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ОглавлениеDiscursive Injustice and the History of Analytic Philosophy
§1.0 Overview of the Chapter
The method that analytic philosophers emphasize involves, at the very least, a commitment to the utility of linguistic and logical analysis. In this chapter and the next, I discuss ways in which we can connect such close attention to the philosophy of language and logic, respectively, to issues of social importance where race and gender are particularly salient. These chapters are intended to give direct case studies, which illustrate the need for, and potential of, combining the history of analytic philosophy with considerations of justice. In this chapter, I try to illustrate both sides of this coin by looking at one particular case study—the Ruth Marcus / Saul Kripke dispute over who deserves most credit for initiating the new theory of reference.
While it led to years of heated discussion, which got overly personal at times, I do not believe this debate got to any reasonably settled point. As was mentioned earlier, I hope to show that, while Soames is right that Kripke cannot be accused of plagiarism, there is good reason to believe that the entire discipline should be accused of discursive injustice in its treatment of Marcus’ works. That is to say, because Marcus was a woman in a field dominated by men,1 her speech acts were not given the correct uptake—her expert assertions and arguments being treated as mere suggestions. I begin with this as a case study because it allows us to see a clear case of analytic tools being used to identify a distinctive type of injustice and shows us how analytic tools can actually help us fight such injustices.
§1.1 Quentin Smith on the New Theory of Reference, Ruth Marcus, and Saul Kripke
I began the introduction with a number of quotations from philosophers with vastly different positions on how connected work in analytic philosophy is to goals of moral significance like that of increasing social, gender, and racial justice. I believe the existence of such different positions can be explained by the fact that there is much potential for critical analytic work, but this potential has all-too-rarely been realized. The theorists who are hopeful about this relationship focus on that potential and those who are despairing of this relationship focus on the actual absence. Here, I illustrate both sides of this coin by looking at one particular case study—the Marcus/Kripke dispute.
More than twenty-five years ago, Quentin Smith gave his paper at the APA on the relative priority of Ruth Barcan Marcus and Saul Kripke with respect to the “new theory of reference”—that cluster of views on naming, reference, and semantics, which took the field away from the descriptivist theories of Frege, Russell, and Wittgenstein. While this led to years of heated discussion, which got overly personal at times, I do not believe the debate got to any reasonably settled point. In this chapter, I show that, while Soames is right that Kripke cannot be accused of plagiarism, there is good reason to believe that the entire discipline of philosophy should be accused of—what Rebecca Kukla (2014) has called—discursive injustice in its treatment of Marcus’ works. I begin with this as a case study, despite the fact that it comes closer to the end of the era, which I will focus on, because it:
(1) allows us to see a clear case of analytic tools being used to identify a distinctive type of injustice,
(2) allows us to see why analytic philosophy as an institution needs to—as a perpetrator of injustice—pay more attention to thinking about injustice, and
(3) gives us a model for thinking about how this can be done more going forward.
Given just how central Kripke’s work is to the institution of analytic philosophy over the last fifty to sixty years, such a case exhibiting all of (1)–(3) should not be overlooked. Before we can get to any of that, though, we must first set the stage that we will be discussing with some basic historical facts.
The saga under consideration began in December of 1994, when Quentin Smith gave a paper at the Eastern APA in Boston, which “argued that Ruth Barcan Marcus’ 1961 article on ‘Modalities and Intensional Languages’ originated many of the key ideas of the New Theory of Reference that have often been attributed to Saul Kripke and others” (Smith 1995a, 179). At the same session, Scott Soames gave a strong reply, which argued that “Smith does Kripke a grave injustice” since “providing [Marcus and others] with proper credit does not result in a reassessment of the seminal role of Kripke and others as primary founders of contemporary nondescriptivist theories of reference” (Soames 1995, 208). Consistent with APA practice, Smith also gave a reply to that reply in which he argues that, given the concessions Soames makes, “if Soames is to draw a conclusion that is consistent . . . he should have concluded that the evidence [Smith] presented established that Marcus was a primary founder of the New Theory of Reference, even though Soames does not agree with all of the points [Smith] made about her primacy” (Smith 1995b, 243).
Since this APA session predictably created a great deal of discussion and controversy, all three of these papers were published in Synthese in August 1995. Roughly a year later, Soames’ colleague, John Burgess, joined the discussion with his October 1996 paper “Marcus, Kripke, and Names.” Here, Burgess joins the side of both Kripke and Soames, arguing against Marcus’ “claim, which has subsequently been stated more explicitly by others . . . that certain remarks on names in her colloquium talk “Modalities and Intensional Languages” anticipate in an important but unacknowledged way Saul Kripke’s discussion of names in his lecture series “Naming and Necessity”” (Burgess 1996, 1). In 1998, all of the papers mentioned so far were gathered together—along with new contributions from Burgess, Smith, and Soames, as well as some pieces providing historical context—in the book The New Theory of Reference: Kripke, Marcus, and Its Origins. This controversy was not limited to specialists, either, receiving popular coverage by Jim Holt (friendly to Smith’s original) in the January/February 1996 issue of Lingua Franca and Stephen Neale (falling squarely in the Burgess/Soames camp) in the February 2001 Times Literary Supplement. As if to put in his last word on the matter, Soames then published his two-volume history of analytic philosophy in 2003 with Kripke as the culmination and primary hero (and almost no mention of Marcus) (Soames 2003a, 2003b).2
Not only has little agreement been made on the substantive issues, there was significant controversy over whether or not the debate should have even happened in the way it did in the first place. Within a year of the initial session, Anscombe, Davidson, Geach, and Nagel published a letter to the editor in the APA Proceedings stating their “dismay” due to the fact that “a session at a national APA meeting is not the proper forum in which to level ethical accusations against a member of our profession, even if the charges were plausibly defended.” Furthermore, while it has not featured as prominently in the published literature, my personal experience evidences the fact that the matter has not left philosophers’ minds. At my very first departmental gathering in graduate school in 2010, it became one of the significant topics of conversation—and this was not the only departmental event that involved such a conversation. Since then, I have also been a part of multiple conversations on the dispute at various conferences on the history of analytic philosophy. When I gave earlier versions of this chapter as talks at conferences, I also had responses ranging from laughter and scoffing to invitations to contribute my work.
For these reasons, I believe it is time to reopen the debate in the published literature. In doing so, I will defend a more middling position than was gotten from either the Smith or Soames side of the debate. In particular, I will be trying to flesh out what Jaakko Hintikka might have meant when he said,
I’ve no doubt that Kripke has acted in good faith . . . he’s not appropriating anyone else’s ideas, at least consciously. . . . The real blame in all this lies with the philosophical community—which, owing to its uncritical, romantic view of this prodigy, is far too quick to give him credit for new ideas while neglecting the contributions of others. Kripke probably got his results independently, but why should he get all the credit? (Holt 2018, 328)
Focusing more on Marcus not getting credit than Kripke getting credit, again, I will argue that this mistake made by the philosophical community was perpetrating sexist discursive injustice against a woman in a field dominated by men, which implicitly expects genius to be masculine. Toward this end, we will discuss a section each on:
(1) Smith’s claims from the original APA session, as well as Soames’ and Burgess’ responses to them,
(2) oddities that can be found in Soames’ and Burgess’ responses to Smith,
(3) the general background for Kukla’s notion of discursive injustice,
(4) an argument that discursive injustice is the best explanation for what went on in the Kripke/Marcus dispute, and
(5) gesturing at how we might proceed with our investigations into the history of philosophy with this case in mind.
§1.2 Scott Soames and John Burgess Respond to Quentin Smith
As has been alluded to, Smith’s original APA paper has as primary thesis that there is a combination of six main theses associated with the New Theory of Reference (NTR), which originated in Ruth Barcan Marcus’ work. A subsidiary claim is that this has been missed because Kripke originally misunderstood Marcus’ work and, as a result, did not cite it. The works discussed by Smith, which he thinks Kripke should have cited, include her pioneering works on quantified modal logic from 1946 to 1947 (Marcus 1946a, 1946b, 1947) and, more importantly, her “Modalities and Intensional Languages” (Marcus 1961). This last paper is most relevant to the central pieces of NTR and Kripke was present at the February 1962 Boston Colloquium for the Philosophy of Science where it was read and discussed. According to Smith, if Kripke and those following him had properly read, understood, and cited Marcus, they would have found a picture with all of the following theses of NTR:
[T1] Proper names are directly referential, rather than being strongly equatable with, or disguised, definite descriptions.
[T2] Just because a definite description has been used to fix the referent of a name, this does not mean that the name goes on to carry the meaning of that description.
[T3] The modal argument refutes descriptivist theories of proper names.
[T4] Statements of identity express necessary propositions (i.e., the necessity of identity).
[T5] Proper names are rigid designators.
[T6] There exist necessary a posteriori truths. (Smith 1995a, 182–86)
From here, we should also survey Soames’ and Burgess’ responses in Soames (1995) and Burgess (1998). Soames’ (1995) primary issues with Smith (1995a) can be broken down into general worries and specific concerns with each of T1–T6. On the more general side, he says that “[Marcus’] entire discussion of the meaning and reference of names, as well as their relations to descriptions, covers only five or six pages [. . .] and defenses of the various doctrines of the so-called ‘new theory’ would not fit into such a small space” (Soames 1995, 193). With respect to T1–T6, individually, Soames says something different about each that he believes should make us question each one of Smith’s attributions to Marcus. In particular, insofar as T1 and T3 are to be found in work by Marcus, they are also to be found in works by Smullyan (1947, 1948) and Fitch (1949). So, all three of them provided “significant anticipations of some of the central theses of contemporary non-Fregean theories of reference,” but nothing that would single out Marcus as a founder of such theories (Soames 1995, 208).
Something similar can be said for Soames’ response to Smith’s claims about T4 and T5—there is a sense in which they contain a kernel of truth, but ultimately need to be qualified significantly. In particular, Marcus can be attributed with an implicit step along the way toward T4 and T5, but she does not anticipate the full-blown theses that Kripke argued for in the arena. To see this, lets first look at T4—the necessity of identity. Here, Soames rightly points out that this is an ambiguous phrase which can mean that:
(1) statements of identity involving variables express necessary propositions (i.e., (∀x) (∀y) (x = y→ x = y)),
(2) statements of identity involving proper names express necessary propositions, or
(3) statements of identity involving singular terms express necessary propositions.
This is important because the necessity of identity with respect to variables and proper names—(1) and (2)—seem correct, while the necessity of identity with respect to singular terms (n.b. contingent definite descriptions) is false (Soames 1995, 202). Furthermore, while Marcus (1947) proved that the necessity of identity with respect to variables is true, she does not discuss the necessity of identity with respect to proper names—the view that Kripke (1980) got to. Given this, we can no more attribute to her the true view—(2)—that there is a necessity of identity with respect to proper names than we can the false view—(3)—that there is a necessity of identity with respect to singular terms, generally. Similarly, with respect to T5, Soames argues that “[Marcus] can be seen, following Smullyan and Fitch, as implicitly treating proper names as rigid” (Soames 1995, 203). That said, without a possible-worlds semantics, Marcus’ early work does not have the notion of a referent at a world and, thus, cannot be said to have any explicit views concerning rigid designation—reference to just one object across all possible worlds.
Finally, Soames’ responses to T2 and T6 are much less congenial. With respect to T2—the idea that just because a definite description has been used to fix the referent of a name, this does not mean that the name goes on to carry the meaning of that description—Soames argues that Smith misunderstands Marcus’ (& Kripke’s) work and cites it problematically. To make his case for this, he begins by pointing out that understanding exactly what is behind T2 is somewhat difficult. Because of this, he spends some time trying to spell out exactly what T2 asserts, ultimately claiming that T2 requires holding that:
(1) “sometimes the referent of a name is semantically fixed by an associated definite description.”
(2) “even though the description is not synonymous with the name.”
(3) “if the referent of a name is semantically fixed by a certain description, then being a competent speaker who understands the name will involve knowing that if the name has a referent at all, it must be one that satisfies the description.”
(4) “if a name N has its referent semantically fixed by a description D, then one who understands the sentence ‘If N exists, then N is D’ will know, without empirical investigation, that it expresses a truth.” (Soames 1995, 199–200)
Unfortunately, Soames claims nothing quite to the level of any of (1)–(4) can be found in Marcus (1961) because “What she was really saying was that despite the fact that recognizing something as a thing presupposes a readiness to apply descriptions to it, nevertheless we have a linguistic device, the proper name, which allows us to refer to a thing without describing it” (Soames 1995, 200).
As for T6, Soames again argues that Smith has failed to understand Marcus’ and Kripke’s views on the matters at hand. In particular, Soames points out that Marcus could not have introduced the existence of the necessary a posteriori because Marcus fails to use “a posteriori” anywhere in her paper and identifies the necessary with the tautologous, with the analytic. Furthermore, Marcus holds that co-referential proper names are intersubstitutable in all contexts. So, if the following is true—“Krista knows a priori that Hesperus = Hesperus”—so too should the next sentence be true—“Krista knows a priori that Hesperus = Phosphorus.” Given this, Soames says that “it is as clear as anything can be that Marcus did not in her 1961 article embrace the notion of necessary a posteriori identities” (Soames 1995, 205).
With Soames’ (1995) detailed responses to the particular theses in Smith’s original paper aside, it will also be instructive to look at Burgess’ (1998) responses. This is because Burgess takes a step back to argue that the paper does not just suffer from problems of detail, but also has major problems in its underlying methodology. More specifically, Burgess “begin[s] by listing ten reasons why Smith’s original paper should never have been taken seriously as a contribution to historical scholarship, ten ways in which the paper conspicuously violates elementary rules of historiographical methodology” (Burgess 1998, 125). Here, I will focus on just the first four of these reasons. This is because Burgess is just straightforwardly correct about the last six. That said, admitting this does not undermine the primary goal of Smith (1995a). Rather, it shows that it needs significant work to clean it up. Furthermore, Burgess himself admits that there is an important difference between the first four and the last six when he says “[a]s a result of the four methodological errors just enumerated, Smith approaches the texts asking the wrong question,” whereas the last six simply cause problems of interpretation in answering those questions (Burgess 1998, 127).
With these preliminaries aside, we move to the list of reasons that Burgess provides for saying that Smith (1995a), the beginning of this saga, never should have happened in the first place. In the order he considers them, the original paper should never have been allowed to be presented because:
[R1] Smith reduces a complex philosophical theory to a list of a half-dozen points.
[R2] Smith does not seriously examine Kripke’s work.
[R3] Smith conflates introducing theses with endorsing those theses.
[R4] Smith uses highly ambiguous labels for the theses under discussion.
While these are relatively self-explanatory, a few words about each is in order. As far as R1 is concerned, Smith’s reduction of NTR to T1–T6 is problematic because “the importance of a complex theory consists at least as much in the interconnections it establishes among its novel elements” and “it is very far from being [a reasonably accurate enumeration of the novelties of the ‘new’ theory]” (Burgess 1998, 125–26). Furthermore, this list is so problematic because of what Burgess points out in R2—that the list comes from insufficient engagement with Kripke’s original texts. Evidence of the fact that Smith has not significantly examined Kripke’s work is given in the form of the fact that “he omits from his list important novelties of the ‘new’ theory”, including the “notable example [of] the historical chain account of the reference of a name to its bearer” (Burgess 1998, 126).
Similarly, R3 is supposed to result from the fact that Smith has not only failed to carefully comb the literature after Marcus (1961), but also failed to carefully comb through prior literature. As Soames (1995) pointed out, some of T1–T6 are in fact endorsed by Marcus (1961), but she could not have originated them as she acknowledged following up on work from Smullyan (1947, 1948) and Fitch (1949, 1950). Finally, R4 is meant to draw our attention to phrases from T1–T6 such as “direct reference” and “necessity of identity.” Burgess takes these to be problematic because they are ambiguous and Smith has not checked to be sure that they refer to the same thing when accurately describing a view of Marcus’ and when accurately describing a view of Kripke’s. Again, putting R1–R4 together, Burgess concludes,
As a result of the four methodological errors just enumerated, Smith approaches the texts asking the wrong question. He simply asks whether there are passages in Marcus (1963) that could be read as endorsements of doctrines to which the labels “direct reference” and “necessity of identity” and so on could be applied. (Burgess 1998, 127)
Hence, according to Soames (1995) and Burgess (1998),
(1) Smith (1995a, 1995b) should not have been published in the first place,
(2) even if their main theses could have been argued for responsibly, these actual attempts would still have methodological problems in arguing through T1–T6 as a stand-in for NTR, and
(3) even if they did not, the individual attributions of T1–T6 would all be problematic.
§1.3 Oddities in Soames’ and Burgess’ Responses
Now that we have sketched the basic contours of this debate, we are in a position to move toward saying something about it. Remember, my ultimate goal is to say that Smith has gotten some things right and some things wrong, with similar claims about Soames and Burgess. I will also argue that part of the explanation for this situation is that all three have had their focus in the wrong place. We should not primarily be concerned with Kripke and we should not be concerned with charges of plagiarism or misunderstanding. Rather, we should be primarily concerned with Marcus (even if occasionally in relation to how much credit she has gotten relative to Kripke). Furthermore, I suspect that, and will argue for the conclusion that, a significant cause of the insufficient amount of credit Marcus has received has been her gender—a social phenomenon. Because of that, we ought to be looking at trends within social groups and institutions, rather than isolated, individual actors. In particular, we will look at the institution of academic philosophy as a whole as culprit and gendered discursive injustice as the charge, which will explain this situation.
Before we get to that explanation, though, we need to show that there is something in need of explanation. For this, we will turn to a critique of some of Soames’ and Burgess’ work, since their work is clearer and more precise than Smith’s. In doing so, we could choose to either give external or internal critiques. External critiques of a view are criticisms that come from an ideology or standpoint different from the view being critiqued. Internal critiques, by contrast, criticize a view on its defender’s own terms. They show that the position taken does not live up the principles that it initially grew out of. Internal critiques like these can sometimes be more powerful due to the fact that they grant many assumptions to the opponent. It is one thing to be able to criticize your view using my own beliefs and ideology. It is quite another to be able to criticize your view using your own beliefs, ideology, and worldview.
Given this rhetorical advantage internal critiques have, I will place my focus there. In particular, I will argue that there are some internal oddities to several of Soames’ and Burgess’ responses such that, even if we accept some of what they have to say, we can still support the claim that Marcus has been underappreciated and underrecognized. These oddities will be part of the case that there is something in need of explanation for which discursive injustice will serve as explanans.
Soames
Turning to that internal critique, it is important to note that Soames admits that a combination of three to four of these six theses (namely, a combination of T1, T3, T4, and T5) originated in Marcus’ work. That is to say, the individual theses—T1, T3, and an implicit acceptance of T5—do not originate with Marcus. Soames holds that Smullyan and Fitch also argued for T1 and T3, while also implicitly endorsing T5. Even on Soames’ picture, the combination of these with T4—the necessity of identity (on the variables, not proper names, reading)—is original with Marcus’ views, though. This is significant on its own. If Marcus can be uniquely credited with more than half of the six theses connected to NTR in the debate, shouldn’t she receive more credit than she has? This is especially the case given that there is the additional oddity that Soames’ hesitation to give complete credit to Marcus on T4 is at odds with Kripke, who says “Marcus says that identities between names are necessary” (Kripke 1980, 100).
Of course, one may obviously respond to this that Soames admits that Marcus, Smullyan, and Fitch, “deserve a degree of recognition that they are often not given” (Soames 1995, 200) and “should be praised for their prescient insights” (Soames 1995, 208). This is not a completely satisfactory response, though. Part of Soames’ point in connecting Smullyan and Fitch to T1, T3, and T5 seems to be that there is something odd about Smith’s singling out of Marcus. Given that Marcus clearly did much more with respect to T4 than Smullyan or Fitch, this is at odds with Soames’ own points. Furthermore, Soames himself gives further reason to single out Marcus as having been particularly wronged in the lack of credit and recognition she has received. As mentioned earlier, part of his justification for saying Marcus is not deserving of “founder” status is that her discussion was not long and detailed enough. That said, Soames also admits that “although Marcus’ discussion of these points is brief, it is more detailed and explicit than those of Smullyan and Fitch” (Soames 1995, 197). Again, putting Soames’ own views together, this would mean Marcus is significantly more deserving of recognition than Smullyan or Fitch.3
While I think the preceding gives reason to believe that Marcus’ contributions to NTR clearly deserve more recognition if T1–T6 is a good way to carry out the debate, more needs to be said about this antecedent. Remember, this is the main thrust of Burgess (1998)—that Smith’s (1995a, 1995b) methodological errors set us out on the wrong trajectory to begin with. So, in order for my responses to Soames (1995) to have as much weight as I would like them to, we will need to have something to say in response to Burgess’ (1998) R1–R4 as well. Again, given its rhetorical advantages, I will focus on internal critiques of Burgess’ thoughts on these four reasons. In particular, I will argue that R1 and R4 are inconsistent with his praise of Soames’ historical work, whereas R2 and R3 are problems that Burgess’ own work falls prey to. Given this, Burgess cannot consistently say we ought to dismiss Smith’s work while promoting his own and Soames’.
Burgess
Starting with those reasons that I claim Burgess’ own work falls prey to, remember that Burgess argues for R2 on the grounds that Smith did not include some of Kripke’s most important contributions to NTR. In particular, Burgess criticizes Smith for not having recognized the importance of Kripke’s causal historical theory of reference—the idea that names and their referents are passed on from user to user after an initial baptism by being causally connected to the initial bearer. Given that Burgess is criticizing Smith for not having sufficiently looked into his interlocutor’s views, this is a strange claim to make. This is because Smith brings up the causal historical theory of reference multiple times in his work, even explicitly saying “[o]f course some of the ideas in “Naming and Necessity” are genuinely new, such as the causal chain picture of the reference of names, the idea that natural kind terms are rigid designators and the theory of the necessity of origins” (Smith 1995a, 186).
One might still complain that, while Smith recognizes this, he does not sufficiently connect it to NTR since he leaves it out of T1–T6. This seems to be part of what Burgess is saying when he says “[t]he result is that he omits from his list important novelties of the ‘new’ theory” (Burgess 1998, 126). That said, while it is a controversial decision, the causal historical theory of reference does not have nearly the support that T1–T6 do. For starters, theorists have offered compelling arguments that being causally connected to the object of an initial baptism is neither necessary nor sufficient for being the referent of a name. For instance, despite the fact that our current uses of “Madagascar” are causally connected to an initial baptism of part of Somalia, the referent of “Madagascar” is Madagascar—the island off of East Africa (Evans 1973). Furthermore, despite none of us being causally connected to abstract objects, we refer to them quite regularly.
Perhaps even more important for our discussion is that subscribing to the causal historical theory of reference is neither necessary nor sufficient for subscribing to NTR. For instance, causal descriptivists who hold that the description that gives the meaning of a name contains reference to such a causal historical chain subscribe to a causal theory without being New Theorists and Gillian Russell subscribes to NTR without holding on to the causal theory. Russell adopts all of T1–T6, much more of Kripke’s and Kaplan’s work, and was a student of Soames as well as Burgess. That said, she does not accept Kripke’s causal historical theory of reference because she is “uncomfortable with the idea that the reference determiner for an expression might be different for different speakers.” Rather, Russell offers a plausible alternative that “it is the condition specified by the baptiser (using a description, or by pointing) and used to pick out a referent for the name when it was introduced” (Russell 2008, 47).4
Of course, one might still, as Burgess does, worry that without contributions above and beyond T1–T6 “the views of Kripke do not emerge clearly” (Burgess 1998, 126). This is no doubt true, but I do not think it bears on what should be our proper concerns. As mentioned earlier, I do think that Smith, and subsequently Soames and Burgess, made this debate far too much about Kripke. Our concern should be Marcus and her relationship to NTR. Kripke has many views which go beyond NTR shared by “Kripke, Kaplan, Donnellan, Putnam, Perry, Salmon, Soames, Almog, Wettstein and a number of other contemporary philosophers” (Smith 1995a, 179). With our proper concerns in mind, it is no longer such a sin to have left out some of Kripke’s views—even those that are wildly important and novel.
Turning to R3, Burgess holds that it is problematic for one to claim that somebody has introduced something just by endorsing that something because it very obviously could have shown up earlier in the literature. And, as has been mentioned multiple times now, several of the theses in T1–T6 were earlier endorsed by Smullyan and Fitch, among others. Here, though, we find a potential clash with R1 because, again, “the importance of a complex theory consists at least as much in the interconnections it establishes among its novel elements” (Burgess 1998, 125–26). And, while T1, T3, and T5 may have shown up in Smullyan’s and Fitch’s works earlier, these in connection with a formal proof of T4 were new to Marcus’ work. Furthermore, Smith argues that “[t]his modal argument [T3] goes back to Marcus’ formal proof of the necessity of identity [T4] in her extension of S4” (Smith 1995a, 183). Granted, Soames and Burgess both take issue with this way of understanding the relationship between the theses. That said, this is a substantive disagreement (one that I happen to agree with Soames and Burgess on), rather than the methodological one which Burgess thinks helped make the paper inappropriate for presentation.5 Hence, Burgess’ claiming that Smith’s work falls prey to R3 falls prey to his own R1—in thinking that Smith has confused endorsing and introducing part of NTR, he has failed to consider the important interconnections therein.
With R1 coming into the discussion, we should turn to it. Again, my goal with respect to R1 is to show that there is something odd about Burgess saying it should rule out Smith’s work, because it would also rule out much of Soames’ historical work (and much good history). Remember, Burgess claims that the way R1 contributed to Smith’s work being such that it “should never have been taken seriously as a contribution to historical scholarship” was because “[Smith] attempts to reduce a complex philosophical theory to a list of a half-dozen discrete points” (Burgess 1998, 125). Unfortunately, Soames’ most well-known and recognized contribution to the history on these matters—Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century: The Age of Meaning—does this as well.
On the first page of chapter 1, Soames reduces the philosophical work of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations to several discrete views on three discrete topics.6 The discrete topics are:
(i) a critique of what Wittgenstein regards as the dominant referential conception of meaning, and a proposal to replace it with a conception in which to use language meaningfully is to master a certain kind of social practice; (ii) a critique of the previously dominant conception of philosophical analysis, and the substitution of a new conception of analysis to play the central role in philosophy; and (iii) the development of a new philosophical psychology. (Soames 2003b, 3)
Now, I would argue that Philosophical Investigations is a more complex work than Naming and Necessity (and that is meant as a criticism of Wittgenstein, not Kripke). That said, I do not think this means that there is anything wrong with Soames’ work.7 This is what analytic philosophy does at its best—it breaks complex views into the simplest pieces possible and their interrelations. So, again, holding that R1 should rule out Smith’s historical work would also rule out Soames’ own historical work and much good work on the history of philosophy. We find a similar issue in relation to R4—Burgess’ worry that Smith conducts his investigation using “especially ambiguous” terms such as “direct reference” and “necessity of identity.”
Burgess’ R4 would rule out much of Soames’ historical work (and much good history). In fact, every class I took on the history of twentieth century analytic philosophy, which covered matters related to this debate, involved similar use of the terms “direct reference” and “necessity of identity.”
The Discipline Broadly
Now, remember that my goal is not to make charges against Kripke, Soames, Burgess, or any isolated individuals. My goal is to show that analytic philosophy has institutional problems with gender and to use the lack of recognition that Ruth Barcan Marcus has received as an example of that. The point of focusing on Soames and Burgess has been to start a pattern of showing lack of recognition, which is connected to under-citation and under-engagement with Marcus’ work. To continue that pattern, let us turn to the broader literature.8
As I mentioned in the introduction, one of the things that I think warrants marking off a new phase of the analytic movement in the mid-1990s was the development of a self-conscious subfield of the history of analytic philosophy. Consistent with this increased self-reflection, there has also been a notable increase in work dedicated to metametaphysics and meta-philosophy. Because of their connection to NTR, both of these literatures provide a valuable resource for our discussion. Table 1.1 shows some of what we learn by looking at representative examples from these literatures (please note that the numerals in the Kripke and Marcus columns for histories of analytic philosophy and books on meta-philosophy represent numbers of pages on which they are discussed, while the numerals for the anthologies of analytic philosophy and the philosophy of language represent the number of works anthologized).9
So, across these eighteen works, we find 361 pages dedicated to discussion of Kripke’s work and just forty-four pages of discussion of Marcus’ work, with eight anthology entries of Kripke’s work and none of Marcus’ work. With just what has been admitted about Marcus’ contributions so far, this should seem problematic. That said, I will return in the next chapter to some more of Marcus’ contributions that I hope will bolster this case.
For now, I think it will be helpful to look at one further reference point to see something of the pattern of oddities in the discipline’s reception of Marcus’ work. One way to bring the whole discipline under the microscope is to look at the number of citations Marcus’ work has received—as done in table 1.2. To give us a baseline, I will include the five most-cited works of Kripke’s next to the five most-cited works of Marcus’. Also, so as to not be seen as begging the question, I include some philosophers who were ranked around Ruth Barcan Marcus in the poll that Brian Leiter ran on his blog in January 2015 asking philosophers to rank the most important Anglophone philosophers between 1945 and 2000.10
Note that, despite finishing one spot below Alasdair MacIntyre and one spot above Judith Jarvis Thomson, Ruth Marcus has been cited thousands of times less than either of them. Since one might worry that this has to do with the areas of philosophy that the relevant thinkers worked in, I also included David Kaplan, who worked in very similar areas to Marcus. Despite finishing nine spots below Marcus in the Leiter poll, Kaplan too has been cited thousands of times more than Marcus.
Table 1.1 Insufficient Recognition and Engagement
Furthermore, notice that Thomson, the only other woman on this list, has the second fewest citations. Again, to try to compare apples to apples, I included R. M. Hare in the list, a fellow ethicist working at relatively similar times. Despite her finishing five spots above Hare, Thomson has thousands fewer citations. I claim that we are hard pressed to plausibly explain this insufficient recognition, insufficient engagement, and insufficient citation in any other way than gendered injustice. It is toward making good on that claim that we now turn.
Table 1.2 Insufficient Engagement and Citation
§1.4 Kukla on Discursive Injustice
With the case for the existence of these oddities behind us, we can finally turn to an explication of the notion of discursive injustice. Kukla defines it as follows:
DEF’N: One is a victim of discursive injustice when they “face a systematic inability to produce a specific kind of speech act that they are entitled to perform” simply because they are a member of a disadvantaged group. (Kukla 2014, 440)11
That is, Kukla’s work is an application of Austin’s (1962) theory of speech acts. Like speech act theory, generally, we begin with the distinction between saying something—the locutionary act—and the actions we engage in by saying something—the illocutionary acts. Once we recognize that there is a difference between locutionary and illocutionary acts, we should also realize that there is a difference between perlocutionary failures. Sometimes the audience does not grasp the locutionary content, other times they do not grasp the illocutionary force. Furthermore, there are times when this incorrect uptake can alter the illocutionary structure of the original speech act. Finally, within this class, there are times when that inability to produce the rightfully intended illocutionary force/act happens because of incorrect uptake due to a marginalized social identity of the speaker. These are the discursive injustices.
To make discursive injustice as clear as possible, Kukla begins with examples of the genus of which discursive injustice is a species—cases where one intends to perform one illocutionary act, but something goes awry because the audience gives it the wrong uptake. For instance, imagine I am out with my partner, say to them “will you marry me?” intending for this to be a proposal, but my partner does not think I have any intention to be serious and laughs at what I have said. If this happens, there is a very real sense in which I have made a joke, rather than a proposal (Kukla 2014, 443).12 Furthermore, Davidson’s example of an actor on stage trying to warn the audience of a fire in the back of the theater, but failing to do so because the audience thinks this is part of the performance provides us another example (Kukla 2014, 447). Again, though the speakers have intended to produce one illocutionary act, the whole speech activity was altered by the conversation partners giving the incorrect perlocutionary uptake.
Building up to our crescendo, Kukla then provides a striking example of a case where this happens as a result of gender—a case of discursive injustice.
Celia is a floor manager at a heavy machinery factory where 95% of the workers are male. It is part of her job description that she has the authority to give orders to the workers on her floor, and that she should use this authority. She uses straightforward, polite locutions to tell her workers what to do: “Please put that pile over here,” “Your break will be at 1:00 today,” and so on. Her workers, however, think she is a “bitch,” and compliance is low. Why? One possible explanation is that the workers are just being blatantly sexist and insubordinate. They are refusing to follow her orders, which is still a way of taking them as orders. This sort of direct transgression is relatively straightforward. However, a subtler and more interesting explanation is that even though Celia is entitled to issue orders in this context, and however much she follows the conventions that typically would mark her speech acts as orders, because of her gender her workers take her as issuing requests instead. (Kukla 2014, 445–46)
This difference between requests and orders is quite important, since following an order is obligatory and granting a request is not. Since one can always permissibly decline to grant a request, we often expect there to be thanks from the requestor when the request has been granted. Such gratitude is unnecessary for following an order, though. This means either that Celia can thank her employees and undermine her authority or not thank her employees and be called a “bitch”.13
In addition, Kukla gives other classes of discursive injustice based on grammatical structures other than those in the imperative mood. One particular type of discursive injustice that will become important to our discussion later is in relation to what Kukla calls “entreaties to speak”:
One way the performative force of a speech act can be derailed is if one speaks as an insider—a player of a game that comes with certain discursive privileges—but is not given uptake as one. (Kukla 2014, 448)
Unfortunately,
In many scenarios, I suggest, women have good reasons to believe that they are already participants in a discursive game, until it becomes clear from how their speech receives uptake that their attempted moves within the game are actually functioning as entreaties to join it. (Kukla 2014, 449)
This is particularly relevant given that philosophy is a field that thinks that outsiders just do not understand quite how we do things in philosophy and is a field dominated by men. As Kukla continues,
I think we see this kind of discursive injustice frequently when women try to speak as experts in a male-dominated field. Expert speech has a specific kind of default weight. This takes many forms. An expert’s claims about his subject matter, though never appropriately treated as infallible, become more than just truth claims to be subjected to scrutiny and challenge at the whim of any interlocutor. When someone makes a claim about his area of expertise, this claim, though challengeable, has prima facie standing; his recognized expert status itself gives listeners some reason to trust what he says. Conversely, other experts do not get to just overrule his claims in virtue of their own expertise, as they could with a lay speaker. (Kukla 2014, 449)
So, this will be the type of discursive injustice we will be discussing in relation to our debate—injustice on the basis of gender and unwillingness to recognize expertise.
Before we do that, though, it is important to note that there is nothing unique about gender here and nothing that requires that the relevant mistaken attitude disrupting the uptake be about hierarchy, even if it creates or perpetuates hierarchy. That is to say, sometimes discursive injustice occurs as a result of a stereotype that does not involve hierarchical concepts like “manager” or “expert,” but which is easily connected to hierarchies. For instance, there are many stereotypes of people with mental illnesses as generally deranged or irrational. As a result, if somebody knows I have a mental illness and hears me assert something about a problem I have observed, they may dismiss my speech acts as not inherently contentful or rational, but rather simply an acoustic blast produced by chemical misfirings in my brain.14 This may significantly impact my ability to have my problems addressed. Similar examples for many different dimensions of identity can clearly be generated based on stereotypes peculiar to that identity type and how they relate to a listener’s ability to recognize the speaker as meeting the preconditions for their intended speech act.
§1.5 Discursive Injustice in This Case
Now that we have been through a section on the explanandum (§1.3) and a section on the essential concept we will use in the explanans (§1.4), it is time to look at my particular application of discursive injustice as a way to explain this case. For this, we will use a simple model for abduction where a plausible inference to the best explanation must first meet Peirce’s general form for abductions:
“[P1:] The surprising fact, C, is observed.”
[P2:] But if A were true, C would be a matter of course.
[CONCLUSION:] Hence, there is reason to suspect that A is true.” (Peirce Collected Papers, 5.189)
Of course, a good abduction is an inference to the best explanation, so we must follow some further rules above and beyond meeting Peirce’s general form:
(1) A plausible abduction is compared to other explanations.
(2) A plausible explanation will be as simple as possible (i.e., abides Ockham’s razor).
(3) A plausible explanation will be as consistent and coherent with background knowledge as possible (and so will admit of generalization).
With this model of abduction in mind, we can turn to the principle argument of the chapter to which we have been building. First, the basic structure meeting Peirce’s general form for abductions:
P1: There is this surprising fact that Marcus has been under-cited, under-taught, under-anthologized, and underappreciated.
P2: If Marcus has been the victim of discursive injustice, then it would be unsurprising that Marcus has been under-cited, under-taught, under-anthologized, and underappreciated.
CONCLUSION: There is reason to suspect that Marcus has been the victim of rampant discursive injustice.
Filling this out a bit more, my suggestion is that part of the reason Marcus has not been sufficiently recognized for her contributions to the development of NTR and analytic philosophy, more generally, is because some of her speech acts were given the wrong uptake. In particular, her expert assertions and arguments were treated as mere suggestions because she was working in a field with sexist expectations about gender and expertise. This matters greatly because a suggestion and an argument from an expert put very different expectations on us. It is never expected that one need to respond to a mere suggestion—one can always decide to take or leave it. An argument from an expert carries with it much more weight and much more expectation—one should be prepared to engage with and have something to say about an expert’s argument in their area.
To give a concrete picture of what I have in mind, I am suggesting that what happened over Marcus’ career was something of an extended version of what I have seen in conference and colloquium presentations all too many times in my career. Somebody gets finished giving a talk and the Q&A session starts. After a while, a woman raises her hand and gives a comment to the presenter who responds politely enough with something like “thank you for the suggestion—I’ll consider that.” Several minutes pass and a man raises his hand, making very similar points, but this time the presenter responds “oh, wow—what a great argument. I will write that down and have to come up with a response for it in the published piece.” So, what was treated as a mere suggestion from a woman, carrying with it no obligation to respond, is something that would be treated as an expert argument coming from a man.15 And, to be clear that my claim about which particular speech acts were involved in this discursive injustice is not coming out of nowhere, consider the following passages from Soames:
I mentioned that in her early work Marcus suggested that ordinary proper names might be Russellian logically proper names. (Soames 1995, 192, my emphasis) and
In her later work, especially the 1961 paper cited by Smith, Marcus adopted these theses of Smullyan and Fitch, essentially suggesting that ordinary proper names might be Russellian logically proper names. (Soames 1995, 193, my emphasis)
Yet again, my aim here is not to single out Soames and Burgess. My point is to give another representative example, which is close to the heart of this debate and continues the kind of pattern I have been illustrating for several sections now. And with general patterns in mind, it is important to remember that an explanation in terms of sexist discursive injustice coheres well with what we know about the discipline as a whole. It should be no shock that the rampant sexism we find throughout the history of philosophy (and almost all institutions that have ever existed) would make its way into the twists and turns of the literature like this.16 In fact, quite sadly, it coheres quite well with what we know about Marcus’ career in academia.
From the time she arrived at Yale for graduate school, she was subjected to regular patriarchal structures and misogynistic actors—through “separate but not equal” housing for women, exclusion from parts of the library, and being asked by the department chair to not take her duly elected position of president of the philosophy club (Marcus 2010, 80–81). Furthermore, as Diana Raffman pointed out in her obituary of Marcus17:
She would tell of having to fend off the unwelcome advances of a male professor (thankfully not a philosopher!) with a coat hanger, of being barred from all undergraduate classrooms at Yale while studying there for her Ph.D., and of being forced to publish her landmark papers under her married name. (Raffman 2012)
This is appallingly and criminally sexist behavior going far beyond the type of gendered stereotyping and conversing suggested in the preceding argument. So, again, it seems that the simplest explanation that fits in with our background knowledge best is that Marcus’ reception has been a result of discursive injustice.
Given that my primary thesis was gotten at via abductive reasoning, we should consider some alternative explanations and see how they fare in comparison to mine. Again, abduction is inference to the best explanation, rather than inference to any old explanation. To plausibly make such a claim, we have to show a comparison to some competing explanations. Beginning with those that have been suggested in the dialectic under discussion and branching out to explanations that have been offered in the conversations I have had with other philosophers about this matter, I will briefly consider five alternative explanations and point out where I think an argument showing they go wrong would begin.
[E1] Marcus’ work on NTR occurs over too few pages.
Reply: This alternative explanation suggests that it would be far outside of the norm for a significant philosophical contribution to be recognized from just a few pages. As Smith points out, though, “F. P. Ramsey is generally credited with priority for the Dutch book argument for justifying the axioms of probability on the personalist or subjectivist interpretations of the axioms. But this accreditation is based on exactly two sentences” (Smith 1995b). Furthermore, in the exact same year that Marcus (1961) actually came out in print, Edmund Gettier published his famous paper that has been cited roughly 4,000 times and that comes in under three pages (Gettier 1963). This either involves an implicit assumption that women cannot achieve such significant contributions or requires an argument that Marcus’ work is not of that caliber. The first would also be sexist and the second would be implausible.
[E2] Marcus’ work is overly technical and not as accessible as Kripke’s.
Reply: This misses the fact that, throughout its history, analytic philosophers have been extremely interested in, and influenced by, symbol-crunching. Nobody leaves Principia Mathematica out of the history of analytic philosophy because it is not accessible. This response also misses the fact that Marcus’ work ranges from highly technical work on quantified modal logic (Marcus 1946a, 1946b, 1947) to philosophical discussions on abstract issues, which engages with formal results (Marcus 1961) to practical discussions informed by work in logic, but fully accessible to those without a formal background (Marcus 1980).
[E3] Marcus’ proofs are not as elegant as Kripke’s.
Reply: If this were the case, then the recognition that Marcus has received should be similar to the credit Kurt Gödel receives for proving the completeness of first-order logic, despite the fact that Leon Henkin gave the proof of the result that has become standard. Nobody would fail to mention Gödel in relation to this work, though, quite like they have with respect to Marcus, modal logic, and NTR.
[E4] Marcus’ work does not exhibit the “genius” of Kripke’s work.
Reply: While one could obviously argue against the basic premise here, I think it is more important to recognize that there is misogyny built into distribution of these honorifics.18 That said, for those wishing to see an argument for the genius of Marcus’ work, please see chapter 2 of this book.
[E5] Smith’s list does not encompass the import of Kripke’s work.
Reply: This is absolutely right. That said, this does not separate Kripke from Marcus, because the list (T1–T6) does not encompass the import of Marcus’ work either! As we will see in the next chapter, we have a great deal that can be learned from Marcus’ work on the relationship between logic and ethics, especially in Marcus (1980).
§1.6 Concluding Thoughts on Discursive Injustice in the History of Philosophy
I have not tried to provide anything more than the beginning of a reply to each of these alternative explanations, because I only want to make it clear that my claim that Marcus has been insufficiently recognized and this has been because of discursive injustice coming from systematic sexism serves as a plausible explanation. Simply establishing this plausibility is worthwhile because both Soames and Burgess have tried to say that this whole discussion should have never happened. In addition to Burgess’ quotations already discussed, Soames began his reply, “My task today is an unusual and not very pleasant one. I am not here to debate the adequacy of any philosophical thesis. Rather, my job is to assess claims involving credit and blame” (Soames 1995, 191). It is true that Smith made this debate much more about blame directed at Kripke than it needed to be. That said, the focus was always primarily on credit for Marcus and only secondarily on Kripke. And, while Smith certainly got quite sloppy in the details, Soames and Burgess miss the importance of this primary focus of Smith’s work. Importantly, this phenomenon of insufficient credit is something that is to be expected given that the discipline has been a part of sexist (and otherwise oppressive) social structures throughout its history. Because of this, if we look throughout the history of philosophy, we should expect to find such stories and, in fact, we do.19
For example, many recent works have recognized that traditional histories of early modern philosophy are wildly exclusionary. For the last three decades, much work has been done in response to create a sophisticated, specialized subfield of work on women in early modern philosophy. Perhaps the most distinguished thinker in this field, Eileen O’Neill, has herself pointed out that this has not been as quickly followed by corresponding changes in the larger history of modern philosophy and history of philosophy, generally, though (O’Neill 2005). Because of this, we need to develop more tactics for changing people’s minds on the need for them to include previously excluded women in their teaching and work. Given that many of the best pieces on the mechanisms and mistakes of exclusion focus on external criticisms, in this chapter I tried to focus on an almost-entirely internal critique of standard scholarship on early analytic philosophy.
That is, despite a consensus on the existence of a great loss from this exclusion, there is less consensus on the mechanisms by which this ignorance has been created—with problems variously attributed to early modern gatekeepers, to our own contemporaries, and to intermediaries. Despite this variety of explanations, few have centrally utilized tools from contemporary philosophers to explain this exclusion—instead relying fundamentally on concepts like implicit bias (Gordon-Roth & Kendrick 2015), poor scholarly and pedagogical practices (Berges 2015),20 and political/socioeconomic realities (O’Neill 1998). While these are all undoubtedly parts of the story, this chapter was built off of the premise that there can be a practical advantage with some philosophers to discussing this exclusion of women philosophers via the tools of philosophy itself. That is to say, we can perhaps get more philosophers putting time into righting these wrongs by making it clear just how central to the philosophical project it is to avoid such exclusions. Not only do we lose impressive philosophical content from the thinkers excluded and do something morally wrong, we are also being bad philosophers when we exclude people via phenomena like epistemic 21 and discursive injustice.
To further push back against Burgess’ and Soames’ claims that we ought not to have conversations like the one Smith started, I believe we find a similar example if we turn to Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). That such an influential work on such fundamental issues could be discussed almost exclusively in the history of feminist thought can also be explained in terms of Kukla’s (2014) notion of discursive injustice. That is to say, Wollstonecraft’s speech acts were not given appropriate uptake as philosophical assertions and arguments. Rather, they have been taken to be “merely” political with an intended audience of only women or, perhaps, only feminists. Given that Wollstonecraft was working on issues central to modern philosophy and was, more consistently than Kant, extending Kantian principles in moral, social, and political philosophy, this is unfortunate. Building off of O’Neill (1998), in future work I hope to argue that this resulted from an explicitly sexist “purification of philosophy” between 1780 and 1830, just as Park (2013) has shown this period of historiographical work to have been explicitly racist.
Furthermore, Wollstonecraft (1792) should be of particular use to analytic philosophers because of her enlightenment thinking and her strong focus on logic and reason. Some of her principle arguments look something like the following:
P1: All humans have reasoning capabilities.
P2: If all humans have reasoning capabilities, then all persons can possibly attain virtue.
P3: If all persons can possibly attain virtue, then we should give each person what’s needed to attain virtue.
SC1: If all humans have reasoning capabilities, then we should give each person what’s necessary to attain virtue. (P2, P3, Hypothetical Syllogism)
P4: If we should give each person what’s necessary to attain virtue, then we must educate women as well as men.
SC2: If all humans have reasoning capabilities, then we must educate women as well as men. (SC1, P4, Hypothetical Syllogism)
C: We must educate women as well as men. (P1, SC2, Modus Ponens)
and
P1: The most wisely formed society is the one whose constitution is based on the nature of humanity.
P2: The nature of humans is to be reasoning beings.
C: The most wisely formed society is the one whose constitution is based on reason.
These are powerful arguments for the utility of, and frameworks for thinking about, a liberal arts education involving analytic philosophy. It would be helpful to a better discipline of philosophy to bring these into the canon.
Pushing back further yet, something like what I’ve argued has happened with women like Marcus and Wollstonecraft with respect to discursive injustice has happened to people of color and those outside of the Western world quite frequently as well. John Mohawk, in talking about academic work on the Haudenosaunee, has said “[m]any professionals in this field operate on an expectation that rational thought is found only in the West” (Mohawk 1986, xv). Peter K. J. Park has established that many historians have done this with respect to philosophers from Africa and Asia as well.
For instance, Dietrich Tiedemann (1748–1803) wrote a history of philosophy that contains only Western philosophers by denying that any non-Western thinker’s assertions counted as philosophical. Wilhelm Tennemann (1761–1819) did similarly but, instead of faulting non-Western reasons, concepts, and experiences, Tennemann held that non-Western thought cannot be counted as philosophical because of its attachment to political interests. Kant, himself, gave lectures that supported a wholly Eurocentric history of philosophy based on the claim that demonstration and pure reason are not found outside of Europe. Again, this is problematic for a great number of reasons. Of particular concern to analytic philosophers, though, is that one of the topics I believe we get a much better picture of from all of Marcus, Wollstoncecraft, the Peacemaker of the Haudenosaunee, and others excluded by these histories is the relationship between logic and ethics. It is to this topic that we turn in chapter 2.
NOTES
1. While these matters will be discussed in greater detail in chapter 2, this appearance of “man” and “woman” provide an important opportunity to make clear how I will use a number of related, but importantly distinct terms. In particular, “male,” “female,” and “intersex” will be used as terms for sexes. “Man,” “woman,” and “transgender” will be used as terms for genders. “Masculine,” “feminine,” and “androgynous” will be used for gender roles, norms, and expressions.
2. It should be noted that there are only four pages in the books which mention Marcus—two times in which her name appears in a list along with others, once in which this very debate is mentioned as a “nasty controversy” (Soames 2003b, 353), and once in which it is admitted that a lack of discussion of formal logic and Marcus’ role in it is part of “an undeniable gap in the story I have told” (Soames 2003b, 462). In fairness to Soames, it should also be mentioned that he says here that he hopes to return to this story in future work. This was echoed in Volume 1 of his new series on the history of analytic philosophy, where he says “[l]ooking one step beyond to Volume 3, I plan to discuss the struggle for modal logic involving, among others, C. I. Lewis, Ruth Barcan Marcus, Rudolf Carnap, and the young Saul Kripke” (Soames 2014, 632).
3. It should also be noted that Soames’ reasoning for not giving Marcus any credit with respect to the necessary a posteriori might be inconsistent with his giving Kripke some of the credit he receives. Part of his reasoning here is that Marcus should not be seen as contributing to this doctrine because she sees the relevant modal concepts (e.g., tautology, analyticity, necessity, a priority, etc.) as more connected than they ought to be. This is certainly true. Of course, Kripke also sees these as more connected than they ought to be when he stipulates that “something which is analytically true will be both necessary and a priori (That’s sort of stipulative.)” (Kripke 1980, 39). As Gillian Russell (2008) has shown, one can be a full-fledged New Theorist of Reference and recognize that there are contingent analytic (e.g., “I am here now”) and analytic a posteriori (e.g., “Muhammad Ali is Cassius X”) truths. Since a full development of how this can be is outside of the scope of this chapter and Smith’s discussion of the necessary a posteriori is clearly mistaken, this point is relegated to an endnote. That said, for those who are interested in some of the relevant background, please see the discussion on analyticity in chapter 5 or any of Russell (2010, 2011, 2014).
4. For what it is worth, I also consider myself to be somebody who subscribes to NTR—I accept all of T1–T6, I was a student of David Braun (also referenced by Smith as one of the important proponents of the view), I adopted the framework of gappy propositions in LaVine (2016a) (needed to deal with empty names on NTR)—but also do not accept the causal historical theory of reference.
5. Furthermore, whether or not Marcus made this move, there are straightforward ways in which T4 can be helpful to T6—the view that there exist necessary a posteriori truths. Once we have Frege’s Puzzle and the necessity of identity with respect to proper names, the existence of necessary a posteriori truths falls right out:
P1: There exist identity statements between proper names which are known a posteriori (Frege’s Puzzle). P2: All identity statements between proper names are necessary (necessity of identity). C: There exist identity statements between proper names, which are necessary and known a posteriori.
6. It is also worth noting that Soames too breaks down the significance of Kripke (1980) into six “most important aspects” (Soames 2003b, 336).
7. In fact, this fits very nicely with my own explication of Wittgenstein’s philosophy from LaVine and Tissaw (2015). I hope to address the differences between my views and Soames’ on Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations in future work. These differences focus primarily on the understanding of Wittgenstein as having a deflationary conception of philosophy.
8. Importantly, I am here just spelling out some of the details behind Marcus’ own point that “There remain lengthy bibliographies and historical accounts of intensional and modal logic as well as interpretations of modalities where reference to my work is absent, but that is gradually being corrected” (Marcus 2010, 83).
9. It should be noted that there is a very unfortunate unrepresentativeness of these examples in that all of these works were published in English. As a monoglot English speaker, this is one of the areas where my book will simply unqualifiedly suffer. That said, this can also be seen as part of a further internal critique of the discipline which has a similarly problematic reliance on English.
10. The results of this poll can be found at https://civs.cs.cornell.edu/cgi-bin/results.pl?id=E_70df4a00cd504826, accessed June 12, 2019.
11. As Kukla notes, there are nontrivial issues about the metaphysics of speech acts built into this definition. That said, we can leave these aside here, since these could be avoided and the same points about discursive injustice made with the following definition:
DEF’N: One is a victim of discursive injustice iff a speech act fails to occur simply because they have a social identity which has been traditionally marginalized/oppressed. For further discussion, see LaVine (2016b).
12. After all, a failed proposal would seem to change the nature of our relationship. It would also make it a sore subject if others brought up marriage around us, etc. In this case, though, it seems that none of this would be true. This suggests that no proposal ever actually happened.
13. For further discussion of the ways in which women are given norms which cannot be possibly satisfied at the same time, see chapter 1 of Haslanger (2012). We will discuss this more in chapter 2 of this book. So, while Kukla does not take a stance on how common this phenomenon is, it seems to me that part of the value in her work is giving a name to, and framework for discussing, something which is all too common. It is not just philosophers who notice this, either. Novelist and public intellectual, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, has a very interesting discussion, with similar examples, of similar matters on pp. 21–24 of Adichie (2014).
14. Many thanks to Cole Heideman for this example.
15. Again, this type of occurrence is clearly not limited to gender—I have seen this phenomenon occur with people of color, younger academics, etc. It is also not limited to the profession of philosophy. Adichie discusses a very similar example, saying “I have another friend, also an American woman, who has a high-paying job in advertising. She is one of two women in her team. Once, at a meeting, she felt slighted by her boss, who had ignored her comments and then praised something similar when it came from a man” (Adichie 2014, 23).
16. For anyone who does find it to be a shock, I suggest reading through https://beingawomaninphilosophy.wordpress.com/.
17. Also relevant here is the fact that this obituary even being published in the first place required serious campaigning on the part of some feminist philosophers and friends of Marcus’.
18. For further discussion of this, see https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/01/11/new-analysis-offers-more-evidence-against-student-evaluations-teaching and http://benschmidt.org/profGender/#%7B%22database%22%3A%22RMP%22%2C%22plotType%22%3A%22pointchart%22%2C%22method%22%3A%22return_json%22%2C%22search_limits%22%3A%7B%22word%22%3A%5B%22genius%22%5D%2C%22department__id%22%3A%7B%22%24lte%22%3A25%7D%7D%2C%22aesthetic%22%3A%7B%22x%22%3A%22WordsPerMillion%22%2C%22y%22%3A%22department%22%2C%22color%22%3A%22gender%22%7D%2C%22counttype%22%3A%5B%22WordsPerMillion%22%5D%2C%22groups%22%3A%5B%22department%22%2C%22gender%22%5D%2C%22testGroup%22%3A%22D%22%7D as well as Fan et al. (2019) “Gender and cultural bias in student evaluations: Why representation matters.”
19. In fact, we can find other examples of this just from the history of analytic philosophy and just sticking to gender. For instance, Rachael Wiseman and Clare MacCumhaill argued in their 2017 Women in the History of Philosophy Lecture that failure to treat Anscombe, Foot, Midgley, and Murdoch as a philosophical school has been connected to something like discursive injustice. See https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/philosophy/research/womenhistoryphilosophy. Also, in chapters 3 and 5 I will discuss how Susan Stebbing’s importance to the history of analytic philosophy has been under-recognized. I also think this has something to do with discursive injustice.
20. It is important to note that Berges does also use Miranda Fricker’s notion of epistemic injustice as part of her explanation (Berges 2015, 385–87).
21. One type of epistemic injustice is testimonial injustice, defined by Miranda Fricker in the following manner:
DEF’N: “Testimonial injustice happens when a speaker receives a deficit of credibility owing to the operation of prejudice in the hearer’s judgement.” (Fricker 2013, 1319)
I believe we can explain the fact that, for example, Princess Elisabeth is not usually taught or anthologized along with Descartes in early modern philosophy research and teaching via testimonial injustice. I hope to be able to address this in future work.
