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    • 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.

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    • Working for The Man: Reflections on the Hobby Lobby Opinion

      Suspecting that a disappointing Court decision is coming doesn’t make it any better when it arrives, as did the Hobby Lobby opinion this morning, in which a 5-4 majority (led by Justice Alito) said that it violated the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1992 to require a “closely held corporation” (“family-owned,” but expect lots of litigation; apparently some 90% of American corporations may qualify!) to purchase a health insurance policy that provided free contraception to which the owners of that corporation object on religious grounds (nice summary here).  There is a substantial silver lining, which is that the Court seems to endorse an opt-out like the one provided for non-profits: certify that you object to providing contraception coverage, and you don’t pay for that part of the plan.  Either the insurer or the government does.  Accordingly, today’s ruling would also appear to  pre-emptively resolve (see also here) the next round of religious objections to the ACA, where some of those non-profits contend that even signing the paperwork saying they object to providing contraception somehow violates their religious beliefs, because signing the paperwork means they start a process the end of which is contraception (so would employing women at all, but never mind that, apparently).

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    • The Future of the European Polity III: Policies (part 1)

      Discussing the ideal policies of the European Union raises a kind of controversy not so apparent when discussing the idea of Europe and political structures, since people who agree on these may have very divergent views on the relative merits of capitalist and socialist economics, social liberalism and conservatism, and so on. In any case, policies are going to the product of the middle ground in European Union nations at that time. We are certainly very far from a model of European government in which there are sharp shifts according to temporary electoral majorities, and as I've explained in previous posts, I believe a more consensual model is appropriate at the European level, compared with the national level. 

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    • Philosophers who work outside of academia – Part 3: Transferrable skills and concrete advice

      This is part 3 of a 3-part series of interviews with philosophers who left academia right after grad school or in some cases later. See part 1 to see what jobs they held, and part 2 on how they evaluate their jobs. This part will focus on the transferrable skills of academics. 

      The burning question of academics who want to leave academia is: What transferrable skills can they bring to the private sector? The responses of the seven people I interviewed clearly indicate that the skills that are transferrable are broad and fairly high-level.

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    • Searle on formal methods in philosophy of language

      Most readers will have had at least some exposure to John Searle’s interview by Tim Crane, which was published earlier this week. It was then hotly debated in the philosophical blogosphere at large (in particular at the Leiter Reports). Together with Peter Unger’s interview published roughly around the same time, it seems that the ‘old guard’ is on a Quixotesque crusade to chastise the younger crowd for the allegedly misguided, sorrow state of current philosophy. Now, I do think there is some truth to be found in what Searle says about the role of formal modeling in the philosophy of language, but his objections do not seem to apply at least to a growing body of research in formal semantics/philosophy of language. Moreover, it is not clear whether his own preferred methodology (judging from his seminal work on speech acts etc.) in fact does justice to what he himself views as the primary goal of philosophical analyses of language.

      Here are the crucial passages from the interview (all excerpts from the passage posted by Leiter), the main bits in bold:

      Well, what has happened in the subject I started out with, the philosophy of language, is that, roughly speaking, formal modeling has replaced insight. My own conception is that the formal modeling by itself does not give us any insight into the function of language.

      Any account of the philosophy of language ought to stick as closely as possible to the psychology of actual human speakers and hearers. And that doesn’t happen now. What happens now is that many philosophers aim to build a formal model where they can map a puzzling element of language onto the formal model, and people think that gives you an insight. …

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    • Brazilian music on Fridays: ‘Cinema big butts’

      Last week I had a post up celebrating Chico Buarque’s birthday, and among other things I mentioned his relationship with young singer Thaís Gulin (I’m not sure if they are still together or not, but that’s not the point obviously). But it would be utterly unfair to portray her only as ‘Chico Buarque’s girlfriend’, and so to dispel this image of Gulin, here is one of her own songs, ‘Cinema big butts’. It is the strange mix of her own ‘Cinema americano’ interjected with her cover of the 1990s ‘trash-classic’ ‘Baby got back’. The result is at the very least  surprising and refreshing. It is the kind of song that provokes reactions of either love or hate, but in any case no indifference; to me, it is strange and compelling at the same time. So, ‘shake that healthy butt!’

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    • Analytic philosophy and rules bloat

      If I could go back in time and change the Dungeons and Dragons and Philosophy anthology in one way, I would make sure that it included an essay on rules bloat.

      Nearly every role playing game suffers from this. At the outset the impetus is to present something that is easy for new players and game masters to figure out and play. After the game hits a kind of popularity threshold the only way to make new money on it is to produce expansions with new character classes and rule-based mechanics. To get people to pay the money, there has to be some sort of ludological advantage to using the new characters and mechanics. So if you just stay with the old set, at a minimum your characters will be underpowered.

      But each expansion makes the game more complicated, until it finally reaches a point where it becomes borderline unplayable for everyone (except for the Simpsons Comic Book Guy who loves this kind of thing). And it gets so slow. Where you could have had twenty combats a night in the unexpanded version, now you can only complete two, and you spent long increments of time thumbing through various books figuring out the proper algorithm for how the dragon-spawn Barbarian's grappling ability works during attacks of opportunity when the opponent is half submerged in water.

      Since the industry needs non-Simpsons Comic Book Guys to remain viable, a new edition* is then released, and the process starts all over again.

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    • Top Ten Reasons to Visit the PhilSci-Archive

      PhilSci-Archive-Advert(This is a companion piece to Top Ten Reasons philosophers of science should post their papers to PhilSci Archive)

      10.You can be the first to know what's new in philosophy of science.

      9. It's a fast way to survey recent work on any topic in philosophy of science.

      8. It's a fast way to find out who is working in any topic in philosophy of science.

      7. You can search on any keywords or parameters you like.

      6. It's a chance to help an author with a draft before it is too late.

      5. You can download complete conference proceedings.

      4. It offers one stop shopping for open access journals (more coming soon).

      3. It's easy to get to from anywhere.

      2. It's free.

      1. Not sold in stores. Available only through this exciting, time unlimited web offer.

      Bonus reason: find out whether rocks think.

      (Thanks to John Norton for most of this and Ken Waters for inspiration).

    • Aereo, Cable TV, and the Privatization of the Public Sphere

      In the most anticipated Copyright decision this term, the Supreme Court today ruled, 6-3 (opinion by Breyer, dissent Scalia) that Aereo’s service for watching broadcast TV online violates the Copyright Act.  Briefly:  Aero operates a large number of tiny antennas.  Subscribers pick a program they want to watch, and get exclusive access to an antenna.  That antenna then receives the broadcast in question, sets it up on a private folder for that user in the cloud, and then streams it to him/her over the Internet.  The broadcast networks sued, claiming that Aereo’s actions constituted an infringing public performance of their content.

      There is and will be endless discussion about this case, because it may very well have enormous implications for cloud computing (the opinion tries very hard to limit itself: it includes an entire section about why it doesn’t apply to cloud computing, and the argument hinges on an analogy to cable TV and specific statutory language adopted in 1976 to deal with cable TV).  But there’s something else more interesting, I think, under the radar.  I sort of saw it in the opinion, but it came into sharp focus in Scalia’s dissent, so I’ll start there.

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    • Job Placement 2011-2014: Departments with Relatively High Placement Rates (Updated 9/17/2014)

      As discussed in the comments at a previous post, I have been looking at department-specific placement rates. "Placement rate" is the number of reported placements*** divided by the number of graduates. I looked at reported placements between 2011 and 2014 and graduates between 2009 and 2013. I do not have data on many departments that reported placements in this time frame**, but of those 94 departments for which I do have data, 32 appear to have placement rates higher than 50% for tenure-track jobs and 51 appear to have placement rates higher than 50% for a combination of tenure-track, postdoctoral, VAP, and instructor jobs (both sets are listed below).****

      Update: I have removed the following departments from both lists because I do not have updated graduation data from them: University of Chicago, University of Pennsylvania, and Yale University. These departments may well have placement rates as high as these others, but the graduation data I have from them comes from the 2012 APA Graduate Guide, since they did not complete the 2013 APA Graduate Guide. If the department chairs respond to my email of June 10th with updated information, I will update their status.

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