When I wrote this post mentioning some differences between reviewing and citation practices in
philosophy and the sciences, I was asked to substitute 'anonymous
reviewing' for 'blind reviewing', as some regard the expressions 'blind
reviewing' and 'blind refereeing' as able-ist. This topic has already
been the subject of a post and a follow-up
here on New APPS a couple of years ago. I am not sure how many journals
have omitted this kind of talk from their websites yet but it certainly
has not been eradicated from the publishing world yet.
The argument cited for not using 'blind' in this context is that when it is so used, it is supposed to refer to the lack of knowledge. For example, a double-blind peer review is supposed to be one in which the author doesn't know the reviewers' identity, and the reviewers don't know the author's identity. The argument, now, is that this use may indicate to us that blind people aren't individuals who can have knowledge, which could perpetuate implicit biases. The argument is more succinctly put in this post.
Similar considerations extend to the following related
uses of 'blind': blinded randomized controlled trial, blind alley, blind
spot, blind faith, turn a blind eye, blind following, blind effort,
blind force, and so on. It may even be argued that some of these uses
are worse, as they connote stupidity rather than mere lack of knowledge
of identity.
I can see the force of this argument. However, the
argument doesn't tell me when to be careful with the use of other
similar expressions, because I don't know the conditions under which the
use of an expression is able-ist, sexist, racist, age-ist, etc. When
exactly should we avoid an expression that might have bad connotations?
Let me start by saying that I don't think that we should
avoid using all expressions that might offend some minority or
ethnicity. I am not convinced that we shouldn't use the expression
'history' (which might be read as "his story") because it may connote
that women were not historically important. Another example: as a Danish
individual I get slightly irritated when people call pastries
'Danishes' but I am not going to argue that people should stop using the
word 'Danishes' because it might connote that Danish people are greasy
or fat (interestingly, Danish folks call pastries 'Vienna bread'). I
know of Germans who feel the same way about expressions such as
'hamburgers' and 'frankfurters', and French people who would prefer if
Americans didn't call fries 'French fries'.
There are two factors that might help us determine in
which cases uses matter and in which cases they don't. One has to do
with minorities. If Danish people had been a recognized minority in the
United States, i.e., a minority that had been discriminated against
throughout an extended period of American history, then it might be
unfortunate to call pastries 'Danishes'. Since there is no such history
of past, large-scale discrimination against the Danes, there is no
principled reason not to call pastries 'Danishes'.
A second consideration concerns meaning. Though there has
been large-scale discrimination against women in the past, 'history' is
not a word that should be upsetting to anyone, as it does not derive
from the pronoun 'his'. There is thus no sense in which the word is
supposed to refer to maleness.
Things are quite different when it comes to 'blind'.
It is often said that 'blind' as it occurs in 'blind faith' or 'blind
refereeing' is used 'metaphorically'. However, this could also be a case
of polysemy, in which case 'blind' would have different but related
meanings when it occurs in 'blind from birth' and 'blind faith'. If
'blind' is polysemous, it would be on a par with words such as 'healthy'
and 'run', which have different but related meanings when they occur in
'healthy fruit' vs 'healthy person' and 'she ran five mile' vs 'she
runs a company'.
This leads me to make the following tentative suggestion.
A new or derivative use of an 'expression' is socially and/or
politically unacceptable when
(1) The derivative expression is (still) semantically related to the original expression, and
(2) It has negative connotations that may harm, or increase implicit biases involving, recognized minority groups.
If something like this proposal is correct, then certain
derivative uses of expressions of the following kind should be
problematic for the same reasons that expressions like 'blind alley' and
'blind refereeing' are: 'deafening (music)', 'founding fathers',
'mankind', 'penmanship', 'freshman', 'mailman', 'hysterical', 'master',
'hostess', 'the man in the street', 'one-man show', 'black sheep',
'black magic', 'black Monday', 'blacklist', 'blackmail', 'blackballing',
'black book'.
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