we see this kind of discursive injustice frequently when women try to speak as experts in a male-dominated field. Expert speech has a specific kind of default weight. This takes many forms. An expert’s claims about his subject matter, though never appropriately treated as infallible, become more than just truth claims to be subjected to scrutiny and challenge at the whim of any interlocutor. When someone makes a claim about his area of expertise, this claim, though challengeable, has prima facie standing; his recognized expert status itself gives listeners some reason to trust what he says. Conversely, other experts do not get to just overrule his claims in virtue of their own expertise, as they could with a lay speaker. (Kukla 2014, 449)
So, this will be the type of discursive injustice we will be discussing in relation to our debate—injustice on the basis of gender and unwillingness to recognize expertise.
Before we do that, though, it is important to note that there is nothing unique about gender here and nothing that requires that the relevant mistaken attitude disrupting the uptake be about hierarchy, even if it creates or perpetuates hierarchy. That is to say, sometimes discursive injustice occurs as a result of a stereotype that does not involve hierarchical concepts like “manager” or “expert,” but which is easily connected to hierarchies. For instance, there are many stereotypes of people with mental illnesses as generally deranged or irrational. As a result, if somebody knows I have a mental illness and hears me assert something about a problem I have observed, they may dismiss my speech acts as not inherently contentful or rational, but rather simply an acoustic blast produced by chemical misfirings in my brain.14 This may significantly impact my ability to have my problems addressed. Similar examples for many different dimensions of identity can clearly be generated based on stereotypes peculiar to that identity type and how they relate to a listener’s ability to recognize the speaker as meeting the preconditions for their intended speech act.
§1.5 Discursive Injustice in This Case
Now that we have been through a section on the explanandum (§1.3) and a section on the essential concept we will use in the explanans (§1.4), it is time to look at my particular application of discursive injustice as a way to explain this case. For this, we will use a simple model for abduction where a plausible inference to the best explanation must first meet Peirce’s general form for abductions:
“[P1:] The surprising fact, C, is observed.”
[P2:] But if A were true, C would be a matter of course.
[CONCLUSION:] Hence, there is reason to suspect that A is true.” (Peirce Collected Papers, 5.189)
Of course, a good abduction is an inference to the best explanation, so we must follow some further rules above and beyond meeting Peirce’s general form:
(1) A plausible abduction is compared to other explanations.
(2) A plausible explanation will be as simple as possible (i.e., abides Ockham’s razor).
(3) A plausible explanation will be as consistent and coherent with background knowledge as possible (and so will admit of generalization).
With this model of abduction in mind, we can turn to the principle argument of the chapter to which we have been building. First, the basic structure meeting Peirce’s general form for abductions:
P1: There is this surprising fact that Marcus has been under-cited, under-taught, under-anthologized, and underappreciated.
P2: If Marcus has been the victim of discursive injustice, then it would be unsurprising that Marcus has been under-cited, under-taught, under-anthologized, and underappreciated.
CONCLUSION: There is reason to suspect that Marcus has been the victim of rampant discursive injustice.
Filling this out a bit more, my suggestion is that part of the reason Marcus has not been sufficiently recognized for her contributions to the development of NTR and analytic philosophy, more generally, is because some of her speech acts were given the wrong uptake. In particular, her expert assertions and arguments were treated as mere suggestions because she was working in a field with sexist expectations about gender and expertise. This matters greatly because a suggestion and an argument from an expert put very different expectations on us. It is never expected that one need to respond to a mere suggestion—one can always decide to take or leave it. An argument from an expert carries with it much more weight and much more expectation—one should be prepared to engage with and have something to say about an expert’s argument in their area.
To give a concrete picture of what I have in mind, I am suggesting that what happened over Marcus’ career was something of an extended version of what I have seen in conference and colloquium presentations all too many times in my career. Somebody gets finished giving a talk and the Q&A session starts. After a while, a woman raises her hand and gives a comment to the presenter who responds politely enough with something like “thank you for the suggestion—I’ll consider that.” Several minutes pass and a man raises his hand, making very similar points, but this time the presenter responds “oh, wow—what a great argument. I will write that down and have to come up with a response for it in the published piece.” So, what was treated as a mere suggestion from a woman, carrying with it no obligation to respond, is something that would be treated as an expert argument coming from a man.15 And, to be clear that my claim about which particular speech acts were involved in this discursive injustice is not coming out of nowhere, consider the following passages from Soames:
I mentioned that in her early work Marcus suggested that ordinary proper names might be Russellian logically proper names. (Soames 1995, 192, my emphasis) and
In her later work, especially the 1961 paper cited by Smith, Marcus adopted these theses of Smullyan and Fitch, essentially suggesting that ordinary proper names might be Russellian logically proper names. (Soames 1995, 193, my emphasis)
Yet again, my aim here is not to single out Soames and Burgess. My point is to give another representative example, which is close to the heart of this debate and continues the kind of pattern I have been illustrating for several sections now. And with general patterns in mind, it is important to remember that an explanation in terms of sexist discursive injustice coheres well with what we know about the discipline as a whole. It should be no shock that the rampant sexism we find throughout the history of philosophy (and almost all institutions that have ever existed) would make its way into the twists and turns of the literature like this.16 In fact, quite sadly, it coheres quite well with what we know about Marcus’ career in academia.
From the time she arrived at Yale for graduate school, she was subjected to regular patriarchal structures and misogynistic actors—through “separate but not equal” housing for women, exclusion from parts of the library, and being asked by the department chair to not take her duly elected position of president of the philosophy club (Marcus 2010, 80–81). Furthermore, as Diana Raffman pointed out in her obituary of Marcus17:
She would tell of having to fend off the unwelcome advances of a male professor (thankfully not a philosopher!) with a coat hanger, of being barred from all undergraduate classrooms at Yale while studying there for her Ph.D., and of being forced to publish her landmark papers under her married name. (Raffman 2012)
This is appallingly and criminally sexist behavior going far beyond the type of gendered stereotyping and conversing suggested in the preceding argument. So, again, it seems that the simplest explanation that fits in with our background knowledge best is that Marcus’ reception has been a result of discursive injustice.
Given that my primary thesis was gotten at via abductive reasoning, we should consider some alternative explanations
