Applying to PhD Programs in Philosophy, Part IV: Writing Sample

Part I: Should You Apply, and Where?

Part II: Grades, Classes, and Institution of Origin

Part III: Letters of Recommendation

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Applying to PhD Programs in Philosophy
PART IV: Writing Samples

[Probably not your writing sample]

Do Committees Read the Samples?

Applicants sometimes doubt that admissions committees (composed of professors in the department you're applying to) actually do read the writing samples, especially at the most prestigious schools. It's hard to imagine, say, John Searle carefully working through that essay on Aristotle you wrote for Philosophy 183! However, my experience is that the writing samples are read. For example, back when I visited U.C. Berkeley as an applicant in 1991 after having been admitted, I discussed my writing sample in detail with one member of the admissions committee, who convincingly assured me that the committee read all plausible applicants' samples. She said they were the single most important part of the application. Since that time, other professors at other elite PhD programs in philosophy have continued to assure me that they do carefully read and care about the writing samples. At U.C. Riverside, where I sometimes serve on graduate admissions, every writing sample is read by at least two members of the admissions committee.

How conscientiously they are read is another question. If an applicant doesn't look plausible on the surface based on GPA and letters, I'll skim through the sample pretty quickly, just to make sure we aren't missing a diamond in the rough. For most applicants, I will at least skim the whole sample, and I'll select a few pages in the middle to read carefully. I'll then revisit the samples of the thirty or so applicants who make it to the committee's cutdown list for serious consideration. Other committee members probably have similar strategies.

Few undergraduates can write really beautiful, professional-looking philosophy that sustains its quality page after page. But if you can -- or more accurately if some member of the admissions committee judges that you have done so in your sample -- that can make all the difference to your application. I remember in one case falling in love with a sample and persuading the committee to admit a student whose letters were tepid and whose grades were more A-minus than A. That student in fact came to UCR and did well. I'll almost always advocate the admission of the students who wrote, in my view, the very best samples, even if other aspects of their files are less than ideal. Of course, almost all such students have excellent grades and letters as well!

Conversely, admissions committees look skeptically at applicants with weak samples. Straight As and glowing letters won't get you into a mid-ranked program like UCR (much less a top program like NYU) if your sample isn't also terrific. There are just too many other applicants with great grades and glowing letters. The grades and letters get you past the first cut, but the sample makes you stand out.

You definitely want to spend time making your sample excellent. It is perhaps the most important thing to focus your time on in the fall term during which you are applying.

What I, at Least, Look for

First, the sample must be clearly written and show a certain amount of philosophical maturity. I can't say much about how to achieve these things other than to write clearly and be philosophically mature. These things are, I think, hard to fake. Trying too hard to sound sophisticated usually backfires.

Second, I want to see the middle of the essay get into the nitty-gritty somehow. In an analytic essay, that might be a detailed analysis of the pros and cons of an argument, or of its non-obvious implications, or of its structure. In a historical essay, that might be a close reading of a passage or a close look at textual evidence that decides between two competing interpretations. Many otherwise nicely written essays stay largely near the surface, simply summarizing an author's work or presenting fairly obvious criticisms at a relatively superficial level.

Most philosophers favor a lean, clear prose style with minimal jargon. (Some jargon is often necessary, though: There's a reason specialists have specialists' words.) When I've spent a lot of time reading badly written philosophy and fear my own prose is starting to look that way, I read a bit of David Lewis or Fred Dretske for inspiration.

Choosing Your Sample

Consider longish essays (at least ten pages) on which you received an A. Among those, you might have some favorites, or some might seem to have especially impressed the professor. You also want your essay, if possible, to be in one of the areas of philosophy you will highlight as an area of interest in the personal statement portion of your application. If your best essay is not in an area that you're planning to focus on in graduate school, however, quality is the more important consideration. So as not to show too much divergence between your writing sample and your personal statement, you might in your personal statement describe that topic as a continuing secondary interest.

If your best essay is in Chinese philosophy or medieval philosophy or 20th century European philosophy or technical philosophy of physics or some other area that's outside of the mainstream, and you're planning to apply to schools that don't teach in that area, it's a bit of a quandary. You want to show your best work, but you don't want to school to reject you because your interests don't fit their teaching profile, and also the school might not have a faculty member available who can really assess the quality of your essay.

Approach the professor(s) who graded the essay(s) you are considering and ask them for their frank opinion about whether the essay might be suitable for revision into a writing sample. Not all A essays are.

Revising the Sample

Samples should be about 12-20 pages long (double spaced, in a 12-point font). If possible, you should revise the sample under the guidance of the professor who originally graded it (who will presumably also be one of your letter writers). You aim is transform it from an undergraduate A paper to a paper that you would be proud to submit at the end of a graduate seminar dedicated to the topic in question. What's the most convincing evidence that an admissions committee could see that you will be able to perform excellently in their graduate seminars? It is, of course, that you are already doing work that would receive top marks in their seminars. Philosophy PhD admissions are so competitive that many applicants will already have samples of that quality, or nearly that quality; so it will be hard to stand out unless you do too.

I recommend that you treat the improvement of your writing sample as though it were an independent study course. If you can, you might even consider signing up for a formal independent study course aimed exactly at transforming your already-excellent undergraduate paper into an admissions-worthy writing sample. Revise, revise, revise! Deepen your analysis. Connect it more broadly with the relevant literature. Consider more objections -- or better, anticipate them in a way that prevents them from even arising. With your professor's help, eliminate those phrases, simplifications, distortions, and caricatures that suggest either an unsubtle understanding or ignorance of the relevant literature -- things which professors usually let pass in undergraduate essays but which can make a big difference in how you come across to an admissions committee.

What If Your Sample Is Too Long?

Most PhD programs cap the length of the writing sample: something like 20 double-spaced pages, or an equivalent number of words, sometimes as few as 15 pages. What if your best writing is an honors or master's thesis that's 45 pages long?

If that's your best work, then you definitely want it to be your sample. Some applicants ignore the length limits and submit the whole thing, hoping to be forgiven. (Sometimes they single-space or convert to a small font, hoping to minimize the appearance of violation.) Others mercilessly chop until they are down within the limit. Admissions committee members vary in their level of annoyance at samples that exceed the stated limits. Some don't care -- they just want to see the best. Others refuse to read the sample at all, using the rules violation as an excuse to nix the application. I'd guess that the median reaction is to accept the sample but only read a portion of it -- say 15 to 20 pages' worth.

You should probably assume that the admissions committee will only read the number of pages stated in their page limits. There are three reasonable approaches to this problem. One is good old-fashioned cutting -- which, though hard, sometimes does strengthen an essay by helping you laser in on the most crucial issue. Another is submitting the entire sample but with a brief preface advising the committee to read only sections x, y, and z (totaling no more than 15 to 20 pages). Still another approach is to replace some of your sections with bracketed summaries.

For example, if your paper defends panpsychism (the view that consciousness is ubiquitous) and you need to cut a three-page section that responds to the objection that panpsychism is too radically counterintuitive to take seriously, you might replace that section with the following statement: "[For reasons of length, here I omit Section 5, which addresses the objection that panpsychism is too radically counterintuitive to take seriously. I respond by arguing that (1) intuition is a poor guide to philosophical truth, and (2) all metaphysical views of consciousness, not only panpsychism, have radically counterintuitive consequences.]"

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Applying to PhD Programs in Philosophy, Part V: Statement of Purpose

[Old Series from 2007]

Philosophy Contest: Write a Philosophical Argument That Convinces Research Participants to Donate to Charity

Can you write a philosophical argument that effectively convinces research participants to donate money to charity?

Prize: $1000 ($500 directly to the winner, $500 to the winner's choice of charity)

Background

Preliminary research from Eric Schwitzgebel's laboratory suggests that abstract philosophical arguments may not be effective at convincing research participants to give a surprise bonus award to charity. In contrast, emotionally moving narratives do appear to be effective.

However, it might be possible to write a more effective argument than the arguments used in previous research. Therefore U.C. Riverside philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel and Harvard psychologist Fiery Cushman are challenging the philosophical and psychological community to design an argument that effectively convinces participants to donate bonus money to charity at rates higher than they do in a control condition.

General Contest Rules

Contributions must be no longer than 500 words in length, text only, in the form of an ethical argument in favor of giving money to charities. Further details about form are explained in the next section.

Contributions must be submitted by email to argumentcontest@gmail.com by 11:59 pm GMT on December 31, 2019.

The winner will be selected according to the procedure described below. The winner will be announced March 31, 2019.

Form of the Contribution

Contributions must be the in the form of a plausible argument for the conclusion that it is ethically or morally good or required to give to charity, or that "you" should give to charity, or that it's good if possible to give to charities that effectively help people who are suffering due to poverty, or for some closely related conclusion.

Previous research suggests that charitable giving can be increased by inducing emotions (Bagozzi and Moore 1994; Erlandsson, Nilsson, Västfjäll 2018), by including narrative elements (McVey & Schwitzgebel 2018), and by mentioning an "identifiable victim" who would be benefited (Jenni & Loewenstein 1997; Kogut & Rytov 2011). While philosophical arguments sometimes have such features, we are specifically interested in whether philosophical arguments can be motivationally effective without relying on such features.

Therefore, contributions must meet the following criteria:

Text only. No pictures, music, etc. No links to outside sources.

No mention of individual people, including imaginary protagonists ("Bob"). Use of statistics is fine. Mentioning the individual reader ("you") is fine.

No mention of specific events, either specific historical events or events in individuals' lives. Mentioning general historical conditions is fine (e.g., "For centuries, wealthy countries have exploited the global south...."). Mentioning the effects of particular hypothetical actions is fine (e.g., "a donation of $10 to an effective charity could purchase [x] mosquito nets for people in malaria-prone regions").

No vividly detailed descriptions that are likely to be emotionally arousing (e.g., no detailed descriptions of what it is like to live in slavery or to die of malaria).

Nor should the text aim to be emotionally arousing by other means (e.g., don't write "Close your eyes and imagine that your own child is dying of starvation..."), except insofar as the relevant facts and arguments might be somewhat emotionally arousing even when coolly described.

The text should not ask the reader to perform any action beyond reading and thinking about the argument and donating.

The argument doesn't need to be formally valid, but it should be broadly plausible, presenting seemingly good argumentative support for the conclusion.

[ETA, Oct 28] Entries must not contain deception or attempt to mislead the reader.

If your argument contains previously published material, please separately provide us with full citation information and indicate any text that is direct quotation.

Choosing the Winner

Preliminary winnowing. We intend to test no more than twenty arguments. We anticipate receiving more than twenty submissions. We will winnow the submissions to twenty based on considerations of quality (well written arguments that are at least superficially convincing) and diversity (a wide range of argument types).

Testing. We will recruit 4725 participants from Mechanical Turk. To ensure participant quality and similarity to previously studied populations, participants will be limited to the U.S., Canada, U.K., and Australia, and they must have high MTurk ratings and experience. Each participant (except those in the control condition) will read one submitted argument. On a new page, they will be informed that they have a 10% chance of receiving a $10 bonus, and they will be given the opportunity to donate a portion of that possible bonus to one of six well-known, effective, international charities. If no argument statistically beats the control condition, no prize will be awarded. If at least one argument statistically beats the control condition, the winning argument will be the argument with the highest mean donation. See the Appendix of this post for more details on stimuli and statistical testing.

Award

The contributor of the winning argument will receive $500 directly, and we will donate an additional $500 to a legally registered charity (501(c)(3)) chosen by the contributor.

Unless the contributor requests anonymity, we will announce the contributor as winner of the prize and publicize the contributor's name and winning argument in social media and other publications.

Contributors may submit up to three entries if they wish, but only if those entries are very different in content.

Contributions may be coauthored.

All tested contributions will be made public after testing is complete. We will credit the authors for their contributions unless they request that their contributions be kept anonymous.

Contact

For further information about this contest, please email eschwitz at domain ucr.edu. When you are ready to submit your entry, send it to argumentcontest@gmail.com.

Funding

This contest is funded by a subgrant from the Templeton Foundation.

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APPENDIX

Stimulus

After consenting, each participant (except for those in the control condition) will read the following statement:

Some philosophers have argued that it is morally good to donate to charity or that people have a duty to donate to charity if they are able to do so. Please consider the following argument in favor of charitable donation.

Please read as many times as necessary to fully understand the argument. Only click "next" when you feel that you adequately understand the text. In the comprehension section, you will be asked to recall details of the argument.

The text of the submitted argument will then be presented.

After the reader clicks a button indicating that they have read and understood the argument, a new page will open, and participants will read the following:

Upon completion of this study, 10% of participants will receive an additional $10. You have the option to donate some portion of this $10 to your choice among six well-known, effective charities. If you are one of the recipients of the additional $10, the portion you decide to keep will appear as a bonus credited to your Mechanical Turk worker account, and the portion you decide to donate will be given to the charity you pick from the list below.

Note: You must pass the comprehension question and show no signs of suspicious responding to receive the $10. Receipt of the $10 is NOT conditional, however, on how much you choose to donate if you receive the $10.

If you are one of the recipients of the additional $10, how much of your additional $10 would you like to donate?

[response scale $0 to $10 in $1 increments]

Which charity would you like your chosen donation amount to go to? For more information, or to donate directly, please follow the highlighted links to each charity.

Against Malaria Foundation: "To provide funding for long-lasting insecticide-treated net (LLIN) distribution (for protection against malaria) in developing countries."

Doctors Without Borders / Médecins Sans Frontières: "Medical care where it is needed most."

Give Directly: "Distributing cash to very poor individuals in Kenya and Uganda."

Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition: "To tackle the human suffering caused by malnutrition around the world."

Helen Keller International: "Save the sight and lives of the world's most vulnerable and disadvantaged."

Multiple Myeloma Research Foundation: "We collect, interpret and activate the largest collection of quality information and put it to work for every person with multiple myeloma."

These charities will have been listed in randomized order.

After this question, we will ask the following comprehension question: "In one sentence, please summarize the argument presented on the previous page", followed by a text box. Participants will be excluded if they leave this question blank or if they give what a coder who is unaware of their responses to the other questions judges to be a deficient answer. Participants who spend insufficient time on the argument page will also be excluded.

Based on the submissions, we may add exploratory follow-up questions designed to discover possible mediators and moderators of the effects on charitable donation.

After consenting, participants in the control condition will read the statement:

Please consider the following description of the nature of energy. Please read as many times as necessary to fully understand the description. Only click "next" when you feel that you adequately understand the text. In the comprehension section, you will be asked to recall details of the text.

They will then receive a 445-word description of the nature of energy from a middle school science textbook. After clicking a button indicating that they have read and understood the description, a new page will open, and participants will read the following:

Some philosophers have argued that it is morally good to donate to charity or that people have a duty to donate to charity if they are able to do so.

After the reader clicks a button indicating that they have read and understood the statement, a new page will open containing the same donation question as in the argument conditions.

Statistical Testing

In an initial round, 2500 participants will each be assigned to read one of the twenty arguments. The five arguments with the highest mean donation will be selected for further testing. These five arguments will each be given an additional 350 participants, and 475 participants will be entered into the control condition. If none of the five arguments is statistically better than control, then we will announce that there is no winner. We will pool all 475 participants (minus exclusions) in each of the five selected argument conditions, then we will compare each condition separately with the control group by a two-tailed t-test at an alpha level of .01. If at least one argument is better than control, the award will be given to the argument with the highest mean donation.

Justification: Based on preliminary research, we expect a mean donation of about $3.50, a standard deviation of about $3, and clustering at $0, $5, and $10. In Monte Carlo modeling of twenty arguments with population mean donations in ten cent intervals from $2.60 to $4.50, the argument with the highest underlying distribution was over 90% likely to be among the top five arguments after a sample of 100 participants per argument (allowing 25 exclusions), and after 400 participants per argument (allowing 75 exclusions) the winning argument was about 85% likely to be one of the two with the highest underlying mean.

Given that we will be running five statistical tests, we set alpha at .01 rather than .05 to the reduce the risk of false positives. In preliminary research, McVey and Schwitzgebel found that exposure to a true story about a child rescued from poverty by charitable donation increased average rates of giving by about $1 (d = 0.3). Power analysis shows that an argument with a similar effect size would be 95% likely to be found statistically different from the control group at an alpha level of .01 and 400 participants in each group, while an argument with a somewhat smaller effect size (d = 0.2) would be 60% likely to be found statistically different.

[image source]

I'm Morally Good Enough Already, Thanks!

In a fascinating new paper (forthcoming in Psychological Science), Jessie Sun and Geoffrey Goodwin asked undergraduate students in psychology to rate themselves on several moral and non-moral dimensions, and they asked those same students to nominate "informants" who knew them well to rate them along the same dimensions. Non-moral traits included, for example, energy level ("being full of energy") and intellectual curiosity ("being curious about many different things"). Moral traits included specific traits such as fairness ("being a fair person") but also included self-ratings of overall morality ("being a person of strong moral character" and "acting morally"). They then asked both the target participants and their informants to express the extent to which they aimed to change these facts about themselves (e.g., "I want to be helpful and unselfish with others..." or "I want [target's name] to be helpful and unselfish with others...") from -2 ("much less than I currently am") to +2 ("much more than I currently am").

Before I spill the beans, any guesses?

I've already got some horses in this race. Based partly on Simine Vazire's work, partly on my general life experience, and partly on theoretical reflections about the semi-paradoxical nature of self-evaluations of jerkitude and general moral character, I have speculated that we should see little to no relationship between self-evaluations of general moral character and one's actual moral character. Also, based partly on recent work in social psychology and behavioral economics by Cialdini, Bicchieri, and others, and partly again on general life experience, I have conjectured that most people aim for moral mediocrity.

You will be unsurprised, I suppose, to hear that I interpret Sun and Goodwin's results as broadly confirmatory of these predictions.

To me, perhaps their most striking result -- though not Sun's and Goodwin's own point of emphasis -- is the almost non-existent correlation between self-ratings of general morality and informant ratings of general morality. Neither of their two samples of about 300-600 participants per group showed a statistically detectable relationship (there was a weak positive trend: r = .15 & .10, n.s). Self-ratings of some specific moral traits -- honesty, fairness, and loyalty -- also showed at best weak correlations with spotty statistical significance (r = 0 to .3, none significant in both samples). However, other specific moral traits showed better correlations (purity, compassion, and responsibility, r = .2 to .5 in both samples).

In other words, Sun and Goodwin find basically no statistically detectable relationship between how morally good you say you are, and how honest and fair and loyal you say you are, and what your closest friends and family say about you.

Could the informants be wrong and the self-ratings correct? Well, of course! That thing I did that seemed immoral, unfair, and dishonest... of course, it wasn't nearly as bad as it seemed. In fact it was good! But only I fully appreciate that, since only I know the full details of the situation. Informants might underestimate my moral character. (If this sounds like suspicious self-exculpation, well, at least sometimes our moral excuses have merit.)

Alternatively, close friends and family might overestimate my moral character: The people who know me well who I nominate for a study like this might cut me more slack than I deserve. I might rightly be hard on myself for the dishonest things I've done that they don't know about or know about but forgive; or maybe they don't want to express their true middling opinion of the target participants in a study like this. Likely, something like this is going on in these data: Overall, informants gave higher moral ratings to target participants than the target participants gave to themselves -- practically at ceiling (mean 4.5 and 4.4 on a 1-5 scale, compared to 4.0 in the targets' self-ratings). Maybe this reflects the way the informants were chosen and how they were prompted to respond.

Without a general moralometer, or even observational data about plausibly moral or immoral behavior, it's hard to know how accurate such self- and other-ratings are. Nonetheless, the discorrelation is striking. While "people who know you well" might easily be wrong about your moral character, you might think that, if anything, participants would tend to nominate informants whose views of them align with their own self-conceptions (their best friends and favorite family members), in which case any error would tend to be on the side of overcorrelation rather than undercorrelation. The lack of correlation suggests an abundance of moral disagreement and error somewhere. My guess would be everywhere, with ample problems on both sides, for multiple reasons. Moral self-assessment is hard, and friend-assessment is at least dicey.

This isn't a general problem in the Sun and Goodwin data. The self-ratings and informant ratings of non-moral traits generally showed good correlations (mostly r = .5 to .7, p < .001) -- including for seemingly mushy traits like "aesthetic sensitivity" and "trust".

How about the moral mediocrity thesis? Do people generally express a strong desire to improve morally? Not in Sun and Goodwin's data. Respondents tended to prioritize reducing negative emotionality (e.g., depression, anxiety) and improving achievement (productiveness, creative imagination). Moral improvement appeared near the bottom of their list of goals. Given the opportunity to choose their three top goals among 21 possible general self-improvement goals of this sort, only 3% of target respondents ranked general moral improvement among those three. People who rated themselves comparatively high in moral traits gave even lower priority to moral self improvement than people who rated themselves comparatively lower, suggesting that they are especially likely see themselves as already morally "good enough" -- even if, as I'm inclined to think, such self-ratings of morality are almost completely uncorrelated with genuine morality.

[Detail of Figure 2, from Sun & Goodwin 2019; click to enlarge]

One thing that Sun and Goodwin did not ask about, which might have been interesting to see, is whether people would express willingness to trade away moral traits for desirable non-moral traits: If they could become more creative and less anxious at the cost of becoming less honest and less morally good overall, would they? I'm not sure I would trust self-reports about this... but I'd at least be curious to ask.

In their deeds, as revealed by the choices they make and the discussions they choose to have and not have and the goals they choose to pursue, people tend to show little interest in accurate moral self-assessment or in general moral self-improvement above a minimal, mediocre standard. In my experience, if asked explicitly, people won't typically own up to this. But maybe, as suggested by Sun's and Goodwin's data, they will admit it implicitly, or admit to pieces of it explicitly, if asked in the right kind of way.

New Kickstarter Project: Vital: The Future of Healthcare

... here.

Help fund science fictional speculation on health technology!

If the project is funded, I will contribute a new story I am writing about the possible future of mood and attitude control in schoolchildren.

Applying to PhD Programs in Philosophy, Part III: Letters of Recommendation

Part I: Should You Apply, and Where?

Part II: Grades, Classes, and Institution of Origin

Good grades alone won't secure admission to a PhD program in philosophy. Writing samples and letters of recommendation are also very important. I believe that writing samples should carry more weight than letters of recommendation (and admission committee members often say they do), but I suspect that in fact letters carry at least as much weight. An applicant needs at least three.

Who to Ask

If a professor gave you an A (not an A-minus) in an upper-division philosophy course, consider them a candidate to write a letter. You needn't have any special relationship with the professor, or have visited during office hours, or have taken multiple classes from them -- though all of these things can help. Don't be shy about asking; we're used to it!

No matter how friendly they seem, you should be cautious about asking for letters from professors who have given you A-minuses or below, since if they have integrity in writing their letters, it will come out that your performance in their class was not quite top notch. If a professor has given you both an A and an A-minus, there might still have to be some restraint in the letter -- though less so if the A is the more recent grade.

Letters from philosophers are distinctly preferable to letters from non-philosophers. Letters from eminent scholars are distinctly preferable to letters from assistant professors. Of course, these factors need to be weighed against the expected quality of the letter.

You may submit more than the stated minimum of letters, but be advised that three strong letters looks considerably better in an application than three strong letters and a mediocre one.

Although it's a delicate matter, you can ask a professor whether they think they can write a strong letter for you. If you feel doubt, and if you have a backup letter writer in mind, tactfully asking is probably a good idea.

Should You Waive Your Right to See the Letter?

Most applicants waive the right, and some professors will feel offended or put on the spot if an applicant does not waive the right.

However, I confess that in my own case, I think I might be slightly less likely to say something negative, and I might think more carefully about how the letter would come across, if I think the applicant might view it. On the other hand, for the few very best of my letters, I might also slightly restrain my transports of enthusiasm. (I suspect professors don't really have good self-knowledge about such matters.)

I have sometimes heard philosophers on admissions committees say that they look more skeptically on letters where the applicant hasn't waived the right. This might be so, but I have not noticed that tendency at UCR.

Enabling Your Professors to Write the Best Possible Letters

Think of all those wonderful things you've done that don't show up on your transcript! You went to a bunch of talks at the APA last year when it was in town. You gave free tutoring to high school students. You won the Philosophy Department award for best undergraduate essay. All on your own, you read Kant's Critique of Pure Reason last summer and two commentaries on it. You play piano in nightclubs. You have two thousand Twitter followers. (Be careful, however, what you say on publicly viewable social media, since admissions committees might discover it.) You got a perfect score on the SAT. You work with a local charitable organization. You're captain of the college debate team.

Your letter writers want to know these things. Such facts come across much better in letters than in your personal statement (where they might seem immodest or irrelevant). In letters, they can be integrated with other facts to draw a picture of you as an interesting, promising student. So give your letter writers a brag sheet and don't be modest! Err on the side of over-including things rather than under-including. Sit there while they read it so they have a chance to ask questions. Explain to them that it's just a brag sheet and that you realize that much or most of it might be irrelevant to their letters. If you're embarrassed, feel free to blame me! ("Well, on Eric Schwitzgebel's blog, he said I should give you a brag sheet with all of this kind of stuff, even though it's kind of embarrassing.")

Give your professors copies of all of the essays you've written for them, including if possible their comments on those essays. I don't always remember what my students have written about, especially if it has been a year, even if the essays are excellent. With a copy of the essays in hand, I can briefly describe them -- their topics, what seemed especially good about them -- in a way that adds convincing detail to the letter and gives the impression that I really do know and remember the student's work.

Give your letter writers copies of your personal statement. If a letter writer says "Augustin has a deep passion for epistemology and hopes to continue to study that in graduate school" and your personal statement says nothing about epistemology, it looks a bit odd. You want the portraits drawn by your letter writers and your own self-portrait to match. Also, personal statements are extremely hard to write well (more on that later!) and it's good to have feedback on them from your letter writers.

Give your letter writers your transcript. They may not know you have excellent grades across the board. Once they know this, they can write a stronger letter and one that more concretely addresses your performance relative to other students at your school. Also, they might be able to comment helpfully to the admissions committee on aberrations in your transcript. ("Prof. Hubelhauser hasn't given a student an A since 2003" or "Although Vania's grades slipped a bit in Fall Quarter 2016, her mother was dying of cancer that term, and her previous and subsequent grades more accurately reflect her abilities". Of course, they can't write the latter unless you tell them.)

Give your letter writers a list of all the schools you are applying to and their deadlines, ideally with the first deadline highlighted. This serves several functions: It tells them when the letter needs to be completed (the first deadline). It makes it convenient for them to confirm that they have received all of the schools' letter requests and sent out all of their letters. It is an opportunity for them to provide feedback on your choice of schools. (Maybe there's a school that would be a good fit that you are needlessly omitting?) And it gives them an occasion to reflect on whether they might want to customize their letters for some of the schools.

Maybe I'm a little old fashioned, but I prefer all of this material printed in hard copy. Then I can just staple it together and easily access everything I need. But it probably wouldn't hurt to also send it electronically, for professors who prefer things that way.

Give your letter writers all of this material at least one month before the first deadline.

Gentle Reminders

Professors are flaky and forgetful. They are hardly ever punished for such behavior, so their laxity is unsurprising. Also, it's part of the charm of being absent-minded and absorbed in deeper things like the fundamental structure of reality!

Consequently, it is advisable to email your letter writers a gentle reminder a week before your first deadline. If you don't receive confirmation from the schools (some will give you confirmation, some won't) or from the letter writer, saying that the letters are sent, send another reminder a week after the deadline.

Don't panic if the letters are late. Admissions committees are used to it, and they don't blame the applicant. However, if the letter still isn't in the file by the time the committee gets around to reading your application, it will probably never be read. (You may still be admitted if the two letters that did arrive were good ones.)

If the school doesn't provide electronic confirmation that your application is received and complete, it might be advisable to email the secretarial staff a week or so after the deadline to confirm that your application is all in order.

Advice to Letter Writers

Reading hundreds of letters of recommendation, things become something of a blur. Most letters say "outstanding student" or "I'm delighted to recommend X" or "I'm confident X will succeed in graduate school in philosophy". It would be strange not to say something of this sort, but still -- my eyes start to glaze over. I suspect that trying to detect nuanced differences in such phrases is pointless, since I doubt such nuances closely track applicant quality. More helpful: (1.) Comparative evaluations like: "best philosophy major in this year's graduating class"; or "though only an undergraduate, one of three students, among 9, to earn an 'A' in my graduate seminar"; or "her GPA of 3.87 is second-highest among philosophy majors". (2.) Descriptions of concrete accomplishments: "Won the department's prize in 2018 for best undergraduate essay in philosophy"; or "President of the Philosophy Club". It's also nice to hear a little about the applicant's work and what's distinctive of her as a student and person.

Regarding those little checkboxes on some schools' cover sheets ("top 5%, top 10%" etc.): My impression is that letter writers vary in their conscientiousness about such numbers and have different comparison groups in mind, so I tend to discount them unless backed up by specific comparison assessments in the letter. However, my experience is that other people on the admissions committee sometimes take the checkboxes more seriously.

Most letter writers write the same letter for every school rather than addressing the specific paragraph-answer questions that some schools ask. However, if you think an applicant is a particularly good fit for one school, a specifically tailored letter that explains why can be helpful.

Gifts of Thanks

The best gift of thanks that you can give to your letter writers is to update them on your admissions and rejections from time to time. Even if it's a complete whiff and you're rejected everywhere, please do tell them. Also, maybe about year later, after you're in a graduate program, or alternatively after you're out of academia into the world of business or elsewhere, an update on how things are going is lovely to hear!

Personally, I -- and I suspect most letter writers -- prefer not to receive chocolates or gift cards or such. Of course, we appreciate the thought behind such tokens, and there's nothing wrong with expressing appreciation this way. If you do this, please keep the monetary value low.

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Applying to PhD Programs in Philosophy Part IV: Writing Sample

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So 2018?

I'm told that A Theory of Jerks and Other Philosophical Misadventures is now being printed. I haven't yet seen a physical copy, but hopefully soon! If you're thinking of reviewing it or commenting on it, that would be awesome, and I can see if I can talk MIT Press into sending you an advance copy.

PS: Is the cover already dated? Will vaping hipsters soon seem so 2018, a relic of the past, to whom we owe mainly a wistful nostalgia?

What Makes for a Good Philosophical Argument, and The Common Ground Problem for Animal Consciousness

What is it reasonable to hope for from a philosophical argument?

Soundness would be nice -- a true conclusion that logically follows from true premises. But soundness isn't enough. Also, in another way, soundness is sometimes too much to demand.

To see why soundness isn't enough, consider this argument:

Premise: Snails have conscious sensory experiences, and ants have conscious sensory experiences.

Conclusion: Therefore, snails have conscious sensory experiences.

The argument is valid: The conclusion follows from the premises. For purposes of this post, let's assume that premise, about snails and ants, is also true and that the philosopher advancing the argument knows it to be true. If so, then the argument is sound and known to be so by the person advancing it. But it doesn't really work as an argument, since anyone who isn't already inclined to believe the conclusion won't be inclined to believe the premise. This argument isn't going to win anyone over.

So soundness isn't sufficient for argumentative excellence. Nor is it necessary. An argument can be excellent if the conclusion is strongly suggested by the premises, despite lacking the full force of logical validity. That the Sun has risen many times in a regular way and that its doing so again tomorrow fits with our best scientific models of the Solar System is an excellent argument that it will rise again tomorrow, even though the conclusion isn't a 100% logical certainty given the premises.

What then, should we want from a philosophical argument?

First, let me suggest that a good philosophical argument needs a target audience, the expected consumers of the argument. For academic philosophical arguments, the target audience would presumably include other philosophers in one's academic community who specialize in the subarea. It might also include a broader range of academic philosophers or some segment of the general public.

Second, an excellent philosophical argument should be such that the target audience ought to be moved by the argument. Unpacking "ought to be moved": A good argument ought to incline members of its target audience who began initially neutral or negative concerning its conclusion to move in the direction of endorsing its conclusion. Also, members of its target audience antecedently inclined in favor of the conclusion ought to feel that the argument provides good support for the conclusion, reinforcing their confidence in the conclusion.

I intend this standard to be a normative standard, rather than a psychological standard. Consumers of the argument ought to be moved. Whether they are actually moved is another question. People -- even, sad to say, academic philosophers! -- are often stubborn, biased, dense, and careless. They might not actually be moved even if they ought to be moved. The blame for that is on them, not on the argument.

I intend this standard as an imperfect generalization: It must be the case that generally the target audience ought to be moved. But if some minority of the target audience ought not to be moved, that's consistent with excellence of argument. One case would be an argument that assumes as a premise something widely taken for granted by the target audience (and reasonably so) but which some minority portion of the target audience does not, for their own good reasons, accept.

I intend this standard to require only movement, not full endorsement: If some audience members initially have a credence of 10% in the conclusion and they are moved to a 35% credence after exposure to the argument, they have been moved. Likewise, someone whose credence is already 60% before reading the argument is moved in the relevant sense if they rationally increase their credence to 90% after exposure to the argument. But "movement" in the sense needn't be understood wholly in terms of credence. Some philosophical conclusions aren't so much true or false as endorseable in some other way -- beautiful, practical, appealing, expressive of a praiseworthy worldview. Movement toward endorsement on those grounds should also count as movement in the relevant sense.

You might think that this standard -- that the target audience ought to be moved -- is too much to demand from a philosophical argument. Hoping that one's arguments are good enough to change reasonable people's opinions is maybe a lot to hope for. But (perhaps stubbornly?) I do hope for it. A good, or at least an excellent, philosophical argument should move its audience. If you're only preaching to the choir, what's the point?

In his preface to Consciousness and Experience, William G. Lycan writes

In 1987... I published a work entitled Consciousness. In it I claimed to have saved the materialist view of human beings from all perils.... But not everyone has been convinced. In most cases this is due to plain pigheadedness. But in others its results from what I now see to have been badly compressed and cryptic exposition, and in still others it is articulately grounded in a peril or two that I inadvertently left unaddressed (1996, p. xii).

I interpret Lycan's preface as embracing something like my standard -- though with the higher bar of convincing the audience rather than moving the audience. Note also that Lycan's standard appears to be normative. There may be no hope of convincing the pigheaded; the argument need not succeed in that task to be excellent.

So, when I write about the nature of belief, for example, I hope that reasonable academic philosophers who are not too stubbornly committed to alternative views, will find themselves moved in the direction of thinking that a dispositional approach (on which belief is at least as much about walking the walk as talking the talk) will be moved toward dispositionalism -- and I hope that other dispositionalists will feel reinforced in their inclinations. The target audience will feel the pull of the arguments. Even if they don't ultimately endorse my approach to belief, they will, I hope, be less averse to it than previously. Similarly, when I defend the view that the United States might literally be conscious, I hope that the target audience of materialistically-inclined philosophers will come to regard the group consciousness of a nation as less absurd than they probably initially thought. That would be movement!

Recently, I have turned my attention to the consciousness, or not, of garden snails. Do garden snails have a real stream of conscious experience, like we normally assume that dogs and ravens have? Or is there "nothing it's like" to be a garden snail, in the way we normally assume there's nothing it's like to be a pine tree or a toy robot? In thinking about this question, I find myself especially struck by what I'll call The Common Ground Problem.

The Common Ground Problem is this. To get an argument going, you need some common ground with your intended audience. Ideally, you start with some shared common ground, and then maybe you also introduce factual considerations from science or elsewhere that you expect they will (or ought to) accept, and then you deliver the conclusion that moves them your direction. But on the question of animal consciousness specifically, people start so far apart that finding enough common ground to reach most of the intended audience becomes a substantial problem, maybe even an insurmountable problem.

I can illustrate the problem by appealing to extreme cases; but I don't think the problem is limited to extreme cases.

Panpsychists believe that consciousness is ubiquitous. That's an extreme view on one end. Although not every panpsychist would believe that garden snails are conscious (they might think, for example, that subparts of the snail are conscious but not the snail as a whole), let's imagine a panpsychist who acknowledges snail consciousness. On the other end, some philosophers, such as Peter Carruthers, argue that even dogs might not be (determinately) conscious. Now let's assume that you want to construct an argument for (or against) the consciousness of garden snails. If your target audience includes the whole range of philosophers from panpsychists to people with very restrictive views about consciousness like Carruthers, it's very hard to see how you speak to that whole range of readers. What kind of argument could you mount that would reasonably move a target audience with such a wide spread of starting positions?

Arguments about animal consciousness seem always to start already from a set of assumptions about consciousness (this kind of test would be sufficient, this other kind not; this thing is an essential feature of consciousness, the other thing not). The arguments will generally beg the question against audience members who start out with views too far away from one's own starting points.

How many issues in philosophy have this kind of problem? Not all, I think! In some subareas, there are excellent arguments that can or should move, even if not fully convince, most of the target audience. Animal consciousness is, I suspect, unusual (but probably not unique) in its degree of intractability, and in the near-impossibility of constructing an argument that is excellent by the standard I have articulated.

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Age Effects on SEP Citation, Plus the Baby Boom Philosophy Bust and The Winnowing of Greats

I have a theory about the baby boom and academic philosophy in the major Anglophone countries. To explain and defend it, we'll need to work through some more numbers from my analysis of citations in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Recency Bias

First, left's examine recency bias in the encyclopedia. I've done this by taking David Schwitzgebel's August 2019 scrape of the bibliographic sections of all the main-page SEP entries and searching for the first occurrence of "19", "20", or "forthcoming" on each line, then retrieving the first four characters from that location. Non-numbers (except "fort") and numbers <1900 or >2019 were excluded. Everything else was interpreted as a date. (I did not include dates from before 1900, since those works citation formats are less systematic, and often a translation date is cited rather than an original publication date.)

The result is a pretty little curve peaking at 2003-2007:

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In 2014, I'd conducted a similar analysis. In those data, the peak was 1999-2003:

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And in 2010, I'd also done a similar analysis! The peak year was 2000:

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Thus, in the Stanford Encyclopedia, the most recent works appear to be somewhat disadvantaged compared to works about ten years old. Back in time from the peak years, there's a steep linear decline to about 1950, before which there are few citations and the citation rate becomes approximately flat. (Probably, serious curve fitting wouldn't show it to be three linear phases; but close enough.) Over the past nine years, the peak appears to have advanced by about five years. Since SEP entries are updated about every five years on average, we might expect some delays for that reason; and if people are a little lazy about updating references when they update their entries, that could explain why the peak isn't advancing as fast as the clock.

I assume that all these effects are recency effects. Another alternative, of course, is that early 21st century philosophy is vastly better and more citable than earlier philosophy, so that a good a 23rd century encyclopedia would show a similar curve, also massively disproportionately citing early 21st century philosophers compared to 20th century philosophers. (If you find that plausible, I have a beautiful little Proof that P to sell you!)

Based on these results, one might expect that the most-cited philosophers in the 2019 Stanford Encyclopedia would be those whose most influential works appeared around 2003-2007. However, that is not the case.

I have a twofold explanation why: The Winnowing of Greats and The Baby Boom Philosophy Bust. But it's going to take a bit of data analyses to get there.

Most Cited Philosophers, Oldest Generation

For analysis, I have divided my list of the 295 most-cited philosophers into four generations based on age: 1900-1919 (oldest), 1920-1945 (pre-boom), 1946-1964 (boomers), and 1965-present (Generation X). Age was estimated based on birthyear as recorded in Wikipedia (for most authors) or estimated based on date of undergraduate degree (assuming age 22) or in a few cases date of PhD (assuming age 29). A CSV with the data is here. I welcome corrections.

Looking at the oldest generation (1900-1919), we see some stalwarts near the top of the most-cited list: Quine at #2 and Davidson at #5. Chisholm, Strawson, Popper, Geach, Goodman, Mackie, and Anscombe all appear in the top 50. Interestingly, although 19 philosophers from this generation rank among the top 100, only 13 appear in the remainder of the list of 295.

I'm inclined to attribute this to a phenomenon I call The Winnowing of Greats. This is the tendency for the difference between the top performers and the nearly-top performers in any group to come to seem larger with historical (and other types of) distance. We're still citing Quine and Davidson, and to some extent Richard Brandt (#129) and Norman Malcolm (#236), but less famous philosophers from that generation are quickly dropping off the radar.

The intuitive idea of Winnowing of Greats is this: If you're close to a field and you want to list, say, ten leaders in that field in rank order, you might list A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, and J. Another person, also close, might partly agree, maybe listing A, C, B, E, G, D, I, K, L, and M. With more distance, someone might only list or think of five -- likely A, B, C (consensus top) and two of D, E, F, or G, starting to forget about H and higher. Still later, people might only mention A, B, and C. Over time, these will come to seem the consensus "best" and thus the ones who need to be discussed on grounds of historical importance in addition to whatever other reasons there are to discuss them; and others will be relatively less mentioned and mostly forgotten except by specialists, and the gap in apparent importance between the top and the remainder will grow -- eventually becoming the "consensus of history".

We could interpret such winnowing as a type of recency bias against all but the most famous, flowing from ignorance due to distance; or we could see it as a more legitimate winnowing process.

Starting somewhere around rank #50, the philosophers from the oldest generation who are still ranked might strike those of us who know the history of 20th century philosophy to be ranked rather low relative to their historical importance. I interpret this as recency bias. Quantitative evidence of recency bias is this: Looking at only those philosophers on both the 2014 and 2019 lists, the average loss in rank between the two measures was 11 spots. (Going logarithmic, the average natural log of the rank is 4.11 in 2014 and 4.29 in 2019.)

(For the curious, Chisholm was a notable decliner, rank 12 to 19, which is proportionally large in just 5 years, while Anscombe bucked the trend, climbing significantly, from 66 to 48.)

Most Cited Philosophers, Pre-Boom Generation

The dominant generation is the pre-boom generation (1920-1945). Although this generation includes the largest number of birth years, their dominance of the top of the list is too great to be explainable by that fact alone. This generation gives us six of the top ten (Lewis, Putnam, Rawls, Kripke, Williams, and Nozick) and 33 of the top 50. Most of these authors did their most influential work in the 1960s-1980s. Despite the citation curve peaking for works written in 2003-2007, foundational work by this generation is still being heavily cited. For example, the two most-cited works in the Stanford Encyclopedia are Rawls's A Theory of Justice (1971, cited in 115 entries) and Kripke's Naming and Necessity (1980, cited in 88 entries). (More data on this soon.)

Time is starting to affect the rankings of this generation, too, with an average decline in rank of 8 (average difference in ln of .05). Notably, however, in the top 50, there is an average increase in rank of 3. (It's 1.4 if we exclude Pettit, whose rank increased markedly due to a methodological change: I now include second authors.) This difference in trajectory between the top and bottom is consistent with the Winnowing of Greats.

According to a demographic theory that I call The Baby Boom Philosophy Bust, the Baby Boom generation had a substantial demographic advantage in academic philosophy in the United States. (This probably generalizes outside of the U.S. and outside of philosophy, but let me stick with what I know.) Undergraduate enrollments in the U.S. jumped from 2,444,900 in 1949-1950 to 3,639,847 in 1959-1960 to 8,004,660 to 1969-1970 to 11,569,899 in 1979-1980. After that, enrollments continued to grow, but at a much slower pace. The latter part of this period was of course when the baby boomers hit college, but the earlier part of the period was important too, in the wake of the G.I. Bill and the fast growth of the national prestige of higher education. This national prestige was, I conjecture, partly due to the prestige of the space race and the power of the atom bomb, and it extended into the humanities and arts partly due to the popularity of the idea of IQ and the emerging notion of "creativity". (I have a colleague here at UCR, Ann Goldberg, who is doing fascinating work on the history of the concept of creativity and its role in educational institutions.)

Who was hired to teach all of these new undergraduates? It was of course, the pre-boom generation. A flood of pre-boom Assistant Professors hit the universities during this period. Doing their foundational early-career work in the 1960s-1970s, they set the agenda for the philosophy of the period. Then when the boomers got their PhDs and hit the job market in the 1980s, they discovered that pre-boomers were already astride the academy -- mid-career now, at the height of their influence, not yet ready to step aside for their younger generation. The job market was terrible, and those who made it into tenure-track positions found themselves in an academic world already dominated by Rawls, Lewis, Kripke, Fodor, etc., without a lot of new space at the top. My hypothesis is that this fact about academia in the 1980s and early 1990s means that the baby boomers grew philosophically in the shade of the pre-boom generation -- and not to the heights of prestige and influence that they would have grown to, had they not been so overshadowed in their early careers.

With this hypothesis in mind....

Most Cited Philosophers, Baby-Boom Generation

The boomers (born 1946-1964) contribute two philosophers to the top ten: Nussbaum (#9) and Williamson (#10). Another five are among the top fifty: Fine, Sober, Kitcher, Hawthorne, Smith. (Hawthorne, born 1964, is right at the cutoff between Boom and Gen X, if I have his date right.) They are thus vastly underrepresented in the top 50 compared to the pre-boomers (7 vs 33). However, they are more proportionately represented in the list as a whole (113, compared to 129 for the pre-boomers).

Could the boomers rise in relative prestige, so that if we did a similar analysis in ten or twenty years, we'd find them dominating the top 50 in the way the pre-boomers do now? I see three reasons not to think so.

First, the boomers have already started declining in citation rate, comparing 2014 and 2019, with an average rank decline of 8 (ln = +.009). Mitigating this, however, if we look at the top 100, there's an overall average rank gain of 11 (ln = -.16) -- consistent with the winnowing hypothesis.

Second, in other research, I've found that philosophers tend to reach peak influence around ages 55-70. Thus, boomers should be at their peak influence now and we shouldn't expect a lot more climbing overall.

Third, as noted above, there is a strong recency bias in the Stanford Encyclopedia citations. This should tend to favor philosophers younger than the boomers, and increasingly so over time -- especially since philosophers on average tend to do their most influential work in their late 30s and 40s.

Most Cited Philosophers, Generation X

Gen Xers (born 1965-1980) are still too young to be very well represented among the top-cited philosophers in the Stanford Encyclopedia: Only 21 qualify for the list of 295, three in the top 100 (Chalmers, Schaffer, and Sider). In the past five years, the average rank gain in this group is 16 positions (ln = -.15), so, as one would expect, they are still on an upward trajectory. Also as one would expect, many of them are new to the list as of 2019 (11 of the 21), and so not included in these trajectory averages, though headed upward in another sense.

It is, I think, too early to know if Generation X will ultimately prove also to have grown too much in the shade of the pre-boom generation. I sense that this might be so: Mainstream analytic philosophers still to a large extent live in a philosophical world whose agenda was set by Lewis, Kripke, Rawls, Williams, and Putnam.

Side note on demographic diversity of most-cited Gen X philosophers: If my gender and race/ethnicity classifications are correct, then (perhaps surprisingly?) the most-cited Gen X philosophers are slightly farther from gender parity and racial diversity than the Boomers, with 3/21 women and no Latinx or non-White philosophers (compared to the Boomers' 17% women, 2% Latinx or non-White). However, since the numbers are small, this might be chance variation.

Explanation of the Misalignment of Peak Citation Year and the Age of the Most-Cited Philosophers

To cross my t's and dot my i's: Although the peak citation years are 2003-2007, the pre-boom generation is the most cited because, due to their demographic advantage in academia, they dominated philosophy from the 1970s at least into the 1990s (and maybe they still do, despite death and retirement), shading the boomers and maybe also the Gen-Xers. Although recent work is the most cited in the aggregate, the Winnowing process hasn't yet given us the distance required for consensus on the Greats, so those recent citations remain scattered among many authors.

This post is already plenty long, so I won't bother crossing my x's and dotting my j's.

Applying to PhD Programs in Philosophy, Part II: Grades, Classes, and Institution of Origin

It's awfully hard to be admitted to top-ranked PhD programs in philosophy in the U.S., as I mentioned in Part I of this series.

Today: What do admissions committees look for in transcripts? In future posts, I'll talk about other aspects of the application.

First: How Admissions Committees Work

Normally, philosophy PhD admissions are decided by committees constituted of a few faculty members from the philosophy department, with higher administration formally reviewing and approving the choices. Although some faculty members work on admissions year after year, most faculty rotate on and off the committee.

At U.C. Riverside, where I teach, we receive one to two hundred applications every year, arriving in January. (Elite programs must receive hundreds more.) We have a committee of four, and two members read the files of every applicant. In February, we winnow to about 40 applicants, who are then reviewed and discussed by the whole committee. Offers go out February to March or sometimes April. We usually aim to admit about 15-20 students for a final entering class of 6-8.

In my experience, committee members employ different approaches. Some take GRE scores seriously; others don't consider them at all. Some look carefully at the letters; others think letters typically say more about the letter writer than about the applicant. Some read every writing sample, looking for gems; others don't bother with the samples unless the student looks plausible on other grounds. Some care a lot about whether the student's interests fit with strengths of the department; others happily admit students with any range of interests. These differences, along with yearly changes in committee composition, explain some of the unpredictability of the process. There is no formula.

GPA, Overall and in Philosophy

You must have excellent grades to have a reasonable prospect of admission to a top-50 ranked philosophy PhD program, unless there is something very unusual about your application. At UCR, currently ranked #32 in the U.S. in the Philosophical Gourmet Report, admitted students typically have GPAs of 3.8 or more and basically straight A's in philosophy during the last year or two of their transcript. For example, in a two-year sample of 13 entering students at UCR (excluding non-U.S. students), median GPA at the most recent previous institution was 3.89, and there were several perfect 4.0's. (Admitted students who declined our offer presumably had GPAs at least as good on average.) The lowest GPA in the two-year sample was about 3.6, but that student had straight As in the final three terms of their record.

Transcripts are evaluated holistically. Not all 3.8 GPAs are equal. What matters most are grades in upper-division philosophy courses. A "C" in chemistry your first year won't sink your application. Conversely, a 3.9 that includes a lot of A-minuses in senior-year philosophy courses doesn't look so good. We want the very strongest students, not (usually) the A-minus students.

Of course, transcript isn't everything. Eyeballing last year's applicant pool, the median GPA of rejected applicants was probably at least 3.75, and we rejected at least 16 applicants with GPAs in the 3.95-4.00 range. A great transcript earns you a closer look, but the whole application has to be impressive, standing out in a field containing dozens, or even hundreds, of other terrific students.

Yes, it's that competitive.

Institution of Origin

By institution of origin I mean where you received or expect to receive your undergraduate degree, or if you are in a Master's program, your Master's degree. Institution of origin strongly influences prospects for admission. Admissions committees tend to look more favorably on applicants from Yale and Oxford than on applicants from less prestigious schools. This appears to be especially true of the most elite PhD programs (PGR top ten ranked), perhaps less true of lower-ranked PhD programs (PGR ranked 30-50), though even among lower-ranked PhD programs I suspect that pedigree has a big influence. (Follow the links for some quantitative analysis.)

This pedigree advantage has several possible explanations. It can be difficult for faculty to evaluate transcripts from schools with which they are unfamiliar (how meaningful is that "A"?). Also, students from elite schools might be better taught how to create writing samples and personal statements that will please admissions committees. Members of admissions committees are more likely to know of, and respect the judgment of, letter writers at elite schools. They might also generally respect the ability of elite schools to select and train excellent students. And, of course, there may also be simple prestige bias.

Non-U.S. students, except from a few elite universities, are probably also disadvantaged in the admissions process, for related reasons: transcripts that can be difficult for U.S. committees to evaluate, differences in philosophical culture and training, fewer personal and professional connections. Furthermore, some programs cap their foreign admissions. At UCR, for example, the Philosophy Department normally can’t enroll more than one new foreign student per year, due to (foolish!) U.C. regulations concerning international students.

Since it can be difficult for admissions committees to evaluate transcripts from small liberal arts schools, foreign schools, and the less famous M.A. programs, it helps if students can have at least one of their letter writers address the issue with concrete comparisons. "Jill's GPA of 3.91 is the best GPA for a graduating senior in Philosophy in the past five years, among 80 graduates." Now the admissions committee knows better what that 3.91 means, in your context.

If you have attended multiple institutions (e.g., community college before undergrad), you are normally required to submit transcripts from all institutions. This can be worrying if, for example, your grades from an older institution are weak. Although ideally its best to have strong grades throughout your college career, in my experience, the most recent two years are more seriously considered than older work, so poor grades early in your education aren't necessarily an application killer. People's educational aspirations and priorities can change over time, especially if their educational path has been crooked. Admissions committees know this.

Master's Degrees

Although probably the majority of admittees to PhD programs gain admission straight from undergraduate study, a substantial minority (about a third?) have some graduate work first. Typically, this is in the form of a terminal Master's program in philosophy. If you aren't admitted into a PhD program that you like, you might want to consider applying to M.A. programs. However, there are also downsides. See the discussion of this issue in Part I.

Transcripts from M.A. programs are evaluated somewhat differently from undergraduate transcripts and often read alongside undergraduate transcripts. From the most demanding M.A. programs, a mix of A's and A-minuses is more favorably viewed than a similar mix would be at the undergraduate level, though in my experience successful applicants from M.A. programs typically do have all or mostly A's, with few A-minuses.

Do You Need to Be a Philosophy Major?

Somewhat to my surprise, when I crunched the numbers, I found that 96% of graduate students in a sample of elite PhD programs and 90% in lower-ranked programs had majored in philosophy or a cognate discipline like History and Philosophy of Science, either at the undergraduate or graduate level. This might give you the impression that unless you are a Philosophy major, your odds of admission are low.

My experience on admissions at UCR suggests that these numbers might be misleading. As long as a student has performed excellently in a substantial number of upper-division courses in philosophy (maybe six to eight), I'm not sure we care so much about the major. There's something attractive about admitting, say, a Biology major who has also done well in a bunch of philosophy courses. That student will bring an unusual perspective and set of skills to the department. The main thing is to have a track record of excellent performance in upper-division or graduate level philosophy.

If I’m right about that, maybe the very high proportion of philosophy majors among admitted students reflects a similarly high proportion in the applicant pool (or the pool of plausible applicants), rather than the preference of admissions committees.

Graduate-Level Courses

If you have the opportunity to take graduate courses in philosophy, by all means do so, especially if you're at a school with a PhD program. If you can earn an A or two in graduate-level courses in philosophy, that can really solidify the case that you're ready for graduate school -- especially if one of your letter writers compares you favorably with their current graduate students! Also, a graduate course can provide a good opportunity to write an essay that will make a good writing sample.

Unfortunately, applications generally have to be sent in early winter, so make sure you do that graduate work by fall term of the year you apply.

Honors Thesis

For some reason, we don't get many applicants who have written undergraduate honors theses, nor do many philosophy students at UCR write them. (I have supervised only two in my 22 years.) However, if your school offers this option, I would recommend considering it, especially if you are able to complete the thesis by the time of application. It establishes that you can do long-term, self-directed work, and also it gives you a taste of such work so that you can think about whether it's really for you; it's likely to be your best piece of work and so a natural candidate for a writing sample; and on top of all that, it's an intrinsically worthwhile experience!

Timing Graduation

Oddly, students completing their studies in May or June, as is traditional, are at a disadvantage compared to students who finish in December. If you start on the standard U.S. undergraduate schedule, take four years to graduate and apply at the beginning of your 4th year, 1/2 or 2/3 or your senior year won't show in your transcripts, you'll have fewer essays to draw on as writing samples, and you'll have had less exposure to potential letter writers than if you take an extra term to graduate and apply at the beginning of your fifth year.

I myself took an extra quarter at Stanford and applied in fall of my fifth year -- and I know my application was much better than it would have been had I applied in fall quarter of my fourth year. I then had fun for nine months, hanging out with friends in northern California, holding a temporary job I didn't care much about. I had plenty of time to travel to the schools that admitted me -- a wonderful experience that I'll describe in Part VII of this series.

Another possibility is to graduate your fourth year, then apply the year after. This potentially doesn't look quite as good to admissions committees, who might wonder why you didn't proceed straight to graduate school. However, let me emphasize that if you are still within one year of graduation this consideration is a relatively minor factor.

If you are more than a year past graduation, the situation is more difficult. You will need to work carefully on your Personal Statement (which I will discuss in Part V) to explain why you are now interested in pursuing graduate school in philosophy. You will probably also want to show recent engagement in academic philosophy, for example, by taking further coursework.

Part III: Letters of Recommendation

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Applying to PhD Programs in Philosophy, Part I: Should you Apply, and Where?

Old series from 2007, Parts I-VII.

In Praise of UC Riverside Undergraduates

This year, U.C. Riverside is ranked #1 among national universities on the US News & World Report college ranking metric of "social mobility". This metric is based on six-year graduation rates among Pell Grant recipients (most of whose family incomes are below $50,000) and the relative graduation rates of Pell students vs non-Pell students.

UCR has long been notable for its success with first-generation college students, economically disadvantaged students, and students from historically underrepresented groups. Money Magazine ranks it #1 among "most transformative" public colleges (and #4 overall), based on having higher-than-expected graduation rates, earnings, and student loan repayment given the economic and academic background of its students. In 2014, when President Obama proposed a plan to rank universities based on graduation rates, percent of Pell recipients, and affordability, UC Riverside also came out as #1. Fifty-six percent of UCR students are Pell recipients, and the plurality (40%) are Latinx.

I often hear faculty from other universities complain about their undergraduates acting entitled to high grades and special treatment. I have not found this to be the case at UC Riverside. Last year, only one student complained to me about their grade, and the few who asked for accommodations or exceptions seemed genuinely to need them. Many UCR students work incredibly hard, juggling work, school, and sometimes difficult family lives. Students admitted to the U.C. system who want to party choose one of the coastal schools instead.

In theory, a school could achieve high graduation rates by making the coursework easy. Although grade inflation is widespread in academia, I don't think it is especially the case at UCR. My lower-division class "Evil", for example, requires substantial amounts of difficult reading, two essays, and three exams in a ten week term, including a comprehensive in-class final exam which students must pass in order to pass the course. Despite the difficulty of the course, it is among the most popular courses at UCR, always filling with as many spots as we can open up, usually 300-500.

Although students cannot pass Evil without passing the final exam, and about 10% normally fail the final exam, there is almost no cheating on the exam as far as I can tell. Potentially, students could cheat by going to the restroom and looking things up on their phones, but only a small percentage go to the restroom at all, and almost all of those students are quickly in and out. Only about 1% of students even spend long enough in the bathroom to call up a meaningful amount of information on their phone if they wanted to. Students in my Evil class would rather fail the final exam than cheat in that way. Those who do fail tend to blame themselves and retake the course, doing better the next time through.

You won't find me complaining about "kids these days". Not at UCR.

ETA (8:15 a.m.): Some speculations on how this comes about. Mostly, I think, it's explained by the population of students who choose UCR: solid enough academically to gain U.C. admissions, but not the ones who choose schools on grounds of attractive location or party reputation, and often commuting students from the greater L.A. area, with family ties that keep them local. Partly, it's a critical mass of diverse students, so that students from traditionally disadvantaged backgrounds don't feel unusual or isolated, and professors are accustomed to students from such backgrounds. And partly, it's the generally supportive and collaborative academic culture at UCR, in which staff, faculty, and peers all generally want to see each other succeed.

Aiming for Moral Mediocrity

New essay, just out!

published version: Res Philosophica, 96, 347-368

manuscript version

Introduction

I have an empirical thesis and a normative thesis. The empirical thesis is: Most people aim to be morally-mediocre. They aim to be about as morally good as their peers -- not especially better, not especially worse. This mediocrity has two aspects. It is peer relative rather than absolute, and it is middling rather than extreme. We do not aim to be good, or non—bad, or to act permissibly rather than impermissibly, by fixed moral standards. Rather, we notice the typical behavior of people we regard as out peers, and we aim to behave broadly within that range. We aim to be neither among the best nor among the worst. We -- most of us -- look around, notice how others are acting, then calibrate toward so—so. The normative thesis is that this a somewhat bad way to be, but it's not a terribly bad way to be. Also, it is a somewhat good Way to be, but it's not a Wonderfully good way to be. It's morally mediocre to aim for moral mediocrity. This might sound like a tautology, but it's not. Someone with stringent normative views might regard it as inexcusably rotten to aim merely for mediocrity in our rotten world. Someone with much less stringent views might think that it's perfectly fine to aim for mediocrity, as long as you avoid being among the Worst. I will argue that aiming for mediocrity is neither perfectly fine nor inexcusably rotten. We're morally blameworthy not to aspire for better, but we also deserve tepid praise for avoiding the swampy bottom.

Part One defends the view that most of us aim for about the moral middle. Part Two argues that, at least in out culture, having such an aim is not perfectly morally fine, and thus that the somewhat pejorative term mediocre is warranted, capturing in a single word both the empirical peer-relative middlingness and the moderate moral badness.

Part One: The Empirical Thesis

2. Following the Moral Crowd

Robert B. Cialdini and collaborators went to Arizona's Petrified Forest National Park (2006). The park had been losing about a ton of petrified wood per month, mostly stolen in small amounts by casual visitors. Cialdini and collaborators posted four different signs intended to discourage theft, rotating their placement at the heads of different paths. Two signs were explicit injunctions: (A) "Please don't remove petrified wood from the park" (with a picture of a visitor stealing wood, crossed by a red circle and bar) and (B) "Please leave petrified wood in the park" (with a picture of a visitor admiring and photographing a piece of wood). Two signs were descriptive: (C) "Many past visitors have removed petrified wood from the park, changing the state of the Petrified Forest" with pictures of three visitors taking wood) and (D) "The vast majority of past visitors have left the petrified wood in the park, preserving the natural state of the Petrified Forest" (with pictures of three visitors admiring and photographing the petrified wood). Cialdini and collaborators then noted how much wood the visitors tookc from the paths headed by the different signs. Rates of theft were lowest (1.7%) when visitors were explicitly enjoined not to take wood (Condition A). Rates of theft were highest (8.0%) when visitors were told that many past visitors have removed wood (Condition C). Being told that many visitors have removed wood might even have increased the rates of theft, which were estimated normally to be 1% to 4% of visitors (Roggenbuck et al. 1997).

Cialdini and collaborators also found that hotel guests were substantially more likely to reuse towels when a message to "help save the environment" was supplemented with the information that "75% of the guests who stayed in this room (#xxx) participated in our new resource savings program by using their towels more than once" than when the message to help save the environment was supplemented with other types of information or a longer injunction (Goldstein et al. 2008). Similarly, evidence suggests that people are more likely to heed injunctions to reduce household energy usage when shown statistics indicating that they a.re using more energy than their neighbors -- and they may even increase usage when shown statistics that they are using less (Schultz et al. 2007; Allcott 2011; Ayres et al. 2013; Karim et al. 2015). Littering, lying, tax compliance, and suicide appear to be contagious (Cialdini et al. 1990; Gould 2001; Keizer et al. 2011; Haw et al. 2013; Innes and Mitra 2013; Abrutyn and Mueller Z014; Hays and Carver 2014; Kroher and Wolbring, 2015; Maple et al. 2017; Hallsworth et al. 2017; Reyes-Portjllo et al. 2018). In "dictator games" (i.e., in laboratory situations in which randomly chosen participants are given money and told they can either keep it all for themselves or share some with less lucky participants), participants tend to be less generous when they learn that previous participants kept most of the money (Bicchieri and Xiao 2009; Dimant 2015; Mcauliffe et al. 2017).

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To read more about the empirical evidence that people mostly aim for peer-relative moral mediocrity and for my reflections on the ethics of doing so, access the full paper here.