with the following definition:
DEF’N: One is a victim of discursive injustice iff a speech act fails to occur simply because they have a social identity which has been traditionally marginalized/oppressed. For further discussion, see LaVine (2016b).
12. After all, a failed proposal would seem to change the nature of our relationship. It would also make it a sore subject if others brought up marriage around us, etc. In this case, though, it seems that none of this would be true. This suggests that no proposal ever actually happened.
13. For further discussion of the ways in which women are given norms which cannot be possibly satisfied at the same time, see chapter 1 of Haslanger (2012). We will discuss this more in chapter 2 of this book. So, while Kukla does not take a stance on how common this phenomenon is, it seems to me that part of the value in her work is giving a name to, and framework for discussing, something which is all too common. It is not just philosophers who notice this, either. Novelist and public intellectual, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, has a very interesting discussion, with similar examples, of similar matters on pp. 21–24 of Adichie (2014).
14. Many thanks to Cole Heideman for this example.
15. Again, this type of occurrence is clearly not limited to gender—I have seen this phenomenon occur with people of color, younger academics, etc. It is also not limited to the profession of philosophy. Adichie discusses a very similar example, saying “I have another friend, also an American woman, who has a high-paying job in advertising. She is one of two women in her team. Once, at a meeting, she felt slighted by her boss, who had ignored her comments and then praised something similar when it came from a man” (Adichie 2014, 23).
16. For anyone who does find it to be a shock, I suggest reading through https://beingawomaninphilosophy.wordpress.com/.
17. Also relevant here is the fact that this obituary even being published in the first place required serious campaigning on the part of some feminist philosophers and friends of Marcus’.
18. For further discussion of this, see https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/01/11/new-analysis-offers-more-evidence-against-student-evaluations-teaching and http://benschmidt.org/profGender/#%7B%22database%22%3A%22RMP%22%2C%22plotType%22%3A%22pointchart%22%2C%22method%22%3A%22return_json%22%2C%22search_limits%22%3A%7B%22word%22%3A%5B%22genius%22%5D%2C%22department__id%22%3A%7B%22%24lte%22%3A25%7D%7D%2C%22aesthetic%22%3A%7B%22x%22%3A%22WordsPerMillion%22%2C%22y%22%3A%22department%22%2C%22color%22%3A%22gender%22%7D%2C%22counttype%22%3A%5B%22WordsPerMillion%22%5D%2C%22groups%22%3A%5B%22department%22%2C%22gender%22%5D%2C%22testGroup%22%3A%22D%22%7D as well as Fan et al. (2019) “Gender and cultural bias in student evaluations: Why representation matters.”
19. In fact, we can find other examples of this just from the history of analytic philosophy and just sticking to gender. For instance, Rachael Wiseman and Clare MacCumhaill argued in their 2017 Women in the History of Philosophy Lecture that failure to treat Anscombe, Foot, Midgley, and Murdoch as a philosophical school has been connected to something like discursive injustice. See https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/philosophy/research/womenhistoryphilosophy. Also, in chapters 3 and 5 I will discuss how Susan Stebbing’s importance to the history of analytic philosophy has been under-recognized. I also think this has something to do with discursive injustice.
20. It is important to note that Berges does also use Miranda Fricker’s notion of epistemic injustice as part of her explanation (Berges 2015, 385–87).
21. One type of epistemic injustice is testimonial injustice, defined by Miranda Fricker in the following manner:
DEF’N: “Testimonial injustice happens when a speaker receives a deficit of credibility owing to the operation of prejudice in the hearer’s judgement.” (Fricker 2013, 1319)
I believe we can explain the fact that, for example, Princess Elisabeth is not usually taught or anthologized along with Descartes in early modern philosophy research and teaching via testimonial injustice. I hope to be able to address this in future work.
The History (and Future) of Logic (and Ethics)
§2.0 Overview of the Chapter
This chapter will focus on the second subdiscipline, which gets placed at center stage in what I call “analytic philosophy the method”—namely, logic. While I am adopting a general policy of discussing formalisms and technicalities as little as possible, this chapter will be the one that discusses minutiae in more detail than any other. That said, the point of this chapter is to show that there can be significant emancipatory potential in sometimes doing so. In order to motivate sticking with this discussion of the minutiae, I begin with a number of thoughts that most clearly express the motivations of my own study of logic. First, John Mohawk on the founding principles of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy—the rightful stewards of every bit of land I have ever lived on, be it John Mohawk’s own Seneca people in Buffalo, the Oneida people in Vernon, the Onondaga people in Syracuse, or the Mohawk people in Potsdam:
If you do not believe in the rational nature of the human being, you cannot believe that you can negotiate with him. If you do not believe that rational people ultimately desire peace, you cannot negotiate confidently with him toward goals you and he share. If you can’t negotiate with him, you are powerless to create peace. If you can’t organize around those beliefs, the principles cannot move from the minds of men into the actions of society. (Mohawk 1989, 221)
Building on this very same idea of logic as tool for peace in the very same year, yet discussing very different temporal and cultural contexts, John Corcoran says,
many exemplary moralists, including Socrates, Plato, Kant, Mill, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, showed by their teachings and actions a deep commitment to objectivity, the ethical value that motivates logic and is served by logic. (Corcoran 1989b, 37)
Finally, to be clear that these should not be read as implicating the gendered reading of “men,” but the species reading of “men,” my earliest introduction to feminist philosophy:
“When men fight for their freedom, fight to be allowed to judge for themselves concerning their own happiness, isn’t it inconsistent and unjust to hold women down? I know that you firmly believe you are acting in the manner most likely to promote women’s happiness; but who made man the exclusive judge of that if woman shares with him the gift of reason? (Wollstonecraft 1792, 2)
§2.1 Logic, Ethics, and the Discipline of Philosophy
Alongside the centrality of chapter 1’s focus—philosophy of language—to the development of early analytic philosophy was chapter 2’s focus—logic. Logic holds a unique position as the most worked out analytic subdiscipline with the most uncontroversial progress. For somebody interested in the practical, everyday value of analytic philosophy, logic should not be overlooked. It is hard to imagine some individual manifestation of theory from any academic discipline, which more people would be willing to grant had everyday value than the computer—a piece of technology that develops through a story belonging to the history of logic. Given many communities’ growing distrust and skepticism of the value of philosophy, this is something that should make us think that pitching logic is an important
