Hidebound steepness
Fri 15 Aug 2014 06:58 AM
Eric Schwitzgebel recently compiled a list of the 267 most-cited contemporary authors in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Eric Schliesser suggests that it might be used as a measure of one's saturation in conventional wisdom by tallying up how many of the authors were once one's teachers. Schliesser reports that he scores 4 and so identifies his "personal Schwitzgebel-SEP-index" as about 1.5% (4/267). Schwitzgebel also scores 4. [1]
I score 4, and there are another 2 who were were faculty at UCSD while I was a grad student but with whom I didn't actually take a course.
Other measures that they suggest are how many of the authors one knows about or for how many one can identify the area of philosophy to which the author most contributed. However, those are measures of propositional knowledge rather than of sociological connection to the discipline. A hermit who reads a lot could score highly.
We might instead tally the number of authors on the list with whom one talked philosophy while one was a student. Let's set the bar low and say that asking the author a question at a public talk counts, but merely seeing the author give a public talk or exchanging pleasantries does not. The well-read hermit would score nullity on this, and so it is perhaps a more interesting sociological metric.
In addition to the 6 UCSD faculty, I score at least another 29 on this measure. [2] A couple were while I was still an undergraduate and a few were at conferences, but most were because the author was a visiting speaker at UCSD. I attended colloquia religiously and participated avidly, so I came close to maxing out the possible score given the opportunities I had. But it reminds me how lucky I was to be at a place where there were those opportunities.
It is well known from science studies that social connections serve to transmit tacit knowledge in important ways, so I am surely a different philosopher than I would have been than if I had been taught the same material in a more isolated place. I think it's a difference for the better, but perhaps it has made me so steeped in orthodoxy that I am a bitter cup of hidebound philosophical tea.
So let's call this measure the SEP-hidebound-steepness score.
My SEP-h-s is 35. I probably won't put that on my business cards.
Notes:
[1] Schliesser writes that there must be somebody who was taught by 25 or more of the philosophers on the list, but I doubt it. One can only take classes with some many different people, and one tends to take classes at only a few institutions before one stops being a student.
[2] The number would be higher still if it included people on the list with whom I've talked philosophy since graduating and becoming a professor. But construing it so that I get the biggest number possible makes it look less like a measure of sociological position and more like bragging.