Thanks to David Wallace (Oxford) for calling this exchange to my attention. David Velleman (NYU) writes:
All this talk of bias in the PGR evaluator panels presupposes that there is something for the survey to be biased about, a reality that it can misrepresent. The same presupposition underlies criticism of the PGR’s “methodology” — as if there is something that the survey can mis-measure. This presupposition is false. As Jessica Wilson has pointed out in her excellent FaceBook post, philosophy encompasses too many differences of approach, interest, method, and tradition to allow for a uni-dimensional measure of “quality”.
Any student who is considering how to spend the next 6-7 years of his or her life should be willing to spend a couple of days with departmental websites, PhilPapers, and Google Scholar, looking at faculty publications, following trails of citations, getting a feel for the self-presentation of various programs and checking their placement records. This sort of research will uncover not just who the recognized experts are but what style of philosophy they do and how their values are reflected in their departments’ curricula and self-descriptions. Compared with this sort of research, a reputational survey is nothing but a crutch — and a broken crutch, at that.
As many other have noted in various discussions on the Web, those who participate in the PGR are kidding themselves if they think they are performing a service for prospective graduate students. They a producing a distraction from the research that prospective students ought to do and easily can do with the resources of the Internet.
David Wallace (Oxford) responds:
I evaluated for PGR 2014 – mostly for philosophy of physics – and, pace David Velleman, I don’t think I’m kidding myself that I’m participating in something helpful for graduate students, at least in my area. Obvious disclaimer from the start: I’m delighted that Oxford was placed first and I’ll leave readers to apply whatever discount weighting seems appropriate for that conflict of interest.
Ten people evaluated for philosophy of physics in 2014 (down from 11 in 2011, 1 women each time, for those keeping count) and, to be honest, the list of recommendations they produced, at least for the top dozen or so, is pretty much what I’d have produced by myself. So one of my undergraduates wanting to do philosophy of physics wouldn’t have been helped much by PGR, though arguably if I had any particular idiosyncratic likes or dislikes they’d have been shielded from them.
Even five years ago, I’m not sure that would have been true. Being in the UK inevitably means my grip on the structure of US institutions, and the location of various US philosophers, is going to be a bit shaky, because someone’s physical location isn’t that salient if you only encounter them as a name on a paper. I travel quite a lot and by now have more or less worked it out, but that’s a relatively recent thing and to some extent turns on the fact that I’m in a privileged position with lots of opportunities to travel.
But more importantly, very few applicants for grad work in philosophy of physics have access to a research active philosopher of physics. Only a minority of philosophy majors will – and plenty of people come into philosophy of physics from physics or maths backgrounds. Those people need to have some way to work out where to apply, and I disagree with David Vellemann that a couple of days of research will do it. For a start, assessing the quality of someone’s work is pretty tricky if you’re only undergraduate level – in philosophy of physics some of the best papers will be literally unreadable without the kind of math background that you’re likely to pick up only at graduate school. You may well not know which journals to look in (how many non-philosophers of physics know that Stud.Hist.Phil.Mod.Phys. is the place to publish anything specialist and technical) or which archives to check (philosophy of science mostly uses philsci-archive.pitt.edu, philosophy of physics uses arxiv.org – but plenty of students don’t even know either exist). Citation rates aren’t that easy to find for people without public profiles on google scholar. (And are themselves scarcely reliable.) Most importantly, how do you know who to research in the first place? You could, of course, look down the faculties of the most prestigious universities to find the philosophers of physics – and Oxford would do just fine that way – but UC Irvine ranks about 50th in the THE rankings, Western Ontario about 100th.
All in all, I suspect that a seriously diligent undergraduate with very developed research skills could produce a halfway reasonable list after several *weeks* of work. That is unrealistic as an expectation for prospective applicants trying to put together their application in the middle of full-time study, and in any case I have no reason at all to think that they’d produce something epistemically *more* reliable than PGR (they will have spent much longer on the task than a PGR assessor did but will have been hugely hampered by a lack of specialist knowledge up-front and a greatly reduced ability to judge the relative merits of specialist work).
The PGR speciality ranking for Philosophy of Physics can’t and doesn’t pretend to be a definitive scientific study of which universities have the best philosophy of physics groups or individuals. As has been pointed out at length, it’s not even clear that’s well defined. It’s an aggregate of informed opinion, from a moderate-size group of informed people. It doesn’t really offer anything to the prospective graduate student who has nine or ten* well-respected philosophers of physics on speed-dial. For those that don’t, it’s an approximation of that. It isn’t as good as the Platonic ideal of a resource for Philosophy of Physics admissions, but the thing about Platonic ideals is that they don’t actually exist. If and when an actually-existing rival resource for Philosophy of Physics turns up, I’ll weigh it on its merits against PGR. Until then, PGR is, (a) for philosophy of physics, way better than any currently available alternative heuristic for the great majority of applicants, and (b) sufficiently good that I don’t feel an urgent disciplinary need to do better in the face of other pressures on my time.
* nine well-respected philosophers of physics plus me!
Since Professor Wallace is so obviously correct about all this, and Professor Velleman so obviously wrong (not to mention utterly insensitive to the situation undergraduates face, though that doesn't surprise me), one does wonder why it is even necessary to have these debates? But I am grateful to Prof. Wallace for entering the fray. (The exchange appeared in a comment thread here.)
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