Experimental Friendly Departments Revisited

In light of a recent comment by Wes Anderson--who is an administrator for the newly created X-Phi Facebook Group--I thought I would post something once again concerning departments that are experimentally friendly.  The ordering is based on Leiter's most recent Gourmet Report.  Neither the list of schools nor the faculty I list for each school is supposed to be exhaustive--just a series of incomplete suggestions:

PhD Programs:

Rutgers (Stich)
Princeton (Appiah, Harman, Leslie, and Singer)
University of Michigan
Pittsburgh HPS (Machamer, Machery, and Palmieri)
Harvard (Godfrey-Smith, Kelly, and Siegel)
UNC Chapel Hill (Knobe and Prinz)
Arizona (Nichols)
UC San Diego (The Churchlands, Cohen, Grush)
Indiana (Weinberg)
Penn (Bicchieri and Hatfield)
UC Riverside (Schwitzgebel)
Carnegie Melon (Arlo-Costa, Danks, Glymour, and Palmer)
Wash U (Bermudez, Doris, and Heil)
Florida State University (Bishop and Mele)
Utah (Mallon)

MA Programs:

Georgia State University (Nahmias)

There are of course a number of other departments where you will find empirically minded philosophers to work with--but this list is composed of places where the methods used by experimental philosophers will be welcome (by at least some of the faculty).  But since I am currently advising a student with respect to potential PhD programs, this is the list I have put together for her.  Hopefully, some of the undergraduates who read this blog will find it useful as they prepare to apply to graduate school this fall.  If I left any departments or faculty out, I apologize.  Please rectify my shortsightedness in the comment thread!

UPDATE:  This list has been revised in light of the helpful comments in the thread--for, instance, I can't believe I left Princeton off the list!  Thanks for all the suggestions!

Comments

[Edouard Machery]

A few corrections:

Pittsburgh
- Paul Griffiths is not in Pittsburgh anymore--he's now at the University of Sidney
- Add Paolo Palmieri (Pitt, HPS) who uses experimental methods to study the history of science.

CMU
- Add Clark Glymour

Edouard

[Edouard Machery]

one more thing:

"Pittsburgh" in Thomas's list links to the philosophy department.

Most of the experimental philosophy friendly people like me in Pittsburgh are in History and Philosophy of Science. The 2 departments are closely working with each other, but we are nonetheless distinct, have different research interests, and are somewhat looking for different kinds of students.

For HPS, see:
http://www.pitt.edu/~hpsdept/index.html

Edouard

[Clifford Sosis]

Hello Thomas,

You might want to mention that Michael Bishop (a disciple of Stitch) is at FSU. He is currently editing Stephen Stitch and his Critics. Bishop is a prominent critic of the tradition of consulting intuitions, in general(see: The Standard Pathologies of Analytic Epistemology). If X-Phi is 'empirically-minded philosophy' then he is in (see: Epistemology and the Psychology of Human Judgement). If X-Phi is canvassing intutions then he might not belong on your list. I suspect most people, including yours truly, consider X-Phi the latter rather than the former, but, based on what I've read here, many would consider Bishop an experimental philosopher par excellence (in the spirit of Hume, rather than Wittgenstein). Bishop seems to believe that we should burn all of our epistemological armchairs, even if they belong to the folk. He has suggested that intuitions can be useful instruments in some circumstances, but seems to believe that, in general, we should't consult our intuitions in order to evaluate the epistemic status of beliefs. I'm interested in what you think. What criteria should we use to determine whether we should include an institution, or individual on this list?

Excelsior!
C.L.Sosis.

P.S. I say, he's in.

[Gilbert Harman]

You might include Princeton: Peter Singer, Anthony Appiah, and Sarah-Jane Leslie, among others. (Our recent PhDs include Joshua Greene and Joshua Knobe.)

Also Harvard: Sean Kelly.

Gil

[Wes Anderson]

Would it be terribly inconvenient to post this every few years, to show changes (sort of like Leiter, albeit less detailed than his)?

[Thomas Nadelhoffer]

Wes,

It only took ten minutes to do, so it wouldn't even be minorly inconvenient. But I will, however, need to be reminded!

Thomas

[Wes Anderson]

What about Tufts?--
http://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/incbios/dennettd/dennettd.htm

[Wes Anderson]

I was just wondering if any of these would be good candidates (from the Knobe site). Is the Knobe site not a very good site to use for this sort of thing?:

1. Hubert Dreyfus: http://ist-socrates.berkeley.edu/%7Ehdreyfus/
2. Jerry Fodor: http://www.philosophy.rutgers.edu/FACSTAFF/BIOS/fodor.html
3. Colin Klein: http://tigger.uic.edu/~cvklein/index.html
4. Victoria McGeer: http://web.princeton.edu/sites/philosph/bios/mcgeer.htm
5. John Mikhail: http://www.law.georgetown.edu/faculty/mikhail/
6. Mark Phelan: http://www.unc.edu/home/mphelan/index.htm
7. Dan Ryder: http://www.unc.edu/home/mphelan/index.htm
8. J.D. Trout: http://www.parmly.luc.edu/~jtrout/
9. Brian Weatherson : http://www.arts.cornell.edu/phil/faculty/weatherson.html
10. Eric Wiland: http://www.umsl.edu/~philo/Faculty/facultybios/wiland.htm

Also, is there no one from NYU?

Are these professors not as deeply deep-rooted in experimental philosophy?

[Wes Anderson]

whoops!
Ryder: http://www.danryder.com/

[Edouard Machery]

It is useful to distinguish between philosophers who are naturalistically oriented and people who have some sympathy toward experimental philosophy.

More than a few philosophers of science and of psychology (with real knowledge of the relevant sciences) have expressed some doubts, and sometimes hostility, toward experimental philosophy. This includes a few philosophers who are themselves doing experimental work in collaboration with some scientists. They sometimes do not view the experiments made by experimental philosophers as real, serious experiments. (Don't even ask for names)

So, if you want to apply for a grad program and if you want to do some experimental philosophy, you should not assume that every naturalistic philosophers will view your interests positively. Far from it.

Edouard

[Ron Mallon]

(1) I think this is a great list and very useful, though I believe it almost certainly underestimates the list of good candidate departments. My sense is that lot more people than the usual suspects, even hard core conceptual analysis people, are interested in experimental results. Sometimes they think the experimenters just haven't asked the right questions (or have asked them badly), and they're too far along to think it worth getting the requisite experimental credentials to do it themselves. Such people might really enjoy having their own graduate student to allow them to join the fray.

(2) Students should really think about other departments at the schools, e.g. the cognitive science centers at Rutgers or Indiana makes them places where a person can get some real knowledge and credentialing about contemporary empirical work. If we were independently ranking programs for ex phi, that would be something to take into account.

(3) Because experimental philosophers are still philosophers, attending the best graduate program one can get into (by the profession's lights) is still the best policy (ceteris paribus) for one's career prospects, I expect.

[jonathan weinberg]

Following up on Ron's and Edouard's posts, I would also note that looking to get graduate education in x-phi must involve getting really high-quality graduate education in the part of philosophy that one wants to do the x-phi of. It takes a fair amount of getting steeped in the philosophical area that you want to participate in, before you can figure out which questions are worth asking & what implications various results can have for it.

Also, there's a very good chance that even if down the line your graduate work heavily involves x-phi, most of the people you'll be wanting to get to think about hiring you won't be x-phi people, and you'll need to know how to present yourself as a philosopher that they'll recognize as such.

[Mark Phelan]

Hey Wes,

I'm still a lowly grad student, so I don't fit the bill of faculty interested in experimental philosophy. It may be worth considering, though, how many students within these departments are interested in X-phi. I guess it probably follows the profs though.

M

[Mark Phelan]

Oh, also on the faculty point, I'm currently working on an experimental project with Ram Neta (at UNC) and another with Marga Reimer (at Arizona). So, I can contest to their interest--though neither's published anything experimental yet, so I don't know if they count.

[John Bengson]

"this list is composed of places where the methods used by experimental philosophers will be welcome (by at least some of the faculty)"

Given that many philosophers who do not themselves use the methods of experimental philosophers still to some extent welcome such methods, this criterion seems quite inclusive. I'm curious: are there any programs of which this is not true?

[Eric Schwitzgebel]

I'd recommend a stricter criterion than "welcoming" or "friendly", which John and others have noticed are pretty weak. If one hopes to focus one's research on experimental philosophy, it would be helpful (though not necessary) to be advised by someone who is him- or herself actively engaged in it -- who maybe knows, for example, a little something about statistics and research methodology.

The list above more closely approximates a list of people of that sort (though perhaps it casts its net a bit wider) than a list of people who are merely "friendly".

[Thomas Nadelhoffer]

John,

How would you prefer that I parse the issue--given that undergraduates have requested a list of institutions that would be a good fit for students who may be experimentally inclined? My intuitions(!) tell me that some schools would be particularly bad for students wanting to do experimental work.

Keep in mind that the list should not only include places with faculty who actually do experimental philosophy as that would rule out some really great programs (e.g., Princeton). So what else--other that "experimentally friendly"--would do the trick? Your suggestion that the criterion I have selected is too inclusive may be correct. However, the implication--namely, that there are NO programs without at least some faculty who to "some extent welcome such methods"--seems incorrect. I can think of several where students wanting to do experimental work would not be taken seriously, but it is simply impolite and unnecessary to list them. Of course, that is not to suggest that such departments don't exist--for surely they do! It is also worth pointing out that there are surely other schools that should perhaps be on the list. So, if you some additional candidates, I would be happy to add them to the list (e.g., Texas with Leiter)!

[John Bengson]

Thomas,

Good question. I like Eric's suggestion, though I worry that the requirement that the faculty be competent in statistics and research methodology is a bit too exclusive. Perhaps it's just right if we're talking about departments for grad students interested in writing an x-phi thesis or dissertation. Yet, it seems that a grad student could get input about such matters from someone else (a scientist) on his/her committee, in which case this is still too strong. Maybe the criterion should be: has faculty that would be willing to supervise a dissertation or thesis in x-phi (caveat, caveat). However, if we're talking about departments for grad students merely interested in pursuing (publishing in) x-phi, this criterion is obviously once again too strong.

Why am I hesitant to fully endorse any of the above criteria? Well, I've done x-phi at both Wyoming and Texas, but not with faculty in possession of the above competence. Nor do they have a general proclivity for x-phi. In fact, I'd describe the faculty I've worked with most at Wyoming and Texas as thoroughgoing *rationalists*. It strikes me that this is an indication not only of the extent to which x-phi and the armchair can co-exist (despite the x-phi T-shirts, of which I'm not a fan), but also of the extent to which many contemporary philosophers -- rationalists included -- embrace a sort of methodological pluralism. For this reason, it seems a bit misleading to make a list of PhD and MA programs specifically for x-philes. This is not to say that one should not make some sort of list to help undergraduates make informed decisions about where to do their graduate work. It's just to suggest that the criterion for any such list should be accompanied by many very loud bells and whistles.

[jonathan weinberg]

Jen Wright's presence there surely means that Wyoming should be included.

[Eddy Nahmias]

Wherever you go, make sure you get a solid education in philosophy and make sure you take a good course in statistics (and if possible a psychology methodology course).