As most of you probably already know, initial data has been released from the PhilPapers survey (as well as from the metasurvey). I don't have time to fully digest and process this data, but here are some quick thoughts on things that caught my eye (in no paticular order):
- phil of mind was, by pretty sizable margin, the highest reported AOS. In fact, of the 3226 people who completed the survey, 721 reported phil of mind as their first AOS and 385 reported it as their secondary AOS. Assuming that people did not double report their AOS's (I can't remember if you could do this when filling out the survey; even if you could, I'd think not may people would), greater than 1/3 of respondants work in phil of mind. This struck me as very odd.
- of the people who took the survey and filled out gender (I'm assuming by 'gender' they meant 'biological sex'), only 488 (of the 3013) are female. This is surprising to me given that the vast majority of respondants are born in the 70s or 80s (and thus are either grad students are new PhD's). I would have thought that this proportion would be higher, not among the profession, but among this sub-population.
- more people identify more with Davidson than with Plato (and more with Carnap than with Aquinas and Augustine combined!)
- of all respondants, 2/3 accept or lean toward atheism while only 18.5% accept or lean toward theism. Among people who identify phil of religion as an AOS, the percentage of those accepting or leaning toward theism is 68.3%. (For a discussion of this issue, see here and here.)
- (metaphysical, not political) libertarianism is a very minority view in general (18.3%, not too surprising) but also among philosophers of action (22.4%). Libertarianism is much more widespread among philosophers of religion (49.1%).
- free will skepticism is higher among philosophy undergrads than among either the general population or among PhD's.
That there's such a high percentage of Phil Mind'ers is surely in part a function of the fact that Chalmers is in charge (80's bad sitcom ref). This will affect who knows about the survey, who uses Phil Papers, and, certainly, the results of the survey. This must be kept in mind when interpreting the survey.
The results tell you what a group dominated by Phil Mind'ers think. At the course level that is. They did a great job of allowing for custom populations, though I wish oh how I wish I had the raw data. And I wish you could select multiple categories at once.
I'd like to see the results controlled for demographics. That would fix the phil. mind and gender problems. We certainly have gender demographics for the profession, right? Do we have AOS demographics for the profession?
Interesting observations. I had not realized that men were clearly over-represented even among the younger groups. That's worrying.
Regarding philosophers of mind, they are over-represented on PhilPapers generally because of its roots in MindPapers, a smaller site specialized in philosophy of mind we built two years before PhilPapers.
Fortunately, the target faculty does not show this bias, or at least it shows much less of a bias (phil of mind is a popular area after all). The target faculty results are more representative of the profession as a whole in this respect.
Thanks for weighing in David. Will the general public ever have access to the raw data, or does the PhilPapers staff plan on doing the kinds of more detailed analysis that some of us would like to see?