G1. Here is the grading rubric. As noted on that page, your total score corresponds to a letter grade roughly as follows:
| 33 to 35 | A |
| 30 to 32 | A- |
| 27 to 29 | B+ |
| 24 to 26 | B |
| 21 to 23 | B- |
| 18 to 20 | C+ |
| 15 to 17 | C |
| 12 to 14 | C- |
| 9 to 11 | D+ |
| 6 to 8 | D |
| 0 to 5 | F |
These correspondences are for your information only. The records from which we calculate your final grades work with the numbers: so a 26 is better than a 24, and some of you may receive scores in between the letter grades in this table, such as 26.5.
For each of the main categories of your grade (M, Q, A, I, W — leaving aside the potential 10 points for following all the clerical/formatting instructions), you have a score from 0-5. Any score of 4 or higher is strong. Any score of 1 or lower is notably bad/problematic. Scores from 2 to 3 (which are most common) are middling: you do somewhat well in this respect, but there’s definitely room for improvement.
If your M score was below 4, you are exhibiting some imperfect understanding of some of the concepts or positions you’re discussing. These may be materials from the class, or other materials you brought in from outside sources. (It wasn’t necessary to bring in outside sources, or even encouraged. But it’s definitely allowed. However, it’s very common when students do so that they don’t fully understand what they’re bringing in, or how it relates to the main debate/positions they’re addressing. This is why we don’t encourage you to rely on them.)
If your Q score was below 4, it’s less clear than it ought to be how the main elements of your discussion are contributing to answer the question in the prompt. (Or there are some parts of the prompt that you’re not answering; if that’s so, we’ll aim to say so in our specific feedback.)
With some of the papers, we specifically encourage you to have more argumentative back-and-forth (see for example point A3 below). But even when we don’t say this, if your A score was below 4, try to find more ways to develop objections and respond to them. This will generally strengthen your paper. For example, with the aliens-on-Europa papers, many of you made reasonable proposals about the kinds of things that would be evidence of mentality; but you didn’t engage with possible doubts or objections. Of course, you’re probably not going to be in a position to prove that some behavior has to be the outward sign of some genuine inner thinking or feeling. But you could do more to explain why an inner mental life is the more plausible explanation of the behavior — or why this behavior is better evidence of a mind than some other outwardly observable signs are. Perhaps you were already starting to think about this, or make some moves in that direction. If you reorganize what you say into the form of objection and reply, it can help to bring out more clearly (to both you and your reader) what are the arguments you’re relying on in your thinking.
If a W score is below 4, this could be for several reasons. Sometimes you are regularly using words or expressions that are hard to understand (this is a low-level problem). Sometimes part or all of the overall structure is unclear: what role does each paragraph play in the overall dramatic arc of the paper? (this is a high-level problem). In some cases, the problem is more in-between. We’ll try to explain any deficits of this sort in the specific feedback.
G2. Don’t be too discouraged by your grades on these first papers. They are only a minor contribution to your final grade for the course. We’re giving you feedback about the quality of the paper you’ve so far written. But you now have the opportunity to take that feedback and rewrite the paper, crafting what should be a much better product. For most of us, it takes practice and feedback to learn how to do this well.
On the other hand, if this is a wakeup call that you’re not putting the time and effort into the course needed to do as well as you’d like to, then yes, let it play that role.
G3. Be sure you understand our feedback and what the most important things will be for you to address in your rewrites. If anything is unclear, find some way to explore it with us further and understand better what would help.
G4. Your rewrites are due on Thursday Mar 28 and are permitted to be a page or two longer. Sometimes the most fundamental issues with your version 1 submission wouldn’t be directly addressed by just writing more. But if you do end up needing extra space to develop the best parts of your paper, you are permitted to take it.
G5. Your rewrites should try to go beyond specific errors and problems we indicate. Your version 1 paper may have some general shortcomings that could be improved throughout: perhaps it was difficult to see what your argument and the paper’s structure were supposed to be? Or perhaps you didn’t push back against some of the positions you discussed as much as you might? The scores you got for different categories explained in our grading rubric should help guide you here. (See point G1 above.) The best way to address general shortcomings like these is to rewrite your paper from scratch. Start with a new, empty window in your word processor. Use your draft and the comments you received on it to construct a new outline, and write from that. This will tend to improve the paper a lot more than you’d achieve by just editing various sentences and paragraphs in the draft.
When we grade a rewrite, there may be weaknesses in parts of your paper that you didn’t change that stand out more than they did in the first version. They may have affected our overall impression of the paper, without us being able to give you any specific recommendation about fixing them. They will continue to affect our impression of the rewrite. So this is another reason you should try to improve the whole paper, not just the passages we comment on.
G6. We expect everyone to make a serious effort at improving their paper in the rewrite — even if you’re already satisfied with the grade you got on the first version. Turning in a rewrite showing only minimal efforts to improve may earn you a lower grade instead.
Minimal efforts to fix the paper look like this: adding one new paragraph and changing a few sentences or phrases here and there. Sometimes this may manage to patch up some problems we described in our feedback. But it misses an opportunity to generally improve your paper. Our feedback attempts to target what seems to us to be the most notable issues, most needing your attention. This doesn’t mean the rest of your paper is perfect and cannot be improved.
Please make sure that your header material appears only on the first page. Many of your papers had the header material on every page. This is distracting. Be sure to select “different first page” in your header settings in your word processor.
W1. Write shorter paragraphs. And sentences. This contributes enormously to readability. There is no rule that this essay should contain five paragraphs. In fact, it should probably have more like ten to fifteen (short) paragraphs.
W2. Tell your reader what you are going to do and what you have done. Transition sentences like, “having argued for X, I’ll now consider a dualist objection to X” help guide your reader. Do this in your introductions, too. Instead of waxing poetic about the problems of philosophy (see W3 below), tell your reader what you will argue for in your paper, and tell the reader how you will do it.
W3. Avoid empty, non-informative verbiage. This includes statements like “This discourse contributes profoundly to deepening our understanding of the universe,” and “These questions have been persistent for centuries, and still pose a great challenge for philosophers.” These kinds of sentences do nothing but take up space. Every sentence in your paper should have an expository or argumentative purpose. If it does not help the reader to understand a problem or argument, consider getting rid of it.
W4. If you mention one of the readings, make sure that you explain the relevant parts of the work you are engaging with. Write as though your reader has not read anything that you mention.
In general, you should aim to write as though your paper is going to be read and evaluated by someone who hasn’t taken our class, hasn’t read any of the texts you refer to, and hasn’t read the question prompt either. You have to introduce the questions that the prompt raises.
W5. In responding to an objection, you need to say more than “this is not right” or “but this is impossible.” Simply saying that the objection is wrong is flat-footed. It also does not yet count as engaging with the objection. If the objection is obviously stupid, you have probably not yet thought of the most compelling objections to your view.
A1. Be sure to distinguish between mental states/processes and signs of mental states that are observable from the outside. Many papers said something like “We should think that the creatures have minds if they are observed to have memories, emotions, and desires.” But memories, emotions, and desires are themselves mental processes or states. Yes, the creatures’ having memories, emotions, and desires probably means that they have minds, but we have no way of directly determining whether they have those things. Instead, try to say something about what observable signs there might be of unobservable mental states, and give some justification for why the observable signs you point to should be thought of as a reliable guide to whether a being has a particular mental state.
A2. When you mention behaviors that you think should be taken as evidence of mental life, you need to explain why each behavior is a sign of mental life. It is not enough to say that, for example, the ability to use (what looks like) language is a sign that the Europans can think. You should say more about why language is connected to thinking, and how we can determine whether the sounds or gestures the Europans make should count as a language.
A3. It would strengthen your argument if you considered an objection (or even a few objections) and made an effort to respond to them.
A4. Many of you seemed to assume that if the Europans were mechanical, they obviously could not have minds. This is not obvious - why can’t the Europans be made up of metal and gears? Think of the Tin Man from the Wizard of Oz who was “mechanical” but not an AI or programmed.
A5. Listing out the evidence you think would be compelling is not enough. We also expect you to argue why this evidence would be compelling. You also need to argue why these pieces of evidence matter more than others.
B1. Avoid confusing causal closure with determinism. Causal closure is the principle that every physical event has a complete physical cause. Determinism is the view that the laws of nature are compatible with only one future. Also, causal closure is the more direct problem for dualism than determinism is. If you mention determinism, ask whether you can simplify things by talking about causal closure instead.
B2. Some of you suggested that dualism is impossible because of causal closure. This is not obvious. A dualist could accept causal closure and think that there is mental causation. This raises worries about overdetermination (as we discussed), but it should be clear a dualist can, in principle, accept causal closure. There’s no contradiction in holding the two views.
B3. Despite what we said in the prompt, some of you still only enumerated various responses to dualism and materialism. Your papers would have been much better had you selected the most compelling (or two most compelling responses) and developed these further.
B4. Many of you referenced the mind-body problem in the introduction of your papers when talking about dualism and materialism. But in doing so, you did not say what the mind-body problem is or how the dualist and the materialist attempt to handle the problem.
C1. Some of you are running together different things that might be meant by “privileged access.” Specifically, it might mean: (1) We have better access to our own minds than anyone else does (or could), (2) We know what is going on in our own minds better than we know what is going on in the world outside our minds, or (3) We cannot be wrong about what is going on in our minds. These forms of privileged access are related to each other, but they are distinct. Be careful not to move from one understanding of privileged access to another without explicitly noting that you are doing so.
C2. Be sure not to confuse having “special” or “privileged” access with having “full” access — i.e., having access to all — our mental states. For instance, some of your papers said that not having complete access to all our mental states is sufficient to undermine the idea that we have privileged access to our mental states. But this isn’t necessarily right.
C3. It’s important that you give adequate mention to both sides of the debate. Many papers failed to do this at all, or only lightly engaged with someone who thinks we do not have special access. You don’t need to decide which view is right. But you do need to frame things such that it is clear there is a substantive debate.