Ranking by group

College Search & Selection
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<p>Okay, just to add to the fun here, I’m calling Phantasmagoric’s bluff. </p>

<p>Of his list shown above that he believes are core arts and sciences programs, I’ll agree to include all of them except graduate schools of Communication and Graduate schools of Drama. Not only are those two clearly professional programs and outside the intended scope of this analysis, they are also not found at every major university. Try finding a Graduate School of Communication at Harvard or Yale or a Graduate School of Drama at Harvard. </p>

<p>As I’ve mentioned twice before, Earth Sciences was already included in the original analysis. That leaves the following, which I’ll add or will add their equivalents, even though I think it’s inappropriate:</p>

<p>Aerospace engineering (clearly a specialized field and one which many schools don’t have or which is combined with Mechanical engineering as is the case at Princeton)</p>

<p>American studies (a program that many universities don’t have, including Princeton)</p>

<p>Cell biology and Microbiology (two fields—especially the latter—that are far more often associated with medical schools–this is why microbiology is under the Health Sciences category for the NRC rankings–or are part of the biology department itself)</p>

<p>Industrial/systems/management engineering (a relatively new field and hardly part of the “core” humanities)</p>

<p>Linguistics (subsumed under the philosophy department at Princeton and many other schools)</p>

<p>Statistics (subsumed under the math department at Princeton and many other schools)</p>

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<p>So, including all of the above disciplines into the analysis I did before, should clearly disfavor Princeton and it does. In some cases, Princeton doesn’t even have that department (e.g. Linguistics) and thus gets a score of zero. (By the way, Phantasmagoric has himself, selected disciplines that heavily favor Stanford which has the best overall score for these six fields shown above and has left out others such as Public Affairs where Princeton is number one.) Using the same methodology I used before and adding the NRC scores for these additional six fields boosts Stanford but still doesn’t change the ordinal rankings by much. I’ve only done this for the top four schools in this analysis.</p>

<p>** Revised NRC Quality Assessment Rankings For 38 Programs ***
(to please Phantasmagoric—though perhaps it won’t please him)</p>

<p>100—Harvard
96.8–Princeton
94.7–Stanford
91.3–Berkeley</p>

<p>Be careful for what you ask. :)</p>

<p>I’ll move on now and let the rest of you have your fun. You can argue endlessly over how to use the data from the NRC rankings. I think my approach is sound and defensible as it includes only those fields that are truly “core” to the humanities and that are found at every major university.</p>

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<p>FWIW (admittedly not a whole lot!), below are results I got almost 3 years ago from averaging the old (1995) NRC rankings for all 41 department rankings, minus the engineering fields. The number in the first column represents the harmonic mean of all ranked non-engineering departments, rounded to integers. The order within rows indicates fractional differences (before rounding).</p>

<p>The way I handled non-existent departments (like Linguistics at Princeton) was to assigned them the lowest possible rank for that department, plus 1. This had the effect of penalizing an unranked department more, or less, depending on how many other universities had a ranking for that department. So you’d get a bigger hit for not having an English department than for not having Linguistics – but you’d never get “zero”. I exclude MIT and CalTech altogether because their pattern of represented & high-ranking departments is fairly different from the others. </p>

<p>I’m too lazy to re-do this for the new NRC rankings.<br>
Not that any of these results necessarily translate very well to an undergraduate ranking, regardless.</p>

<p>3: Harvard, Yale<br>
4: Berkeley, Stanford
5: Chicago, Princeton
7: Columbia, Duke
8: Michigan, Cornell, UCLA, Wisconsin<br>
11: Penn<br>
13: Washington<br>
14: NYU
16: Hopkins
18: Illinois, Virginia<br>
19: Brown<br>
20: UNC
23: Northwestern<br>
24: Cal SB, WUSTL<br>
28: Vanderbilt<br>
32: Emory<br>
33: Carnegie Mellon
42: Rice<br>
46: Notre Dame<br>
49: Georgetown</p>

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<p>"I’m too lazy to re-do this for the new NRC rankings.
Not that any of these results necessarily translate very well to an undergraduate ranking, regardless.</p>

<p>3: Harvard, Yale
4: Berkeley, Stanford
5: Chicago, Princeton
7: Columbia, Duke
8: Michigan, Cornell, UCLA, Wisconsin"</p>

<p>Well then, since you aren’t using the new NRC ratings, I would switch Duke and Michigan around. :-)</p>

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<p>how about</p>

<p>Tier 1 (The Rodney Dangerfield of top colleges): UC Berkeley, U-Michigan, & Duke</p>

<p>Tier 2: Everyone else, but Tier 3</p>

<p>Tier 3: some Junior University on a Farm</p>

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<p>Uh…philosophy doesn’t “subsume” fields, but rather, fields grow out of philosophy. You can see this in many fields which have either directly or indirectly, grown out of philosophy: Psychology, Cognitive Science, Linguistics, Economics, Mathematical Logic, etc. </p>

<p>Linguistics surely has a strong association with philosophy, but that’s mainly due to Chomsky (who’s a closest philosopher.) But, as phantasmagoric said, it’s mainly been a branch of Anthropology for most (i.e. pre-Chomsky) of its formal study. Ironically enough though, Anthropology was heavily influenced by Kant who is essentially one of the most influential philosophers of all time. That being said, philosophers have done many things over many periods that we wouldn’t consider philosophy now. Aristotle was a pioneering biologist, but i think few, if any, people would call biology part of “philosophy” (even though Aristotle probably thought he was doing “philosophy.”)</p>

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<p>Linguistics is not at ALL philosophy. Not even close… I would literally murder myself if I studied linguistics (I apologize to all of the people who study linguistics, I just cannot stand the subject).</p>

<p>Philosophers sometimes call themselves grammaticists; but not linguists. Philosophy of language concerns itself with the semantics and syntax - as well as things like what you can and cannot assert given your epistemic basis, etc. </p>

<p>Linguistics on the other hand studies things like… how do we produce sounds, syntax, semantics, how do we learn language, where does language come from, how does language evolve, etc. </p>

<p>The two are VERY different in that their focus is very different.</p>

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<p>^ thanks for that - I’m both insulted and pleased with your comment about linguistics. FWIW I’d murder myself if I had to study philosophy. So there. :p</p>

<p>PtonGrad2000,</p>

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<p>What about anything I’ve said is a “bluff”?</p>

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<p>Wait, since when does it have to be a school for it to be considered? Princeton doesn’t have a school of engineering, it’s distinctly preprofessional, and yet you included most of those disciplines. Stanford also doesn’t have a school of drama or a school of communication. They’re just more academic departments.</p>

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<p>You know PtonGrad, stating “clearly” every so often does not make your argument stronger.</p>

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<p>Many universities don’t have programs that you included in your original analysis. The point is that many do have it.</p>

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<p>Again, who cares if it is “associated” with a medical school? Berkeley has them and it has no medical school. Sorry but if you aren’t aware that cell biology is one of the most basic offerings of any biology department, you need to educate yourself. And because biology departments tend to be so large, they’re often divided up. Yes, this is one of those instances where Princeton’s small size does not lead to a favorable conclusion about it.</p>

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<p>Industrial engineering isn’t one of the humanities. ;)</p>

<p>It’s also not relatively new. Industrial engineering/operations research goes back to the 1800s. The first US department for it was established over 100 years ago. And it’s offered by all the top universities - MIT, Stanford, Berkeley, Cornell, Michigan, UPenn, Georgia Tech, etc.</p>

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<p>Except for Princeton, at what major university is linguistics subsumed under the philosophy department? MIT doesn’t count, because linguistics and philosophy don’t subsume either as a department, but are rather a combined department.</p>

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<p>I’ll give you that.</p>

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<p>You coincidentally forget to mention that I left out several disciplines where Stanford’s favored, such as immunology, pharmacology, and materials science and engineering (although I should have included the latter; all top engineering schools have it). Notice that I don’t complain about your inclusion of “applied mathematics,” which most universities don’t have and is typically subsumed under math departments – even at Stanford and Berkeley. But I realized that many top universities do have it, so good for them. I’m not going to throw it out because Stanford doesn’t rank.</p>

<p>Public affairs/public policy is excluded because it most definitely is a professional program. There’s no contest about that. Princeton may offer an undergraduate degree in it, but most schools of public policy (such as Harvard’s or Berkeley’s) don’t. The same logic is applied to public health.</p>

<p>The rest of the ones I excluded were either professional (e.g. nursing), associated with medical schools, or agricultural (e.g. nutrition).</p>

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<p>Yet you offer no defense for why you emphasize this “core.” What do the humanities have to do with anything?</p>

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<p>It also concerns itself with reference and bivalence (which linguistics is no doubt interested in.)</p>

<p>Philosophy of Language and Linguistics overlap a lot more than you think. Just like any other field, linguistics has various philosophical problems that it too is unsure how to answer. Questions come up about truth/falsity (e.g. whether “The Present King of France is bald” is true/false or has no truth value.) Questions also come up about vagueness (in fact, one of the top linguistics professors here is coteaching a class on vagueness.) </p>

<p>There are probably a lot more parallels, but i don’t know enough about linguistics to really make the connection. Surely, MIT didn’t blend it’s philosophy and linguistics department because the two just happen to be so different from one another and have very little in common. </p>

<p>Linguistics, no doubt, is a science, and philosophy is not. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have very distinct philosophical roots. Turing is often considered the founder of computer science, but he got his PHD under Alonzo Church (a philosopher at UCLA.) Artificial Intelligence is also a field of computer science, but there’s no doubt that philosophy has important things to say about it (probems of the mind mostly, like consciousness.) And there’s no doubting the influence that first order logic had on computer science. No doubt these fields are there own respected sciences, but to deny their connections with philosophy is to deny history. Both were influenced by philosophy (and still are) and philosophy still has important things to say about them.</p>

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<p>^ Sure, they focus on very different things, but so do ethics and logic. It doesn’t mean they don’t have a very fundamental relationship to one another.</p>

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<p>I know what philosophy studies, I do just happen to actually study philosophy at NYU. </p>

<p>While linguistics and philosophy of language may be concerned with some of the same things, they are very different fields. That’s like saying psychology and philosophy are really really similar. Sure, philosophy and psychology ask the same questions, but they approach them in very different ways - just as linguistics and philosophy of language approach them in very different ways.</p>

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<p>^ NYU2013 is correct I took a linguistics class and a philosophy of language class. They are so different.</p>

<p>Linguistics is honestly bull too.</p>

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<p>The relationship between linguistics and the philosophy of language is about the same as the one between physics and the philosophy of physics. The difference is that the philosophy of language has a richer, older history.</p>

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<p>Linguistics is the reason why search engine results aren’t completely crap, why Siri can understand your intent, why spam filters have gotten so good, etc. It’s sad how under-appreciated linguistics is, when most people don’t go a day without benefiting from it directly or indirectly (in fact, the development of programming languages and compilers, without which no computer would function, has its roots in linguistics). Whatev, haters gonna hate. :p</p>

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<p>Like i said above, you can say the same thing about ethics and logic; they’re still both however part of the four main branches of philosophy (with metaphysics and epistemology)</p>

<p>There’s also a class in linguistics, at UCLA, that focuses on being, which is a distinctly philosophical concept. But i’ve already drawn many parallels, believe what you like.</p>

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<p>No, the relationship between linguistics and phil. of lang. is about the same as the one between physics and metaphysics. (which is not the same as the philosophy of physics; ironically enough, when the whole logical positivist movement was going on in the 20th century, by trying to cut out metaphysics, they ended up cutting out physics.)</p>

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<p>Ethics and logic… Yes… So very different? No. What are you talking about? Without logic, no form of any philosophy would exist. Logic is a necessary part of philosophy… It would be quite literally impossible to have ethics without logic.</p>

<p>So, no, that comparison is completely incongruous.</p>

<p>As someone who quite literally studies philosophy and has taken psycholinguistics, I can guarantee they are not as similar as you seem to think. </p>

<p>That’s like saying metaphysics and physics are really similar because they have the word “physics” in it… </p>

<p>Last time I checked, linguistics doesn’t care about “P, but not P” - Moorean sentences and what the epistemic requirements are for any given utterance, etc.</p>

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<p>You just tried to say metaphysics is similar to physics… I have no idea what metaphysics you’ve been studying, but I think you need to go take another metaphysics class and then take a physics class… Because metaphysics has VERY little to do with physics.</p>

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<p>beyphy, it might depend on what philosophy of language you’re studying. What I took at Stanford wasn’t akin to metaphysics. Of course, I found most philosophy to be too abstract/disparate for me to understand, which is why I threw it out and chose the cognitive route. :)</p>

<p>The topic may be derailed but for once it’s a nice alternative to debating NRC rankings. ;)</p>

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<p>[Brains</a> in a vat](<a href=“http://faculty.uca.edu/rnovy/Putnam--Brains%20in%20a%20vat.htm]Brains”>Brains in a vat)</p>

<p>but yes, i agree with Phantasmagoric, we are getting into a long digression.</p>

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<p>ethics is older than logic historically. Plato talked about ethics and logic didn’t come around till aristotle. Do you mean reasoning? Yes, philosophy can’t be done without reasoning. But logic as a formal study (categorical syllogisms, propositional calculus, etc.) didn’t arive until much after ethics was already on the scene.</p>

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<p>it’s a shame that you feel that way. Philosophy has long been taken to be an intellectual enterprise. Many of the worlds most influential figures (Leibniz, Descartes, etc.) were involved in philosophy and took it very seriously. But yes, it isn’t for everyone.</p>

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<p>Why are you linking me to an article entitled brains in a vat? What on earth do brains in vats have to do with metaphysics supposedly having to do with physics? </p>

<p>Brains in vats is first and foremost a philosophy of mind-thing. While it may have metaphysical origins, it’s not entirely the realm of metaphysics. </p>

<p>And what you just quoted to me says that physics ISN’T metaphysics, and that physics shouldn’t be taken to be similar to metaphysics - which is quite literally what I just said.</p>

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<p>metaphysics: Things that aren’t ‘real’ or ‘physical’, essentially.</p>

<p>Physics: Natural science that uses math and things to study real ‘objective things’. I.e. gravity, forces, etc.</p>

<p>Please explain to my what physics (wherein I study the velocity of an object, say) has to do with… free will? Or why or how there is life? What is time? etc.</p>

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<p>I don’t know how you could have gotten that interpretation. What he’s saying is that physics is our tool for describing the universe (which is what we take metaphysics to be. i.e. physics IS our metaphysics.)</p>

<p>EDIT: That’s not what metaphysics is ‘essentially’. You should read up on it:</p>

<p><a href=“http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/metaphysics/[/url]”>http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/metaphysics/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

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<p>If you’re classify ‘logic’ as first-order logic, then no… Ethics is no way related to FOL. I can use FOL, occasionally. But in most cases, using FOL in ethics is not only pointless but useless - as the content of my sentences matters. In FOL, the whole point is to eliminate content.</p>