction of the European polity, and Habermas' association with that attitude. I suppose those who made the requests now have an idea of why I did not cover the points raised, it takes me that many words to cover my ideas about the politics of Europe and my preferred political theory perspectives. 

Nice Marcus Arvan (Philosophers Cocoon) on the academic culture of fear.

Lots of nice reflections here about how fear undermines our vocation. Though much of it is (appropriately) scary, there's some optimism too. Arvan's post ends with:

The only final thing I would suggest--following Zombie's remarks above as well as my experience with the Cocoon--is that whatever risks you take, whether they are blogging or whatever, commit yourself to pursuing those risks kindly, and helpfully. As I mentioned above, early in my career I found the discipline to be a rather scary place, full of judgmental people. Part of this, I think, was just my fear talking (I "saw" judgmentalism everywhere). But it was not all fear talking: there are judgmental people here and there. But, what I will say is this: if you commit yourself to pursuing your career--your "risks"--kindly, you may be surprised just how many people of good will are out there. In my experience running the Cocoon, there are a ton of people out there looking for more kindness in the discipline. Be among them, and be among those who contribute kindness. If you do, you have little to fear.

This is an important thing to remember. There are so many kind and helpful people studying and teaching philosophy. Their kindness usually (though not always) precludes them from being that great at tooting their own horns, but if you stay in the biz long enough you'll be humbled by the amount of supererogation you run into. This is really pronounced with respect to people who agree to write letters for tenure files. The letter writers get nothing out of it. It's just a lot of work, and you don't get any money for it and it doesn't go on your CV. But at this point I've witnessed dozens of philosophers give up a month or so of their summer to charitably assess one of my colleague's works and then explain it in a way that is accessible to LSU administrators. It's one of the most inspiring things I've experienced. And some non-trivial amount of journal reviewers put in a lot of extra work giving the author helpful advice about how to rewrite the paper. Twice when I was not tenured I got new paper ideas from the reviewers' comments. I couldn't thank the person by name because it was anonymous.

On Future Placement Data

I applaud Brian Leiter's efforts to examine placement data in the past few days *Update 6/13/14: I have removed these links because I think that Brian Leiter's posts have the potential to mislead students. See my new post here*, as well as the efforts of David Marshall Miller and Andy Carson over the past few years. All of this is effort to improve the profession and deserves recognition as such. I plan to continue reporting placement data next year and will likely post the report to an independent website. Below is a list of features that I take to be essential to an ideal report on placement, together with some ideas for improvement on my own work. Please comment below!

1) the original data: as far as I know this is missing from both Brian Leiter and Andy Carson's efforts. This is important because it keeps the analyses honest by opening them up to public scrutiny. I have provided links to my data and will continue to do so. Recommendations on format are welcome here. 

2) the methods: key information is missing in Brian Leiter's presentation, such as the criteria for determining which placements are to "research universities and selective liberal arts colleges," but as far as I can tell David Marshall Miller and Andy Carson are clear and up front about their methods. I have tried to be clear about my methods, but I have received some emails that reveal shortcomings here. Recommendations welcome. 

3) completeness: Brian Leiter's efforts, as of this moment, include only a few departments (that were not selected at random). An ideal report should include all the philosophy departments that have made placements of the type in question, which is something David Marshall Miller, Andy Carson, and myself have all tried to do. What is missing from all of our reports is complete placement data. PhilAppointments is not a complete source, for example, but neither are placement pages. Further, placement pages are often missing key data points on placement (such as names, which help to identify duplicate candidates). Next year I aim to cross-reference PhilAppointments with individual placement pages. Recommendations on how to efficiently improve completeness are welcome. 

4) recency: since these efforts are in their infancy, it is currently unknown what time frames are relevant. Recent data are ideal, so long as recency is balanced with completeness. Brian Leiter chose a 5-year time frame between 2005 and 2010, which I see as a drawback of his report. Although David Marshall Miller, Andy Carson, and myself have all used the most up-to-date data, David Marshall Miller also looked at different time frames. In the future, with more data, the use of time frames should help us to determine how recent our data needs to be. Recommendations on how to proceed with time frames is welcome here, since next year the data set I have will be in its fourth year (2011-2015).

5) neutrality: Those collecting, analyzing, and reporting the data should be as neutral as possible with respect to hypotheses and results. I have concerns about this with respect to Brian Leiter's report, especially given the absence of 1 and 2. The fact that David Marshall Miller, Andy Carson, and I have performed this work on our own is also potentially problematic, even with the inclusion of the original data and methods. Over the next year I plan to form a task force to work on placement data, composed of several people who have reached out to me over the past week or so (but others are welcome). Having more people on the project should help with neutrality. Recommendations on this point are welcome.

We should have anonymous book manuscript review

To my knowledge, full book manuscripts are never reviewed anonymously. Given that the double anonymity of peer review is implemented to decrease biases, and presumably, thereby increase the focus on the quality of the writing, this is puzzling. David Chalmers wrote, in a very helpful comment on how to publish a book "Most book refereeing is not blind, unlike journal refereeing. And when what's being reviewed is a proposal rather than a full manuscript, reputation of the author make a huge difference in reviewers' and editors' confidence that the proposal will be fleshed out well to a book." 

While I can see that the reputation or renown of an author can relevantly play a role at the proposal stage in assessing the competence of the prospective author in writing a full manuscript, I don't see why it should play a role when the full manuscript is reviewed. This will inevitably happen when review of full manuscripts is non-anonymous. It would be hard not to be influenced if the author of one's manuscript happened to work at high-ranking institution, is very senior, and already has an excellent track record (I declined to review a book for a major press for this reason), or conversely, if the author is relatively junior, working at a teaching-focused or obscure place. 

The Gordon Ramsay Hunger Games (and why the world should be more like Iron Chef and Professional Wrestling)

I don't own a television (one of many area men I approximate), but with the advent of Hulu now my wife and I watch an episode of some reality cooking show nearly every evening after the kids go to bed. I've seen nearly every episode of the Gordon Ramsay vehicles Master Chef and Hell's Kitchen. In both shows twenty or so people compete with one another in inventively designed cooking contests. One loser is thrown off every episode until the lone survivor emerges victorious at the end of the season. The ginned up drama is fun and there's lots of interesting food.

Recently though Ramsay's schtick has started to wear thin. Before throwing people out at the end of every episode of Hells Kitchen, he makes two or three people tell him why they deserve to stay in Hell's Kitchen. What follows are desperate platitudes about how they are a fighter and getting better all of the time. It's infantalizing. Then Ramsay strings it out dramatically, telling one person to step forward and starting a sentence where you might think one thing will happen and then ending it by telling them the opposite. It's frankly obnoxious. And of course he yells at and belittles the contestants in the manner of an abusive father starting to lose his temper. And nearly every episode has the obligatory bits where the contestants gush at length about what a wonderful person this obnoxious man is. It's Orwellian.

Anatomy of a drubbing

of Brazil here.

Against the ‘this is nonsense!’ objection

Carolyn Dicey Jennings has a post up discussing the unfortunate implications of criticizing a person’s views in terms of their presumed (lack of) intelligence. I agree with much of what she says there (though I don’t think the issue is exclusively or even predominantly about criticism of women and members of other disadvantaged groups, even if impacts these groups to a greater extent). I want however to bring up another aspect of Brian Leiter’s criticism of Carolyn’s analysis, namely his use of the adjective ‘nonsense’, and connect it to what seems to be a pervasive but somewhat questionable practice among philosophers.

In fact, I was thinking of such a post even before reading Carolyn’s post. The idea was prompted by a conversation with Chris Menzel over lunch last week in Munich. Chris was telling me about some of his thoughts on Williamson’s Modal Logic as Metaphysics, and how Williamson describes the actualism vs. possibilism debate as ‘confused’, i.e. as something that he cannot make sense of. So technically, Williamson is (here) not accusing specific people of holding nonsensical positions, but according to him this is a nonsensical debate, as it were. (Chris Menzel is working on a paper on this material where he objects to Williamson's diagnosis of the debate.)

The notion of ‘nonsense’ has an interesting philosophical (recent) history, dating back at least to the Tractatus, and then later appropriated by the Vienna Circle. (I’d be interested to hear of earlier systematic uses of the notion of nonsense for philosophical purposes.) So, to be sure, it is in itself a philosophically interesting notion, but I think it becomes problematic when 'this is nonsense!' counts as a legitimate, acceptable move in a philosophical debate.

Congratulations to Naftali Weinberger and Charles Rathkopf

for winning the 2013 Philosophy of Science Association prizes for best essay by, respectively, a Graduate Student and a recent PhD.  More details here.  

Welcome to the club!  :)

 

A pretty awful argument against scientific replication (h/t Dan Weiskopf).

Jason Mitchell, a Harvard social neuroscientist, gives an argument against scientific replication, and a defense of unreplicated science, here.   His argument, in a nutshell, is that all we ever learn from the failure to replicate an experiment is that the attempted replicator is a lousy experimenter.  Quoting Mitchell: 

• Recent hand-wringing over failed replications in social psychology is largely pointless, because unsuccessful experiments have no meaningful scientific value.
• Because experiments can be undermined by a vast number of practical mistakes, the likeliest explanation for any failed replication will always be that the replicator bungled something along the way.  Unless direct replications are conducted by flawless experimenters, nothing interesting can be learned from them.

Mitchell is giving, pretty much out of a bottle, what Harry Collins and Trevor Pinch call "The Golden hands" argument.   "If you can't replicate what I did in the lab, that shows I have golden hands and you have iron claws."   Interestingly, C&P generally believe that this is always a rationally defensible claim that any scientist can make.   Of course, unlike Mitchell, C&P understand that was is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.  If the above is, as both M and C&P maitain, always a defensible claims, then so is its converse:  "If I got the opposite result in the lab and you can't replicate it, then that shows I have golden hands and you have iron claws."

The problem is, if all the above is true, then this would vindicate C&P's claim that all scientific reasoning is circular.   This is, after all, and for example, what they think the famous case of Pasteur and Pouchet and spontaneous generation shows.    Pasteur can always claim that Pouchet has iron hands, and Pouchet can always claim that Pasteur has iron hands, and this explains, from each one's point of view, why the other is getting results that don't accord with the first one's theoretical views.    

C&P are absolutely right to think that it follows from this that all scientific reasoning is circular.  It becomes a matter of definition, on this conception, that you have iron hands just in case you get results that don't accord with my theoretical views.   But scientific reasoning isn't circular.  And hence there has to be something wrong with this conception.    And what's wrong is that pace C&P, there are often, in the long run (and hopefully not such a long run that we are all dead, thought that may have been the case in the Spontaneous Generation case) independent means of deciding whose experiment is the valid one.  And that means that pace Mitchell, scientific replication, and the process of figuring out who has the iron claws and who has the golden hands, is a crucial part of the scientific enterprise. 

Brazilian music on Fridays: 'Garota de Berlin'

[Special edition] After the massacre of yesterday, there is little left to do other than reminding oneself of other, more mutually rewarding Brazilian-German encounters. So here is ‘Garota de Berlin’, the song that owes its existence to the brief but intense encounter between German singer Nina Hagen and Brazilian singer Supla. This happened back in 1985, when Hagen went to Brazil to perform in the first edition of the Rock in Rio festival. At the time, Supla, now also a reality TV celebrity of somewhat dubious reputation (and the son of two influential politicians – quite a mix!), led the post-punk band Tokyo, and so the band ended up recording ‘Garota de Berlin’ with Hagen’s participation.

The video-clip below is almost comic in its badness, and the song is not exactly a high point in Brazilian music. (I didn’t say that this particular Brazilian-German encounter would be rewarding for all the parties involved, including listeners.) But it is a funny episode in the history of Brazil-Germany relations, and in any case way less painful than those depressing 6 minutes in yesterday's match -- which are easily the most painful 6 minutes in the history of the Seleção.

(On the bright side, I get another chance today! The joys of carrying two nationalities…)

Intelligence as a Criticism

When the NewAPPS bloggers first invited me to submit a guest post on my attention research as a graduate student, I decided to submit a post on the term "genius" instead. In the case that it was the only post I would write, I wanted the post to have maximum utility. After some thought, I decided to target the obsession with genius, thinking it a pernicious problem easily deflated. I am not alone in finding it to be a problem. In fact, I may well have been alerted to the problem by Eric Schwitzgebel's blog post on "seeming smart." Commentators on the problem have looked at everything from its impact on women and racial/ethnic minorities to its impact on child prodigies, some of whom have written against it in favor of work-based praise (and for good reason). So, I was half-right: I was right to think it is a problem, but I was wrong, of course, in thinking the problem could be easily deflated. I am going to give it another stab, this time aiming closer to the heart of what I find to be the problem--the way that the terms "genius" and "smart" are used to silence minorities. I know about this first hand--just last week Brian Leiter implied that I was not smart enough to understand a particular distinction that he felt I had overlooked.

Update (6/9/2014): I urge skeptical readers to examine these much more respectful posts, where there is no mention of intelligence, for sake of comparison: on David Marshall Miller, on Andy Carson, and again on Andy Carson. These job market analyses were perfomed after my first analysis in April 2012 and have many similar elements. Furthermore, the content of Brian Leiter's criticisms to these analyses is much the same, but without the damaging remarks about mental capacity, intention, etc. 

Helen De Cruz's posts on what philosophers do showcased by the Atlantic Monthly

The article by Atlantic Monthly Senior Editor Rebecca Rosen is HERE.

Pretty Cool! De Cruz's posts actually produced postive national coverage of academic philosophy. The Rosen article is currently at the top of their web page.

Did Russell's Paradox entail that set theory is incomplete (if axiomatized)?

Tonight I was fondly recalling Michael Hand and Jonathan Kvanvig's old paper on Tennant's solution to Fitch's Paradox (it's a beautiful read) and a weird thought occured to me.

Hand and Kvanvig argue that Tennant's solution would be analogous to a set theorist responding to Russell's Paradox by proposing naive set theory with Frege's comprehension axiom restricted to instances that don't allow one to prove absurdity from that instance and the other axioms (call this theory N'). For Hand and Kvanvig this is a reductio of Tennant, and in my response* I argued that Tennant's solution was not actually analogous to N'.

If I remember right, Hand and Kvanvig argue that N' is bad because it doesn't illuminate the nature of sets in the way we properly expect of solutions to paradoxes. But they don't go into the logical properties of N' at all, and tonight I'm thinking that this is actually an important question in its own right. Let's just consider consistency, completeness, and axiomatizability.

The Causal Power of Non-existing Events

While glancing through Graham Priest's new book I came across a place where he said something to the effect that what distinguished existing from non-existing things was whether or not the thing in question was causally efficacious.

Following up on Mark Lance's suggestion that we should be most skeptical when a philosopher suggests something taken to be obvious enough not to elaborate on (look for adverbs of the clearly family).* I think that this is probably a case of that.

On counterfactual analyses of causality, non-existent entities and events clearly have causal powers. At the 2014 Narrative Theory Conference at MIT I saw a great paper by Emma Kafelanos called "How Can Events that Do Not Occur Make Things Happen?" that conclusively showed that any theory of narrative structure will have to include nodes denoting events that didn't happen. The speaker gave real world examples such as Obama not ordering the bombing of Syria. She didn't mention counterfactual analyses of causation, but clearly many counterfactuals of the form "If it were not the case that Obama hadn't ordered the bombing of Syria, then it would not be the case that P" are true.

This doesn't just occur with non-existent events but also with impossible events. The fact that Max can't surf explains quite a lot about him. Consider the sentence "Hobbes' inability to square the circle caused him to experience no small amount of ridicule." On a counterfactual analysis of causation with impossible worlds** there is nothing wrong with sentences such as that. Maybe these work as counterexamples to the counterfactual analysis. I don't know.

What's the deal with closeups of people chewing food in LSD movies?

Check out all the people chewing around the 4:00 minute mark of the video at right. I don't get this. Close ups of people eating are disgusting, yet they form a fairly reliable trope in LSD movies.

If you've suffered through the entire Magical Mystery Tour movie, then the infamous spaghetti scene is traumatically imprinted in your mind (if you dare, go to the thirty minute mark at the video here). Or consider the Mad Hatter scene of the Ringo Starr directed T-Rex documentary where the band's tamborine/conga drum player and a group of nuns masticate wildly to the T-Rex's Jeepster. Yuck. Why? Why? Why? Or consider the amount of gratuitous eating in Easy Rider, the old man's farm, the commune, and the diner with the rednecks that end up beating Jack Nicholson's character to death.

Interestingly, the pivotal scene in Terry Gilliam's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas also occurs in a diner. Benicio Del Toro's character's bullying of the waitress completely changes the tone and reality intrudes on what had to that point been an absurdist escape. Fear and Loathing isn't really a drug movie in the sense of classic LSD movies, or even Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers (Vitamin B injections). In classic drug movies, some large subset of the performers and off-camera people are abusing the substance themselves. Unfortunately, this tends to eliminate the aesthetic distance necessary for making something non-horrible. Clearly, Gilliam gets this, and thus we can see that the food scene in his movie works as an implicit critique of the trope and its associated genre.

The Future of the European Polity III: Policies (part 2)

The biggest policy issue of the moment is the Euro, which it can be said without much controversy  needs some form of fiscal integrationism, or federalism, to stabilise it. That means Eurobank bonds and a stronger Eurobank. There is no chance of the UK being part of the setup without a very big change in attitude, which is not likely to come before the end of a period to be measured in decades. Something similar applies to Denmark and Sweden. Germany is clearly not eager to be in the position, as the major payer for the European Uni0n,  where it is bearing the responsibility for debt in less prudent or less fortunate countries, so some major changes are necessary to make the liabilities acceptable. Of course it is already implicitly liable and has acted accordingly, but there needs to be structural changes and more explicit policies to create a situation acceptable to all.

Any good recent overviews on theories of vagueness?

Near the end of summer the LSU philosophy reading group is going to begin reading things on vagueness. We're going to start with Rosanna Keefe's excellent Theories of Vagueness, which gives an excellent overview of the state of the field circa 2000.

We don't really know where to go from there, since so much has been done in the ensuing 14 years. Are there any more recent books that achieve what Keefe managed, presenting an overview of the state of the field? Barring that, are there a handful of more recent canonical texts that one must cover to get reasonably up to date? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

It takes a village. . .

One of the worst things that can happen to someone is that they become so powerful in their field that the community no longer works as a check on their behavior. We should pity their victims more, but we should also have some sympathy for people like Dov Charney and  Terry Richardson. Who in their right mind would want to be so controlled by the awful desire to control?

Reformed Christianity speaks to this. Not only do we believe in Calvin's (insert Schopenhauer if theism isn't your bag) "depravity of man" thesis, but we also believe that the solution involves moral communities willing to publicly call people on their depraved behavior (Presbyterians call this "discipline"). 

When I screw up even in little ways there are lots of people near and far who publicly call me on it. I don't know what kind of monster I'd be if I had the resources to silence them.*

Academics are a little bit like the fashion industry, like rock and rollers, like dictators. We have this awful cult of genius where someone's awfulness can be evidence that they deserve to get away with being awful. I don't know if philosophy is worse than other fields in this respect.

[*UPDATE 7/7/2014 I removed a parenthetical involving people who threaten lawsuits that some readers with justice took to be both unfair and passive-aggressive. When writing it, I didn't mean for this post to single out one person. But we know what good intentions pave. And to be honest, while writing it I was pretty depressed about the latest brouhaha concerning Brian Leiter reacting to criticism in ways that strike me as frankly abusive. So the criticism is fair.

Bad news for academia in Europe

A Portuguese colleague (who has good reasons to remain anonymous) has brought to our attention some very important and worrisome recent events/developments pertaining to research funding in Portugal and Europe, which are described below. Academics in Europe (and also outside Europe) wil do well to pay close attention to these developments.

UPDATE: Perhaps my original phrasing was ambiguous, so to be clear: I am not the author of the post below, rather it is a guest post by the Portuguese colleague in question.

============================

This post serves as a warning, and a plea for help, to academics around Europe.

Brazilian music on Fridays: 'Faroeste Caboclo'

It’s Friday evening, so I’m just in time for another BMoF. The reason for the ‘delay’ is that I just came back from Munich, and the notorious paucity of German youtube did not allow for a timely BMoF. But it was also in Munich that I finally got to meet Steven French, who besides being an accomplished philosopher of science and the editor of a ‘small, provincial journal’ (his words), is a big fan of Brazilian music. (He lived in Brazil for some time in the 1980s.) I asked Steven what his request would be for today’s BMoF, and his answer was: ‘Faroeste Caboclo’ (1987). It is an interesting choice: an extremely long song, with even longer lyrics (not a single line gets repeated), by a band that was hugely popular in my youth, Legião Urbana. (I posted a few songs by them a few years ago.) After the tragic death of leader Renato Russo (a victim of AIDS) in 1996, the band ceased to exist, but their music remains immensely popular among successions of younger generations.

‘Faroeste Caboclo’ tells the story of João de Santo Cristo, a criminal who ends up dying as a hero. The story is so elaborate that a whole movie was recently made based on the song. Below I am posting a video of the song illustrated with scenes from the movie, so that gives listeners who do not understand Portuguese at least an idea of what the whole thing is about. So all in all, a terrific suggestion by Steven, who I hope will like the video I'm posting below.

An Ideal Ranking

I recently signed a pledge with the aim of being more respectful toward my colleagues and of trying to uphold a culture of respectfulness in our profession. Following conversation over a previous post, I have come to the belief that I should provide a safe space for people to discuss departmental rankings in philosophy. When I made critical comments at the Leiter Blog on the inclusion of women among the rankers of the PGR in 2011 as a graduate student, I felt shut down. My comments were edited without permission in a way that made me appear less reasonable, while the original post and other comments were edited to make my interlocutors appear more reasonable. I think that it is healthy to evaluate ranking methodologies critically and openly and I think that there must be a public space for this. Since I have already earned the ire of those who appear to be opposed to a public discussion, I am a good candidate for putting forward a post that will allow for discussion. I will thus allow anonymous postings and will aim to respect that anonymity both privately and publicly (except when required by law or conscience to do otherwise).

I will start with some of my own thoughts: I think that reputational information is helpful and important, but that it would be better to combine this information with data on placement, publications, and other such objective measures. (With this in mind, I sent my original findings on the job market to Brian Leiter and Kieran Healy in April 2012 without response.) An ideal ranking, in my mind, would be customizable. The viewer would have to choose metrics before a ranking would be created. I am open on what the relevant metrics might be. This is where you come in. Should we have rankings at all? What metrics do prospective graduate students care about (a variety of voices is of value here)? How should this work be completed, and by whom? Comments that appear to violate the norm of respectfulness will not be admitted as is, but anonymity is both welcomed and encouraged. Update: commentators should feel free to leave off their email addresses when posting comments. 

Update: Creating (or updating) a ranking of this kind, with multiple objective values, is beyond my current capabilities. I fully and wholeheartedly welcome someone with more time and competence than me to take on this task. Better yet, I think, would be a task force involving those familiar with the PGR, since they already have lots of expertise. I am welcoming discussion here not because I plan to create a new ranking, but because I think it is important to have a discussion about all such rankings in the open. I am limiting my personal contribution to the placement data for now.

In support of Carolyn Dicey Jennings

Most readers have probably been following the controversy involving Carolyn Dicey Jennings and Brian Leiter concerning the job placement data post where Carolyn Dicey Jennings compares her analysis of the data she has assembled with the PGR Rank. There have been a number of people reacting to what many perceived as Brian Leiter’s excessively personalized attack of Carolyn Dicey Jennings’s analysis, such as in Daily Nous, and this post by UBC’s Carrie Ichikawa Jenkins on guidelines for academic professional conduct (the latter is not an explicit defense of Carolyn Dicey Jennings, but the message is clear enough, I think). UPDATE: supportive post also at the Feminist Philosophers.

It goes without saying (but I’ll say it anyway) that we, NewAPPS bloggers, fully support Carolyn’s right to post her important analyses of job placement data, and deplore the tone and words adopted by Brian Leiter to voice his objections to her methodology. (This is not the first time that episodes of this kind involving Brian Leiter and junior, untenured colleagues occur; I for one deem such episodes to be inadmissible.)

Placement Data 2011-2014

As promised, here is the link to the data set I have been using in the placement posts. Most of you will probably be most interested in the "Department Trends" tab. If you find that data should be added, please email me with the following information, preferably in order and separated by commas OR add the relevant information to PhilAppointments, which I will use to update this data set from time to time:

1) Year of placement

2) Name of placed candidate

3) PhD-granting institution of placed candidate (and department, where relevant)

4) Type of placement and name of hiring institution

5) AOS (if known)

6) Prior positions (if known)

Enjoy!

Job Placement 2011-2014: Comparing Placement Rank to PGR Rank (Updated 9/17/2014)

As discussed here in the comments, one of the advantages of comparative data on placement is that they help fill in gaps left over by the PGR. That is, the PGR aims to measure the collective reputation of a department's faculty, but faculty reputation does not necessarily predict the likelihood of placement by that department, perhaps because it does not necessarily predict the overall quality of education in that department nor the quality of preparation for the job market by that department. Comparative data on placement has the potential to provide insight on these factors. To illustrate this, I below bracket the top 50 departments by tenure-track placement rate** (Note: I removed three universities from the top 50 that reported fewer than 2 graduates per year, since small numbers may yield misleading placement rates), providing for comparison these department's ranks from the 2011 "Ranking Of Top 50 Faculties In The English-Speaking World" by the Philosophical Gourmet Report. Please note that placement brackets are provided only to demonstrate the potential utility of these data. Since the data set is not yet complete, I do not recommend viewing these as authoritative brackets. Update: Please see this post for an idea of how I envision this project developing. I have released the spreadsheet containing the raw data and methods I have been using to compute these results, and welcome any/all corrections. As a reminder, I do not have data on the yearly graduates from many departments, listed below. (Those departments are welcome to send me their data, if available.)

Update 7/1/2014: It has come to my attention that Brian Leiter has aired some criticisms of this post on his blog and has publicly suggested that it (this post, not his blog) be taken down. I respond to these criticisms below. 

Updates 7/2/2014:

1. I changed some wording above from "ranking" to "brackets" and added a link to the spreadsheet. I have also changed the numbers in the below ranking to a grouping by bracket (where departments are listed in alphabetical order within brackets). This was a suggestion of Ned Block's. We have been corresponding on statistical significance and I decided that his suggestion would help avoid making small differences between placement rates appear more important than they are. I have left in the PGR rank for comparison, although the difference in rank has been omitted for the reasons provided above. 
2. I have also added updates to my responses to Brian, based on some new statistical tests. 
3. I am adding a link to a chart that will help readers to visualize the total number of reported tenure-track placements and estimated graduates from each department, rather than just percentage of tenure-track placements. 

Update 7/6/2014: I ran a completeness test for 5 departments selected at random using a random number generator. The tenure-track numbers for these 5 departments appears to be accurate. More below.

Google Scholar Metrics Doesn't Tell You The Average Quality Of Papers In Philosophy Journals

Brian Leiter criticizes the new Google Scholar Metrics, which uses h-index and various similar measures to assess journals. He writes that "since it doesn't control for frequency of publication, or the size of each volume, its results are worthless." Some of my friends on Facebook are wondering why he's saying this, so I'll try to offer a helpful toy example here.

Consider two journals: Philosophical Quality, which publishes 25 papers a year, all of which are good and well-cited; and the Journal of Universal Acceptance, which publishes 25 equally good and well-cited papers a year as well as 975 bad papers that nobody ever cites. Google gives both journals the same score along all its metrics. Since tacking extra uncited papers onto a journal doesn't affect the number of papers in it with at least that number of citations, JUA's additional bad papers make no impact on the h-index (or on Google's other measures defined in terms of h-index, like h-median or h-core). But if you're looking at someone's CV and they've got a paper in one of these journals, you should be more impressed by a Phil Quality paper than an JUA paper. The Phil Quality paper is likely to be good, while a JUA paper is likely to be bad. Still, Google will see them as equal.