I have been kindly invited to become a contributor to this blog upon my en passant remark to one of its current contributors that this could become a good venue for the discussion of some gender-related issues that are important from a philosophical point of view (and not only in terms of how the profession is organized). I am a big fan of the Feminist Philosophers’ blog, but I suspect that it is not as widely read as it should be. So at the very least, here I hope to be able to discuss some of the important points they make over there in my own terms. Today I would like to offer some comments on the recent Buckwalter & Stich paper on gender and philosophical intuitions that has been much discussed in several blogs in the last couple of days. (But let me notice that my interests go well beyond gender issues, in fact none of my own work as a professional philosopher is on feminist issues – not yet, in any case…)
There has been much discussion as of lately on the gender imbalance in the profession; it is great to see awareness of the problem growing in different quarters. Yet, nobody knows exactly what the causal mechanisms behind this phenomenon are, and to what extent it is or is not different from gender imbalance in other fields. At any rate, most of us seem to agree that women are underrepresented in philosophy, and that it is important to think of ways to redress the imbalance. My own take on this is that one way in which things could get better is to intensify the presence of female role models, so as to convey the message to young female students that philosophy is a place where women can rise and shine. In this context, I fully endorse the Feminist Philosophers’ ‘Gendered Conference Campaign’, which consists in stressing the importance of having female keynote speakers at conferences. In particular, I have created a list of women working in the areas I work in (history and philosophy of logic, philosophical logic), which is intended to serve as a source of ideas for conference organizers looking for potential speakers.
Anyway, now on to the Buckwalter & Stich article, “Gender and Philosophical Intuition”. The starting point seems to be that gender differences in philosophical intuitions might be a factor involved in women’s under-representation in philosophy. Presumably, if in introductory courses, (male) professors systematically dismiss deviating intuitions, and that it so happens that these deviating intuitions are mostly those of female students, then female students may end up feeling discouraged to pursue their interest in philosophy. They would simply have the ‘wrong’ intuitions. Moreover, if there are indeed systematic differences between the philosophical intuitions of men and women, this would also be a blow to the intuition-based style of doing philosophy, comparable to the blow inflicted by the alleged discovery of cultural differences in philosophical intuitions (the classical X-phi studies on discrepant intuitions concerning Gettier cases and Kripke’s Gödel puzzle in Chinese subjects). So Buckwalter and Stich correctly point out that their results may force us to review philosophical pedagogy as well as philosophical methodology.
Personally, I am no friend of the intuition-based style of doing philosophy anyway, but not specifically because it may entail the exclusion of women from philosophy (rather, because I think it is based on excessive epistemic conservativeness). In fact, the article has not convinced me that there are indeed such significant gender differences when it comes to philosophical intuitions. For starters, and as has been pointed out in comments to the paper in blogs, the samples they are working with are not large enough to exclude the possibility of statistical noise. Secondly, what exactly would have caused systematic differences between men ad women when it comes to (philosophical or otherwise) intuitions? The idea that men and women ‘think differently’ for ‘biological reasons’ is still widespread, but its rests on very frail, if not non-existence, scientific support (see for example Cordelia Fine’s recent book, Delusions of Gender, The Real Science Behind Sex Differences). It might then be that it is ‘cultural indoctrination’ that makes women and men have discrepant intuitions, just as girls are trained to like pink and dolls, while boys are trained to like blue and cars. But the philosophical puzzles that are usually presented to elicit the manifestation of philosophical intuitions are typically based on far-fetched scenarios which bear no connection with people’s more mundane experiences; so how would mundane gender-stereotyping carry over to philosophy? One might think that this could be the case in e.g. ethics, but Buckwalter and Stich’s examples cover other areas as well. Interestingly, in Putnam’s twin-earth case, their results suggest that women have the ‘right’ intuition more often than men… So even if there would be systematic gender differences, it is still not clear whether the deviant intuitions would always be more pervasive among women.
In short, I am unconvinced that there are indeed systematic differences between men and women when it comes to philosophical intuition. It is certainly a hypothesis worth exploring, but the results in this paper do not seem to be sufficiently robust. At least for the time being, the hypothesis that an important cause for gender imbalance in the profession is intuition-based methodology and pedagogy seems to me not to be particularly compelling. So we must keep looking for other ways to redress gender imbalance in philosophy! At any rate, Buckwalter and Stich's article also presents important facts and figures of the demographics of the profession, and raises important and interesting hypotheses.
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