GIGO or the new rankings of philosophy journals

It was a philosopher, Charles Babbage, who first coined the term “garbage in, garbage out,” a term invaluable in understanding that computers only work as well as what is plugged into them. And now the term is coming back full circle to philosophy, at least if one wants to make sense of the latest misbegotten ranking in philosophy: the recent ranking of philosophy journals put out by the European Science Foundation.

I found these guidelines for how the index was compiled.  It doesn’t look like a straightforward A to C grading scale. To get on the list at all, a journal has to meet the “normal international academic standards” like being peer-reviewed, etc.  C is for local regional journals. A and B are for international journals. A is reserved for “high ranking” international journals and B is for “standard” internaltional journals. That difference is worth worrying over.  Hypatia, the leading journal of feminist philosophy in the English-speaking world,  gets a B.  How the hell can that be? Also, the rankings are based upon the judgments of a small select group of “experts” and I’m sure the philosopher experts aren’t expert in continental or feminist philosophy.
John McCumber is terribly wary of this ranking, as am I. See his recent post to this effect. I have additional concerns. I think that any ranking based on the input of a select group of philosophers will only tell what that select group thinks. So it is entirelly bogus to think that this one group’s rankings say anthing beyond what that group thinks. Or, as statisticians put it, the results are not generalizable. In other words, it’s just X in, X out. As to whether X is garbage or gourmet findings, the index itself is silent.

As to who were the “inputs” for the study, note the following and think about how much they may, or may not, represent philosophy today, especiallly the burgeoning work going on in continental, pragmatist, and feminist philosophy. I thank John McCumber for compiling this list

Philosophy
François Recanati (Chair), Institut Jean Nicod, CNRS/EHESS, Paris (FR) (Barrry Smith,below, is also associated with the institute Nicold)

http://www.institutnicod.org/notices.php?user=recanati

Après des études de philosophie à Paris (agrégation 1974), Récanati a poursuivi son apprentissage philosophique à Oxford, et il a étudié la linguistique à l’EHESS. Lui-même chargé de conférences à l’EHESS, il y a enseigné la pragmatique linguistique et la philosophie du langage de 1975 à 1990. En 1990 il a participé à la création du DEA de Sciences cognitives (EHESS/Paris VI/Ecole Polytechnique), dans le cadre duquel il enseigne toujours aujourd’hui.

Manuel Garcia-Carpintero, Universitat de Barcelona (SP)

http://www.ub.es/grc_logos/people/garciacarpintero/index.htm

Doctor in Philosophy by the Universitat de Barcelona (1988), and professor in the Departament de Lògica, Història i Filosofia de la Ciència of this university since 1984.

Interests
I am currently working on a book on reference, defending a certain form of a neo-Fregean picture from the criticism of new theorist of reference. That picture takes modes of presentation prototypically to be components of semantic presuppositions in the ordinary speech acts, like assertions, on which singular reference is involved. The book will make use of and elaborate on views which I have presented in already published papers, including views on the nature of the logical properties, on the semantics/pragmatics divide, and on the nature of phenomenal consciousness. It will also argue for the historical appropriateness of describing the view as Fregean.

Diego Marconi, Universitá degli Studi di Torino (IT)

http://hal9000.cisi.unito.it/wf/DIPARTIMEN/Discipline1/Professori/Diego-Marc/

Diego Marconi was born in Torino in 1947. He graduated under Luigi Pareyson in 1969, writing a thesis on Wittgenstein. At that time, he shared the existential-hermeneutic orientation of Pareyson’s philosophy. Later, he did graduate work at the University of Pittsburgh with Nicholas Rescher, Wilfrid Sellars, Richmond H.Thomason and others. He wrote his Ph.D. thesis (1979) on Hegel. The thesis was an attempt at tracing the origin of so called “dialectical contradictions” in Hegel’s use of language. Afterwards, Marconi has been working within analytic philosophy, which he conceives not as a doctrinal body but as a philosophical style. He wrote or edited four books on Wittgenstein (1971, 1987, 1988, 1997), edited a reader on the formalization of Hegelian dialectics (1979), and published many articles in logic and philosophy of language.

Kevin Mulligan, Université de Genève (CH)

Click to access PostContinentalPhilosophy1.pdf

“Born eighty years ago, Continental philosophy is on its last legs. Its extraordinary career has been helped along by an almost total absence of interest on the part of analytical or other exact philosophers in what the Australian philosopher David Stove calls “the nosology of philosophy,” the explanation of the manifold forms taken by bad philosophy….The Gallic gallimaufry and galimatias alluded to in ¶1 are symptoms of sickness from the point of view of philosophy as a theoretical enterprise.”

Barry Smith, Birkbeck College, University of London (UK)

http://www.bcsmith.org/

Barry Smith’s central interests are in language and mind. His particular focus is on knowledge of language and its relation to other aspects of the mind. He has been developing a position which can do justice to both the interpretationist (Davidsonian) view of the normative nature of belief, desire and meaning and the theoretical (Chomskyan) account of our knowledge of grammar even while it accommodates first-personal knowledge of meaning and mind.

In Gender Studies, though I am unfamiliar with their work:

Gender Studies

Gregory Woods (Chair), Nottingham Trent University (UK)
Ülle Must, Archimedes Foundation, Tartu (EE)

Harriet Bjerrum Nielsen, Universitetet i Oslo (NO)
Jens Rydström, Stockholms Universitet (SE)