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Feminist methodology and traditional standards for evaluating philosophical argumentation

May 17, 2017August 30, 2017 Cate Hundleby

I have finally read the controversial article from Hyptia — which I don’t think all those interested in the editorial dispute need do, but which I decided I must do — since I teach gender identity and will be in the future teaching racial identity. It is also somewhat related to my own research, especially on standpoint epistemology, but I wouldn’t normally consider myself qualified to referee a paper like this for Hypatia. (I do referee for them periodically, have published there, and have a long standing paper-and-print subscription.)

My impression from the protest has always been that the article’s serious error is its neglect of work done on the topic by trans people and people of colour. (I list of such sources has been compiled here.) Methodologically this is problematic, and I could see it from the bibliography; but it might not be visible in the steps of argumentation. However, I think I can indicate where it comes out, and I know some people are interested in such an account. I confine myself to two serious objections, and think that shows deep problems with the article.

  1. On page 265, early in the article, it says, “it is not clear how one can affirm that it is possible to feel like a member of another sex but deny it is possible to feel like a member of another race.” My jaw dropped at that point because the discussion continued speculatively, as a thought experiment rather than attending to the actual evidence of lived experience. This sets the tone for remainder. 
  2. The long literature on passing is never mentioned – which is something I’ve actually done a little research on. Gender passing has been punished in either direction — as male or as female (though often for different reasons). But racially there’s a stark asymmetry. People of colour are punished for passing as white; white people are assumed to have no desire to pass except as a joke. (Clearly the Dolezal case mucks up this picture, but it is the background.) This all connects with “the one drop rule.”
    This omission becomes visible (to my quasi-expert eye) when the author fails to recognize the weight of this power structure in page 270’s quotation from Tamara Winfrey Harris. The article focuses only the temporariness of identity and fails to appreciate the weight of Harris’ final words: “I will accept Dolezal as black like me only when society can accept me as white like her.” It’s not that whiteness is harder to shake as a mask than blackness – the interpretation the author gives, but that being accorded white identity allows one to willfully adopt a race or ethnicity when others can’t, which makes it an expression of privilege. The article employs analogies on 271 to challenge this point by Harris, but they regard much smaller scales, less categorical forms of privilege, and have other contrasts that I find altogether make them false analogies.

I am not using the author’s name because I continue to believe that whatever problem underlies this scandal rests in the journal and its editorial process and standards, not with the author. Also, the editorial dispute has received too much attention already from academic gawkers. For what it’s worth, I think the arguments in the article could be rehabilitated into an account of how this sort of transracialism could become acceptable, and it already argues why in the abstract that would be desirable. However, in failing to attend to the obstacles to such progress, it perpetuates certain silences that are among those very obstacles. It so happens that in feminist philosophy that omission counts as a serious error in reasoning. I believe I’ve shown how that emerges as a problem too in more traditional philosophical and argumentative terms.

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Posted in Argumentation, Authority & expertise, bias, Critical thinking, Feminism & social justice, Philosophy, ResearchTagged race, trans

Free & open workshops May 18 in Windsor: Argmentation, Bias and Objectivity

April 24, 2016 Cate Hundleby

Workshops

These workshops launch the conference Argumentation, Bias and Objectivity organized by the Ontario Society for Studies in Argumentation and hosted by the Centre for Research in Reasoning, Argumentation & Rhetoric at the University of Windsor. The workshops do not require conference registration; they are free and open to the public.

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Posted in Argumentation, bias, Critical thinking, Feminism & social justice, Pedagogy, ResearchTagged bias, CRRAR, OSSA, pedagogy, race, Windsor

Diversity and academics

March 23, 2015March 29, 2015 Cate Hundleby3 Comments

The situation of women in philosophy has received a lot of attention lately, including the Gendered Conference Campaign for philosophy developed back in 2009. Including women in academic venues (conference invitations or departmental hiring, notably) is not simply an attempt to make manifest a social ideal. There are many epistemological reasons to demand the representation of women be significant (I tend to find a minimum of 1/3 works well for most the arguments):

  1. Regarding the need to counteract the operation of implicit social bias in selecting people: Reasoners tend to (often unconsciously) prefer men over women. This general tendency tends to remain unaffected by one’s conscious political commitments such that women and feminists are vulnerable to bias against women just like everyone else (we may have ‘aversive bias’). The implicit association test (IAT) now provides massive evidence to this effect that builds on decades of social psychological studies of how people judge each other. (If you haven’t taken the IAT, then you should.) Such studies show that gender bias (e.g.) is not better for those trained to be objective, and in fact they (we?) tend to have a false sense of confidence that makes us actually moreprejudiced. This recent article by Moss-Racusin et al. on this psychological phenomenon shows that faculty members in science are just as biased as anyone else and more so if they consider themselves to be personally objective. 
  2. Regarding the ability of women (and other marginalized social identities) to participate: Psychology reveals a robust phenomenon of (mostly unconscious) stereotype threat.  It’s complicated, but one aspect of it, one trigger for it, is when few participants (only one or less than 1/3) belong to the same social group as oneself. Minority status is sufficient to trigger stereotype threat. The effects are that people in that group will not perform as well and will be deterred from participating (and they may never realize it).
  3. Regarding the quality of the discussion and emerging understanding or knowledge: (1) and (2) affect this, and there is further reason for concern:
    1. from feminist epistemology and philosophy of science:
      1. Helen Longino’s empiricist view of objectivity arising from critical discourse suggests that social diversity provides for a great range of background assumptions and therefore more meaningful criticism and response.
      2. Standpoint theorists argue that women’s experiences (i) provide a more complete perspective, or (ii) a critical outsider perspective, are (iii) less invested in current systems of power, and (iv) simply provide an underrepresented perspective.
      3. Standpoint theorists also argue that feminist and other liberatory perspectives provide valuable input because their understandings are (i) different from the more widely accepted perspective; (ii) are committed to developing understandings of a different future. More women tends to mean more feminist perspectives.
    2. from psychology (in Scientific American: I confess I haven’t read the original research) comes evidence that social diversity makes people work harder in groups.

Many of these arguments hold for any marginalized group, but the epistemic values sometimes run up against a lack of people having adequate training.  That is no longer the case for women in philosophy, as we can be found in decent numbers (again 1/3) in almost all fields and subfields.  At this point, the exceptions where women are not well-represented may well indicate that the field has been constructed in some way to include only the work done by men and thus that the field needs to change. (Despite great progress over the last 200 years, work remains quite gendered, and that includes academic work.)

Including women and other marginalized people may well require broadening a field or its methods, and that is good enough reason for change, but it’s justified on epistemological grounds as much as socio-political. It’s not easy to do, at all, and token efforts may be quite ineffective, as Carla Fehr (2011) argues. The above are all “diversity as excellence” approaches and they demand a lot of work to be effective. I’ve written this post in the hopes of saving people a step when you are called on to make arguments for the epistemological value of diversity, such as solid representation by women. You have here almost a dozen reasons, just to start with.

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Posted in Argumentation, Authority & expertise, Epistemology, Feminism & social justice, Philosophy, Research, ScienceTagged bias, communication, dialogue, diversity, diversity as excellence, epistemology, feminism, gender, gendered conference campaign, IAT, implicit bias, methodology, minority status, race, reasoning, standpoint theory, stereotype threat

Addressing gender bias in philosophy

November 4, 2012November 10, 2012 Cate Hundleby

Gender bias has become a hot subject in philosophy, not merely as a topic for epistemology — in the work of Lorraine Code, Nancy Tuana, and Miranda Fricker, for instance.  Thirty years of feminist epistemology bears currently on the discipline in ways that it hasn’t since the emergence of the field in the 1980s.  Whereas at that point a central contention was that women might bring different ways of thinking or different concerns to the discipline, now the issue is that all people — including philosophers — tend to be biased against women.  Over fifteen years of research on implicit bias shows that across cultures (classes, and professions) people tend to underestimate women’s ability and qualification.  Take the demonstration test and see!  (Though the test is not meant to offer a personal diagnosis, taking it can be profoundly humbling.)

The effects of bias in philosophy have become apparent because women are now around 20% of philosophy departments, and often more.  This is a rather meagre advance over the last thirty years, and the continued under-representation and leaky pipeline has earned the name “the philosophy exception” because it is so poor relative to women’s advances in other fields. Nonetheless, enough women work in the discipline that when philosophical forums neglect women there is quantifiable reason to complain.  (This contrasts with the case for people of colour and other marginalized philosophers who don’t yet constitute a significant number of people in the discipline.)

Further, the evidence about implicit bias suggests that the reason for the problem is not personal or curable (though perhaps treatable) at the individual level and provides reason to demand systematic and institutional attention to the problem.  Witness the Gendered Conference Campaign that “aims to raise awareness of the prevalence of all-male conferences (and volumes, and summer schools), [and] of the harm that they do.” This campaign recently received an apology from a co-editor of a Canadian philosophy journal, Dialogue, Mathieu Marion.

Ordinary critical thinking does not serve us well in addressing implicit bias.  At least, reflection does not affect how implicit bias enters into our pre-discursive evaluations, poisoning our reasoning from the outset.  To address and root out the default switches, the fast thinking in Daniel Kahneman’s terms, demands we develop a new set of tools.  I think some of those tools may come from argumentation, as a discursive practice, and I think the success of the Gendered Conference Campaign bears that out: they write letters to organizers of events that under-represent women pointing out the problem.  Philosophy will not be the same in ten years, we have reason to hope, for women; and that should set a precedent that allows the discipline to better address intersecting forms of marginalization.

We are all vulnerable to implicit bias — me too!  And ordinary philosophical methods are no help.  Introspection is a weak defence against socialization. So we must rethink our methodology, but philosophers don’t like to think about methodology. There can be good reason to stick with a general argumentative rigour, and follow intuition as well as evidence.  However, the utter lack of any methodological sensibility renders philosophy prone to the vague pronouncements most susceptible to implicit bias.  For instance, terms such as “smart” seem to apply most frequently to young white men, argues Jennifer Saul in The Philosophers Magazine.  

Instead of introspection and personal resolve, assuming that good will can be adequate to the problem, addressing social biases head-on requires making equity into a principle of organization. Most of us reach for the names of old white men when looking for someone important or interesting to feature if we receive no further guidance. Organizational resistance to that proclivity can help us head it off, giving ourselves new patterns of practice by asking ourselves to look first for women, people of colour, disabled philosophers, and other marginalized people to feature in our forums.

Sometimes too, women and other marginalized philosophers may be harder to engage as speakers and authors.  After all, women do more work than men hour-by-hour, in all cultures and classes; and other forms of social marginalization bring with them other obstacles to ready participation.  Those obstacles provide another reason to prioritize the inclusion of people who are not men, not white, not able-bodied, not straight, and so on, and to do so systematically from the start of our editorial and organizational work.  Without that priority we succumb not only to implicit bias but to systemic discrimination that lowers the quality of the philosophy we promote.

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Posted in Authority & expertise, Epistemology, Feminism & social justice, PhilosophyTagged bias, expertise, feminism, gendered conference campaign, limits of critical thinking, methodology, philosophy, race, reasoning

At the Risk of Sounding Angry: On Melissa Harris-Perry’s Eloquent Rage

September 9, 2012November 4, 2012 Cate Hundleby

Argumentation schemes (Walton) show the lie in the “disavowal of emotion as a legitimate form of expressing thought,” but there has been little attention yet to how constructive anger can be in argumentation and in pedagogy.

The Crunk Feminist Collective

The internets were all abuzz over the weekend sharing clips of our collective Black feminist shero Melissa Harris-Perry’s Saturday morning show. During the show, she lost her cool with panelist Monica Mehta, a conservative financial expert, who represented every unthoughtful mythic thing that I’ve come to believe a person has to believe in order to be a member of today’s racist Republican Party.

After I posted the clip to my FB page, a former student of mine, simply commented that this was an example of “eloquent rage.” She knew I would get the reference, because the first time she ever used it was in reference to me, and my impassioned style of teaching students about the politics of race, class, and gender. My first reaction to being characterized in this way was denial. “I’m not angry,” I told her. “I’m passionate.” And then she looked at me with a tell-tale…

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Posted in Argumentation, Feminism & social justice, PedagogyTagged anger, emotion, gender, legitimate, race, reasoning, thought

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