and meta-philosophy. Because of their connection to NTR, both of these literatures provide a valuable resource for our discussion. Table 1.1 shows some of what we learn by looking at representative examples from these literatures (please note that the numerals in the Kripke and Marcus columns for histories of analytic philosophy and books on meta-philosophy represent numbers of pages on which they are discussed, while the numerals for the anthologies of analytic philosophy and the philosophy of language represent the number of works anthologized).9
So, across these eighteen works, we find 361 pages dedicated to discussion of Kripke’s work and just forty-four pages of discussion of Marcus’ work, with eight anthology entries of Kripke’s work and none of Marcus’ work. With just what has been admitted about Marcus’ contributions so far, this should seem problematic. That said, I will return in the next chapter to some more of Marcus’ contributions that I hope will bolster this case.
For now, I think it will be helpful to look at one further reference point to see something of the pattern of oddities in the discipline’s reception of Marcus’ work. One way to bring the whole discipline under the microscope is to look at the number of citations Marcus’ work has received—as done in table 1.2. To give us a baseline, I will include the five most-cited works of Kripke’s next to the five most-cited works of Marcus’. Also, so as to not be seen as begging the question, I include some philosophers who were ranked around Ruth Barcan Marcus in the poll that Brian Leiter ran on his blog in January 2015 asking philosophers to rank the most important Anglophone philosophers between 1945 and 2000.10
Note that, despite finishing one spot below Alasdair MacIntyre and one spot above Judith Jarvis Thomson, Ruth Marcus has been cited thousands of times less than either of them. Since one might worry that this has to do with the areas of philosophy that the relevant thinkers worked in, I also included David Kaplan, who worked in very similar areas to Marcus. Despite finishing nine spots below Marcus in the Leiter poll, Kaplan too has been cited thousands of times more than Marcus.
Table 1.1 Insufficient Recognition and Engagement
Furthermore, notice that Thomson, the only other woman on this list, has the second fewest citations. Again, to try to compare apples to apples, I included R. M. Hare in the list, a fellow ethicist working at relatively similar times. Despite her finishing five spots above Hare, Thomson has thousands fewer citations. I claim that we are hard pressed to plausibly explain this insufficient recognition, insufficient engagement, and insufficient citation in any other way than gendered injustice. It is toward making good on that claim that we now turn.
Table 1.2 Insufficient Engagement and Citation
§1.4 Kukla on Discursive Injustice
With the case for the existence of these oddities behind us, we can finally turn to an explication of the notion of discursive injustice. Kukla defines it as follows:
DEF’N: One is a victim of discursive injustice when they “face a systematic inability to produce a specific kind of speech act that they are entitled to perform” simply because they are a member of a disadvantaged group. (Kukla 2014, 440)11
That is, Kukla’s work is an application of Austin’s (1962) theory of speech acts. Like speech act theory, generally, we begin with the distinction between saying something—the locutionary act—and the actions we engage in by saying something—the illocutionary acts. Once we recognize that there is a difference between locutionary and illocutionary acts, we should also realize that there is a difference between perlocutionary failures. Sometimes the audience does not grasp the locutionary content, other times they do not grasp the illocutionary force. Furthermore, there are times when this incorrect uptake can alter the illocutionary structure of the original speech act. Finally, within this class, there are times when that inability to produce the rightfully intended illocutionary force/act happens because of incorrect uptake due to a marginalized social identity of the speaker. These are the discursive injustices.
To make discursive injustice as clear as possible, Kukla begins with examples of the genus of which discursive injustice is a species—cases where one intends to perform one illocutionary act, but something goes awry because the audience gives it the wrong uptake. For instance, imagine I am out with my partner, say to them “will you marry me?” intending for this to be a proposal, but my partner does not think I have any intention to be serious and laughs at what I have said. If this happens, there is a very real sense in which I have made a joke, rather than a proposal (Kukla 2014, 443).12 Furthermore, Davidson’s example of an actor on stage trying to warn the audience of a fire in the back of the theater, but failing to do so because the audience thinks this is part of the performance provides us another example (Kukla 2014, 447). Again, though the speakers have intended to produce one illocutionary act, the whole speech activity was altered by the conversation partners giving the incorrect perlocutionary uptake.
Building up to our crescendo, Kukla then provides a striking example of a case where this happens as a result of gender—a case of discursive injustice.
Celia is a floor manager at a heavy machinery factory where 95% of the workers are male. It is part of her job description that she has the authority to give orders to the workers on her floor, and that she should use this authority. She uses straightforward, polite locutions to tell her workers what to do: “Please put that pile over here,” “Your break will be at 1:00 today,” and so on. Her workers, however, think she is a “bitch,” and compliance is low. Why? One possible explanation is that the workers are just being blatantly sexist and insubordinate. They are refusing to follow her orders, which is still a way of taking them as orders. This sort of direct transgression is relatively straightforward. However, a subtler and more interesting explanation is that even though Celia is entitled to issue orders in this context, and however much she follows the conventions that typically would mark her speech acts as orders, because of her gender her workers take her as issuing requests instead. (Kukla 2014, 445–46)
This difference between requests and orders is quite important, since following an order is obligatory and granting a request is not. Since one can always permissibly decline to grant a request, we often expect there to be thanks from the requestor when the request has been granted. Such gratitude is unnecessary for following an order, though. This means either that Celia can thank her employees and undermine her authority or not thank her employees and be called a “bitch”.13
In addition, Kukla gives other classes of discursive injustice based on grammatical structures other than those in the imperative mood. One particular type of discursive injustice that will become important to our discussion later is in relation to what Kukla calls “entreaties to speak”:
One way the performative force of a speech act can be derailed is if one speaks as an insider—a player of a game that comes with certain discursive privileges—but is not given uptake as one. (Kukla 2014, 448)
Unfortunately,
In many scenarios, I suggest, women have good reasons to believe that they are already participants in a discursive game, until it becomes clear from how their speech receives uptake that their attempted moves within the game are actually functioning as entreaties to join it. (Kukla 2014, 449)
This is particularly relevant given that philosophy is a field that thinks that outsiders just do not understand quite how we do things in philosophy and is a field dominated by men. As Kukla continues,
