How Professors Think: Inside the Curious World of Academic Judgment

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“Humanists” include art historians, English professors, musicologists, and
philosophers. While some historians are committed to producing a narrative
and descriptive history, others are more engaged with theory and with social
explanation.



  1. Guillory (1993, chapter 2).

  2. Lamont (2004b) discusses indicators of the vitality of fields. See also
    Feller et al. (2007). For an illustration of a more encompassing study of indi-
    cators of the health of a field, see http://www.asanet.org/cs/root/leftnav/re-
    search_and_stats/health_of_sociology_fact_sheets (accessed July 8, 2008).

  3. The literature on the conditions for consensus is voluminous. See, for
    instance, Cole, Cole, and Simon (1981); also Hargens (1988).

  4. See for instance, Knorr-Cetina (1999) on the role played by context
    in the production of knowledge for molecular biology and high energy phys-
    ics. For quantitative social science, see Ragin’s important book (2000) on
    fuzzy sets.

  5. Sewell (2005).

  6. Chapter 4 discusses cognitive contextualization as well as the other cus-
    tomary procedural practices of panelists. See also Mallard, Lamont, and
    Guetzkow (2009). Science studies such as Callon (1994), Callon, Lascoumes,
    and Barthe (2001), and Collins and Evans (2007) have considered procedural
    fairness in evaluation. Collins and Evans (2002, 262) suggests that procedural
    fairness is achieved when panelists demonstrate the generalized applicability
    of idiosyncratic criteria through an intersubjective process of translation,
    defined as the “special ability to take on the style of the ‘other,’ to alternate
    between different social worlds and translate between them.” Future work
    should consider academic judgments in the context of broader literatures on
    injustice, such as Dubet (2005), and corruption—see Bezes and Lascoumes
    (2006).

  7. Nehamas (1997, 232).

  8. A trend toward “naturalism” within philosophy in recent decades aims
    to “adopt and emulate the methods of successful sciences... or to operate in
    tandem with the sciences, as their abstract and reflective branches”; see Leiter
    (2004, 3). Naturalism has made philosophy more compatible with interdisci-
    plinary evaluation, because it incites philosophers to collaborate with psy-
    chologists, computer scientists, linguists, and economists. This trend did not
    facilitate the work of the panels I studied, however, perhaps because few if any
    of their members were drawn from most of these fields.


Notes to Pages 59–65 / 271
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