“Greg Mankiw”:http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2006/10/signaling-at-aea-job-market.html publishes some correspondence about the American Economic Association’s ‘signalling’ initiative.

bq. The basic idea of a signaling mechanism is that there is a big part of the market in which departments, in allocating scarce interview slots, have to form an assessment not only of how promising a student looks, but also of how likely that student is to be interested in them. …

bq. Of course students can send any signals they want in their cover letters, but because every cover letter expresses interest, that may be of limited help to departments in separating the signals from the noise. To some extent that may also apply to information in emails and letters from advisors. Those channels can all convey valuable signals of interest, of course. The new signaling mechanism is just a supplement to the traditional ways of signaling interest, and may be of most help to students who are interested in places to which they don’t have other reliable means of conveying their interest. Because they can send a maximum of two signals through the AEA mechanism, the signals may convey some information.

The main target users of this mechanism are job candidates who might be turned down for jobs they would quite like because they (the candidates) are perceived to be unattainable. Consider, e.g., a student with pretty glowing letters from a top school who has always wanted to live in college town X where, say, they went to middle school. The college in that town might assume (reasonably) that the student will get an offer from a more prestigous school, and so it isn’t worth interviewing them. The result is bad for both the student (who actually prefers X to the more prestigous school) and the school (who prefers the student to who they hire). Of course the student could try to communicate this preference through their cover letter, but it is hard to know how seriously to take such letters since the candidate may say something similar to everyone. The signalling mechanism gets around that.

It’s an interesting idea for considering for the APA. I’m worried (as some are about the AEA model) about whether people would be punished for not signalling an interest in a school. But I can also see how it might ameliorate some of the effects of assumptions about prestige in the job market.

“Mark Lieberman”:http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/005280.html makes a good new year’s resolution.

bq. Once a week, I’ll post about some interesting and relevant piece of linguistic research, with links to a preprint, a published paper, a book chapter, or something similar. This has almost been true in past years, and with a little bit of effort…

I should try to do something similar. One reason I’ve stopped doing this in the past is that most of the stuff I’ve read and thought hard about has been Phil Review submissions. And for obvious reasons I couldn’t blog about them. But from now on I should be reading more published pieces and fewer submissions, so hence more philosophy blogging and fewer announcements!

The “call for papers”:http://myweb.facstaff.wwu.edu/wasserr/BSPC/bspc_2008 for Bellingham 2008 is up. Bellingham is always one of the most enjoyable and philosophically valuable conferences of the year, and I highly encourage flooding them with submissions. (Of course, their acceptance rate is lower than many major journals, so this isn’t a guarantee of getting a paper accepted, but it’s good to try.)

I’m going to try very hard over the upcoming year(s) to reduce the amount of travel I do, especially since there are so many things I can get to by local trains. But coastal Washington at that time of year, with the quality of philosophy on offer there, is really hard to pass up.

Good luck to everyone who’s being interviewed at the APA this week.

In some ways it’s a weird, weird process – not obviously geared to producing good results, and clearly torture for some participants. I suppose I can imagine someone arguing that the ability to get through it is a sign that a candidate has some of the qualities they want in a colleague (organisational skills, ability to push on and keep working under stressful conditions, ability to cope with difficult people and formal situations etc.), but when I was reading Pascal Boyer’s Religion Explained recently, and he described a coming of age ceremony in which adolescent boys are subjected to a terrifying ritual in which their deaths are faked (they are held underwater and it is made to look as if a spear is plunged into their bellies) before they are taken away from the village by the older men and basically hazed for an extended period of time, I couldn’t help being reminded of the APA. Good luck keeping your heads, guys.

(N.B. Just to clarify, I haven’t actually heard any stories about APA interviews involving water-boarding. And there is a rumour that girls are sometimes interviewed too.)

I hadn’t realised, until “Matthew Yglesias”:http://matthewyglesias.theatlantic.com/archives/2007/12/i_know_myself_well.php pointed it out, that Google Reader will recommend blogs to you. So I looked for my recommendations, and happily my blog was the most recommended blog to me. After having his blog recommended to him, Yglesias concluded:

bq. Basically, I have the reading habits typical of someone who would read my blog.

I think that’s a bit quick, or at least it would be in my case. What’s going on for me is that I have most of the philosophy blogs there are already on my reader list. The highest profile philosophy blog I don’t subscribe to is, naturally, my own. The interesting question is whether there is a blog I currently subscribe to such that if I didn’t subscribe to it, it would be more highly recommended given my reading preferences than my own blog. I suspect there are several such blogs, but I’m not in a hurry to check it out.

One of the causes of the lack of updates around here has been that Ishani and I have been getting ready to move in preparation for starting at Rutgers in the spring. We are almost finished moving, so hopefully the regular posting will resume shortly. In the meantime, two calls for papers.

First, the INPC on “Carving Nature at Its Joints”:http://www.uidaho.edu/philosophy/INPC/. Most of the time I regard the question of how to demarcate the natural from the unnatural properties in special sciences, especially the human sciences, as the toughest and most important philosophical question there is. So I hope some of the papers submitted have something useful to teach us on this question.

Second, the Oxford Studies in Metaphysics Younger Scholar Prize. This is my last year of eligibility for it, but I don’t think I’ll be submitting anything. There’s no website to link to, so here is an edited version of the announcement.

bq. Sponsored by the A. M. Monius Institute and administered by the editorial board of Oxford Studies in Metaphysics, the essay competition is open to scholars who are within 10 years of receiving a Ph.D. or students who are currently enrolled in a graduate program. The award is $8000. Winning essays shall appear in _Oxford Studies in Metaphysics_, so submissions must not be under review elsewhere.

bq. Essays should generally be between 7,500 and 15,000 words; longer essays may be considered, but authors must seek prior approval by providing the editor with an abstract and word count prior to submission. To be eligible for next year’s prize, submissions must be received, electronically, by January 30, 2008 (this is an extension of the deadline from January 15). Refereeing will be blind; authors should omit remarks and references that might disclose their identities. Receipt of submissions will be acknowledged by e-mail. The winner is determined by a committee of members of the editorial board of Oxford Studies in Metaphysics. At the author’s request, the board will simultaneously consider entries in the prize competition as submissions for publication in _Oxford Studies in Metaphysics_, independently of the prize. Inquiries should be addressed to the editor, Dean Zimmerman, at dwzimmer@rci.rutgers.edu.

I’ve just been wrapping up semester, and moving cities, so not much writing around here. In the meantime, here are a few links to announcements.

* “Semantics and Philosophy in Europe”:http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/%7Earche/spe/call.shtml
* “Reduction and Elimination in Philosophy and the Sciences”:http://www.alws.at/wittgenstein08.htm
* “Young Philosophers Lecture Series and Podcast”:http://www.youngphilosophers.org/

Two quick conference links. The “call for papers”:http://socrates.berkeley.edu/%7Efitelson/few/announcement.html for next year’s Formal Epistemology Workshop has been posted. And the Syracuse/Rochester/Cornell “mental causation workshop”:http://mail.rochester.edu/~aney/events/mc/ is on this Friday through Sunday.

As readers of Leiter will already be aware, Professor Peter Lipton died suddenly on Sunday. 

This is a big loss for philosophy.  Peter was an excellent philosopher, with wide research interests, particularly in the philosophy of science, epistemology and the philosophy of mind, a willingness to think and talk about pretty much anything and a very inclusive attitude to discussing philosophy. His papers are exemplary for their clarity and style.  He was also an inspiring teacher; I remember his undergraduate lectures as among the best I have seen. 

I am just finishing off a paper on explanation for the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society; as Peter was the person who first inspired my interest in this topic, and also (typically) sent me several pages of encouraging and helpful comments on this very paper shortly before he died, I have decided to dedicate the paper to his memory.

An obituary has been posted on the Cambridge HPS website.

The “mental causation workshop”:http://mail.rochester.edu/~aney/events/mc/ being held in Syracuse in a couple of weeks, the first in a series of Syracuse/Rochester/Cornell joint ventures, now “has a website”:http://mail.rochester.edu/~aney/events/mc/.