Feminist philosophers and women philosophers

Posted on January 11, 2008 by sharon crasnow

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.

Posted in feminism, women in philosophy | Leave a comment

Articles in Philosophy of Science: Models and Representation

Posted on December 28, 2007 by sharon crasnow

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.

Posted in models, philosophy of science, representation | 7 Comments

Doing philosophy in public

Posted on December 20, 2007 by sharon crasnow

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.

Posted in Uncategorized | 4 Comments

Has the Time Finally Come?

Posted on December 11, 2007 by sharon crasnow

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.

Posted in women in philosophy | 1 Comment

Philosophers’ Carnival

Posted on December 4, 2007 by sharon crasnow

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.

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

What do the Numbers Mean?

Posted on December 2, 2007 by sharon crasnow

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.

Posted in women in philosophy | 1 Comment

The Value of Philosophy

Posted on November 28, 2007 by sharon crasnow

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.

Posted in philosophy | 3 Comments

Mothering and Philosophy

Posted on November 26, 2007 by sharon crasnow

Noelle McAfee has a post at Gone Public on Women,Children, and Philosophy. She speculates that there are fewer women with children in philosophy, perhaps because philosophy is modeled more closely after the sciences than the humanities. Is the question whether women in philosophy have fewer children than other women with academic careers or is it that they have fewer children than women in general? If we are going to draw a conclusion about women in philosophy we need to see if it is true that women in philosophy have fewer children than women in the academy more broadly. I do not think we have evidence for that claim at this time. I am not even sure that we have anything that would qualify as anecdotal evidence. What we do have evidence for is that women in the academy are less likely to have children than women more generally and that having children is correlated with less professional success, if we equate success with academic rank. The primary source for this is research done by Mason and Goulden (references below).

I was the guest editor for the most recent edition (Fall 2007) of the APA Newsletter of Feminism and Philosophy in which several women philosophers share their thoughts on combining philosophy and family. I was motivated to put together this collection of papers because I am fascinated by the ways that philosophy and the other parts of life intertwine. This is a different sort of enterprise than searching for generalizations however. I think that one of the things that these papers show is the great difficulty of generalizing. Mothering and philosophy may not go together particularly well, but this is probably primarily because mothering and any demanding career is challenging. But I would love to investigate this in more detail. I have been dying to do exactly this sort of research about women philosophers particularly. Any ideas on how to start?

Mary Ann Mason and Marc Goulden. “Do Babies Matter (Part II)? Academe 90.6 (Nov. 2004a): 10-15.

Mason and Goulden. “Do Babies Matter? The Effect of Family Formation on the Lifelong Careers of Academic Men and Women.” Academe 2002.

Mason and Goulden. “Marriage and Baby Blues: Redefining Gender Equity in the Academy.” Annals, AAPSS 596 (Nov. 2004b).

Mason and Goulden, “Do Babies Matter?” 2002.

Posted in mothering, women in philosophy | 2 Comments

Science on Faith?

Posted on November 24, 2007 by sharon crasnow

Paul Davies has a piece on the op ed page of today’s NYT that seems to me to be rather confused. In the piece, Davies argues that science and religion are not at odds in the way that they are often thought to be since “science has its own faith-based belief system.” And how is this? Well, according to Davies, “All science proceeds on the assumption that nature is ordered in a rational and intelligible way.” This is an assumption that cannot itself be proven and, in fact, is exempt from the testability that is demanded of science more generally. It has to be accepted on faith in order for science to even get off the ground.

Davies goes on to get more specific about how he thinks science requires taking the rationality of the universe on faith.

The most refined expression of the rational intelligibility of the cosmos is found in the laws of physics, the fundamental rules on which nature runs. The laws of gravitation and electromagnetism, the laws that regulate the world within the atom, the laws of motion — all are expressed as tidy mathematical relationships. But where do these laws come from? And why do they have the form that they do?

He concludes that there is not much difference between the belief in the existence of God and the belief in the existence of the laws of nature. In fact, he notes that the very idea of a law of nature is a theological notion (God’s laws).

Historically, he is correct about the source of the idea of natural law in theology, but he fails to recognize that the genesis of the idea need not determine the contemporary use of the term. There is another way of thinking about the assumptions of rationality and about “laws” of nature so that does not commit us to thinking of science as resting on faith.

Bas van Fraassen in his Laws and Symmetry (1990) reviews the metaphorical use “law” and opts for an understanding of the notion that does not require a commitment to the existence of laws of nature. I offer the following in a similar vein.

It is not that science requires the assumption that the universe is rational and governed by laws. What it requires is the belief that we will be able to construct useful theories if we make these sorts of assumptions. It is very much worth noting that this belief is not based on faith. If we take it as a given that there is order in the universe, then we can build theories about it. If those theories work, that is evidence that we are justified in our assumptions. If we were to make these assumptions and were unable construct successful theories, then we would not be justified in them and we would have to abandon them.

But there is another point to make here as well. That we are able to build theories that are successful using these assumptions does not show that the universe is rational and governed by laws. It only shows that we are able to successfully navigate the universe with theories that describe it in that way.

So my point is that this “faith” seems to be of a very different sort than theological faith and so ultimately Davies’ claims that they are both based on faith is at least misleading, if not simply false.

Clearly, then, both religion and science are founded on faith — namely, on belief in the existence of something outside the universe, like an unexplained God or an unexplained set of physical laws,… . For that reason, both monotheistic religion and orthodox science fail to provide a complete account of physical existence.

Contrary to Davies’ claim, the assumption that we can explain and understand key elements of the universe by modeling it as a rational universe with laws does not commit us to the existence of anything outside of the universe. He assumes that science requires a realism about laws and rationality which it does not. He does finish the article asking for science to explain the laws of the universe without appeal to something external to the universe, but isn’t that the task of philosophy of science rather than science? And shouldn’t that explanation be something like the one that I have offered?

Some additional posts on Davies’ op ed piece can be found at: Adventures in Ethics and Science, The Bad Idea Blog, and The Reality Club. I’ve also posted at Knowledge and Experience.

Posted in faith, laws, science and religion | 2 Comments