Methodology

Methodology of the Pluralists’ Guide

The program recommendations in this Guide are the product of opinion polls of recognized experts. We created expert Advisory Boards for each sub-field of philosophy we cover, and then asked our experts about where they would recommend prospective students to apply if they are interested in specific areas. We also ask them for contributions to our general advice to prospective students, such as, the need to look for at least one or more persons in a department with relevant teaching and publication experience in regard to specific topics. Basically we sought to gather information on two questions: Which departments are likely to provide substantive support for research in specific areas? And: Which departments are likely to provide a welcoming climate for students from underrepresented and traditionally excluded populations? We posed these substantive questions to experts in American philosophy, Continental philosophy, Africana Philosophy, Latinx/Latin American Philosophy, LGBTQ Philosophy, and the Critical Philosophy of Race and Ethnicity.

In our discussions with our advisors, we know that just having one faculty member in a department who can serve as their mentor in a specific area is not enough. Students also need to be able to find a community of scholars with related interests in a department and make connections with faculty in other departments or programs that may have related expertise (such as Ethnic Studies or Women’s Studies).

We made a decision not to rank departments, but to create two broad categories: Strongly recommended and recommended. We did not want to declare someone number 1; rather we sought to identify promising and plausible places for students with interests in specific areas to study.

We offer these lists, and we solicited the information used to generate them, in the same spirit in which people in the academy typically make recommendations about graduate schools to their students. The idea in those (we hope) familiar cases is that the advisor understands both the intellectual substance and the professional landscape of the relevant areas of study, and on the strength of this understanding makes recommendations to his or her advisees about where these subfields are being successfully taught and productively explored. Our basic idea was to expand this familiar practice, and get recognized experts and leaders in each of these fields to declare themselves, somewhat systematically, on the same sorts of issues – to indicate, in a way calculated to deepen the impressionistic judgments of overall quality that we all make, which programs they thought presented good options for graduate study in the relevant fields.

The helpful folks whom we consulted describe this approach as a poll of expert opinion, one of the standard methods used by social scientists. The method we use is an aggregate method, so that, instead of getting advice from one faculty member, students can access the aggregate of advice gathered from an extensive group of faculty with the relevant expertise. Having said this, we should point out that, as philosophers, we are sometimes inclined to think that social scientists have something approaching consensus about the methods they should use, and about the paradigms for understanding their methods and projects. This is of course not so, as our friends in the field were quick and eager to remind us. In work related to surveys and public opinion research as in any academic field, there is disagreement as to the best methods for asking questions and evaluating answers. We believe it is important to keep this fact in mind: to remember that there is not one best way to gather the kind of data we seek. It is, however, equally important to remember that there are better and worse ways. We believe strongly that we have chosen some of the better ways, and that we have as a result made a responsible attempt at providing an accurate picture of certain areas of philosophical study for prospective students in those areas.