tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26951738.post6727200025917510074..comments2024-03-28T19:14:33.619-07:00Comments on The Splintered Mind: Age Effects on SEP Citation, Plus the Baby Boom Philosophy Bust and The Winnowing of GreatsEric Schwitzgebelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11541402189204286449noreply@blogger.comBlogger10125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26951738.post-69065982115207294372019-10-03T22:21:04.309-07:002019-10-03T22:21:04.309-07:00GREAT STUFF, Eric. I've long said the key to ...GREAT STUFF, Eric. I've long said the key to getting a great job in philosophy, based on my experience was to be born in 1943, and earn your phd as the baby boomers were entering college. <br />Johnhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13947334719510941984noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26951738.post-69396571225847604422019-09-30T16:31:43.504-07:002019-09-30T16:31:43.504-07:00Thanks for the continuing comments, folks!
Jonath...Thanks for the continuing comments, folks!<br /><br />Jonathan: I suspect that it's less so now than it used to be, yes.<br /><br />Gen X Philosopher: Interesting thought. This would fit with my hunch that Gen X philosophers *might* be less specialized than the Boomers, including less specifically focused on audiences of academic philosophers as opposed to broader audiences or interdisciplinary audiences. There might be a trend toward more space for applied ethics and other sorts of practically-oriented philosophy that would also fit with this picture.Eric Schwitzgebelhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16274774112862434865noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26951738.post-9874391719811895362019-09-30T06:40:56.858-07:002019-09-30T06:40:56.858-07:00Hi Eric,
This is all absolutely fascinating - tha...Hi Eric,<br /><br />This is all absolutely fascinating - thanks so much for doing it. I just wanted to consider one further thought about the difference between the baby boomers and Gen X.<br /><br />How influential a person is in philosophy seems to be a function of two things:<br /><br />(a) How influential that person is<br /><br />(b) What percentage of that influence is in philosophy specifically<br /><br />Now, my sense is that Gen X is doing pretty well on (a) but that the baby boomers are completely destroying us on (b). The result is that the baby boomers might be more influential within philosophy specifically, but it would be a mistake just to immediately infer for that reason that they are more influential overall.<br /><br />You are actually a very good example of this phenomenon yourself. Suppose we pick out a few baby boomers who are approximately equal to you in their influence within the discipline of philosophy specifically. My guess is that you would be more influential than almost any of them overall (just because there would be SO much more Interest in your work outside the discipline).Gen X Philosophernoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26951738.post-54162086027088264432019-09-29T14:25:18.634-07:002019-09-29T14:25:18.634-07:00The optimistic take on this is that the field is f...The optimistic take on this is that the field is finally stepping out of the shadow of the pre-boomers. There is more room than ever for new ideas and new research programmes to emerge. No student entering the field today will get the feeling that they simply <i>must</i> engage with the work of Big Shots X, Y and Z in order to be taken seriously. There is no X, Y and Z.Jonathan Birchhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01073088565890005370noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26951738.post-80436014804864252692019-09-28T07:47:26.497-07:002019-09-28T07:47:26.497-07:00Thanks for the comments, folks!
Brian: Interestin...Thanks for the comments, folks!<br /><br />Brian: Interesting about the UK. I haven’t looked at that quantitatively, but impressionistically, the oldest generation was more relatively important in the UK than in the US (Ryle, Strawson, Austin) in a way that doesn’t show well in the SEP. Also, interesting six-year analysis.<br /><br />Anon 2:12: I’m inclined to endorse Brian’s response. We could also do it with more complex statistical methods than binning. I agree that some of these cutoffs are a bit arbitrary. But I bet we still find the general results with continuous variables.<br /><br />Tom: Interesting point about specialization. That seems likely to be part of the story. Two of the Gen X philosophers with the most citation by my method are pretty broad and systematic within their subdisciplines (Chalmers and Schaffer) in a way that doesn’t seem narrower to me than, say, Kripke or Rawls. Some lower ranked Gen Xers are probably overranked by my method due to medium sized contributions to lots of areas (I would classify myself as an example of that.). I wonder if specialization is partly an adaptive response of Boomers to their situation which Gen Xers do less — in addition to probably being a general trend over time, as you say. Of course there are broad Boomers too, like Nussbaum, so the assessment is tricky. Also, the data are consistent with your assessment that we are increasingly narrow if the main reason we see the Gen Xers we do is that they are the exceptions. In 20 years, maybe, we could see whether the Gen Xers tend to make narrower rather than broad contributions or whether the currently listed Gen Xers are representative of a shift away from specialization.Eric Schwitzgebelhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16274774112862434865noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26951738.post-22911272781653836402019-09-27T18:18:37.724-07:002019-09-27T18:18:37.724-07:00As a boomer, I can absolutely endorse your point a...As a boomer, I can absolutely endorse your point about the terrible job market in the early 1980s. Boomers are normally thought to have been lucky economically; in the academic world not so much.<br /><br />I have a further thought. As I believe you've noted in the past, to get a lot of citations in the SEP, the way you count them, it's important to have contributed on many topics, so you can appear in many entries. But one long-term trend there's been in philosophy has been toward greater and greater specialization. So the pre-boomers have, as one advantage in your calculations, that they tended to write on a wider variety of topics than the boomers and later generations have done. In my field of ethics, boomer books -- e.g. Larry Temkin on equality, Shelly Kagan on desert -- may be very good, but they're on much narrower topics than those of A Theory of Justice or Anarchy, State, and Utopia.<br /><br />At least this seems a factor to consider: if philosophical writing becomes more and more specialized, writers from early generations, who tended to write more widely, will have an advantage in the specific kind of calculation you do.Tom Hurkanoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26951738.post-28769963959024983122019-09-27T18:01:05.325-07:002019-09-27T18:01:05.325-07:00In the immediate post-war years, the birth-rate in...In the immediate post-war years, the birth-rate in the US was roughly double what it had been during the war. But in terms of impact on analytic philosophy, the children born during the war (or, more precisely, between 1939 and 1945) had roughly twice the impact of the children born in the six years after the war ended. If your prior was that each cohort's influence would be proportional to its size, that's a factor of four away from what you expected. That kind of difference from expectation feels like it needs explaining.<br /><br />And while the cultural experiences of war-time children might be fairly similar to the cultural experiences of the boomers, their professional opportunities were, as Eric rightly points out, very very different. Brian Weathersonhttp://brian.weatherson.orgnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26951738.post-4218824783376450012019-09-27T14:12:43.951-07:002019-09-27T14:12:43.951-07:00The date cut-offs for generations are notoriously ...The date cut-offs for generations are notoriously arbitrary, sometimes indicating a cultural divide and sometimes something else. For example, the Gen X vs Boomer cut-off of 1964 is based on birth statistics rather than cultural identity or shared historical experiences. Many born in the early '60s identify as Gen X, and cultural identification also depends where someone grew up (e.g., London vs. rural Arkansas). Similarly, Silents have much in common with Boomers who experienced the Kennedy and King assassinations and the Vietnam War. It's hard to understand what the point of citation comparisons by generation would be even if if the date cut-offs weren't so arbitrary. Is there some problem that needs addressing? Is it sheer curiosity? Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26951738.post-57610920839651574342019-09-27T09:45:57.924-07:002019-09-27T09:45:57.924-07:00That last comment was by me - I thought a name wou...That last comment was by me - I thought a name would show up automatically - sorry about that.Brian Weathersonhttp://brian.weatherson.orgnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26951738.post-83980521552031983382019-09-27T09:42:47.095-07:002019-09-27T09:42:47.095-07:00This is really great.
It would be super interesti...This is really great.<br /><br />It would be super interesting to know how much the Silent Generation stuff generalises to non-philosophy and the non-US.<br /><br />My impression is that it does not generalise to the UK - there are way fewer influential philosophers born during the war in Britain than there are in America. Relatedly, the UK did not have a post-war baby boom. (There was a huge spike in births almost literally 9 months after the war ended, and then it returned to baseline pretty quick.) And it certainly didn't have anything like the GI Bill.<br /><br />I did some very cursory poking around math and econ about the relative influence of people born during or just before the war, compared to the boomers, and the initial data wasn't as dramatic as in philosophy. But I suspect I wasn't looking in the right spot - this still feels like the right explanation for what happened in philosophy.Unknownhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10876405644464889060noreply@blogger.com