“Brian Leiter”:http://webapp.utexas.edu/blogs/archives/bleiter/000925.html reports that Jeff King has accepted the offer to move from UC Davis to USC. He says this might move USC into the top 3 in philosophy of language. So that got me thinking, what are the best schools in philosophy of language? Rutgers, Michigan, Stanford and NYU all deserve very strong consideration, as does this fall’s manifestation of USC. And, to toot our own horn a little, so does Cornell as it will be in a few months time, with Delia and Zoltán and __moi__ working directly in philosophy of language, and many other members of the department working in very closely related areas.

One of the difficulties in evaluating how strong a school is in philosophy of language is that in the ideal case, a large chunk of the strength will reside in the linguistics department. Of course the same issue arises in many other areas, including ancient philosophy, philosophy of law, political philosophy and many areas of philosophy of science. It’s a difficulty in performing any measurements because what matters is not just how strong the linguistics program is, but how strong they are in philosophically relevant areas (especially semantics) and how much contact philosophy students have with the relevant people in linguistics. Perhaps one can from the outside how strong in semantics a program is, but it’s hard to tell without first-hand evidence how much interaction between philosophy and linguistics there is. This is perhaps one of those variables that can’t be measured by something like the Leiter report, but which a prospective graduate student should investigate for themselves before choosing a school.[1]

In principle, the strength of the linguistics program, especially in semantics, could affect the relative standing of quite a few philosophy programs in philosophy of language. This consideration makes Stanford even more attractive in philosophy of language, and also helps MIT, UMass Amherst, UC Santa Cruz and, I think, Cornell. (And probably several others that I’ve forgotten about.)

fn1. This isn’t intended in any way as a criticism of the report. As Brian often points out, there are more factors relevant to choosing a graduate school than what can be measured by the report. This is just one of those factors.