A Philosopher's Walk

AAP - Women in Philosophy

2009-07-15T11:48:00.000-07:00

Why is it that the Australian Association of Philosophy (AAP) has prepared a report, "Improving the Participation of Women in the Philosophy Profession", and there is no comparable report from the APA? All I can say is that it makes me very sad that this is something that Australian Philosophers - and not just women philosophers, by the way - thought was worth spending energy and time on. In the U.S., the Committee on the Status of Women continues to try to call the issue to the attention of the APA, seemingly with little effect.

The report is available here and I found it through a post at Feminist Philosophers.

Reading the executive summary of the report I have noticed several things that suggest further lines of inquiry for those of us interested in this issue in the U.S. First, the executive summary indicates that women are disproportionately represented in part-time, non-secure, and casual teaching positions in Australian. This is something that I have suspected is true in the states as well I do not have the data to back it up. The study notes that there effects of women being in these positions which keep them from other positions. The lack of security impacts the ability to do research as does the heavy teaching load associated with such positions, for example. Second, women now appear to be hired proportionately to their numbers, though they continue to be under-represented in the academy (23% to our 21% - so the proportion is roughly similar). The very preliminary work that Miriam Solomon and John Clarke have done on this issue would seem to conform to the Australian finding. Third, Australia seems to have data on female participation in philosophy classes at the undergraduate level which shows that while 55% of undergraduate philosophy students are female it falls each year till 4th year female participation is 47%. (First year doctorate research is 39%, by the way.) The numbers that I was able to find are philosophy female baccalaureate degrees - 30.8% in 2008. While it is not clear that these are figures that it is appropriate to compare it would seem that are starting out behind Australia in the number of women that are studying philosophy to begin with! I would be curious to explore this further.

I have yet to dig into this report more completely and other projects will probably prevent me from doing so right now. The current and forthcoming issues of the APA Newsletter on Philosophy and Feminism have articles on these issues - analysis in the current issue and suggestions for strategies forthcoming in the fall. While I think it is great that the Committee on the Status of Women continues to support these inquiries, why is it that it appears that only women in the profession seem to think this is an issue? Surely it is a concern for the profession as a whole, as our Australian counterparts have clearly seen!

2009-06-26T10:31:00.000-07:00

Society for Analytical Feminism
Feminist Philosophy in the Analytic Tradition

CALL FOR PAPERS
SAF Session at the Central Division APA
Palmer House Hilton, Chicago, Illinois
February 17 - 20, 2010

The Society for Analytical Feminism invites submissions for a session at the 2010 Central Division APA meetings to be held in Chicago in February 17-20, 2010.

The Society seeks papers that examine feminist issues by methods broadly construed as analytic, or discuss the use of analytic philosophical methods as applied to feminist issues. Reading time should be about 20 minutes. Authors should submit either (1) a paper, or (2) an extended abstract, as detailed as possible (up to 1000 words) accompanied by a bibliography. Please delete all self-identifying references from your submission to ensure anonymity. Submit papers as a word attachment to sharon.crasnow@rcc.edu.

The deadline for submissions is August 15, 2009.

Graduate students or underfunded professionals whose papers are accepted will be eligible for the Society’s $250 Travel Stipend. Please indicate on a separate page (or in your covering letter) if you fall into one of these categories.

The Society for Analytical Feminism

The Society for Analytical Feminism provides a forum where issues concerning analytical feminism may be openly discussed and examined. Its purpose is to promote the study of issues in feminism by methods broadly construed as analytic, to examine the use of analytic methods as applied to feminist issues, and to provide a means by which those interested in Analytical Feminism may meet and exchange ideas. The Society meets yearly at the Central Division meetings of the APA, and frequently organizes sessions for the Eastern Division and Pacific Divisions as well. Information can be found on our website:

http://faculty.rcc.edu/crasnow/SAF.html

2009-05-28T11:48:00.000-07:00

The new issue of the APA Newsletter on Feminism and Philosophy has been posted online. This issue includes the study by Miriam Solomon that I mention in the previous post. It also includes the papers from the Central Division 2007 session sponsored by the Committee on the Status of Women, except for Sally Haslanger's article which was published in Hypatia (Sally Haslanger. “Changing the Ideology and Culture of Philosophy: Not by Reason (Alone).” Hypatia 23 (2008): 210-23). There is also an additional article by Kathryn Norlock. I was a participant on that panel and so my article is there.

Kathryn Norlock makes some interesting points in her article, which is an extended argument for collecting data on women in philosophy. Most particularly I was chastened when she notes that one reason that we might think that we shouldn't collect the data is that "Women do enough service already. Women in academia are already well aware that we have limited time and resources. Every pursuit is a diversion from other pursuits, and when women in philosophy make it our task to do the work of disciplinary demography, a service which, in other fields, would be accomplished by a national organization, we succeed in adding to the service labors which women already over-perform."

This point hit home. In addition to this article, I will have another in a collection of papers from a second, follow-up panel. This will appear in the fall issue of the newsletter. I have spent quite a bit of time on the issue over the course the last several years, so much so that when I was lamenting my inability to focus on my primary research project, science and values, my partner pointed out that I had spent so much time on women in philosophy that it was no wonder that I hadn't done anything else!

Take a look at the articles if you have not already. Obviously I think this is worth continuing to worry about.

And yet more employment data

2009-04-25T01:00:00.000-07:00

Miriam Solomon (with John Clarke) has completed a study of this year's hiring season in philosophy. It has been published in the current Proceedings and Addresses of the APA and will be appearing in the forthcoming issue of the newsletter on Feminism and Philosophy. It is also available online here .

It appears that, at least for this year, the hiring of women is roughly consistent with the percentage of PhDs. More importantly, we at last have a baseline which may help us better understand inequities of the past and the path to a more equitable future.

Thanks to Miriam for her hard work in making sure that this information was finally available!

More on women in philosophy

2009-04-22T09:01:00.000-07:00

Sally Haslanger has posted data on women in philosophy at the "top 20" schools in the 2009 Leiter Report. It is posted here but I have copied it below since it seems that some people have had trouble accessing the information.

School	Rank	%women of tenured	%women of full-time	%women of all faculty
NYU	1	5	17	14
Rutgers	2	10	10	19
Princeton	3	7	21	18
Pittsburgh	4	5	8	10
U. Michigan	5	18	18	16
Harvard	6	36	30	21
MIT	6	20	17	25
Yale	8	36	39	33
UCLA	9	25	21	26
UC Berkeley	9	23	27	20
Stanford	9	24	26	21
UNC Chapel Hill	9	22	19	16
Columbia	13	28	35	33
U. Arizona	13	25	24	23
CUNY Grad Ctr	15	22	22	22
Notre Dame	15	12	15	17
Brown	17	25	27	25
Cornell	17	31	25	29
USC	17	17	14	21
UTexas Austin	20	11	14	10
Total (top 10)		18	20	19
Total (top 20)		19	21	20

Julie van Camp has been keeping track of the percentage of women in tenure-track positions at 98 institutions for quite some time (at least since 2004), though her information hasn't been updated since last year (4/14/2008). She notes the following for the "top 54" Leiter ranked institutions:

"Percentage of women on tenured/tenure-track appointments at Top-54 Doctoral Programs in Gourmet Report: 19.61%
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Average percentage of women at the Top 54 doctoral programs: 19.85%

Median percentage of women at Top-54 Doctoral Programs: 20%

Data taken from Departments' own faculty listings on the Web, as linked above, as of 4/14/2008"

The complete information is available at http://www.csulb.edu/~jvancamp/doctoral_2004.html

Though there is much to be said about this state of affairs the one thing that I would like to point out is that things aren't changing much.

The percentage of philosophy PhDs that are women is roughly 27% and has been right around 27% for at least the last 10 years. The Committee on the Status of Women is working on getting data about the what percentage of women are hired for the jobs advertised in JFP (Jobs for Philosophers) and that ought to be available for the 2007-2008 job search soon. Preliminary information indicates that it is most definitely not the case that the women are getting all the jobs, contrary to rumor.

The APA Newsletter on Feminism and Philosophy will be publishing two issues that address this problem based on two CSW sponsored APA panels: the Central in 2007 and the Pacific in 2008. Watch for them.

Being a philosopher at a community college

2009-04-19T11:45:00.000-07:00

I read a post about interviewing at a community college on The Philosophy Smoker last night. Several days ago I had an email from a philosopher who is a friend of a friend asking me for advice on applying for a job at a community college. It isn't surprising given the job market this year. Newly minted PhDs who had thought that they would be going to research institutions or liberal arts colleges are looking at places that they hadn't thought they would look before and so are considering community college teaching. I have been at a community college for 17 years now. They aren't all the same of course, but I think I have some understanding of the pros and cons, particularly as someone who has tried to continue doing research while working at an institution that all but actively discourages it. So, I thought I would write a little about what it is like to work at a community college.

Here's a little of my history. This is a case study in a way, and whether or not the case is relevant might depend on knowing the specifics so here they are.

I drifted a bit after graduate school taking and then leaving a tenure track job at a small liberal arts college. I didn't really want to write any more after my dissertation, feeling shell-shocked from the whole graduate school experience, and I toyed with giving up on philosophy entirely. I had children. But philosophy was the only thing I really knew well and so while my children were small I continue teaching as an adjunct for 9 years. I was lucky, because my teaching was all upper division, challenging, and in my area of specialization. Financial pressures and a renewed interest in research led me to pursue full-time employment in the early 90s. At that point, I had been out of graduate school for over 10 years but had recent publications and so I looked interesting enough to people to be a finalist for several positions, was offered one, but was ultimately unable to take it for personal reasons.

During that same year, I applied for a full-time temporary position at a community college, primarily driven by financial concerns. It was a revelation. I had students who were excited about philosophy, thrilled to be exposed to new ideas, and striving for something other than the lives that they saw around them. I felt like my teaching mattered and as though philosophy was important. The general excitement of that semester also fed my energy to write and even with all the teaching (5/5 at the California community colleges), I felt as though I could do everything. When I saw a full-time opening at a community college in the area I applied.

I got the job. Yes, the interviews are odd and very unlike the sorts of interviews that I had experienced at the APA. Though, I have to say I had some extremely odd interviews at the APA. There was one that took place in a hotel room (pre-APA prohibition), where the three men who interviewed me had clearly been drinking, and one was wearing the plastic Groucho Marx glasses and mugging a bad Groucho. I believe that they did ask me some questions that were relevant to philosophy but not many. It was humiliating. I've interviewed four or five times at community colleges and never felt humiliated. Of course, that sort of thing does not happen at the APA any more.

Community college interviews, at least in California, tend to be very regimented. They conform to rules and regulations that are designed to be defensible in court. Questions are the same to each candidate. Each candidate is required to do exactly the same set of tasks. I remember in one case our overhead projector did not work for the first interview and so we had to force all subsequent interviewees to use the non-working projector. Completely bizarre at one level but conforming to a preverse logic at another. So, if you are given instructions that seem not to make sense to you, you are at least assured that everyone else is being given those same instructions.

Do community colleges frown on PhDs? Community college search committees will frown on anyone who thinks that they are bottom trawling by applying for a position at a community college. That should be obvious. Why on earth would you want to work with someone who thinks that you are beneath him or her? The job is hard enough without having colleagues that think they are slumming it hanging out with you. This doesn't necessarily have anything to do with having a PhD however. Most of the search committees that I have served on have preferred PhDs though only those who they thought understood the role of a community college instructor. This varies depending on the college however and so I am reluctant to generalize.

Community colleges are very secure employment. Tenure is generally granted as long as one is a good colleague and successful teacher (in California, after 4 years). Retirement and health care are good and in urban areas in California (I am sorry that I do not really know about the rest of the country) starting salaries are generally higher than for the CSUs and one advances relatively quickly. PhDs are frequently paid an additional stipend or at a higher starting salary. These are strong positives. Given the nature of these jobs it is not surprising that they are hard to get. I think that this suprises some graduate students who apply thinking that they are over-qualified and ought to be snapped up. Community colleges are looking for teachers however, and if you are a researcher primarily and a teacher coincidentally, search committees are likely to see that and so see that you are not appropriate for the job.

So, there are good things about teaching at a community college, but there are hardships as well. There is a lot of teaching and it is painfully redundant. In California, it is five classes per semester. Again, that can be good in some ways, because it means less preparation time after the first few years and so in principle one could devote more time to research, but since there are no TAs and classes tend to run somewhere around 50 students (that's 5 sections with 50 students so roughly 250 students a term), there is a lot of grading and maybe not so much time for research after all.

There are, of course, ways to spice things up so that you are not doing the same class exactly the same way over and over again. But this again leaves less time for research. Then there are ways to get release from teaching by becoming involved in various types of service to the college. This can be interesting, if you have interests in education more generally, but also eats away at research time.

I do not want to be too negative about this. I have been at a community college for 17 years now and I have managed to continue my research though it is at a relatively slow pace. I am not happy with it however, I have to confess. I am critical enough of my own work to see that I have not always worked out the arguments as carefully as I might. I have not always done the level of research that I ought to have. Is this because I am at a community college and I just don't have the time? Maybe. But maybe I am just not as good a philosopher as I had hoped to be. Overall though, I consider myself very lucky. I love philosophy. I have made a living being a philosopher, something that I wasn't sure I would ever be able to do. I attend conferences and workshops, deliver papers, publish, and interact with philosophers in a way that I find satisfying. One can do all that while at a community college, at least, I have done that.

So what is the case and is it relevant to you? I am a woman philosopher and so some of my story is about that aspect of my life. I am someone with a PhD who teaches at a community college so maybe that's what's relevant here. I am not a terribly ambitious philosopher so maybe that is what's relevant. Or maybe none of it is relevant at all.

A reflection on pausing from time to time

2009-02-24T09:12:00.000-08:00

I haven't done much philosophical reading, writing, or even thinking in about a year. This is not to say that I have stopped entirely. There were several projects underway that I managed to complete or continue, but my heart hasn't been in it. I have had similar "pauses" in my work over the course of my entire career, beginning with a year break during graduate school which meant that it took me 6 years to finish instead of the recommended 5 (which was the norm at the time).

The negative aspect of such pauses is that each time I stop it takes a very long time to gear back up. For one thing, I fall behind in the literature and so I have to catch up, but also I lose the habit of thinking and, perhaps even more importantly, writing as a philosopher. By that I mean thinking carefully and not allowing myself to accept an incomplete or undeveloped thought as some kind of truth upon which to build other ideas. There are probably other important aspects of philosophical thinking that I lose but that is the one that I most aware of.

What makes me pause? Sometimes causes have coincided with some important events in my personal life. One followed the death of my father in my late 20s. Another followed a series of events: completion of my PhD conjoined with the birth of my daughters about 5 years later. But events in my personal life do not always lead me away from philosophy. My divorce and the years of upheaval following it were productive philosophically. This most recent pause seems to have been the result of exhaustion caused more by other activities outside of philosophy, primarily, service to my institution. Although, I think that this service may have been precipitated by or at least coincided with coming to a hard place in my research. I think this may be one of the first times that it is a philosophical problem that has been the primary cause of my slowdown. That's probably not the norm for philosophers I would think. It is probably the difficulty of the problem that is the usual cause.

Am I more erratic in my working patterns than other philosophers? I think I am more erratic than those who are most productive. I do not feel apologetic about it any longer, though I certainly did when I was younger. I cannot work unless I feel that I have something to say and that saying it is important enough to motivate me to work. This is one of the pleasures of not having an appointment at a research university.

I suppose the big question is whether the pause leads to a full stop of career, which I suppose such pauses do for some people, or whether it is part of the process of reaching a point where I am ready to tackle the problem again. I am about to explore that question.

New blog, new philosophy search engine, and a new post of women in the profession

2009-02-06T09:44:00.000-08:00

Several interesting things have been happening online over the last week. First, there is a new philosophy of science group blog: It's Only a Theory. Posts so far have mostly been about the nature of scientific theories and specifically about the semantic view of theories. The blog seems to be an offshoot of a discussion from the HOPOS list that was started by Gabriele Contessa and then moved over to the blog. I think it is a great idea and I look forward to the extension of the discussion into other areas of philosophy of science.

The next exciting development is the launch of an online research engine for philosophy papers. We have David Bourget and David Chalmers of the Centre for Consciousness at the Australian National University to thank for this development. I am thrilled. I particularly like the feature that allows one to browse the latest philosophy journals. Particularly for someone who is not at an institution with deep journal resources this is a wonderful feature. One might quibble with the categories that they are using, but first, they are very self-aware about their choices and acknowledge that other interests might produce a different categorization, and second, they are open to suggestions and this feature is likely to rapidly evolve. It also has this wonderful, self-correcting feature that allows one to upload papers that the search engine might have missed or works in progress. I will post some thoughts on this in relation to feminist philosophy in another post (soon).

Finally, at Lemmings, Brit Brogaard raises the question of why there are so few female speakers at conferences (Female speakers: a rarity). There is one comment that reinforces one of her hypotheses: there just aren't that many women in the conference field (in this case, philosophy of mind). A quick reminder about the numbers of women in philosophy (check out Knowledge and Experience for the a good account of current numbers - left hand column of the blog) also helps with part of the explanation. There is more to fill out however. The lower numbers of women means that it is less likely that there are going to be women organizing the conferences, it means that the men organizing the conferences are going to be less likely to think of women to invite, and so on. The aggregation of these small effects perpetuates the absence of women on these programs and their inclusion in the subsequent published volumes and so on. But wait! Here are some conferences that don't seem to have that problem. Check out the webpages for FEAST, SAF (Society for Analytical Feminism), and the interdisciplinary group FEMMSS. One might argue that the problem is that women are only liberally included (in fact, they dominate) when the topics are explicitly feminist. That, in itself, does not seem all that surprising but when you put together that information with the point that women seem to be so poorly represented in other venues, I think it is clear that there is a problem.

Update: I just noticed that I had missed another reference to women and conferences at Feminist Philosophers.

Minimalist seascape

2008-07-16T21:13:00.000-07:00

I have been terrible at posting, but my excuse is that I am traveling. Here's a picture just to indicate that I am still here and that I have not abandoned the blog. It is a sea scape version of a Quinean desert landscape, at least that is how I was thinking of it and my excuse for posting it on a philosophy blog. The location is Otaru, on Hokkaido, in Japan.

CFP: Society for Analytical Feminism-Central APA

2008-06-12T12:49:00.000-07:00

PLEASE POST

Society for Analytical Feminism
Feminist Philosophy in the Analytic Tradition

CALL FOR PAPERS
SAF Session at the Central Division APA Meetings
Palmer House Hilton, Chicago, Illinois
February 18-21, 2009
NOTE DATE CHANGE!

The Society for Analytical Feminism invites submissions for a session at the 2008 Central Division APA meetings to be held in Chicago in February 18-21, 2009. Please note that this is a different date than you may be used to!

The Society seeks papers that examine feminist issues by methods broadly construed as analytic, or discuss the use of analytic philosophical methods as applied to feminist issues. Reading time should be about 20 minutes. Authors should submit either (1) a paper, or (2) an extended abstract, as detailed as possible (up to 1000 words) accompanied by a bibliography. Please delete all self-identifying references from your submission to ensure anonymity. You may submit papers as a word attachment to sharon.crasnow@rcc.edu (preferred) or mail four copies to:

Sharon Crasnow
925 Archer Street
San Diego, CA 92109

The deadline for submissions is August 15, 2008.

Graduate students or underfunded professionals whose papers are accepted will be eligible for the Society’s $250 Travel Stipend. Please indicate on a separate page (or in your covering letter) if you fall into one of these categories.

The Society for Analytical Feminism

The Society for Analytical Feminism provides a forum where issues concerning analytical feminism may be openly discussed and examined. Its purpose is to promote the study of issues in feminism by methods broadly construed as analytic, to examine the use of analytic methods as applied to feminist issues, and to provide a means by which those interested in Analytical Feminism may meet and exchange ideas. The Society meets yearly at the Central Division meetings of the APA, and frequently organizes sessions for the Eastern Division and Pacific Divisions as well. Information can be found on our website:

http://faculty.rcc.edu/crasnow/SAF.html

Membership in the Society is open to all who are interested in and concerned with issues in Analytical Feminism. Annual dues are $15 for regularly employed members, $5 for students, unemployed, underemployed and retired members. To join, send your check for the appropriate amount payable to the Society for Analytical Feminism to Sharon Crasnow at the address above.

Society for Analytical Feminism conference

2008-05-01T09:50:00.001-07:00

Forgive my very late reporting, but even though it was almost a month ago already, I still think that it is worth saying something about the wonderful Society for Analytical Feminism conference in Kentucky at the beginning of April. You can see the program on this blog or at the SAF website. I came away with the strong impression that feminist philosophy is indeed very healthy, thriving, in fact. Now, I am bound to be somewhat biased on this topic, since I was one of the organizers of the conference (as well as being a presenter), but I do not think that my bias has compromised my judgment too badly. Time will tell.

Kentucky was lovely and green, if wet. Sorry that the picture doesn't do Kentucky more justice, but it did rain rather viciously on the first day and most of that night. In my defense, however, the picture does have very green grass and horses. Still this has nothing to do with philosophy, so let me get to the interesting stuff.

The theme of the conference was Analytical Feminism's Contributions to Traditional Philosophy. The papers that were presented over the greater part of three days clearly were representative of this idea, though it was not the explicit theme of most (with the exception of Ann Cudd's closing plenary presentation). There were papers in epistemology (including philosophy of science), metaphysics (questions of gender and identity primarily), and values (ethics and social an political philosophy), all traditional areas of philosophy, but with feminist concerns at the forefront in two ways. First, the papers were embedded not just in the analytic tradition but in the feminist variant of that tradition that is now maturing. The papers reflect a conversation within the philosophical tradition as a whole but especially with feminists working in that tradition. Second, the papers point towards the contributions (as the conference title suggests) that feminist discourse can provide in the growth of the analytical tradition as a whole.

Here is an example. When Libby Potter discusses "Hybrid Values", she begins with but refines a notion of social practices that she finds in Alisdair McIntyre's work. A discussion of propositions and propositional attitudes provides a bridge to the epistemic and the work of Elizabeth Anderson and other feminists thinkers offers the idea that there are hybrid values (hybrids between epistemic and social or moral values) that we can see in practices such as feminist consciousness raising. So she engages with the tradition but at the same time offers a resource for addressing a current concern in epistemology and philosophy of science. Though using her notion of hybrid values specifically in relation to feminist work, the idea that there are practices of knowledge production that incorporate values that are at the same time epistemic and social/moral provides another way of thinking about the vexing questions that have troubled not only feminist but most epistemologists who take seriously the idea that knowledge is social.

Another example is Kristina Rolin's "Defending Critical Contextual Empiricism" in which she responds to objections raised to Longino's contextual empiricism. What is striking about this paper is that it is a conversation within feminist epistemology itself, but again about issues that are not just feminist issues. The concerns about relativism that are raised run throughout the literature in philosophy of science at least since Kuhn. The idea that contextualist epistemology might be compatible with Longino's contextualism is worth exploring. In each of these cases, the papers are embedded in the analytic tradition both methodologically and in terms of content.

I mention these papers in epistemology because it is sometimes harder to acknowledge feminist contributions in epistemology than it is to see that there are such contributions in ethics, social and political philosophy, and metaphysics (though the recognized contributions in metaphysics might be thought of as more circumscribed than in the other areas and mostly confined to issues of gender and identity). As Ann Cudd pointed out in her talk "Resistance is Not Futile: Analytical Feminism's Contributions to Political Philosophy", the role and contribution of feminist thought is more readily acknowledged in political philosophy and ethics than in other areas.

The philosophical problems that feminists are dealing with are not problems solely for feminism but they are often problems that surface in feminism because they are philosophical problems and grappling with them in relation to feminism can produce insights that are applicable elsewhere. If one is a feminist, this may well be where you want to do your grappling.

Look for more from this conference. Some of these papers are already committed for publication in a variety of venues, but Anita Superson and I hope we will soon have an anthology that will display the breadth and depth of the current work in analytical feminism. My apologies to all the authors of the papers that I have not specifically mentioned. The papers were uniformly of high quality and there were so many good ideas!

A Psychotherapist's Observation

2008-04-01T18:53:00.000-07:00

I was in San Francisco over the weekend and while wandering around the de Young Museum looking at American art, S and I ran into some people that he knew. One of these was a psychotherapist from a mid-western urban center. Her patients were almost entirely from one of the major universities located where she lived. We chatted a bit in that way that one does when you are trying to get to know another person a little and very quickly. In the course of that discussion, I told her that I was a philosopher. "Many of my patients are graduate students and the women in philosophy and the sciences are really struggling." She told me that she had one woman patient who had recently just given up and quit, finding the environment in her graduate program too inhospitable, particularly after two of her female friends quit. "What is it about women and philosophy?" she asked me. I pointed out that it could simply be that there were fewer women in the field that made it harder for women to enter it, but of course this isn't a very good explanation because many of the fields where women are now 50% were fields where men once were the majority. Then I offered some of the other explanations that are sometimes offered. That there is the emphasis on the mind in philosophy and the association of women with the body is possible explanation of why there are fewer women. I didn't get very far with this line of thought because we were joined by another couple and dropped the conversation. This was just as well I think because I didn't really have a good, coherent explanation, though I would have been interested in exploring it with her.

Here was someone outside of the profession commenting on a feature of it that so many of us have noticed from the inside. I felt something almost like relief that this psychotherapist was providing independent confirmation. No, we are not imagining it. Other people have noticed as well. I would have loved to have known more about her patient, the other women who had left the program, and so on. Was there something in particular about this program or is it a more general feature of philosophy that was the problem? I am not committed to any particular explanation but rather suspect that there are a variety of expanatory factors that all contribute to varying degrees in specific causes but that they may be all causally relevant in a variety of ways that are difficult to sort out. Investigating by asking people why they leave instead of just guessing (and by "asking" I mean asking through good quantitative methodology) seems like an essential first step to understanding what is and is not causally relevant.

I hesitated to post this story because some of the comments about philosophers and the APA more specifically have been focused on how unpleasant the profession is for women and the psychotherapist's experience would seem to support that. I am wondering how useful it is to dwell on the negative. Here is another confirmation that it is bad for women in the profession (at least in this one urban university's philosophy graduate program). What are we to make of it? Reporting that the profession is particularly difficult for women is important for audiences that do not know this, but most of the readers of this blog are aware of it already, so this story has limited usefulness beyond reinforcing what we already believe. But noting that the story is true and that its truth is not particularly helpful in moving us to action is itself worth pointing out. It is important to be clear about, acknowledge, and document the fact that there are not many women in the field, but this is just the beginning. From here we need to move to the next step. How do we re-create philosophy as a profession that doesn't drive women into therapy but rather is part of a fulfilling life? We don't really need more evidence that this is not where philosophy is at the moment but rather ideas and plans about how to be different. Still, I would have liked to have finished that conversation.

More on the APA-Report on CSW panel

2008-03-30T19:33:00.000-07:00

In a previous post I mentioned the CSW (APA Committee on the Status of Women in the Profession) panel Strategizing Changes in the Culture and Ideology of Philosophy at the Pacific APA. Here is a brief report on that panel along with a set of weblinks that Ann Garry distributed. Many of these links you may have seen elsewhere (some of them were mentioned on the SWIP and FEAST lists) but it is nice to have them all in one place.

The four members of the panel spoke briefly. Ann Garry started off with an account of the resources that you will see below and the motivations that gave rise to them. They are the result of several months of discussions on a variety of listserves including SWIP land FEAST lists. Ann also mentioned one thread which focused on the percentage of women applicants for jobs this year. Several listserves members had done informal counts of women applicants in their departments. These numbers were disturbingly low (10-17%). Ann noted that she had been inspired to do a similar count after reading these reports. Her figures were higher. Having better information on the number of women applying for and getting jobs came up again in the discussion period (see below).

Alice MacLachlan was next with the story of how she came to set up the Feminist Philosophy Draft Exchange after a FEAST meeting last year where she mentioned that such an exchange would be a good idea. The next thing she knew everyone was saying that they liked her idea and asking when she would have it up and running. The draft exchange is a google group and has quickly grown as a way of sharing information. It has several discussion threads, 97 members, a page for posting conference announcements, several syllabi, but only one online draft so far! There's a lot of interest in the idea but so far people have been reluctant to post drafts. Alice finished her talk by wondering why.

Lindsay Thompson from the Carey Business School at Johns Hopkins gave an account of working with a committee appointed to do research of how to improve the retention of women faculty. They had collected data and had put together a report but the members of the committee came to think that the report was just going to join all the other reports up on some shelf. They came to believe that the way to truly change things for women in the academy was to work to change the culture by using various strategies to subvert the current ideology. So rather than employing institutional changes alone (policies that stopped the tenure clock and so on) they were working informally to make the institution friendlier for women. Lindsay offered to share strategies to any who were interested.

I was the last panelist and spoke about the Chicago panel, the difference in the way women's organizations in other disciplines had approached the status of women in their professions (sociology, history, and psychology had all infiltrated the political hierarchy of their professional organizations), the work of the CSW over the past several years, the question of data collection, and the more general question of what to do next. The discussion was then opened to everyone. Some of the interesting exchanges that I remember were questions about women applying for and getting jobs (as mentioned above). I noted that this was one of the key projects that the CSW had been working on. David Schrader, the Executive Director of the APA, was at the session and spoke to the issue. The APA had hoped to collect this data this year but the transition to a new computer system seems to have created problems about this. The good news is that the new system ought to make such data collection much simpler. The bad news is that we are still waiting. One of the reasons why this data collection is important is that there are still reports that it is women who are getting all the jobs. As Lindsay Thompson pointed out, data collection isn't the solution but it is an essential tool in the arsenal of strategies for changing ideology. David Schrader also pointed out that one of the reasons that the strategy of infiltrating the organization politically was difficult was because the APA is very much less centralized than other professional organizations. But he also noted that his could be positive as well because there were lots of ways in. He urged women to self-nominate or nominate each other for committees other than the CSW or the Committee on Inclusiveness, committees where they are well-represented.

Another question led to some discussion of the relationship between being a woman in philosophy and feminist philosophy. Since much of the available support for women in philosophy revolves around feminist philosophy, women who do not identify themselves as feminist philosophers sometimes feel that they have nowhere to turn. Somehow, I felt that this issue was never fully addressed. The conversation always turned back to feminist philosophy without addressing the question of women philosophers specifically and separately. I have posted on this issue previously here.

This last issue intersects with my personal. Coming out of graduate school in 1980 I saw myself as a philosopher of science and not as a feminist philosopher. When asked if I could teach feminist philosophy at a job interview, I politely replied that though I was prepared to teach in new areas, this was not my area of specialization or competence. At that time, I didn't feel an affinity for feminist thought and though I considered myself a feminist, I did not see that there was any connection between feminism and the philosophy that I did. By the end of the decade, I realized that many of the issues interesting to me in philosophy of science were the issues that feminist philosophers of science were working on, but I also was beginning to recognize that many of the choices that I had made and the insecurities that I felt as a philosopher were constrained and sometimes shaped by the fact that I was a woman. This was the beginning of the integration of my professional and personal life.

My overall assessment of the panel? I think that continuing to search for strategies to change the ideology of philosophy is a good idea and having conversations like these is one of the many steps that can be taken. But there was a lot of exhaustion and discouragement on the faces and in the voices of those who were there. I think the panelists were more upbeat than the audience, perhaps because we were each engaged in some sort of activity that we felt was contributing.

Resources:

Web resources or books about programs or containing data (most mentioned on SWIP-L or FEAST-L):

Unlocking the Clubhouse (book about Carnegie Mellon’s program to attract women into computer science)
Virginia Valian’s gender equity project: http://www.hunter.cuny.edu/genderequity/equitymaterials.html

Barnard study that Alison Wylie co-authored: Women, Work and the Academy Report on-line:

UW website: http://faculty.washington.edu/aw26/WorkplaceEquity/BCRW-WomenWorkAcademy_08.pdf
BCRW conference website (with podcast of panel: Nancy Hopkins, Claude Steele, Virginia Valian): http://www.barnard.edu/bcrw/womenandwork/description.htm
ADVANCE programs. No specific site chosen here, but “ADVANCE” programs are around the country for gender equity (science-focused).
Collegium of Black Women Philosophers http://www.vanderbilt.edu/cbwp/
New site started by Noelle McAfee on which data will be posted. http://philosophydata.wikispaces.com.

APA-Committee on the Status of Women (there are two different “resource” links on the site):

http://www.apa.udel.edu/apa/governance/committees/women
List compiled by APA-CSW from volunteered information about MA and PhD programs, numbers of women and feminist friendly faculty, etc. http://www.apa.udel.edu/apa/governance/committees/women/GradPrograms2007.pdf• Faculty Productivity Index (FISP) http://chronicle.com/stats/productivity/page.php?primary=10&secondary=91&bycat=Go
Julie Van Camp’s list of % of women teaching in Philosophy Ph.D.-granting departments http://www.csulb.edu/~jvancamp/doctoral_2004.html
Kathryn Norlock worked with the Bureau of Labor Statistics to come up with these figures: http://www.apa.udel.edu/apa/governance/committees/women/Women%20in%20the%20Profession%20CSW.pdf
Feminist Philosophy Draft Exchange (a Google group that can be joined): http://groups.google.com/group/feministdraftexchange?hl=en&lnk=srg
Sally Haslanger’s website lists many links to feminist sites including blogs: http://web.mac.com/shaslang/Sally_Haslanger/Links,_etc..html
Symposium on Gender, Race, and Philosophy http://web.mac.com/shaslang/SGRP/Welcome.html

Blogs:

Feminist Philosophers: http://feministphilosophers.wordpress.com
Noelle McAfee’s blog: http://gonepublic.wordpress.com/
Evelyn Brister’s blog: http://knowledgeandexperience.blogspot.com/
e.g. on women’s stats: Using data from http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d06/tables/xls/tabn258.xls

My Pacific APA

2008-03-23T12:40:00.000-07:00

Last week the Pacific Division of the APA met. For a very brief, visual summary, see this post at Feminist Philosophers. I found the meeting truly interesting for a change. It wasn’t so much the sessions, though there were good sessions, but rather the professional dynamics that were visible in more informal interactions, though these “informal interactions” were fueled by the sessions. Here are my “highlights”, though some of them might be more appropriately referred to as “lowlights”. I acknowledge that this report on my Pacific APA may bear little or no resemblance to your APA!

A P-SWIP/BayFAP reception where I had several fascinating conversations. One was about the question of wanting to live a life that addresses issues of social relevance and doing philosophy of science. Are these different impulses? If not, how do we integrate them and yet still do work that is judged to be good by the standards of the field. This conversation was followed by another about the ongoing and so little changed sexism that female graduate experience. The latter was particularly disconcerting to me. I left graduate school 28 years ago and the stories that I was hearing were too similar to my own experience. The reports that male graduate students (at least some) truly believe that female graduate students get all the jobs was particularly worrying.

A Routledge Companion to the Philosophy of Science that had 55 articles only 5 of which were by female philosophers and two of those were co-authored with males. More disturbing is that there was only one article discussing feminist philosophy of science (by Cassandra Pinnick) and the theme of that article was that there was nothing of value that it had to offer and that feminist should stay out of science and stick to politics!

A memorial session for Richard Rorty which reminded me of the startling experience of the meta-philosophical critique, a possibility that had not yet occurred to me when I read it as I finished graduate school and something that the experience above remind me is so sorely needed.

A mini-conference on Making Philosophy of Science More Socially Relevant organized by Nancy Cartwright, Sophia Efstathiou, Helen Longino, Katie Plaisance. These sessions were an example of where one might go if one engages in such a critique and a hopeful sign that at least some philosophers are interested in integrating all the aspects of their lives as philosophers and participants in their social and political life.

Blogging connects you to people! Several people came up to me and recognized my name from blogging both on Knowledge and Experience and here. I also got to know some of the bloggers who contribute regularly to the blogs that I read.

Update: Check out Philosophy's Sexism at the APA particularly the comments. I think these are discussions we need to be having. What are we ourselves doing to keep these sexist practices in place?

Women in Philosophy: What's Next?

2008-03-10T08:36:00.000-07:00

The APA's Committee on the Status of Women is sponsoring a special session at the Pacific Division meeting next week in Pasadena (see the complete program here).

Thursday, March 20
1:00-4:00 p.m.

Topic: Strategizing Changes in the Culture and Ideology of Philosophy
Chair: Robin S. Dillon (Lehigh University)
Ann Garry (California State University–Los Angeles)
Alice MacLachlan (York University)
Lindsay Thompson (Johns Hopkins University)
Sharon Crasnow (Riverside Community College-Norco)

You will see that the program I have listed here is slightly different from that in the printed program given that two of the scheduled panelists will be unable to attend. The idea of the session is that it is a follow-up to the Central Division session of last year blogged about at Lemmings and at Knowledge and Experience. One of the key features of that Central Division session was a paper by Sally Haslanger, "Changing the Ideology and Culture of Philosophy: Not by Reason (Alone)" that has since been widely distributed.

The Central Division session started off a lively discussion not only on those blogs but also on several feminist philosophy listserves including the SWIP-list and the FEAST-list. The upcoming session is designed as a way of keeping the conversation going by looking at what as happened since and discussing some concrete projects that address the low participation and limited persistence of women in philosophy. So Alice MacLachlan will discuss a Feminist Publishing Support group that she has set up online and Lindsay Thompson will discuss her participation in a university-wide initiative on the status of women.

The format will be a panel discussion rather than formal papers and the hope is that we will be doing some serious brainstorming. I will report back on the results after the session. Please join us if you are in Pasadena.

On Objectivity

2008-02-18T15:21:00.000-08:00

While this post is on objectivity more generally it is specifically about Objectivity by Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison.

There are three main points that I took away from the book, though there is much more there that others might be interested in. The first is that objectivity is not a univocal concept. This isn't a particularly surprising point for those who are familiar with philosophical literature on objectivity. Lisa Lloyd, Heather Douglas, and Marianne Janack has all written articles in which they have identified a variety of senses of "objectivity". But the way in which Daston and Galison identify the various different concepts of objectivity is different. Rather than looking at one moment, an abstract philosophical "now", they examine what they take to be concepts of objectivity that emerge at different moments in the history of science. They do this through an examination of the use of images in science (atlases which are used in a variety of ways to inform our and the experts' understanding of the phenomena). Their contention is that these images track different epistemic virtues, which they identify as both virtues of science and of those that do science.

This leads to the second key idea, that "objectivity" can function as a stand-in for a slew of epistemic virtues rather than the pre-eminent virtue that it sometimes taken to be. This reminds me of Alison Wylie's idea about how to reconceive objectivity. She too takes objectivity to be a shorthand for set of epistemic virtues, while also pointing out that at any given time we may not be able to maximize all these virtues. In fact, they frequently compete with each other and a judgment is made about which are more important in the particular context. While the list of epistemic virtues that Wylie has in mind is something like simplicity, conservativeness, empirical adequacy, maybe fecundity (some variation on a list that Kuhn and others have proposed), Daston and Galison are looking at three (actually four) different sets of virtues proposed in the different periods that they examine.

The third idea follows from the historical approach that they take. It is that the concept of objectivity can change. Changing, or reconfiguring a concept of objectivity that is useful for feminist philosophy of science has been a project that a number of feminist philosophers have been involved in and so the approach that book offers lends support to that project.

There are some questions that the book raises for me however. Virtues are virtues in relation to a particular goal. It would seem that if what are taken to be virtues change there are at least two ways in which this can happen. Virtues can change because the idea of how to achieve a goal changes or they can change because the goal changes. So, for instance, at one time chastity might be considered a virtue of women. It is a virtue because women are to be mothers of the children in a patriarchy and their chastity helps to ensure that the children they bear will indeed be the children of the appropriate father. But chastity might cease to be a virtue (as perhaps it has) and there are at least two ways in which this might happen. It might be the case that patriarchy ceases to have the hold on society that it once did and so the importance of linking a child to a particular father is diminished in society. This would be a case where the goal has changed. It also can turn out that the method for obtaining the goal might not work any longer in which case the virtue also ceases to be a virtue. So, if birth control is effective, chastity is no longer necessary.

So how does this work in the case of objectivity? What goals changed or was it that methods failed to work? Daston and Galison talk about the goals for which objectivity is a virtue in terms of the fears that people had of various ways in which we might fail to attain knowledge. As they see it, the different types of objectivity are each aimed at addressing these fears and the fears change. So, they begin by describing an ideal that they call "truth to nature". With truth to nature the goal is to capture the real natures of the things that are being depicted. The fear is that the variations that individual examples of those things might exhibit will prevent us from seeing their true natures. After a while, a new ideal of objectivity emerges. This is what they call mechanical objectivity. This idea (the only one that they consistently refer to as "objectivity") involves avoiding interpretation and mechanically reproducing nature (think of photography). The fear here is that we insert ourselves into understanding nature and we rather need to record what is actually happening. The interpretation is seen as a distortion. Which of the two ways that a characteristic can cease to be a virtue is happening in this account? For Daston and Galison it isn't clear whether the goal has changed or the change has to do with a change in ideas on how to achieve the goal. I think that minimally understanding objectivity requires investigating what kind a virtue we think it is and this means being clear on what goals we are trying to achieve. Daston and Galison have a very interesting way of telling the story that they choose to tell but in the end I am not sure to what extent it illuminates the kinds of questions that are currently raised about scientific objectivity, particularly those that have to do with science and values.

Society for Analytical Feminism 2nd Conference Program

2008-01-24T18:00:00.000-08:00

The Society for Analytical Feminism 2nd Conference program is not available and is posted below. The conference will be at the Radisson Hotel in Lexington, KY from April 4-6, 2008. Registration forms and the a downloadable version of the program are available at the Society for Analytical Feminism website.

Society for Analytical Feminism
2nd Conference
Analytical Feminist Contributions
to Traditional Philosophy
Sponsored by the Dean of Arts and Sciences
and the Office of the Vice President
University of Kentucky

Friday, April 4th
12-1 pm Registration (at desk near hotel meeting rooms)

1 pm: First Session

A. Breckinridge Room
Chair: Betsy Hopkins (University of Kentucky)
Speaker: Anita Superson (University of Kentucky, University of Michigan)
"Standards of Rationality and Intrinsic Worth"

B. Clay Room
Chair: Libby Potter (Mills College)
Speaker: Phyllis Rooney (Oakland University)
"Toward a Feminist Metaepistemology"

2 pm: First Plenary Session
Daniel Boone Room

Chair: Anita Superson (University of Kentucky, University of Michigan)
Plenary Speaker: Ann Garry (California State, Los Angeles)
"Implications of Intersectionality"

3 pm: Second Session

A. Breckinridge Room
Chair: Christa Hodapp (University of Kentucky)
Speaker: Carol Hay (Bryn Mawr College)
"Rationality and Oppression"

B. Clay Room
Chair: Heidi Grasswick (Middlebury College)
Speaker: Libby Potter (Mills College)
"Hybrid Values"

C. Daniel Boone Room
Chair: Jen McWeeny (John Carroll University)
Speaker: Nancy McHugh (Wittenberg University)
"More than Skin Deep: Situated Communities and the Case of Agent Orange in Viet Nam"

4-4:30 pm: Coffee & snacks/registration (hallway outside meeting rooms)

4:30 pm: Third Session

A. Breckinridge Room
Chair: Carol Hay (Bryn Mawr College)
Speaker: Anne Barnhill (New York University)
"Feminist Sexual Virtue and Feminist Sexual Vice"

B. Clay Room
Chair: Janine Jones (University of North Carolina, Greensboro)
Speaker: Jen McWeeny (John Carroll University)
"The Epistemology of Margaret Cavendish: A Seventeenth Century Theory of Embodied Cognition"

C. Daniel Boone Room
Chair: Pieranna Garavaso (University of Minnesota, Morris)
Speaker: Sharon Crasnow (Riverside Community College, Norco) "Resources for Feminist Epistemology: Models, Representation, and Objectivity"

5:30 pm: Second Plenary Session
Daniel Boone Room

Chair: Anita Superson (University of Kentucky, University of Michigan)
Plenary Speaker: Louise Antony (University of Massachusetts, Amherst)
"Democracy is Not an Epistemic Value"

7:30: Welcome Dinner at Radisson; pre-registration required; cash bar; Daniel Boone Room

Saturday, April 5th

8-9 am Registration (at desk outside meeting rooms)

9 am: Third Plenary Session
Daniel Boone Room

Chair: Sharon Crasnow (Riverside Community College, Norco)
Plenary Speaker: Alison Wylie (University of Washington)
"What Knowers Know Well: Standpoint Theory and the Foundation of Gender Archaeology"

10 am: Fifth Session

A. Breckinridge Room
Chair: Helga Varden (University of Illinois, Champaign/Urbana)
Speaker: Andrea Westlund (University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee) "Rethinking Relational Autonomy"

B. Clay Room
Chair: Phyllis Rooney (Oakland University)
Speaker: Kristina Rolin ( Helsinki School of Economics)
"Defending Critical Contextual Empiricism"

C. Daniel Boone Room
Chair: Lisa McLeod (Guilford College)
Speaker: Nancy Daukas (Guilford College)
"Why Feminist Epistemology Needs More Virtue"

11 am: Fourth Plenary Session
Daniel Boone Room

Chair: Anita Superson (University of Kentucky, University of Michigan)
Plenary Speaker: Julia Driver (Dartmouth College)
"Feminism and Moral Realism"

12 -- 1:30 pm: Lunch (local downtown restaurants)

1:30 pm: Fifth Plenary Session
Daniel Boone Room

Chair: Clare Batty (University of Kentucky)
Plenary Speaker: Sally Haslanger (MIT)
"Social Categories, Social Structure, and Ideology Critique"

2:30 pm: Sixth Session

A. Breckinridge Room
Chair: Anne Barnhill (NYU)
Speaker: Helga Varden (University of Illinois, Champaign/Urbana)
"The Injustice of Anti-Abortion and Anti-Homosexuality Laws"

B. Clay Room
Chair: Kristina Rolin (Helsinki School of Economics)
Speaker: Heidi Grasswick (Middlebury College)
"Sharing Knowledge: Querying the Norms"

C. Daniel Boone Room
Chair: Alison Wolf (Simpson College)
Speaker: Pieranna Garavaso (University of Minnesota, Morris) "Personal Identity and Gender Identity"

3:30-4 pm: Coffee; Registration (hallway outside meeting rooms)

4 pm: Sixth Plenary Session
Daniel Boone Room

Chair: Sharon Crasnow (Riverside Community College, Norco)
Plenary Speaker: Miriam Solomon (Temple University)
"Discerning Feminist Empiricism"

5 pm: Seventh Plenary Session
Daniel Boone Room

Chair: Anita Superson (University of Kentucky, University of Michigan)
Plenary Speaker: Robin Dillon (Lehigh University)
"A Feminist View of Vice and Virtue"

6 pm: Dinner on your own; local downtown restaurants

Sunday, April 6th

9 am: Eighth Plenary Session
Daniel Boone Room

Chair: Sharon Crasnow (Riverside Community College, Norco)
Plenary Speaker: Charlotte Witt (University of New Hampshire)
"Humans, Persons and Social Individuals"

10 am: Ninth Plenary Session
Daniel Boone Room

Chair: Anita Superson (University of Kentucky, University of Michigan)
Plenary Speaker: Ann Cudd (University of Kansas)
"Resistance is Not Futile: Analytical Feminism’s Contributions to Political Philosophy"

11 - 12:30: Lunch on your own; local downtown restaurants

12:30 pm: Tenth Plenary Session
Daniel Boone Room

Chair: Anita Superson (University of Kentucky, University of Michigan)
Plenary Speaker: Mariam Thalos (University of Utah)
"The Self-construction of the Self"

1:30 pm: Seventh Session

A. Breckinridge Room
Chair: Elisia Taylor (University of Kentucky)
Speaker: Marilyn Friedman (Washington University)
"Female Terrorists: Gender and Meaning"

B. Clay Room
Chair: Andrea Westlund (University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee)
Speaker: Sonya Charles (Cleveland State University)
"Stoljar's Challenge: How Should Feminist Autonomy Theorists Respond to the Problem of Oppression?"

Women, Work, and the Academy

2008-01-19T11:01:00.000-08:00

Women, Work , and the Academy written by Alison Wylie, Janet R. Jakobsen, and Gisela Fosado in now available from the Barnard Center for Research on Women (BCRW). There is also a video of a panel on the topic and other information on the website.

It is interesting to ask about to what extent the issues that women philosophers have in the academy are part of a more general phenomenon and to what extent they are endemic to philosophy as a profession. It is clear that there is some compounding of causes that results in the overall under-representation of women in the profession. But just exactly what is it. Knowledge and Experience has some links to further thoughts on these issues.

Feminist philosophers and women philosophers

2008-01-11T11:15:00.000-08:00

There is an interesting discussion unfolding on the SWIP list over the last couple of days. It began with some questions about both the validity and the usefulness of the Leiter rankings for women and/or feminists going into philosophy. It was suggested that an alternative ranking system for feminist-friendly programs might be appropriate. By the way, there is a listing of feminist-friendly programs at the CSW website linked through the APA website, here. You'll need to scroll to the bottom of the page. Note this information is not a ranking. These are programs that are self-reported as feminist-friendly and the information here is of the sort that can help people make judgments for themselves. Anyway, as the discussion on the SWIP list has progressed a number of questions have been raised, among them the question of the connection between being a woman philosopher and being a feminist philosopher.

There is certainly some reason to think that there would be an overlap between these two. At the same time, there are plenty of reasons to think that they are not equivalent. Most particularly, it seems reasonable to think that there is no requirement for women to focus on gender issues purely because they are women. There are many women philosophers who have no interest in feminist philosophy, even though they might count themselves to be feminists. And then there are women philosophers who are antagonistic to both feminist philosophy and feminism. Being a woman philosopher does not ensure any particular attitude towards feminism or feminist philosophy.

There are a number of things that could be said about this and I am not really sure what I think about it at the moment. I began my career having no interest in feminist philosophy, though I was sympathetic to feminism. It wasn't until the early 90s, 10 years out of graduate school, that I started working on issues in feminist philosophy of science. Before that I was occasionally asked if I could teach feminist philosophy, I suppose because I was a woman. I refused to do so, because I thought it was a weird question and resented the assumption, but over the years it became clearer to me that as a woman doing philosophy, I was finding it increasingly difficult to separate my intellectual from my pragmatic struggles (what sort of jobs I had, how I was perceived by my peers, how I perceived myself, my abilities, what problems I felt capable of tackling). It is this latter set of concerns that makes me sometimes wonder whether it really is possible to completely separate feminist philosophy from being a woman doing philosophy, no matter what you are working on. I wonder this even though I know that the "proper" attitude to have is that these two issues are distinct. Still, I think I am puzzled about this because it brings me face-to-face with the question of how integral gender is to any and all human activities. I am not really sure what it means to claim that gender issues are or are not relevant in a particular case, because I am not entirely sure how I would know. I think I feel more comfortable acknowledging that they are are more salient in some cases and for some issues than for others. But whatever the salience of gender to the issues that we are working on, isn't what we want is that our gender is not a roadblock to our interests and our pursuit of those interests. Isn't this the underlying problem in the discussion about the low numbers of women in philosophy, the low number of female applicants for jobs in philosophy, and most importantly, because it suggests that women are being discouraged or even driven out of the field, the decline in the number of women who are in the profession after receiving their PhDs?

I am not sure of the answers and I think it is worth questioning some of the assumptions, but I am very happy that this discussion is taking place.

Articles in Philosophy of Science: Models and Representation

2007-12-27T20:09:00.000-08:00

For a treat during winter break, I am reading back issues of Philosophy of Science and have been pleasantly surprised that there are articles that I am actually interested in reading! Vol. 74 (2007) has a number of articles that are not so terribly specialized as POS articles have sometimes been in the past. This is not to say that there are no super specialized articles, for those of you who are fans of such, just that there were several articles that were more like the articles that I enjoy reading.

In particular, Margaret Morrison has an article in which she suggests that the recent interests that many philosophers of science have developed in models has wrongly led to ignoring theory (Number 2, April 2007, 195-228). She argues that there is still an important role for theory in philosophy of science and sketches an account of the relationship between theory, model, and the world that shows this. Her account of models differs from the semantic view, which identifies theory as a family of models.

Gabriele Contessa also has an article on models, but his focus is more squarely on the question of how models represent the systems they are models of (Number 1, January 2007. 48-68). Since I am currently working on a paper that deals with representation, I found this article particularly intriguing and so I am raising some questions about it here.

Contessa argues that it is possible to give necessary and sufficient conditions for a model representing a system. He contrasts this view to that of Mauricio Suarez, who denies that this can be done. Contessa's argument rests on several distinctions and is worth reading the paper, even if only for an overview of several of the key positions that are currently being defended in this discussion. I won't go into detail about these distinctions but will focus on the one at the core of Contessa's account of representation.

Contessa claims that much of the confusion over representation comes from a failure to distinguish between representing and representing faithfully. If we (wrongly) think that representation requires faithful or even partially faithful representation we are likely to draw the conclusion that Suarez does. Contessa makes the case that in order for a vehicle to represent a target it need not be a faithful representation. Of course, we are interested in what makes a representation faithful and he acknowledges that a full account of representation would include an account of faithful representation. What he does in this paper is give necessary and sufficient conditions for representation simpliciter (what else is required for faithful representation will have to wait, he notes at the end of the paper). In order to represent, the vehicle must be used by someone as an interpretation of the target system. (I am not doing full justice to the account because I haven't discussed his definition of interpretation and its connection to surrogative reasoning, a notion that he takes from Chris Swoyer (1991).)

The account that Contessa gives solves several problem and has some intuitively compelling features. However, what may not be quite so intuitive is that at first blush the account seems to commit Contessa to the view that it is possible for anything to represent anything else. There do not seem to be any inherent constraints on what the features objects that become models must have in order to be used as interpretations. On the one hand, this makes sense. Suarez's point that there isn't anything that we can point to in the model that would give us the necessary and sufficient conditions for it to function as a representation is vindicated. But Contessa asks us to look more closely at the use of the model to understand what it is to represent. On the other hand, I feel uncomfortable about the idea that a model that is not at all (even partially) faithful could be meaningfully said to represent a system because a user's interpretation turns it into a model of that system. Why am I uncomfortable with this? Is it because I am confusing faithful representation with representation as Contessa contends?

I am not sure, but here is my first pass at the answer. I am wondering to what extent someone can use an object (a model) as an interpretation of a particular system if there are no features of the model (object) that bear any relation to the system in some way that is independent of the user. If this is right, Contessa's account begs the question because when a model can be used as an interpretation it already requires that it have some other features in virtue of which it represents. It seems pretty clear from his article that he does not see this as being circular, so either I have not fully understood his account of interpretation, or I am slipping into that confusion of representation and faithful representation. All the force of my worries would then be addressed in the account (yet to be given) of faithful representation.

I am not sure what is going on here but this discussion reminds me of another similar one. Philip Kitcher criticized van Fraassen's pragmatic account of explanation because the way van Fraassen sets up the relevance relation between the explanandum and the explananda allows anything to be an explanation of anything else under the right circumstances (as long as the right relevance relation holds and what counts as the right relevance relation is dependent on context, so given the right context anything could be an explanation). The similarity between these two cases seems to be connected to the fact that both accounts depend on how something is used by someone. Van Fraassen did not seem to be terribly worried by Kitcher's criticism, because this was indeed what he intended. Kitcher later acknowledged that the flexibility had been intentional. (Sorry that I don't have the references here. I will fill them in later.) Another similarity between Contessa's account of reference and van Fraassen's account of explanation is that Contessa's argument precedes by asking us to draw a distinction between representing and representing faithfully. Van Fraassen's discussion depends on a similar distinction between having an explanation and having a good explanation.

This is all very incomplete, but I offer a final thought here. Could it be that the ambiguity is in "use"? To use and to use successfully are different are different in the same way as the other two concepts vary. It seems to me that making this distinction can only be done as a matter of degree however. There is some point when it no longer makes sense to describe what is going on as using A in order to do B. So, for instance, I can use a hammer to remove a screw, in the sense that I can pick the hammer up with the intention of taking out the screw with it. I can take the hammer and touch the screw with it and so on, but I cannot remove the screw with it. So I cannot successfully use the hammer to remove the screw. I think it would be reasonable for someone to describe what is happening in the following way: "She thought that she could use the hammer to remove the screw but in fact she cannot use it that way." It is not just that I was using it and failed, but rather that I wasn't really using it though I believed that I was. In a similar vein, I might think that I can use Newtonian physics to explain iridescence, but in fact, all explanations that I give in this way will be bad. So am I explaining? I may believe that I am but I will be wrong and since I can only be wrong we might reasonably say, at least at some point during my attempts, that I am not explaining at all, not just that I am explaining badly. Finally, to come back to representing, I might use the salt and pepper shakers on the table to represent the structure of the atom. This would mean, according to Contessa, that I am interpreting the salt and pepper shakers as a representation of the atom. The problem here is that I do not know how I would determine what sorts of things might appropriately represent others, that is, whether it is even plausible to claim that I or anyone else could use these objects in this way. Of course, how I do use any of these things in each of these examples (as a tool, as an explanation, as a representation, via using it as an interpretation) depends on background knowledge and so perhaps my worry about whether it is possible to make a distinction between something being a good tool, good explanation, or faithful representation and being simply a tool, an explanation, or a representation respectively can be resolved by specifying that all judgments about use are relative to background knowledge. But doesn't this just push the issue of the distinction between a good x and an x into background knowledge and so not eliminate the problem just move it around?

Well, these are some of the puzzles that I have had while thinking about Contessa's account of representation. I worry that it may be circular and so wonder if it gets us anywhere, but I like that it is so based in use. I hope to have more to say about this as I get clearer on what I want to do with the issue.

Swoyer, Chris (1991), "Structural Representation and Surrogative Reasoning," Synthese 87: 449-508.

Doing philosophy in public

2007-12-20T08:38:00.000-08:00

What is it to do public philosophy? At Gone Public there is a post and this suggestion for the answer:

So what is public philosophy? I’d say it is philosophy that is in some way or another engaged with public concerns, and not necessarily political ones, and with the public itself. This blog of mine is a species of public philosophy.

Evelyn Brister at Knowledge and Experience raises the question in a way as well in conjunction with the implicit and explicit critique of the Philosophy of Science Association that appears in some of the candidates’ statements. The very existence of feminist philosophy directs us to the issue as well, and, of course, there are many other philosophical subdisciplines that have public aspect, such as bioethics, environmental ethics, philosophy of race, disability and so on.

I have sometimes done philosophy in public. Is that public philosophy? I think it can be and I will give some examples of what I mean in a moment, but in preparation let me take a stab at characterizing “public philosophy”: Public philosophy is the explicit use of philosophical reasoning, methods and ideas, in public places, particularly to address issues of public policy.

The word “public” appears twice in this characterization and in each case it is used to refer to a different aspect of being public. So in the first case, “the use of philosophical reasoning, methods, and ideas in public places”, the idea that philosophy is not always thought of as being done in public places is made explicit. This is a reference to the way in which so much of Western philosophical tradition treats philosophical thought as private, either because it is done by a solitary philosopher (think Descartes) or because it is done with others in a way that suggests a private club. That we even speak of “public philosophy” is partly a result of the tradition in philosophy that emphasizes those features. Contrast this with the following: public economics, public political science, or public anthropology. They sound strange, don’t they? I am not claiming that there aren’t some circumstances under which it might be possible that we would have a use for such phrases, but, at least to my ear, they sound redundant.

The second “public” comes in “public policy” and here there a specific goal that is mentioned for doing philosophy in public. It is in this sense that Dewey was a public philosopher. It is in this sense those who are critiquing the PSA are calling for public philosophy.

What I meant about doing philosophy in public can be illustrated with some examples of very small scale and local public philosophy. The city that our college is located in contracts with a unit of the college to arrange continuing education workshops for city employees. Among the workshops available for middle managers is a critical thinking workshop. It used to be taught by someone from the business department, but lately I’ve been doing it. Police officers, fire fighters, public works managers, and others were a bit skeptical of a philosopher running these workshops, as was the human resources manager who originally arranged them. I had to work to win her over to the idea that I would have something "practical" to offer. It has worked out though and participants seem to find them interesting and useful. My primary focus in these workshops has been problem solving, with an emphasis on techniques for thinking of problems in a new way. Much of what that takes is at the core of philosophy and so is something that philosophers are typically pretty good at. Finding chances to both show the value of these skills and help others learn how to use them is one way to do public philosophy.

Another way to take philosophy public is through the participation of philosophers in public life. For me, for reasons that have to do with a complex set of living arrangements that keep me outside of the communities that I live in, that primary means life at the college. And how can philosophy be useful there? The promotion of clear and careful thinking as a means to find solutions to problems, the willingness to listen to and understand opposing viewpoints, modeling the willingness to change positions when better arguments support the other side, and the examination of underlying presuppositions, both of fact and value, that drive policy are all characteristics of philosophical method that should play a role in the public sphere.

One more point about public philosophy. It encourages an integration of thought and action that has too often been missing from philosophy. I think that some of the objections to armchair philosophy and the emergence of experimental philosophy are driven by a desire to reintegrate and ground our thinking about the world.

Has the Time Finally Come?

2007-12-10T21:46:00.000-08:00

Over the last several weeks and perhaps more gradually over the last year or so there seems to have been an increasing awareness of the many ways in which women are less incorporated into the world of academic philosophy than men are. During my life as a philosopher I have found a sense of being excluded puzzling and difficult in a variety of ways, but I have found it equally disturbing that there really just hasn't been terribly much awareness of this fact.

But now we are have a moment when the discussion is being fed by an excellent series of posts by Evelyn Brister at Knowledge and Experience , picked up at Feminist Philosophers, and continued on the SWIP-list. These online discussions are echoes of others earlier this year. The issues seem to be gaining some traction. So much so that now, people are beginning to talk about how to do something to at least keep the conversation going, but maybe more importantly to begin to do something to change the circumstances.

So what to do? Here are some suggestions:

I am very pro more data collection. I have been thinking for some time that what we need is collection of both quantitative and qualitative data about women in philosophy AND women who leave philosophy. There has been at least one SWIP post in the latest discussion that has looked at this question.
Also along the lines of data collection, Sally Haslanger has been looking at women philosophers and journals. We need more of this as well. She has some resources available here.

Those are more old ideas, that is ideas that aren't really mine but I am adding here because I think they are good ones. This final one is a newish idea and perhaps some people will not like it because it sounds a little "old-fashioned", a bit like consciousness raising or something along those lines. But here goes anyway.

I think that it is worthwhile for those of us who have persisted in philosophy to think hard about the ways in which gender has played a role in our lives as philosophers. I am saying this based on my own shifting understanding of these issues. Throughout my career many of the choices that I have made as well as many of the forces that shaped my choices turn out to have been influenced by my gender in a variety of ways that I was not aware of at the time. But more to the point, I worked very hard not to see them as being related to my gender at all. In the end I think that I did myself a disservice because of this but more importantly I think that failing to discuss how this happens harms others because they are apt to repeat more head-in-the-sand approach. I think it is important not just to think about it but to talk about it, not to bemoan the hard time that women philosophers have but to understand what needs to be changed and why.

So there are some suggestions for action. I am optimistic. I think we may be on the verge of some new ways of thinking about women in philosophy.

Update: I've just come across a book that seems to be doing the sort of thing that I am talking about above. It is not specifically by or about philosophers but more generally about women in the academy. See Mama, PhD.

Philosophers' Carnival

2007-12-03T20:08:00.000-08:00

My post made the carnival! It is posted here as "Science on Faith", but also posted at Knowledge and Experience. Check out the Philosophers' Carnival at Philosophy Sucks.

What do the Numbers Mean?

2007-12-02T15:55:00.001-08:00

Over at Knowledge and Experience Evelyn Brister is posting a series on women in philosophy. What is really interesting is that for PhDs in philosophy, slightly under 30% are women and undergraduate women philosophy majors appear to be a very similar percentage. This would suggest that it isn't exactly a pipeline problem in philosophy but something more systemic. A commenter at Knowledge and Experience notes this.

There are plenty of questions that are suggested by these numbers. One is why is the percentage of undergraduate philosophy BAs lower than in so many other fields (57.5 % of all undergraduate degrees were earned by women in 2005)? But it is really interesting that the pipeline doesn't appear to be leaking much between undergraduate majors and PhDs. I want to know more. I want to know why and how the women that go into philosophy manage to stay in philosophy through graduate school and what happens to drive them out of philosophy once they leave graduate school.

We know that women leave academia at greater rates than men, but is this worse in philosophy? A quick look at 2005 figures from the Digest of Education Statistics shows 45% of the PhDs awarded in all fields are given to women and 39% of full-time employees at degree granting institutions are women. This suggests a 6% loss of ground for women from graduate school to the academy. In philosophy, the average is about 27% of PhDs are women and the percentage of full-time women philosophers in the degree granting institutions appears to be around 21%. This is also a 6% loss so perhaps the issue here is less philosopher per se but rather the academy. The low philosophy figures show that there is still an issue for philosophy nonetheless. At any rate, there is a lot to find out.

I posted a comment at Knowledge and Experience and Evelyn responded asking if the paper I gave at the Committee for the Status of Women 2007 Central Division session on this issue is on the web. I post it here: "What do the Numbers Mean?"

More: There is a new post in this discussion at Knowledge and Experience.

The Value of Philosophy

2007-11-28T07:15:00.000-08:00

Noelle McAfee asks "What Counts as Philosophy?" at Gone Public. She is wondering about professional philosophy, but I like to think about what counts as philosophy in our daily lives. Professional philosophy is just a more rarefied version of something human beings do anyway, and surely this is part of the reason why we believe it makes sense to to teach philosophy to undergraduates. As evidence for this I note the Guardian article of last week which several of the philosophy bloggers that I read were quite happy to report on. Another piece of evidence comes from an interview with Steve Martin that I heard yesterday morning on NPR's Morning Edition. In the interview, Martin describes how he came to his very different approach to stand up comedy:

Studying philosophy in college at the time, Martin says he learned you can question anything. "So I turned it on my little comedy act, thinking, 'What could I change, what would be different, what would be original, what would be new?' And I realized that comedians of the day were operating on jokes and punch lines."

So philosophy is not simply an academic discipline but the ability to philosophize has practical implications and can even be quite profitable in the right circumstances.