Digressions&Impressions

An Alternative Future for Leiterreports

The philosophical blogosphere and social media are abuzz. Brian Leiter speaks of a "smear campaign" in the headlines of two of his posts (here and here)--it's unclear if he thinks there is a smear campaign against the PGR, his stewardship of the PGR, his blog (Leiter reports), or him personally. In another post, Leiter quotes some anonymous correspondents, who seem to think that the smear campaign is directed at the PGR and him personally.

The so-called statement of concern by Sally Haslanger and David Velleman only describes him as "the editor of the Philosophical Gourmet Report." Another group, which has "decided to decline to volunteer" its services to the PGR focuses primarily on Leiter's control over the PGR (e.g. "Professor Leiter has the power to have this kind of impact on Professor Jenkins in part because of his control over the Philosophical Gourmet Report.") A third letter, drafted by David Chalmers, Jonathan Schaffer, Susanna Siegel, and Jason Stanley, (not yet fully disclosed) urges Leiter "to turn over the PGR to new management." So, the three letters all focus on Leiter's control over the PGR, and at least two of the letters call attention to the power that springs from this control.

It is worth noting that so far nobody suggests that Leiter should give up or scale back blogging/tweeting. Maybe I note this only because I am a blogger and I am inclined to overvalue its significance? This is a bit odd because many of the most public problems associated with Leiter's role in the discipline are associated with his agressive public-blog-persona. (Not all the problems: as noted before, PGR does not conform to best practices in (i) transparency/sharing of data; (ii) managing conflicts of interests; (iii) the results in 'Continental' miss out on important stuff.) In fact, he has 'leveraged' PGR to drive traffic to his blog through which he has considerable influence on opinion/discussion in the profession and, in turn, used his blog to create awareness about the PGR

A whole lot of problems could have been prevented if Leiter did not blog/tweet at all or if he had channeled his famous personal charm into his cyber-persona. I do not think an aggressive blog persona is problematic per se. I believe that norm changes sometimes require in addition to careful public education, a variety of tactics that may be perceived as bullying or shaming. And I have supported many of Leiter's efforts. Rather, the main problem has been that he seemed very aggressive in defending his turf, as Brian Weatherson puts it, "highlighting the deficiencies of every possible rival." As readers of D&I know, I was especially surprised by his hostility toward the Jennings rankings (which he repeatedly called "nonsense"). Maybe I was extra sensitive to this because I used to blog with Jennings at NewAPPS. But as I highlighted in my postings on the Jennings rankings, I thought many of his harsh criticisms missed the mark and, more important, her research had already uncovered non-trivial hiring patterns in the profession.

Now one reason why Leiter's blog persona causes trouble is because he sticks (by his own lights) to the following norm: "if people say and do things in public, I respond to what they say and do, not who they are." In one sense this is refreshingly egalitarian, but in another sense this is patently unfair. If we worked and operated in a perfectly rational communicative community Leiter's norm would make sense. But de facto in many interactions there are non-trivial power differentials due to diverging status, tenure, blog influence, sub-specialty, risk aversion, tolerance for disagreement, and other possible salient differences. These differences have normative significance. Even if one is merely responding to provocation, the world is more likely to perceive the actions of the haves. (I learned this the hard way during my stint at NewAPPS, where we developed a reputation for snark against anonymous junior members of the profession.)

Note that the previous paragraphs I have not challenged Leiter's continued stewardship of the PGR. Not unlike Weatherson, I hope we will see more ranking in the future. But I recommend that if Leiter and the PGR Advisory Board think it wise that he should stay intimately involved in the future of PGR,* then that Leiter be strongly encouraged to suspend his blogging/tweeting. I say this not because I think Leiter is especially unsuited for combining editing the PGR and active role in social media (on the contrary, as I am able to recognize more than most observers, his achievement at combining service to the profession alongside demands of scholarship, teaching, family, etc. is nothing less than astounding and awe-inspiring); rather we have learned that combining these tasks leads to the perception of "too much power concentrated in any one person’s hands." (Weatherson)

LEMM & HISTORY NOT ATTRACTING BLACKS IN THE PHILOSOPHY PROFESSION

 There is a willful, not necessarily a conscious, preference among many members of the philosophy profession largely to maintain the status quo in terms of: the social group profiles of members; the dynamics of prestige and influence; and the areas and questions deemed properly or deeply "philosophical." None of this is good for black folks.--LK McPherson at NewAPPS, Dec. 12, 2011.

I put a screaming headline on this post. That's because I just finished reading “What is the State of Blacks in Philosophy?” (2014) Critical Philosophy of Race, by Tina Fernandes Botts, Liam Kofi Bright, Myisha Cherry, Guntur Mallarangeng, and Quayshawn Spencer. DailyNous posted a link to the piece, but to my amazement it has not generated any significant public discussion that I am familiar with. So, let me provoke some. According to the paper (this is summarized on DailyNous from which I quote):

• Blacks make up just 1.32 percent of the total number of people professionally affiliated (as grad students or faculty) with U.S. philosophy departments.
• Approximately 0.88 percent of U.S. philosophy Ph.D. students are black.
• Approximately 4.3 percent of U.S. tenured philosophy professors are black.
• Of black philosophy Ph.D. students in the U.S., half are female. That is about double the rate of the U.S. philosophy Ph.D. student population as a whole.
• The distribution of black female Ph.D. students across philosophy Ph.D. programs is much lower than black males. Specifically, 69 percent of black female Ph.D. students are at Penn State.
• The top areas of specialization for U.S. black philosophers are (1) Africana, (2) Race, (3) Social and Political, (4) Ethics, and (5) Continental philosophy.

One bit of terminology: Fernandes Botts et al. use "BIPs" to refer to Blacks in the Profession; I follow this convention. Before I offer some commentary I want to note that the "4.3 percent of U.S. tenured philosophy professors are black" number is based on the number of tenured APA members. I think it would be a  mistake if that number became the baseline for future discussion of BIPs. For, Kate Norlock reminds me that NCES has calculated (based on now ten year old data) that there are about 13,000 full-time philosophy faculty. (These are NOT all tenured, of course. But it excludes nearly all PhD students/ABDs.)* The number of BIPs in the (non-graduate-student) full-time teaching population, is, thus, probably closer to approximately 1%. This is back-of-the-envelope calculation, so should be treated with caution; it excludes part-time faculty! But that rough 1% number matches better, I think, the other data collected by Fernandes Botts et. al.

Correlation isn't causation. But....ahhh...correlation can also not be ignored.  So, to be blunt, every time we treat the LEMM as the CORE parts of philosophy (recall) and every time we mock SPEP-style Continental philosophy, we are, in effect, also (further) marginalizing (insulting, demeaning, etc.) the majority of BIPs. Every time you are a bystander to this, you are very likely complicit to making matters worse when it comes to the status of BIPs.

Or to get to the nub of the matter: the way professional philosophy understands what philosophy is may well be part of the problem. The issue has been explored with subtlety by Kristie Dotson in her now famous paper (see also her post at NewAPPS and McPherson's post linked at the  top of this post). I think we need to acknowledge that analytical philosophy, the way it has evolved, and the way we understand the history of philosophy are part of the problem. This is not to deny that we may have inherited Plato's original sins. (See also this post; so, yes, I was probably too optimistic, if not just deluded, in this post.) How much, I don't know. (This is not to ignore problems within Continental and other areas of philosophy; I am just not the right person to speak about them.) That is to say, rather than only focusing on fighting bias (explicit/tacit)), and improving procedures, we should be open to the possibility that our systematic downplaying of those parts of philosophy that seriously question both the philosophical status quo as well as the political/social/cultural/institutional status quo, and philosophical complicity in it, may, in fact, contribute to the very problem here.

When I was an undergraduate I was in awe of most of my philosophy teachers. I admired their intelligence, their argumentative skill, and their intellectual integrity. At the time, I didn't think I could become as good as them, but I wanted to join a club in which I could participate as a peer in the noble quest for the search after truth and justice. Professionally philosophy has treated me better than I expected. In looking at the numbers collected by Fernandes Botts and her colleagues, I now recognize that I was also striving to join and be allowed into a club very much like myself. And while I want to scream like my headline, this belated -- 'what took you so long?!' -- insight makes me wonder how many of my aspirations are tainted.

On the Carnap-Strawson debate and the soul of Analytical Philosophy during the Cold War

If the reader is shocked or offended by the two last-mentioned procedures, I hasten to assure him that they, occur, of course, only in the more barbarous regions, like America, where the sacrilege of tampering with the holy tradition of language is sometimes connived at.--Carnap "P.F. Strawson on Linguistic Naturalism" (937)

The distinction I used above between the way things happen in the world, and our own natures, is here, though vague, important. For it is a part of our nature that, things other than ourselves being as they are, it is natural for us to have the conceptual apparatus that we do have. But human nature is diverse enough to allow of another, though related, use of philosophical imagination. This consists in imagining ways in which, without things other than ourselves being different from what they are, we might view them through the medium of a different conceptual apparatus; Some metaphysics is best, or most charitably, seen as consisting in part in exercises of this sort...Of course, even when it can be so interpreted, it is not presented as a conceptual or structural revision by means of which we might see things differently; it is presented as a picture of thing as they really are, instead of as they delusively seem. This presentation with its contrast between esoteric-reality and daily delusion, involves, and is the consequence of, the unconscious distortion of ordinary concepts, i.e. of the ordinary use of linguistic expressions. So metaphysics though it can sometimes be charitably interpreted in the way I suggest, in fact always involves paradox and perplexities of the kind I first mentioned; and sometimes embodies no rudimentary vision, but merely rudimentary mistakes. Strawson (1963) "Carnap's Views on Constructed Systems Versus Natural Languages in Analytic Philosophy," (516; [emphases in original--ES])

Branden Fitelson wrote me a lovely, critical letter in response to viewing my lecture, "Anti-Mathematicism and Formal Philosophy" at the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy available online. In it he reminded me of an exchange by Strawson and Carnap that he uses in teaching. The papers represent philosophical fireworks of the highest order--they are, as Strawson's title indicates, a debate over the very soul of analytical philosophy. The papers repay repeated re-readings, and both sides make many  insightful observations on the philosophical merits of formal philosophy (a topic I regularly post about, see here and here). In particular, one is reminded -- and this is especially noteworthy in a philosophical age in which the guide to graduate education provided by the PGR does not even consider expertise in philosophy of education as worthy of note -- that one of the central philosophical issues is the nature of philosophical education.*

As a speculative aside, prompted by some remarks by Jason Stanley, the displacement of philosophical education as worthy of any attention was, in part, due to the success of Strawson's and Carnap's students and their intellectual allies in discrediting the non-scientific wing of Pragmatism associated, say, with Dewey. Subsequently, even Plato scholarship was reconstituted as unrelated to philosophical education. (The Meno and Theaetetus are then taught as obviously belonging primarily to the history of epistemology, etc.)

To return to my main point, in his response to Strawson, Carnap construes the debate as one between (linguistic) "naturalists" (that is Strawson, although this is not Strawson's term) and "constructionists" (Carnap). This construction allows Carnap to recycle some of his anti-Quine-ean moves against an opponent that has fewer resources to respond. He then offers effective responses to most of Strawson's charges, showing that they rely on unreliable distinctions/assumptions, misrepresentations of Carnap's program, and, crucially, that even where Strawson's positive program has merit, the two programs can be mutually supportive. Now, due to Strawson's title and the way the dialectic is construed it seems that what is at stake is ultimately the respective roles of natural language (and empirical observations on use), and the role of formal languages (and the merits of explication).+ Because Carnap has the last word in the Schilpp volume, he also gets away ignoring a feature of Strawson's argument (the passage quoted above) that Strawson admittedly qualifies as not being "central," (515), but does characterize as "inportant" and "a wide field open to philosophical imagination." (516)

I have quoted Strawson's defense of the role of "imagining ways in which, without things other than ourselves being different from what they are, we might view them through the medium of a different conceptual apparatus." Now the first thing to note is that this is presented as an extremely modest enterprise. There is no sense that an alternative conception of reality might be a guide to action or generate a vision of reality worth attaining (see philosophical prophecy). Given that Strawson makes disparaging remarks ("grandiose plan of logical atomism") of Carnapian "planners," the conservative implications are deliberate here. Strawson's version of descriptive analysis and descriptive metaphysics, self-consciously leaves things alone (recall yesterday's post). No doubt there will be howls of derision from Oxford -- if they pretended to care about my digressions -- but this is (further) evidence of the ignoble effects of the cold war on philosophy's self-image.

On Disciplinary Princes and Princesses

The superior gods laugh--'David Hume' [Suppressed by Adam Smith]

Look who thinks he is nothing?--From an old joke.

1. Lewis, David (214)
2. Quine, W.V.O. (164)
3. Putnam, Hilary (131)
4. Davidson, Donald (120)
4. Rawls, John (120)
6. Kripke, Saul (117)
7. Williams, Bernard (104)
8. Nozick, Robert (96)
9. Nagel, Thomas (94)
9. Nussbaum, Martha C. (94)
11. Searle, John (93)
12. Chisholm, Roderick M. (92)
13. Armstrong, David M. (87)
14. Fodor, Jerry (86)
15. Dummett, Michael (84)
16. Dennett, Daniel (83)
16. Harman, Gilbert (83)
16. Jackson, Frank (83)
19. Strawson, P. F. (82)
20. van Fraassen, Bas C. (77)---From The 266 Most-Cited Contemporary Authors in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. [Compiled by The Schwitzgebel family; HT Newapps]*

In accompanying posts, Eric Schwitzgebel has already noted the analytical/anglo slant of the Encyclopedia and the dramatic exclusion of anybody not 'white male' from the the-Schwitzgebel-SEP-top-266-list. Anybody familiar with the patterns of intellectual, cultural, and personal exclusion in the profession is not surprised by this.  Even so, it is -- forgive the pun -- instructive to note that the list is also a testament to the successful emancipation of Jewish men in the Anglophone world. Many of the  most important educational institutions had policies/quotas restricting Jewish access through the 1950s. (I am too young to remember any of this, of course, but when I would visit my grandfather in Forest Hills (Queens) in the 70s, he would show me the grounds of the (once) famous Tennis stadium and tell me about the exclusion of Jews.) One finds echos of these days not just in the cherished anecdotes about Morgenbesser, but also, more subtly, in some of Nozick's self-fashionings (walking around Brooklyn with Plato). {For more on such themes, see Robert Paul Wolff's memoir.}

Much of my philosophical life is a struggle against my inner high-school-teacher-to-be, and so I resist getting too close to the-list-making philosophers (Aristotle, Kant, you know the type). Of course, I love lists and stared at the-266 longer than I should. I was pleasantly surprised that two (Nussbaum and Dennett) in the top-20 were my teachers once. I was pleased that my supervisor (Garber) made the list based not just on his strength as a scholar, but also for his youthful contributions to decision theory. I know that Leonard Linsky (who did not make the list) would have been proud of his Bernard.  I am startled that one of my graduate school peers, Jesse Prinz, is about to crack the 'top 200' (and he has time to watch movies).

Is there anything else to say about the Schwitzgebel-SEP-top-266-list other than my name-dropping?

Philosophy Rankings: Experts And Markets, Part (I)

The Philosophical Gourmet rankings (hereafter: "Gourmet" or "Rankings" or "Gourmet rankings") are said to be "primarily measures of faculty quality and reputation" of selected institutions. These Rankings aggregate expert judgments by way of a survey of selected, expert faculty. These Rankings serve multiple functions in the profession. In addition to measuring quality, one of the main purposes is to guide student choices in graduate education. Several tabs in the report are directly related to and informative about graduate education, choosing graduate departments, as well as job placement (and "employment"). It has been a true service to the profession that the report "was used to encourage all departments to provide comparably candid and thorough information." So, one non-trivial impact of these rankings is to create far more transparency about professional philosophy in North America, the UK, Irelands, Australia, and New Zealand. By and large, the advisory board and the evaluators are drawn from members of the profession who were trained and work in these countries. (I counted four exceptions to this claim in the 2011 list, but I may have missed a few.) In addition, the vast majority of evaluators are drawn from PhD/MA granting programs. (My eye-ball guess is that this is true of around 90% of the evaluators)

In the report the coverage of Gourmet is described as "The English-Speaking World," even though it excludes quite a few populous English speaking countries (South Africa, India, Pakistan, Nigeria etc.). It is, especially, worth nothing that much professional philosophy in Europe and increasingly Asia and South America has switched to English as its lingua franca during the last decade. Perhaps I am biased, but there is now considerable interaction between European philosophers and North American ones; they share professional journals in common and increasingly the job markets are becoming integrated.I mention this not to nit-pick but because it helps us see thatthe Gourmet's experts are judging their own professional ecology (henceforth: "ecology" or "Gourmet ecology" or "the ecology.") In particular, they are judging the institutional elite within this particular ecology.*

Of course, these institutions have many different characteristics (e.g., private/public) and they inhabit different funding regimes. But on the whole, the Gourmet ecology shares – what I will call – competitive emulation as a key axiological commitment. Relative quality is the scarce good, and by increasing (relative) quality one moves up in the rankings (itself another scarce good). Within this particular ecology, the rankings, thus, also serve to alert outsiders (Deans, Administrators, Alumni, foreign observers, potential students, etc.) to the aggregated expert judgments and can also helpguide policy – for example, hiring and curriculum decisions – in the area. Given that Gourmet offers both overall and niche rankings, it has created a variety of 'markets' and 'market strategies' for (relative) quality in lots of areas of philosophy within the ecology. Not to put too fine a point on it, it is my opinion that the existence of Gourmet has helped increase the average salaries of quite a few professional philosophers that have benefitted from the possibility of competitive bidding of their services within the ecology; I believe I have benefitted from this mechanism. It has also helped that thanks to Brian Leiter's efforts, professional philosophy has been a first mover in these areas, and that neighboring disciplines have been relatively slow to catch up. Moreover, as anybody that is old enough to remember can attest, the existence of Gourmet has undermined, in part, a more close-knit old-boys-club centered on the Ivies, Oxbridge, and a few Midwestern/West Coast Institutions; from a low base-line, it has promoted a more meritocratic ethos within the profession. By updating the Rankings relatively frequently, it has also undermined folk resting on their laurels and, thereby, promoted increased activity within the profession.**