In comments to Kieran Healy’s posting/article analyzing the PGR data, Tom Hurka (Philosophy, Toronto) (who is also a member of the PGR Advisory Board) raises some interesting questions about Professor Healy’s finding that philosophy is a "high consensus field":
Could the high consensus in philosophy not lead departments to want to hire and individuals to want to work on a comparatively few “hot” topics, maybe some interdisciplinary and some not, with the result that the kind of work hired for and done was less varied and original, at least with respect to topic, than it might otherwise be. (The split here is just hot/unhot, not disciplinary/interdisciplinary.)
In suggesting this, I make two assumptions. One is that to judge a department or individual highly one must judge that he is doing a) intellectually high-quality work or b) important subjects. So the consensus in overall judgements will rest in part on consensus on b), the important subjects. The other is that the consensus Kieran found in whole-department rankings will also be found in the specialty rankings, so there is consensus not only on what are the important specialties in philosophy, say Mind/Metaphysics/Language vs. continental, but also on what are the important subtopics in, say, metaphysics or ethics. But I’m not assuming that departments’ hiring and individuals’ research decisions are driven only by the desire for the prestige working on the hot topics can bring. They may genuinely share the judgements of importance. But the effect may still be the same: less variety and less originality in the topics people work on and hire for than if there were less consensus on what is important.
This suggestion resonates with a couple of things for me. One is Richard Rorty’s anecdote, in a recent London Review of Books, about a department that decided not to hire in the history of philosophy because it was more important to have someone contributing to the literature on vagueness. This anecdote may have been embellished in the telling, either to or by Rorty, but it does have the ring of truth to me. And if many departments look to hire in areas as specific (and currently hot) as vagueness, mightn’t the result be the loss of variety and originality mentioned above?
I also recall Kieran mentioning, in a post before Christmas, a sociological generalization to the effect that major intellectual breakthroughs usually don’t occur in the top institutions but are made by people working outside them, in more marginal locations. But if the top philosophy departments become more similar in their conceptions of what topics are important, and their consensus spreads to other departments, wont’t there be fewer marginal locations and less space for true innovations?
Finally, and this both is impressionistic and may reflect just middle-aged jaundice, but I’m often struck by how many PhDs coming out of the top departments in my field of ethics work on familiar and even overdiscussed topics, such as internal vs. external reasons (yawn, yawn), without this seeming to stop them from getting hired by other top departments. Maybe this has always gone on; certainly when I was a graduate student in Oxford in the 1970s everybody was writing on some aspect of Davidson. But it does seem that at many departments there is a strong and quite narrow sense of what the important topics are, so graduate students are trained and encouraged to write on those topics rather than to try to identify new ones. And that again lessens the chances that varied and original work, the kind that uncovers genuinely new issues, will get done.
There are good things and bad things about the philosophical profession as it now operates. The high degree of consensus Kieran found in the PGR highlights some of the good ones, such as the existence of comparatively objective standards, but it also may highlight some that…aren’t so wonderful. May there not be some respects in which philosophy would be more lively if there were less consensus within it?
I have opened comments, and invite discussion of the issues raised by Professor Hurka. I will delete anonymous postings, regardless of content. (Sorry to put this in bold, but in the past some folks have missed this.) Also, please no discussion of whether philosophy is or is not a high-consensus field, based on this or that fringe group having a grievance with the PGR. That topic was aired on the original thread (linked above). What I am curious about is philosophers’ reactions to Professor Hurka’s observation that perhaps the high-level of consensus in the field is actually a bad thing; and if it is, what might be done (via the PGR or otherwise) to alter that state of affairs.
Leave a Reply to Jamie Cancel reply