On the ranking of multiplicities

Adapted from this talk at the 2013 Eastern APA on conference organizing; I'm here addressing the question of ranking philosophy departments. I think this would hold even for specialty rankings, and if it does there, it would hold a fortiori for overall rankings.

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A one-dimensional "merit" measure used to rank-order departments runs into two problems at least.

First, it sets us up for implicit bias via schemas of "what a good philosophy department looks like"; this reliance on familiar looks then reinforces the replication across time of the over-representation of certain philosophical areas and methods in our profession, what Jessica Wilson calls "premature dogmatism."

Second, merit ranking seems to me to involve a questionable metaphysics in which "merit" is seen as a property inherent in individuals that can be discerned, extracted, and then compared to others on a single scale. You could simply express this as an attribution error: you're making network position into a property of an indvidiual department.

That is, there are complex relations among departments – position in hiring and citation networks and so on – that account for perception of merit, and it's a mistake to make those positions into properties of individuals. What my wife says about hiring holds for ranking: "You can't take rejection personally; there are too many variables at work. [Wait two beats.] In fact, you can't even take acceptance personally!"

We could express the same point in Deleuzean language and talk about multiplicities and individuations. That is to say, there is a multi-dimensional matrix of philosophical qualities that each person and each department individuates. A "multiplicity" is a Deleuzean technical term that I'm loosely adopting here; let's say that here it refers to the multiple dimensions of philosophical quality each of us and each of our departments condenses in teaching, talks, essays, books, and so on. For instance,

1. Rigor, clarity, elegance, and innovation of expression;
2. Breadth and depth of the field coverage;
3. Historical awareness of predecessors / analogues;
4. Originality of conceptual innovation;
5. Originality of the problematic: is one attempting to refine  slices of an established field or to establish a new field?
6. Etc …

Okay, why the ellipses? This is what Judith Butler, at the end of Gender Trouble, calls "the embarrassed 'etc' ": it indicates the inability to ever completely list the dimensions of a multiplicity. 

For now, let me offer an image whose benefits – and limits – show why I think a one-dimensional ranking is bound to do violence to the irreducible plurality or real multiplicity of philosophical quality.

Imagine philosophical quality is like a multi-faceted prism: turn it one way and look down one axis of sight and you'll see all the other dimensions seen from the perspective of that aspect; turn it another way and you'll see the other dimensions from that perspective. (If I knew music better, I could probably come up with a musical analogue here, something about a tune in multiple keys, maybe.)

Before anyone objects about holograms being exactly that which produces a single image condensing multiple perspectives, the limit of the prism image for our purposes here is that a hologram will put equal weight on each perspective [I think! I'm no expert on holography, so bear with me if the details are off], whereas there's no way to turn "scores" along all the dimensions of philosophical quality into a single ranking without making some judgment as to the importance of each dimension, and that's going to stack the deck for the ranking.