Semantics etc.

The program for this year’s Sinn und Bedeutung (September 21-23, 2006 in Barcelona) is online.

Larry Horn pointed us at a cartoon in the July 31, 2006 issue of the New Yorker (p. 39):

Stay tuned for a mid-September release of a draft paper by Sabine Iatridou and myself on “How to Say Ought in Foreign: The Composition of Weak Necessity Modals”, where we hope to explain what is happening in this cartoon (and elsewhere).

A while back, I puzzled over the semantics and pragmatics of the sentence “The authors appear in alphabetical order”. Now, it is time to look at the sociology of alphabetical order in author listings. In a recent paper, Liran Einav and Leeat Yariv explore the issue:

In this paper, we focus on the effects of surname initials on professional outcomes in the academic labor market for economists.

We begin our analysis with data on faculty in all top 35 U.S. economics departments. Faculty with earlier surname initials are significantly more likely to receive tenure at top ten economics departments, are significantly more likely to become fellows of the Econometric Society, and, to a lesser extent, are more likely to receive the Clark Medal and the Nobel Prize. These statistically significant differences remain the same even after we control for country of origin, ethnicity, religion or departmental fixed effects. All these effects gradually fade as we increase the sample to include our entire set of top 35 departments.

We suspect the “alphabetical discrimination” reported in this paper is linked to the norm in the economics profession prescribing alphabetical ordering of credits on coauthored publications. As a test, we replicate our analysis for faculty in the top 35 U.S. psychology departments, for which coauthorships are not normatively ordered alphabetically. We find no relationship between alphabetical placement and tenure status in psychology.

We then discuss the extent to which the effects of alphabetical placement are internalized by potential authors in their choices of the number of coauthors as well as in their willingness to follow the alphabetical ordering norm. We find that the distribution of authors’ surnames in single-authored, double-authored and triple-authored papers does not differ significantly. Nonetheless, authors with surname initials that are placed later in the alphabet are significantly less likely to participate in four- and five-author projects. Furthermore, such authors are also more likely to deviate from the accepted norm, and to write papers in which credits do not follow the alphabetical ordering.

A short blurb in the Boston Globe added this coda: “Reaction to the article has been mixed-and not randomly mixed. ‘You definitely see a correlation between how much they believe the article and how late in the alphabet they appear,’ says Einav. Jeffrey Zabel, an economist at Tufts, deems the results ‘persuasive.’ The chair of Harvard’s department, Alberto Alesina, said he had not read the paper, so he couldn’t comment. Hmm.”

I found an older paper — not cited by Einav and Yariv –, which reports on a similar study of British chemists and found no such effect.

I myself have, of course, been very careful in my choice of friends and co-authors so that I always appear first in the listing. (Here, it is crucial that my name is alphabetized under “F”). The only reason why I might consider a collaborator who precedes me in the alphabet is if the collaboration would lower my Erdös number, which is 7 right now, or my Bacon-Erdös number, which is infinity right now.

The Washington Monthly has published a new style college ranking, which finds MIT at the top:

To put The Washington Monthly College Rankings together, we started with a different assumption about what constitutes the “best” schools. We asked ourselves: What are reasonable indicators of how much a school is benefiting the country? We came up with three: how well it performs as an engine of social mobility (ideally helping the poor to get rich rather than the very rich to get very, very rich), how well it does in fostering scientific and humanistic research, and how well it promotes an ethic of service to country. We then devised a way to measure and quantify these criteria (See “A Note on Methodology”). Finally, we placed the schools into rankings. Rankings, we admit, are never perfect, but they’re also indispensable.

By devising a set of criteria different from those of other college guides, we arrived at sharply different results. Top schools sank, and medium schools rose. For instance, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, 48th on the U.S News list, takes third place on our list, while Princeton, first on the U.S. News list, takes 43rd on ours. In short, Pennsylvania State, measured on our terms–by the yardstick of fostering research, national service and social mobility–does a lot more for the country than Princeton.

Don’t get us wrong. We’re not saying Princeton isn’t a superb school. It employs many of the nation’s finest minds, and its philosophy department is widely considered the best in the country. Its eating clubs, or whatever they’re called, are surely unmatched. Princeton may be a great destination for your tuition dollars, all 31,450 of them, not including room or board. But what if it’s a lousy destination for your tax dollars? Each year, Princeton receives millions of dollars in federal research grants. Does it deserve them? What has Princeton done for us lately? This is the only guide that tries to tell you. That, and a bit more.

The Findings

This year, once again, top-tier schools on the U.S. News chart fare much worse on our list. State schools are, by our measure, the primary heroes of higher education in the United States today. There are also a few villains to make it interesting. Here are some highlights from this year:

The U.S. News top 10 rarely cracks our top 10.

Of the top 10 national universities in the 2006 rankings of U.S. News, only two, Stanford and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, make it onto our top 10. Harvard, first with Princeton on the U.S. News list, occupies only 28th place on our list, mainly because it’s weak on national service. MIT takes first place, while four state schools take spots two through five: the University of California, Berkeley; Pennsylvania State, University Park; University of California, Los Angeles; and Texas A&M University.

[Thanks to Steve Yablo for the link.]

Thony Gillies and I just wrote a survey article on epistemic modality from a linguistic and dynamic semantic perspective, based in part on our presentations in an informational session at the Eastern APA in December. The paper is supposed to be part of Volume 2 of the Oxford Studies in Epistemology. We’d appreciate any comments people might have. Keep in mind that it is meant to be an introduction to the topic rather than a presentation of original research (although we do identify some issues that research should address).