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    • 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.

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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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