More PhilPapers survey results

We have just posted a number of new results from last year's PhilPapers Philosophical Survey.  The results include correlations (over the responses from 930 target faculty) between the main answers to the survey, and correlations of those answers with background factors include gender, age, nationality, and much else.  We've also posted an attempt at a factor analysis, and a list of all public respondents.

The correlation results largely speak for themselves.  There are some fairly predictable geographic effects: e.g. a UK affiliation correlates most strongly with disjunctivism and a belief in a priori knowledge; Australasia with consequentialism and B-theory; US with deontology and Millianism; Europe with Fregeanism.  The strongest gender effects are that being female correlates with holding an epistemic view of truth, with not switching on the trolley problem, with rejecting apriority and analyticity, and with scientific anti-realism, while being male correlates with the opposite.  The strongest age effects are correlations of youth with Humeanism, B-theory, teletransporter survival, content externalism, and knowledge invariantism (and with being accurate on the metasurvey!).  There's much else of interest on the "highest correlations page" as well as on the pages for specific variables.

The factor analysis is not especially sophisticated, but the first four or five factors seem reasonably identifiable, corresponding roughly to naturalism, realism (especially about values and abstracta), rationalism, externalism, and epistemically oriented anti-realism.  Of course all this is partly a function of the somewhat arbitrary choice of survey questions.

The list of public respondents (along with browsable responses) is also worth checking out.  A sampling of names that may be familiar to readers of this blog include Berit Brogaard, Laurence Bonjour, Sally Haslanger, Terry Horgan, Brian Leiter, Joe Levine, Beatrice Longuenesse, David Papineau, Derek Parfit, John Perry, Nathan Salmon, Michael Tye, Peter Unger, Stephen Yablo, and me.  One can also see which respondents have given answers that are similar to those of a specific respondent.  I'd encourage others to make their responses public so they can be browsed in this way.

Comments

[Daniel Nolan]

Hi Dave, is there any way of finding out what the median age in the target departments is? I can see from the histograph that the median aged person is probably born in the early 1960s, but it would be nice to know which year when interpreting the above-or-below median age data.

[Timothy Scriven]

An exploratory factor analysis could be interesting.