[Yo]u have to learn to accept the rejections themselves gracefully...But sometimes, they simply confirm that you are fighting a losing battle. This referee report was one such. The reviewer complained about my use of feminist terms and concepts throughout the paper – e.g., “hegemonic dominance”, “messages that are not only false but oppressive,” and “hermeneutical injustice,” being the specific phrases which they listed as objectionable. And they went on to remark more generally that “the rhetoric of the ms. is such that it will, I think, (1) turn off some readers and (2) distract from the author’s argument. The author brings in some concepts and language which, whatever their merits, seem dubious to many of us in the analytic tradition.”
As a feminist philosopher in the analytic tradition, this is a very disappointing reaction to encounter. Many of us...take the above terms and concepts to be standard, useful, and indeed vital, stock-in-trade. And the people who the reviewer feared would be so “turned off” by the language as to be “distracted” from my argument seem to include the reviewer themselves, ironically. They not only managed to completely miss, but handily illustrated, my central point in the paper. The point being that if one espouses politically marginalized views within philosophy, then one is disproportionately likely to be dismissed, disparaged, silenced, or even excluded from the discipline altogether. One is less likely to be given a platform in leading journals, for one concrete example, in view of which one is of course less likely to be able to earn a living wage, let alone get tenure.
...Feminist philosophy is virtually absent, and plausibly systematically excluded, from top journals...
These points have important epistemic as well as political implications. (This was the main intended lesson of my paper, which the reviewer missed entirely.) Some epistemologists have argued recently that, if you discover that you are in the minority in philosophy, insofar as most of the philosophers who you take to be smarter and more expert than you take a different view, then you should doubt your own judgment. Generally speaking, you should defer to the experts. In my paper, I argued that this idea fails to be compelling when it comes to philosophy, specifically. For suppose that one forms a certain idiosyncratic philosophical view or judgment. It is difficult to know if one’s view is just foolish (as is admittedly quite likely if no one else has ever or would ever share it), or whether one’s natural intellectual allies have been selected against, essentially. For if (e.g.) feminist voices in philosophy have been silenced or suppressed, all I will hear is silence. Much the same goes for my reviewer, naturally.
So should I be especially worried about the plausibility of my position in virtue of the fact that there are admittedly a fair number of smart, knowledgeable analytic philosophers who think like my reviewer, and are dubious about, or even positively contemptuous of, feminist views and methods? I don't think so. For there might have been plenty of smart, knowledgeable feminist philosophers who would have agreed with me, were they only around and given the platform from which to do so. The problem is that people like my reviewer are the ones with most of the power. And the more they wield this power to exclude feminist philosophers, the more their sense of what ‘we’ do will in fact be accurate.
The final irony is that this is hegemonic dominance par excellence. And it is the fact that it persists, not the concept, which is bullshit.--Kate Manne (of Facebook) [quoted with permission].
I sometimes joke that analytical philosophy has so evolved that it is now easier to get a paper defending the modal intuitiveness of the Trinity published in Philosophical Review than it is to get a hearing for work inspired by, say, De Beauvoir, Fanon or Du Bois. The not-so-funny point is that the methods and technologies deployed by analytical philosophy generate few intellectual barriers to introducing substantive views. This makes it actually easy to discern, if one is willing to do so, that if some views are not being aired, then there are almost always certainly sociological mechanisms that explain the barriers to entry (recall my post on Lewis's intervention on behalf of Priest).
One interesting, such sociological mechanism is the use of images of science in order to create an image of philosophy that make it reasonable to deny alternative views a hearing or to respond to known objections. By an 'image of science,' I mean a list of characteristics of science, often associated with a bunch of epistemic virtues, that get trotted out in polemical or self-justifying context. Two elements of the most pernicious image of science are (i) the idea that experts mutually adjust (or haggle)--this is a view (recall) that has its clearest expression in the work by Aumann (the game theorist who won a Nobel in economics); (ii) the Kuhnian, technocratic idea that science is about paradigmatic consensus. These underwrite the idea of expert deference within philosophy (which understands itself as producing something akin to scientific knowledge, often with some appeal to inference to best explanation). What is often forgotten is that what (i) and (ii) have in common (and this is true of Aumann as much as it is true of Kuhn) is the commitment that science is usefully thought of as perfectly free market in ideas. But even if one arranges one's institutions of knowledge (journals, promotions, tenures, prizes, grants, etc.) to facilitate the reality of (i) and (ii) [this is sometimes called 'social engineering'], it can still be the case that market of ideas is not free.
The reason why we know that the market of ideas is not free in analytical philosophy is that our methods are, as Katrina Hutcheson notes, often non-transparent [quick example: the nature of analysis (recall and here)], which is why there has been a salutary turn to meta-philosophy, and that our top journals have been run as (often in house) factional fiefdoms. Undoubtedly the latter served a purpose in order to ensure the survival and even dominance of analytical philosophy in light of various competitors. It also lead to a lot of toleration for hyper-analytical approaches in areas where they are manifestly not suitable (quick and dirty example: the philosophy of art).*
Manne titled her Facebook post "Losing Battle." Analytical feminism is not losing the battle (recall my post on analytical ideology studies). I say this because analytical feminism has succeeded at attracting a lot of young talented folk (including Manne!), who, in turn, are mining -- and by the magic of philosophical alchemy are transforming -- rapidly some of the best ideas developed outside of analytical philosophy in order to create something genuinely new and important (e.g. Dotson, Haslanger, Stanley, Langton, Saul, Maitra, Fricker, etc.).**
For those of us with a historical sensibility, this sponge-like ability to absorb, transform -- and sometimes unfairly present as wholly new -- is in fact, one of the beautiful, shameless essences of analytical philosophy. The lack of proper shame, alas, also entails that we regularly generate bullies and gatekeepers that confuse their second-rate philosophical abilities for true philosophy.
* See Annelies Monseré's dissertation.
**I am a bit biased because since teaching Fanon, I have considerable sympathy for standpoint epistemology.
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