Questions that interest me on norm institution and grounding

For any norm N_k that we institute, there is a prior norm N_k − 1 that specifies that when the acts of institution of N_k are performed, then N_k has such-and-such force.

On pain of a regress incompatible with the empirical facts of humanity’s finite past, any instituted norm must be grounded in an uninstituted norm. What are these uninstituted norms like?

Are they specific to our human nature or do they apply to all rational beings or are some of one sort and some of the other? Thinking about some issues in ethics, language, epistemology and decision theory has made me think that it is likely that at least some of the uninstituted norms are specific to human nature rather than to all rational beings.

Also, what types of norms are the uninstituted norms, and how do they relate to the types of norms that they ground? For instance, are instituted linguistic norms grounded in uninstituted linguistic norms or in some other kinds of norms, say moral ones?

For those of us who love theoretical simplicity, it would be a great joy if it turned out that all the uninstituted norms were of one type. If so, that type would be the moral. For, plausibly, no norm can ground an instituted norm that has greater force than itself, and moral norms have greater force than any others. In any case, either there are multiple types of uninstituted norms, or they are all moral. In the latter case all norms are moral or derive by institution from moral ones.

Note that the uninstituted norms need not be fundamental. There could be grounding relations between uninstituted norms. For instance, neither the moral norm not to torture the innocent nor the moral norm not to torture innocent blue-eyed people is instituted, but the latter (assuming it really counts as a norm, rather than an application or something like that) is clearly grounded in the former. If it turns out that, as I think, some uninstituted norms are specific to our human nature, it could still be the case that all the uninstituted norms that are specific to our human nature are grounded in a norm not specific to human nature—say, the universal norm to act in accordance with one’s nature.

Furthermore, there are norms that govern rational behavior as such and norms that do not govern rational behavior as such, such as the norm that two legs is good for humans and four legs is good for pigs. What grounding relationships are there between these? Are all the uninstituted norms of one sort or the other, or are they of both sorts?

There is material for interesting dissertations exploring questions like this. Of course, such questions have been explored in multiple contexts, but perhaps not quite in the above structure.

Baylor's PhD program in philosophy

We've just finished a promotional video for our graduate program. Enjoy!

Graduate school admissions

I wonder if it wouldn't be a good idea for US philosophy graduate schools to switch from the GRE to the LSAT. At Georgetown, before my time, my colleagues once did an informal study of what information available at admission-time correlated with graduate school success. They found only two statistically significant correlations:

1. scores on the analytic scale positively correlated with success; and
2. the number of undergraduate courses in philosophy that the student had taken negatively correlated with success.

I think (2) can be ignored. It could, for instance, be an artefact of the fact that the mini-study was done on admitted students, and admitted students with few undergraduate courses would probably have to be really good in other ways to get admitted, or would be less likely to have simply naturally drifted into graduate school as a continuation of undergraduate classes.

But (1) strikes me as important. And the GRE has eliminated the analytic section, replacing it with an analytic writing section. The analytic writing scores have low resolution (0-6, in intervals of 0.5). Anecdotal evidence suggests that differences in the analytic writing component do not correlate with the philosophical quality of the student—one knows of really impressive undergraduate students whose scores were pretty low, say 4. The LSAT, on the other hand, continues to have questions that test reasoning skills in the way the old analytic section of the GRE did, and even some that, from the samples that I've seen, combine logical reasoning with reading comprehension in a way that intuitively would very nicely reflect important aspects of philosophical abilities.

Furthermore, there are claims that I've seen that philosophy majors do better on the LSAT than other majors. This suggests that the LSAT is measuring something relevant to philosophy.

Alas, this is not a switch that any one Department can do on its own, and there may be university-wide policy problems. It would need to be done by the profession at large. Though, perhaps, some Departments could make the move of encouraging students to submit LSAT scores in addition to or, if the administration allows, instead of the GRE.