Feminist epistemologists have often argued for the importance of a diversity of perspectives in a community of enquirers. (A variety of reasons have been given, including the counteracting of pernicious elements of each others’ biases and each perspective being particularly conducive to understanding particular parts of the truth.) Well, the Supreme Court is at least arguably a community of enquirers. And it’s about to lose its only Protestant Justice, the superb John Paul Stevens, leaving 6 Catholics (6!) and 2 Jews. Should we, then, want to ensure that Protestantism remains represented? I’m not sure. One point against it is the thought that Protestantism is already amply represented in the long history of case law which is meant to guide its rulings. Another thought might be the standpoint theory-inspired one that what we really need are the standpoints of the less powerful groups, as they’ll be able to see the stuff the rest of us miss. That might lead one to suggest a Hindu, a Muslim or– gasp!– an atheist. But nah, that’s just too out there, isn’t it?
Category: epistemology
Epistemological insight
from Bill Clinton:
And the flaw in that argument,” Clinton added, “was that first of all sometimes people with a lot of money make stupid decisions and make [them] without transparency.”
Amazingly, this probably actually is a significant insight.
Stuff Republicans believe
People over here in the UK often ask me how Americans could possibly oppose universal healthcare. It seems to me one of the key answers is that those who are opposing it believe lots of false things about. But not just about healthcare. Check out this poll on things Republicans believe.
67 percent of Republicans (and 40 percent of Americans overall) believe that Obama is a socialist.
57 percent of Republicans (32 percent overall) believe that Obama is a Muslim
45 percent of Republicans (25 percent overall) agree with the Birthers in their belief that Obama was “not born in the United States and so is not eligible to be president”
38 percent of Republicans (20 percent overall) say that Obama is “doing many of the things that Hitler did”*
Scariest of all, 24 percent of Republicans (14 percent overall) say that Obama “may be the Antichrist.”
*Actually, this one is clearly true, if one includes breathing, eating, talking to friends, running a country, etc. But that’s also clearly not what they’re thinking of.
Consciousness-Raising at Newsweek
There’s a really awesome article calling out sexism in the workplace, and especially at Newsweek. And it’s in Newsweek– which impressively went ahead and published it. There SO much that’s excellent in it. But one thing I found particularly interesting was the epistemic situation that the authors found themselves in regarding sexism.
In countless small ways, each of us has felt frustrated over the years, as if something was amiss. But as products of a system in which we learned that the fight for equality had been won, we didn’t identify those feelings as gender-related. It seemed like a cop-out, a weakness, to suggest that the problem was anybody’s fault but our own…
In countless small ways, each of us has felt frustrated over the years, as if something was amiss. But as products of a system in which we learned that the fight for equality had been won, we didn’t identify those feelings as gender-related. It seemed like a cop-out, a weakness, to suggest that the problem was anybody’s fault but our own…
Somewhere along the road to equality, young women like us lost their voices. So when we marched into the workforce and the fog of subtle gender discrimination, it was baffling and alien. Without a movement behind us, we had neither the language to describe it nor the confidence to call it what it was.
One thing that really hits me is how much this all sounds like the consciousness-raising groups that finally named and began to fight sexual harassment, as discussed in (among other places) Fricker’s Epistemic Injustice. Women who each thought they were dealing with individual problems start talking to each other, seeing commonalities, and finding they need a new vocabulary to talk about them. (The lack of such a vocabulary is what Fricker calls ‘hermeneutical injustice’.)
Another way to see that women participate: Apply!
I know, dear friends, that travel costs money, and that money may not be falling from the sky on you right now, but sometimes, at least in my experience, it’s best to try for an amazing conference in Europe first, and worry the details such as how to pay for the plane ticket second:
The Fifth Cologne Summer School in Philosophy on “New Perspectives in Epistemology” will take place in Cologne, August 23 – 27, 2010. This year’s visiting professor will be Ernest Sosa (Rutgers University, USA). The main focus is the intersection of epistemology, theory of action and philosophy of language. We will discuss foundational issues in epistemology (the analysis of knowledge and justification, the controversy between internalism and externalism), as well as more specific issues in the current debate: virtue epistemology, knowledge as a norm of assertion, is there a normative link between knowledge and action?, intuitions and armchair philosophy, the philosophy of disagreement, and epistemic agency. The Summer School mainly aims at professional philosophers and advanced graduate students.
The attendance is free, but limited to 50 participants – on the basis of motivation and qualification. Online application is possible through April 30. Please add a brief letter of motivation where you explain your academic background and your main motivation for participating in the Summer School. Soon after the deadline we will inform you about the success of your application.
Please send your online application to the following email address:
summerschoolphilosophy@uni-koeln.de
For more information visit our website:
http://www.summerschoolphilosophy.uni-koeln.de/
Prof. Dr. Thomas Grundmann
Philosophisches Seminar
Universität zu Köln
Germany
Watch out, realists!
Mr Jender sent me this cautionary tale from Boing Boing:
Jonathan Springston, a senior reporter for the Atlanta Progressive News, was fired from the online news service because, according to an email from the site’s editor to Creative Loafing magazine, Springston “held on to the notion that there was an objective reality that could be reported objectively, despite the fact that that was not our editorial policy at Atlanta Progressive News.”
Epistemic Injustice and Disability
This devastating article by Rahila Gupta describes her struggles to get medical and educational authorities to believe what she and her son Nihal were saying: that he was perfectly capable of a mainstream education, despite his disabilities. Anyone interested in epistemic injustice should read it, as it’s quite a catalog of such injustices: Nobody believed Rahila because mothers weren’t considered credible; nobody believed Nihal because they were so certain he couldn’t possibly be communicating; educational authorities didn’t want to give him the opportunity to learn because they thought he couldn’t; they didn’t want to facilitate him showing what he’d learned through communicative help or through extra time on exams; and on and on and on. And yet he became a prize-winning teenage poet.
One particularly searing example:
Yet at seven months old, I discovered that Nihal understood the names of the various parts of his face. I would sit him on my lap and hold his fisted hand close to his face and ask him to touch his eyes, nose and so on. He would bring the right part of his face down to his hand. By some miracle it appeared that his cognitive abilities had remained intact… In my delight, I showed him off like a performing monkey to an occupational therapist at a centre that had been our saviour – the first place where there was no suggestion that you might as well walk away from this child… This therapist would ask us to demonstrate his party trick for her students. What I didn’t realise until later, to our utter humiliation, was that she would introduce us before we entered the room as an example of how faith transcended rationality in parents. And once this construct had been placed upon it, those students would not believe the evidence of their own eyes – that Nihal was obviously touching parts of his face on cue.
(For the technically inclined: This seems to me also a good example of silencing (see e.g. Langton). What the therapist said to her students made it impossible for Rahila’s speech acts to have their intended effect of showing Nihal was able to understand language. If we see Nihal’s pointings as utterances, then the therapist arguably silenced these illocutionarily as well, by making it impossible for them to be understood as speech acts at all.)
Down with Shame!
“I’m in a board meeting. Having a miscarriage. Thank goodness, because there’s a fucked-up three-week hoop-jump to have an abortion in Wisconsin.”
Thus ran Penelope Trunk’s tweet, which she defends further here.
Liberal Conspiracy provides a vehement defence of her action, in the face of a barrage of outraged responses. There Laurie Penny attacks such outrage as an attempt to police women’s emotional responses, and notes that the shame attached to public airing of biological function is peculiarly inconsistent (when that function is pornographic or sexualised, the shaming abates…). Interestingly, Penny argues that Trunk is engaged in an important process necessary for gender equality, advocated by Mill:
The knowledge which men can acquire of women …is wretchedly imperfect and superficial, and always will be so, until women themselves have told all that they have to tell.
Yes, social identity can affect ability to understand
as this example, sent to us by Bakka, beautifully shows:
The Senate was discussing requiring insurance companies to require pregnancy care. John Kyl (R, naturally) responded:
“I don’t need maternity care,” Kyl replied. “So requiring that on my insurance policy is something that I don’t need and will make the policy more expensive.”
Or maybe he understood perfectly, and it was just garden-variety selfishness.
Sotomayor’s faux racism and power asymmetries
Racism is a seriously malignant and often unacknowledged force in a society. One might worry that a phrase like “faux racism” (i.e., not real racism) could diminish our sense of how bad racism is. Still, there are times when we need to get a grip on the fact that a judgement ostensibly based on race is not really a matter of racism.
Racism is also extremely difficult to discuss; the following might seem obvious and even simple minded. Or it might seem objectionable or in need of qualifications. Let us know!
During the hearing yesterday, Senator Graham, in his southern accent, asked Sotomayor if she realized how much trouble he would be in if he said he hoped that a wise white man would reach a better conclusion than a Latina judge. I think the session closed on his question, and I don’t know what “don’t rock the boat” answer Sotomayor did or would give. But the remark invites us to look at the difference between verbally analogous remarks.
There seem to me to be two directions at least we could take. One is to bring in standpoint theory directly, as Jender did previously. Originally, that theory’s proponents argued that oppressed minority positions can make truths perceivable that can’t really be discerned by others. We might now see it as saying that people outside a gender, race, class or national group may have insights, particularly about themselves, that the insiders are unlikely to know. In this latter version, it seems pretty obviously true, and we’ve taken note of that very recently, with the help of Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
A second, related approach is to look more directly at the power asymmetries between, in this case, Latinas and white men in the relevant society, the United States. White men, not Latinas, dominate in leadership positions in academia, industry, the law, medicine and the arts. Universities generally teach the history of white men, their theories, the science they have developed and the arts they produce.
In this context, the statement that a wise white man would do better than a comparably placed Latina (e.g., both are judges or artists or whatever) is to say that there is no need to open up the places of privilege that white men so thoroughly dominate. That position in effect underwrites severe injustices.
There is no such implication on Sotomayor’s part. There surely are many arenas in which at least some white men can and do experience failures in justice, but the privileging of learned opinion is in general not one of them. So what is her comment telling us?
A Latina judge of Sotomayor’s standing will be very well versed in white culture; after all, she went to Princeton and Yale. But white men are not well versed in the culture of Latinas. Consequently, when a decision is made where a Latina’s culture has relevance, she may very well be in a position to make a better decision, particularly if she is wise. She will be likely to have relevant experience that white men often don’t even know they are missing. We get this conclusion from the obviously true version of standpoint theory.
You might think there’s still some overstatement – hyperbole – in Sotomayor comments about a wise Latina. But it is in the cause of getting a place at the table and not a claim that a whole class of people don’t need to be heard. The context, with the asymmetries of power, make this clear.
Feminist Philosophers 