Analyzing social wrongs

IF 1.1 3区 哲学 Q3 ETHICS
Hilkje C. Hänel, Sally Haslanger, Odin Kroeger
{"title":"Analyzing social wrongs","authors":"Hilkje C. Hänel,&nbsp;Sally Haslanger,&nbsp;Odin Kroeger","doi":"10.1111/josp.12505","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<p>Academic philosophy has witnessed a significant change in the last years from nonideal investigations of social wrongs as being a rather marginal topic in comparison to what was assumed to be more fundamental questions to those very investigations drawing significant attention and taking their rightful place in the midst of the profession of philosophy. Yet, despite these advances and the increasing awareness of social wrongs in relation to—for example, gender, race, class, and disability—social philosophers are still regularly asked to justify what they are doing or to justify that what they are doing is rightfully called philosophy. This special issue is motivated by the following three ideas: First, to increase awareness for nonideal investigations into gender, race, class, and disability. Second, to draw attention to the insight that our philosophical methods and the topics we are concerned with are not two separate issues; in fact, what we investigate and how we do so are tightly connected. Third, to question the ways in which philosophy as a discipline excludes certain voices, topics, and methods.</p><p>Many of the papers in this issue were the result of a conference marked by the attempt to bring investigations of social wrongs in the tradition of post-Analytic philosophy to the German-speaking philosophy world—a context still very much behind on investigations of social wrongs in a nonideal manner. This conference, which took place in Vienna, and which was organized in 2014 by Hilkje C. Hänel, Daniel James, and Odin Kroeger, served as an international forum for social philosophers to think about the way in which we do philosophy and the topics that are often strikingly absent from philosophy. Since then, much has changed, but the need to question what philosophy is, what it can do, and who is doing it remains. Before we provide a brief overview of the papers in this issue, let us say a bit more about the three aspects mentioned above.</p><p>Discussions of gender, race, and disability have slowly paved their way into the midst of philosophical theorizing and have become an essential aspect of academia; this is evidenced by recent hires in feminist philosophy and critical race studies, the emergence of journals on the topics of gender, race, and most recently, disability, or the central place that these topics take in the APA newsletter, conferences, as well as book and article publications. (This is of course due to the resistant struggle of a few to make our profession better and more welcoming for marginalized and oppressed philosophers.) However, neither nonideal investigations of social wrongs in general nor debates on gender, race, and disability—and many other important sites of oppression and injustice—have a secure place within academic philosophy yet; as can be seen by recent backlashes against trans philosophy or the metaphysical debates that claim that gender and race (and likely disability) are not substantive debates within metaphysics (as discussed by Díaz-León in this issue). Furthermore, the more general backlash against women's rights for abortion, the harmful debate for anyone with a disability and/or chronic illness about triage during the Covid-19 pandemic, and the state and interpersonal violence against Black people and marginalized social groups are a testimony to the importance of continuing to raise these topics.</p><p>It is a commonplace in standpoint epistemology, Critical Theory, and other fields within philosophy that the methods we choose for investigation have implications for what we perceive and the topics that we are interested in and vice versa; after all, the view from the top of the tree will unlikely result in good—or any—research about its roots. The way in which our own social position and relations have consequences for what we deem interesting and the outcome of our research can be seen in detail in more recent theories within the epistemology of ignorance. This issue draws attention to a related phenomenon, namely that the methods we choose have implications for the content of our thinking and the phenomena we deem worth investigating. Furthermore, choosing a nonideal approach to philosophy implies that we start thinking from the particular social wrongs that can at times reveal the insufficiency of our well-established philosophical theories; as the contributions from Bierria, Hänel, Haslanger, and Hufendiek in this issue show.</p><p>Finally, what we deem worth investigating and which methods we choose for investigation has consequences for whom philosophy is open to and attractive to. Research has shown that marginalized philosophers feel less welcome and represented by other scholars in the field and the topics under investigation and are often interested in different topics or methodological approaches; for example, interdisciplinary approaches or investigations of real-world injustices. In this issue, Dotson as well as Ball-Blakely and Chapman and Carel draw attention to the very real and rather explicit exclusion and silencing of specific topics inside and outside of academia as well as marginalized philosophers within academia, and the way in which academic resources, norms, and rules implicitly exclude some but not others within academia.</p><p>The first four papers are concerned with general methodological questions; what <i>are</i> we doing when we analyze social wrongs and what <i>should</i> we be doing? Following up on her paper “How Is This Paper Philosophy?” (2012), Kristie Dotson reflects about the uptake of philosophy papers, especially those that are concerned with socially relevant topics. “On the Costs of Socially Relevant Philosophy Papers: A Reflection” provides important insight both of the problematic exclusions within academia and the ways in which such exclusion influences the written production of philosophy. To do so, Dotson introduces three aspects that papers, which are deemed socially relevant, contain: ideational labor, construction labor, and aspirational costs. The first describes the labor involved in situating a paper in its proper hermeneutical landscape, including the historical formation of ideas and concepts. The second describes the labor involved in the “material and practical necessities of discursive executions” (xx) such as the tooling, training, or time needed for writing a paper. Ideational labor and construction labor are not necessarily problematic; although they can be. The third, aspirational costs, refers to the aspirational goals to “impose influence on future engagement” (xx). These costs are problematic as they often lead to the exclusion of complex rather than technological discourse and its diverse practitioners. Dotson's arguments pick up on the important metaphilosophical insights given in her 2012 paper about the way in which we do philosophy in Western academy and demand some—but not all—to justify what they are doing as well as the costs, both personally and structurally, of our doings.</p><p>Next, in her paper “Disrupting Demands: Messy Challenges to Analytic Methodology”, Naomi Scheman interrogates the central assumption in analytic philosophy “that proper concepts divide logical space” and “that neither real kinds nor real particulars be ontologically vague” (xx). Scheman argues that a fully pluralist and—at least sometimes—conceptually messy approach is better equipped for emancipatory feminist theorizing. The general insight is that as philosophers we should not aim to clean up the messy social world but understand it better in its full messiness. This is motivated by an understanding that especially oppressed, subordinated, and marginalized subjects often have conflicting needs and their voices would be excluded and silenced if any one of these needs would be prioritized over others. Scheman illustrates these important arguments by drawing in the debate of what it means to be a woman and who counts as such that has dominated much of analytic feminist philosophy.</p><p>The next two papers both show the importance of questioning methodological choices for a critical analysis of social wrongs by focusing on inadequate theories common in philosophy. In her “Beyond Essentialist Fallacies: Fine-Tuning Ideology Critique of Appeals to Biological Sex Differences”, Rebekka Hufendiek is concerned with the current prominence of outdated view on sex difference in human behavior given by evolutionary psychology. Hufendiek argues that evolutionary psychologists' neglect data, methods, and critiques of feminist philosophers of science showing that their analyses are methodologically inadequate and reproduce sexist stereotypes as well as the ethical implications that follow from their analyses. This is particularly problematic, as evolutionary psychology reaches a broad audience—even outside academia—, hence, influencing the discourse on gender and sex. Hufendiek argues that these problematic views demand both an analysis from feminist philosophers of science as well as a critical investigation of ideology in so far as the essentialist fallacies in evolutionary psychology reproduce and justify oppressive structures. Hufendiek, thus, shows how methods and content often go hand in hand and analysis of social wrongs has to be attentive to methodological questions.</p><p>Sally Haslanger argues that methodological individualism is inadequate in her paper “Failures of Methodological Individualism: The Materiality of Social Systems”. Haslanger's overall aim is to show that there is an interdependence between the material, the cultural, and the psychological in social systems -crucial for many social explanations; in other words, some social phenomena are best understood in terms of systems or structures instead of individuals and their individual attitudes. To argue for the inadequacy of methodological individualism, Haslanger shows that this method can be traced back to the ideal “that the social world is made up of individuals” (xx) and that, hence, any explanation of social phenomena should focus on these individuals; either in terms of ontological individualism or explanatory individualism. However, Haslanger convincingly argues that both claims— ontological and explanatory individualism should be rejected due to their inadequate explanations of some social phenomena. The more general insight provided in this paper is the fact that some of our methodological choices fail to provide an adequate explanation of the subject under investigation because they focus on the individual; thus, an analysis of social wrongs should track the psychological as well as the material and cultural in social systems.</p><p>The last five papers are concerned with specific social wrongs—from gender to race to class and migration to disability—, while at the same time, showing that <i>what</i> we investigate has an impact on <i>how</i> we investigate or how we should investigate. In her “Problems of Conceptual Amelioration: The Question of Rape Myths”, Hilkje Hänel is concerned with the ways in which the social wrong of sexual violence against women, and in particular rape myths, can question our philosophical methods of social analysis. She argues that rape myths and other problematic background schemas can both distort our dominant working understanding of rape and prevent us from accurate applications of adequate existing concepts. Furthermore, these problematic schemas can also distort our philosophical analyses—even in cases of critical and emancipatory thinking; such as cases of conceptual amelioration. Taking these problems into account, Hänel argues for specific democratic practices that should ground the philosophical task of conceptual amelioration or engineering.</p><p>Esa Díaz-León discusses meta-metaphysical proposals of gender and race, while at the same time showing how a focus on gender and race demands a re-evaluation of some influential meta-metaphysical frameworks. “Substantive Metaphysical Debates about Gender and Race: Verbal Disputes and Metaphysical Deflationism” is a careful investigation of the debate that some disputes in metaphysics are genuine or substantive disputes in comparison to others. Díaz-León argues that some claims about what makes a metaphysical dispute substantive are problematic because they rule out debates about the nature of gender and race and proposes to understand such debates as “disputes about how we <i>actually</i> use or <i>should</i> use gender and racial terms” (xx) and that they trigger important normative assessments.</p><p>Following up on her analysis of the criminalization of Black action in the 2005 media coverage of Hurricane Katrina in “Missing in Action: Violence, Power, and Discerning Agency” (2014), Alisa Bierria tackles the way in which the conceptual conflation between “blackness” and “criminality” raises important challenges for philosophical discussion of intentional action. In her “Racial Conflation: Agency, Black Action, and Criminal Intent”, Bierria argues for a theory of <i>racial conflation</i>, according to which “criminal intent is systematically imposed onto active black subjects” (xx). She then continues to analyze a social logic that functions to re-interpret some agents' actions into a narrative different to their original intentions. Doing so, Bierria shows that philosophical thinking about intentional action is flawed if it fails to consider the ways in which racial oppression works and the social structures supporting such oppression.</p><p>Michael Ball-Blakely argues, against the prevailing orthodoxy, that it is pro tanto unjust for high-income countries to adopt skill-selective immigration policies. He makes two separate cases to this end. First, he cites empirical research that finds that individuals with a low socio-economic status (SES) tend to be seen as incompetent—not only by others, but also by themselves. That being so, selecting immigrants based on their skills will exacerbate the status harms that prospective immigrants with a low SES suffer from; and this may apply to citizens with a low SES, too, for a state's immigration policy sends a message about which kind of people a society values, a message that citizens with a low SES, too, will hear. Secondly, importing skilled labor enables states to forego providing fair and equal opportunities to its citizens, particularly regarding education.</p><p>In their “Neurodiversity, Epistemic Injustice, and the Good Human Life”, Robert Chapman and Havi Carel argue that epistemic injustice may cause a decline of wellbeing for individuals with neurodivergent disabilities. To do so, they focus on autism and show in important detail how the problematic assumption that autism is not conducive to wellbeing and a flourishing life is a result of credibility deficits awarded to autistic individuals and can, thus, block our very ability to imagine or perceive good autistic life. Furthermore, Chapman and Carel show that this analysis has some general implications for ethical theory—and the question of how we conduct such theory—as it indicates a lack of minority forms of human flourishing and therefore identify existing theories of human flourishing as incomplete.</p><p>We hope that the papers in this issue open up even more new questions, new methods for answering them, and new ideas for addressing social justice philosophically.</p>","PeriodicalId":46756,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Social Philosophy","volume":"53 4","pages":"448-453"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1000,"publicationDate":"2023-01-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/josp.12505","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Journal of Social Philosophy","FirstCategoryId":"98","ListUrlMain":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/josp.12505","RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q3","JCRName":"ETHICS","Score":null,"Total":0}
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Abstract

Academic philosophy has witnessed a significant change in the last years from nonideal investigations of social wrongs as being a rather marginal topic in comparison to what was assumed to be more fundamental questions to those very investigations drawing significant attention and taking their rightful place in the midst of the profession of philosophy. Yet, despite these advances and the increasing awareness of social wrongs in relation to—for example, gender, race, class, and disability—social philosophers are still regularly asked to justify what they are doing or to justify that what they are doing is rightfully called philosophy. This special issue is motivated by the following three ideas: First, to increase awareness for nonideal investigations into gender, race, class, and disability. Second, to draw attention to the insight that our philosophical methods and the topics we are concerned with are not two separate issues; in fact, what we investigate and how we do so are tightly connected. Third, to question the ways in which philosophy as a discipline excludes certain voices, topics, and methods.

Many of the papers in this issue were the result of a conference marked by the attempt to bring investigations of social wrongs in the tradition of post-Analytic philosophy to the German-speaking philosophy world—a context still very much behind on investigations of social wrongs in a nonideal manner. This conference, which took place in Vienna, and which was organized in 2014 by Hilkje C. Hänel, Daniel James, and Odin Kroeger, served as an international forum for social philosophers to think about the way in which we do philosophy and the topics that are often strikingly absent from philosophy. Since then, much has changed, but the need to question what philosophy is, what it can do, and who is doing it remains. Before we provide a brief overview of the papers in this issue, let us say a bit more about the three aspects mentioned above.

Discussions of gender, race, and disability have slowly paved their way into the midst of philosophical theorizing and have become an essential aspect of academia; this is evidenced by recent hires in feminist philosophy and critical race studies, the emergence of journals on the topics of gender, race, and most recently, disability, or the central place that these topics take in the APA newsletter, conferences, as well as book and article publications. (This is of course due to the resistant struggle of a few to make our profession better and more welcoming for marginalized and oppressed philosophers.) However, neither nonideal investigations of social wrongs in general nor debates on gender, race, and disability—and many other important sites of oppression and injustice—have a secure place within academic philosophy yet; as can be seen by recent backlashes against trans philosophy or the metaphysical debates that claim that gender and race (and likely disability) are not substantive debates within metaphysics (as discussed by Díaz-León in this issue). Furthermore, the more general backlash against women's rights for abortion, the harmful debate for anyone with a disability and/or chronic illness about triage during the Covid-19 pandemic, and the state and interpersonal violence against Black people and marginalized social groups are a testimony to the importance of continuing to raise these topics.

It is a commonplace in standpoint epistemology, Critical Theory, and other fields within philosophy that the methods we choose for investigation have implications for what we perceive and the topics that we are interested in and vice versa; after all, the view from the top of the tree will unlikely result in good—or any—research about its roots. The way in which our own social position and relations have consequences for what we deem interesting and the outcome of our research can be seen in detail in more recent theories within the epistemology of ignorance. This issue draws attention to a related phenomenon, namely that the methods we choose have implications for the content of our thinking and the phenomena we deem worth investigating. Furthermore, choosing a nonideal approach to philosophy implies that we start thinking from the particular social wrongs that can at times reveal the insufficiency of our well-established philosophical theories; as the contributions from Bierria, Hänel, Haslanger, and Hufendiek in this issue show.

Finally, what we deem worth investigating and which methods we choose for investigation has consequences for whom philosophy is open to and attractive to. Research has shown that marginalized philosophers feel less welcome and represented by other scholars in the field and the topics under investigation and are often interested in different topics or methodological approaches; for example, interdisciplinary approaches or investigations of real-world injustices. In this issue, Dotson as well as Ball-Blakely and Chapman and Carel draw attention to the very real and rather explicit exclusion and silencing of specific topics inside and outside of academia as well as marginalized philosophers within academia, and the way in which academic resources, norms, and rules implicitly exclude some but not others within academia.

The first four papers are concerned with general methodological questions; what are we doing when we analyze social wrongs and what should we be doing? Following up on her paper “How Is This Paper Philosophy?” (2012), Kristie Dotson reflects about the uptake of philosophy papers, especially those that are concerned with socially relevant topics. “On the Costs of Socially Relevant Philosophy Papers: A Reflection” provides important insight both of the problematic exclusions within academia and the ways in which such exclusion influences the written production of philosophy. To do so, Dotson introduces three aspects that papers, which are deemed socially relevant, contain: ideational labor, construction labor, and aspirational costs. The first describes the labor involved in situating a paper in its proper hermeneutical landscape, including the historical formation of ideas and concepts. The second describes the labor involved in the “material and practical necessities of discursive executions” (xx) such as the tooling, training, or time needed for writing a paper. Ideational labor and construction labor are not necessarily problematic; although they can be. The third, aspirational costs, refers to the aspirational goals to “impose influence on future engagement” (xx). These costs are problematic as they often lead to the exclusion of complex rather than technological discourse and its diverse practitioners. Dotson's arguments pick up on the important metaphilosophical insights given in her 2012 paper about the way in which we do philosophy in Western academy and demand some—but not all—to justify what they are doing as well as the costs, both personally and structurally, of our doings.

Next, in her paper “Disrupting Demands: Messy Challenges to Analytic Methodology”, Naomi Scheman interrogates the central assumption in analytic philosophy “that proper concepts divide logical space” and “that neither real kinds nor real particulars be ontologically vague” (xx). Scheman argues that a fully pluralist and—at least sometimes—conceptually messy approach is better equipped for emancipatory feminist theorizing. The general insight is that as philosophers we should not aim to clean up the messy social world but understand it better in its full messiness. This is motivated by an understanding that especially oppressed, subordinated, and marginalized subjects often have conflicting needs and their voices would be excluded and silenced if any one of these needs would be prioritized over others. Scheman illustrates these important arguments by drawing in the debate of what it means to be a woman and who counts as such that has dominated much of analytic feminist philosophy.

The next two papers both show the importance of questioning methodological choices for a critical analysis of social wrongs by focusing on inadequate theories common in philosophy. In her “Beyond Essentialist Fallacies: Fine-Tuning Ideology Critique of Appeals to Biological Sex Differences”, Rebekka Hufendiek is concerned with the current prominence of outdated view on sex difference in human behavior given by evolutionary psychology. Hufendiek argues that evolutionary psychologists' neglect data, methods, and critiques of feminist philosophers of science showing that their analyses are methodologically inadequate and reproduce sexist stereotypes as well as the ethical implications that follow from their analyses. This is particularly problematic, as evolutionary psychology reaches a broad audience—even outside academia—, hence, influencing the discourse on gender and sex. Hufendiek argues that these problematic views demand both an analysis from feminist philosophers of science as well as a critical investigation of ideology in so far as the essentialist fallacies in evolutionary psychology reproduce and justify oppressive structures. Hufendiek, thus, shows how methods and content often go hand in hand and analysis of social wrongs has to be attentive to methodological questions.

Sally Haslanger argues that methodological individualism is inadequate in her paper “Failures of Methodological Individualism: The Materiality of Social Systems”. Haslanger's overall aim is to show that there is an interdependence between the material, the cultural, and the psychological in social systems -crucial for many social explanations; in other words, some social phenomena are best understood in terms of systems or structures instead of individuals and their individual attitudes. To argue for the inadequacy of methodological individualism, Haslanger shows that this method can be traced back to the ideal “that the social world is made up of individuals” (xx) and that, hence, any explanation of social phenomena should focus on these individuals; either in terms of ontological individualism or explanatory individualism. However, Haslanger convincingly argues that both claims— ontological and explanatory individualism should be rejected due to their inadequate explanations of some social phenomena. The more general insight provided in this paper is the fact that some of our methodological choices fail to provide an adequate explanation of the subject under investigation because they focus on the individual; thus, an analysis of social wrongs should track the psychological as well as the material and cultural in social systems.

The last five papers are concerned with specific social wrongs—from gender to race to class and migration to disability—, while at the same time, showing that what we investigate has an impact on how we investigate or how we should investigate. In her “Problems of Conceptual Amelioration: The Question of Rape Myths”, Hilkje Hänel is concerned with the ways in which the social wrong of sexual violence against women, and in particular rape myths, can question our philosophical methods of social analysis. She argues that rape myths and other problematic background schemas can both distort our dominant working understanding of rape and prevent us from accurate applications of adequate existing concepts. Furthermore, these problematic schemas can also distort our philosophical analyses—even in cases of critical and emancipatory thinking; such as cases of conceptual amelioration. Taking these problems into account, Hänel argues for specific democratic practices that should ground the philosophical task of conceptual amelioration or engineering.

Esa Díaz-León discusses meta-metaphysical proposals of gender and race, while at the same time showing how a focus on gender and race demands a re-evaluation of some influential meta-metaphysical frameworks. “Substantive Metaphysical Debates about Gender and Race: Verbal Disputes and Metaphysical Deflationism” is a careful investigation of the debate that some disputes in metaphysics are genuine or substantive disputes in comparison to others. Díaz-León argues that some claims about what makes a metaphysical dispute substantive are problematic because they rule out debates about the nature of gender and race and proposes to understand such debates as “disputes about how we actually use or should use gender and racial terms” (xx) and that they trigger important normative assessments.

Following up on her analysis of the criminalization of Black action in the 2005 media coverage of Hurricane Katrina in “Missing in Action: Violence, Power, and Discerning Agency” (2014), Alisa Bierria tackles the way in which the conceptual conflation between “blackness” and “criminality” raises important challenges for philosophical discussion of intentional action. In her “Racial Conflation: Agency, Black Action, and Criminal Intent”, Bierria argues for a theory of racial conflation, according to which “criminal intent is systematically imposed onto active black subjects” (xx). She then continues to analyze a social logic that functions to re-interpret some agents' actions into a narrative different to their original intentions. Doing so, Bierria shows that philosophical thinking about intentional action is flawed if it fails to consider the ways in which racial oppression works and the social structures supporting such oppression.

Michael Ball-Blakely argues, against the prevailing orthodoxy, that it is pro tanto unjust for high-income countries to adopt skill-selective immigration policies. He makes two separate cases to this end. First, he cites empirical research that finds that individuals with a low socio-economic status (SES) tend to be seen as incompetent—not only by others, but also by themselves. That being so, selecting immigrants based on their skills will exacerbate the status harms that prospective immigrants with a low SES suffer from; and this may apply to citizens with a low SES, too, for a state's immigration policy sends a message about which kind of people a society values, a message that citizens with a low SES, too, will hear. Secondly, importing skilled labor enables states to forego providing fair and equal opportunities to its citizens, particularly regarding education.

In their “Neurodiversity, Epistemic Injustice, and the Good Human Life”, Robert Chapman and Havi Carel argue that epistemic injustice may cause a decline of wellbeing for individuals with neurodivergent disabilities. To do so, they focus on autism and show in important detail how the problematic assumption that autism is not conducive to wellbeing and a flourishing life is a result of credibility deficits awarded to autistic individuals and can, thus, block our very ability to imagine or perceive good autistic life. Furthermore, Chapman and Carel show that this analysis has some general implications for ethical theory—and the question of how we conduct such theory—as it indicates a lack of minority forms of human flourishing and therefore identify existing theories of human flourishing as incomplete.

We hope that the papers in this issue open up even more new questions, new methods for answering them, and new ideas for addressing social justice philosophically.

分析社会错误
学术哲学在过去的几年里见证了一个重大的变化,从对社会错误的非理想调查,作为一个相当边缘的话题,与那些被认为是更基本的问题相比,这些调查引起了极大的关注,并在哲学专业中占据了应有的位置。然而,尽管取得了这些进步,人们也越来越意识到社会上的错误——例如,性别、种族、阶级和残疾——社会哲学家们仍然经常被要求为他们所做的事情辩护,或者为他们所做的事情辩护,证明他们所做的事情是正当的哲学。本期特刊的动机有以下三点:第一,提高对性别、种族、阶级和残疾的非理想调查的认识。第二,提请注意我们的哲学方法和我们所关心的主题并不是两个独立的问题;事实上,我们调查的内容和调查的方式是紧密相连的。第三,质疑哲学作为一门学科排斥某些声音、主题和方法的方式。这期杂志上的许多论文都是一次会议的结果,这次会议的标志是试图将后分析哲学传统中的社会错误研究引入德语哲学世界——这一背景仍然远远落后于以非理想方式研究社会错误。这次会议于2014年在维也纳举行,由Hilkje C. Hänel、Daniel James和Odin Kroeger组织,为社会哲学家提供了一个国际论坛,让他们思考我们研究哲学的方式以及哲学中经常明显缺失的主题。从那以后,很多事情都发生了变化,但人们仍然需要质疑哲学是什么,哲学能做什么,谁在做哲学。在我们对本期论文进行简要概述之前,让我们再多说一下上面提到的三个方面。关于性别、种族和残疾的讨论已经慢慢地进入了哲学理论的中心,并成为学术界的一个重要方面;最近在女权主义哲学和批判性种族研究方面的招聘证明了这一点,出现了关于性别,种族和最近的残疾主题的期刊,或者这些主题在APA通讯,会议以及书籍和文章出版物中占据中心位置。(当然,这是由于少数人为了使我们的职业更好,更欢迎边缘化和受压迫的哲学家而进行的抵抗斗争。)然而,无论是对一般社会错误的非理想调查,还是对性别、种族和残疾——以及许多其他压迫和不公正的重要领域——的辩论,在学术哲学中都没有一个安全的位置;从最近对跨性别哲学或形而上学辩论的强烈反对中可以看出,这些辩论声称性别和种族(以及可能的残疾)在形而上学中不是实质性的辩论(正如Díaz-León在本期中讨论的那样)。此外,对妇女堕胎权利的更普遍反对,在2019冠状病毒病大流行期间对残疾和/或慢性病患者进行分类的有害辩论,以及针对黑人和边缘化社会群体的国家和人际暴力,都证明了继续提出这些话题的重要性。在立场认识论、批判理论和哲学的其他领域,我们选择的研究方法对我们的感知和我们感兴趣的主题有影响,反之亦然,这是一个司空见惯的现象;毕竟,站在树顶的观点不太可能导致对其根源的良好或任何研究。我们自己的社会地位和关系对我们认为有趣的事情和我们的研究结果产生影响的方式,可以在无知认识论的最新理论中详细看到。这个问题引起了人们对一个相关现象的关注,即我们选择的方法对我们的思维内容和我们认为值得研究的现象有影响。此外,选择一种非理想的哲学方法意味着我们从特定的社会错误开始思考,这些错误有时会揭示出我们已建立的哲学理论的不足;正如Bierria, Hänel, Haslanger和Hufendiek在本期的贡献所示。最后,我们认为值得研究的东西和我们选择的研究方法会影响哲学对谁开放和吸引谁。研究表明,被边缘化的哲学家在研究领域和主题中感到不受其他学者的欢迎和代表,并且通常对不同的主题或方法论方法感兴趣;例如,跨学科方法或对现实世界不公正的调查。 在本期中,Dotson、Ball-Blakely、Chapman和Carel将人们的注意力吸引到了学术界内外对特定话题以及学术界边缘化哲学家的非常真实且相当明确的排斥和沉默,以及学术资源、规范和规则暗中排斥学术界某些人而不是其他人的方式。前四篇论文是关于一般的方法论问题;当我们分析社会错误时,我们在做什么,我们应该做什么?接着她的论文《这篇论文是怎样的哲学?》(2012), Kristie Dotson反映了哲学论文的吸收,特别是那些与社会相关的话题。“关于社会相关哲学论文的成本:反思”提供了学术界有问题的排斥以及这种排斥影响哲学书面生产的方式的重要见解。为了做到这一点,多森介绍了被认为与社会相关的论文包含的三个方面:概念劳动力、建设劳动力和期望成本。第一部分描述了将一篇论文置于其适当的解释学景观中所涉及的劳动,包括思想和概念的历史形成。第二种描述了“话语执行的物质和实践必需品”(xx)所涉及的劳动,例如撰写论文所需的工具、培训或时间。构想性劳动和建构性劳动不一定有问题;虽然他们可以。第三,期望成本,指的是“对未来参与施加影响”的期望目标(xx)。这些成本是有问题的,因为它们往往导致排除复杂而不是技术话语及其多样化的从业者。多森的论点是基于她2012年的论文中提出的重要的哲学见解,即我们在西方学术界研究哲学的方式,并要求一些(但不是全部)来证明他们正在做的事情,以及我们的行为在个人和结构上的成本。接下来,在她的论文《扰乱需求:对分析方法论的混乱挑战》中,Naomi Scheman质疑了分析哲学的核心假设,即“适当的概念划分逻辑空间”和“真实的种类和真实的细节都不是本体论上模糊的”(xx)。Scheman认为,一个完全多元主义的——至少有时——概念上混乱的方法更适合解放女性主义的理论化。总的观点是,作为哲学家,我们不应该以清理混乱的社会世界为目标,而应该更好地理解它的全部混乱。这是出于这样一种理解,即特别是被压迫、从属和边缘化的主体往往有相互冲突的需求,如果其中任何一种需求优先于其他需求,他们的声音就会被排除和沉默。图式阐释了这些重要的论点,他引入了一场辩论,讨论作为一个女人意味着什么,以及谁被视为女人,这在很大程度上主导了分析女性主义哲学。接下来的两篇论文都表明,通过关注哲学中常见的不充分理论,质疑方法选择对社会错误的批判性分析的重要性。在她的《超越本质主义谬误:对生物性别差异诉求的微调意识形态批判》一书中,丽贝卡·胡芬迪克关注了进化心理学关于人类行为性别差异的过时观点。Hufendiek认为,进化心理学家忽视了数据、方法和对女性主义科学哲学家的批评,这表明他们的分析在方法上是不充分的,并且再现了性别歧视的刻板印象,以及从他们的分析中得出的伦理含义。这是一个特别有问题的问题,因为进化心理学有广泛的受众——甚至在学术界之外——因此影响了关于性别和性的论述。胡芬迪克认为,这些有问题的观点既需要女性主义科学哲学家的分析,也需要意识形态的批判性调查,因为进化心理学中的本质主义谬误再现并证明了压迫结构的合理性。因此,Hufendiek展示了方法和内容是如何经常携手并进的,对社会错误的分析必须注意方法问题。莎莉·哈斯兰格在她的论文《方法论个人主义的失败:社会系统的物质性》中认为方法论个人主义是不充分的。哈斯兰格的总体目标是表明,在社会系统中,物质、文化和心理之间存在着一种相互依存关系——这对许多社会解释至关重要;换句话说,一些社会现象最好是从系统或结构的角度来理解,而不是从个人和他们的个人态度的角度来理解。 为了论证方法论个人主义的不足,哈斯兰格指出,这种方法可以追溯到“社会世界由个人组成”的理想(xx),因此,对社会现象的任何解释都应该关注这些个人;无论是本体论个人主义还是解释性个人主义。然而,哈斯兰格令人信服地认为,本体论的个人主义和解释性的个人主义都应该被拒绝,因为它们对某些社会现象的解释不足。本文提供的更普遍的见解是,我们的一些方法选择未能对调查对象提供充分的解释,因为它们侧重于个人;因此,对社会错误的分析不仅要追踪社会制度中的物质文化因素,还要追踪心理因素。最后五篇论文关注的是具体的社会错误——从性别到种族到阶级,从移民到残疾——同时,表明我们调查的内容对我们如何调查或我们应该如何调查产生了影响。Hilkje Hänel在她的“概念改良的问题:强奸神话的问题”中关注的是针对妇女的性暴力的社会错误,特别是强奸神话,可以质疑我们社会分析的哲学方法。她认为,强奸神话和其他有问题的背景图式既会扭曲我们对强奸的主流工作理解,也会阻止我们准确应用适当的现有概念。此外,这些有问题的图式也会扭曲我们的哲学分析——甚至在批判性和解放性思维的情况下;比如概念改良的案例。考虑到这些问题,Hänel主张具体的民主实践,应该为概念改进或工程的哲学任务奠定基础。Esa Díaz-León讨论了性别和种族的元形而上学建议,同时展示了对性别和种族的关注如何要求对一些有影响力的元形而上学框架进行重新评估。《关于性别和种族的实质性形而上学辩论:语言争议与形而上学通缩论》是对形而上学中一些争议相对于其他争议是真实的或实质性的争论的仔细调查。Díaz-León认为,一些关于什么使形而上学争议具有实质性的主张是有问题的,因为它们排除了关于性别和种族本质的辩论,并建议将此类辩论理解为“关于我们实际上如何使用或应该如何使用性别和种族术语的争论”(xx),并且它们引发了重要的规范性评估。继2005年媒体对卡特里娜飓风的报道中对黑人行为的犯罪化分析之后,艾丽莎·比耶里亚(Alisa Bierria)在《行动中的失踪:暴力、权力和辨别力》(2014)中探讨了“黑人”和“犯罪”之间的概念混淆如何为有意行为的哲学讨论提出了重要挑战。在她的《种族合并:代理、黑人行为和犯罪意图》一书中,Bierria提出了一种种族合并理论,根据该理论,“犯罪意图被系统地强加于活跃的黑人主体”(xx)。然后,她继续分析了一种社会逻辑,这种逻辑可以将一些代理人的行为重新解释为一种不同于其初衷的叙事。比利亚这样做表明,如果不考虑种族压迫的运作方式和支持这种压迫的社会结构,关于故意行为的哲学思考是有缺陷的。迈克尔•鲍尔-布莱克利(Michael Ball-Blakely)反对主流的正统观点,认为高收入国家采取技术选择性移民政策,从本质上讲是不公平的。为此,他提出了两个不同的理由。首先,他引用了实证研究,发现社会经济地位低(SES)的人往往被视为无能——不仅被他人,而且被自己视为无能。既然如此,根据移民的技能来选择移民,将加剧社会经济地位较低的潜在移民所遭受的地位损害;这可能也适用于社会经济地位低的公民,因为一个州的移民政策传达了一个信息,即一个社会重视什么样的人,社会经济地位低的公民也会听到这个信息。其次,引进熟练劳动力使各州放弃为其公民提供公平和平等的机会,特别是在教育方面。罗伯特·查普曼和哈维·卡瑞尔在他们的《神经多样性、认知不公和美好的人类生活》一书中认为,认知不公可能会导致神经发散性残疾患者的幸福感下降。 为了做到这一点,他们把重点放在自闭症上,并在重要的细节上展示了自闭症不利于健康和繁荣生活的有问题的假设是如何导致自闭症患者的可信度不足,从而阻碍了我们想象或感知自闭症患者美好生活的能力。此外,查普曼和卡瑞尔表明,这种分析对伦理理论以及我们如何实施这种理论的问题有一些普遍的含义,因为它表明缺乏少数形式的人类繁荣,因此确定现有的人类繁荣理论是不完整的。我们希望这期的论文能提出更多的新问题,提出回答这些问题的新方法,提出从哲学上解决社会正义问题的新思路。
本文章由计算机程序翻译,如有差异,请以英文原文为准。
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来源期刊
CiteScore
2.20
自引率
12.50%
发文量
44
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