Tom Morris

Explaining philosophy for social justice warriors and/or trolls

Meet blackwomanvalues.

blackwomanvalues is a black woman. You can tell, right?

blackwomanvalues is apparently transethnic, which is Internet-speak for “I can be whatever the fuck I want, and if you don’t agree, you are just privileged”. Think transgender, except on racial and ethnic lines. There is a high probability of it being a troll. That’s fine by me. If they aren’t a troll, fine, but even if they are, I’m going to unpick a few things they say, because, well, they are interesting and they make some arguments that are quite commonly used by people who probably haven’t studied philosophy very much.

So, here’s a few choice quotes from blackwomanvalues justifying why they identify as a black woman.

It is important to note that race is a subjectively fabricated concept, with no scientifically verifiable cultural or physical characteristics shared universally within any group. Regardless of what you may perceive, there is no definitive formula for the acceptance and identification within a racial group- for objectively, they don’t exist.

Please. If you buy in to this kind of argument, you are conflating different things. That something is socially constructed doesn’t mean it isn’t real in some important sense. Money is socially constructed. It’s pretty arbitrary that when I’m in the United Kingdom I can exchange bits of paper with the Queen’s face on them for goods and services, while in the United States, I use money with pictures of Lincoln and Franklin and Washington on them. Is there some “scientifically verifiable cultural or physical characteristics shared universally” by money that isn’t by non-money? Well, don’t you dare say “a special type of pigment”, because coins are money too, and so are these funny plastic credit and debit cards we carry around. The key thing that distinguishes money from non-money is that money can be used as a method for exchanging value. That function is granted to it by linguistic and social means.

Is Barack Obama scientifically different ten minutes after he was elected President than he was before elected President? No, but there’s an important social distinction, namely he’s the President.

Saying that because something scientifically doesn’t exist in the sense of being undetectable by laboratory methods, that it objectively doesn’t exist is ridiculous—and it misunderstands the way that science operates at multiple layers of explanation. If you honestly buy into this argument and get pissy when someone steals a twenty dollar bill from your wallet, congratulations, you are a hypocrite.

And here’s another thing.

In this case, the pre-englightenment philosopher Rene Descartes statement “Cogito ergo sum”, “I think, therefore I am”, is an important contributing factor to my identification, aided with internal feelings of belonging and similarity.

Descartes’ statement of the cogito, or Descartes’ cogito argument. Oh, fuck, I’m gonna have to explain this, aren’t I?

Imagine you are 17th century philosopher. You set yourself the task of doubting all things. Methodological doubt is your challenge: you want to try and doubt everything and see how far you can take it. Are you sitting at a computer reading something? Well, yes, obviously, but what if it were not true? How can I know it isn’t true? Well, for Descartes, he got right back to the very basics. If you wish to doubt that the external world exists, that’s fine. Perhaps you are having your mind manipulated by an evil demon; these days, you are hooked up in some ghastly contraption with some neuroscientists electrically stimulating your brain. All very Matrix-like. But let’s go one further: what if you didn’t exist at all? You may be a brain in a vat or a victim of the evil demon, but at least you are thinking. There is something, whether it’s a brain or a wibbly-wobbly soul thing or a computer process, and it’s got some kind of consciousness and some intensionality. You know that you are thinking, and you can think about things, like the fact that you can think. Cogito ergo sum: I think, therefore I am. This isn’t a license to believe anything, it’s a response to skepticism about one’s very own existence.

The translation of sum to “I am” is problematic: in English we rather naturally prefer not to use the sentence “I am” alone, preferring an expansion into sentences of the form “I am x”: think of sentences like “I am a vegan”, “I am watching TV”, “I am six foot tall”, “I am gay” and “I am a citizen of the world”.¹ Saying “I exist” would be a much better term, as it is less likely to cause the sort of confusion that sum has.

The problem with using the cogito to justify anything beyond the philosophically basic task of proving that there is a subject is that it leads you to obviously false conclusions. If you think cogito-style reasoning can justify “I think, therefore I’m a black woman in a white guy’s body” (or some other similarly absurd value), then you can substitute anything in the place of x in the sentence “I think, therefore I’m x”. You may want to try and mitigate this problem by switching it to “I think I’m x, therefore I’m x”. This doesn’t work either.² We have situations where we make mistakes. I think I’m looking at a crooked stick, but it’s not crooked. Visual illusions exist. To argue from the certainty implicit in a cogito argument to the justification of anything you happen to think is to make yourself epistemically infallible, that is to say your beliefs can never be wrong. Whether or not you find the cogito convincing, concluding your own infallibility on the basis that one thinks is a conclusion so obviously absurd that one must have made a mistake in one’s understanding.

So, yeah, two bad arguments. They may have been given by a troll in this case, but they are used quite often. And they probably ought not to be. I shall now be on tenterhooks, waiting, desperately, for someone to point out that I’m exercising my “educated privilege”.

Cudd, capsule histories and scientific multiculturalism

I was browsing through Papers on my iPad and ran into a paper in my Epistemology folder called “Multiculturalism as a Cognitive Virtue of Scientific Practice” by Ann E. Cudd in Hypatia, 1998: 13 (3) pp. 43-61. It’s on JSTOR if you have access to that. I can’t remember why I downloaded it, but I’m glad I did.

I’m not sure that I agree with the extent of Cudd’s claim, which is neatly described in the abstract:

I argue that minority and women scientists will be more likely to recognize false, prejudiced assumptions about race and gender that infect theories.

If you grant that as true, that doesn’t justify a policy of multiculturalism in science unless you are willing to state that false, prejudiced assumptions about race and gender infect theories in all areas of the sciences. In, say, social sciences, such assumptions are obviously a problem. We don’t want those studying psychology, anthropology, sociology, criminology and other social sciences to be infected with such prejudiced and false assumptions in their theory-making.

But what about cosmology, computer science and chemistry? I just don’t see the problem. There is a lot of debate about whether being a scientist and being religious is compatible. And, not to draw any equivalence, religiosity may or may not affect scientific endeavour in the same way that racism might. A racist or a misogynist may not make a great cultural historian due to their prejudices; certain brands of religious fundamentalist may not be good evolutionary biologists because of their religious commitments. But if you switch the scientific discipline or the particular prejudice or – how shall I put this? – pre-existing inflexible ontological or epistemic commitments then the problem goes away.

If we accept that religious scientists can defend themselves from charges of inconsistency by saying that their religious commitments “don’t come up” in day-to-day scientific practice, a similar claim can be made for racially prejudiced or misogynistic scientists working in fields where matters of race or gender “don’t come up” - the natural rather than human or social sciences, for instance.¹ And if you can justify it for the individual, I think the force of the multicultural argument holds. In the natural sciences, there is no prima facie case as far as I can see that increasing the representation of currently marginalised groups will have epistemic benefits, although it will obviously have social and moral benefits (racists having to work in close quarters with those they are prejudiced against will hopefully prompt a softening or abandonment of their prejudices).

I’m not totally sure about this though: I am sceptical about the epistemic benefits of multiculturalism, although I think Miranda Fricker’s account of epistemic injustices may provide a case that we cannot neatly partition off the epistemic from the moral. Of course, I think discrimination against women and racial minorities is a social injustice and that resolving those will have great moral and social benefits to both the oppressed and the oppressors. I just think the case that epistemic benefits would accompany these other goods hasn’t been made.

Indeed, let me sketch a scenario that provides an example of where increased cultural diversity may not lead to the recognition of “false, prejudiced assumptions”. Two scientists, Mr. A and Ms. B are both interested in the same area. Mr. A has had a privileged upbringing: access to a high-quality private education, went to a top university and fell naturally into a scientific research job without much struggle. Ms. B had none of those advantages: she grew up in an area and in a family where education was difficult to come by or was not valued by her family and peers, and she had to work exceptionally hard to get into university (etc.). To put it simply: B had to work much harder to make it while for A it came without struggle. The two must now choose hypotheses to investigate. A, stable in his privileged position, chooses to investigate a groundbreaking topic because if the research programme fails to bring about results, he has less to lose. If B fails, she will have greater negative consequences in her career (possibly due to prejudice²) and so engages in safer research less likely to bring about a radical result or to undermine entrenched theories in the field. While in some situations, Ms. B may undermine certain specific prejudiced-based theories in some fields, in general she may be - through no fault of her own - unable to make a radical change in what we know outside of those narrow confines. If we can imagine a preponderance of cases like this, it undermines the case that Cudd is making for epistemic benefits from greater equality.

Of course, as previously stated, I think the moral case matters far more than the epistemic/pragmatic one. Barriers to participation ought to be removed as a part of a fundamental moral commitment to equality and justice, regardless of whether or not it produces better epistemic results or not, for the same reason many countries exclude evidence in courtrooms that has been collected in an illegal or illiberal way even though it would help a jury or judge with justificatory grounds for a more certain and clear-cut judgment of guilt or liability.

In spite of not agreeing with the conclusions of the article, I wanted to praise two things about it:

Firstly, it presents a much more reasonable interpretation of feminist social constructivism of knowledge of the sort given by Sandra Harding. I tend to find myself in the Sokal camp on social constructivism, but this clears up a few myths about it and presents an altogether more reasonable version of feminist social constructivism.

Secondly, it contains a very good capsule history of the history of epistemic foundationalism in the twentieth century, with reference to the logical positivists and Ayer, and the undermining of the idea by Wilfrid Sellars and W.V.O. Quine. The history is no doubt simplified, but such simplified presentations are a necessary stepping stone. You need to get a broad general map from this kind of capsule history to see the general map in order to explore the detail. It was somewhat surprising to see this kind of epistemic history in an article on feminist philosophy of science. (Contra Sokal pessimism, there is hope yet!)

I’d like to keep track of other of these kind of capsule histories in philosophy because I think they are important and have value. Some people will say they are reductionist, and they are right. They are reductionist because the process by which we come to understand the world is reductionist. Hermeneutical circle and all that.