The class as a whole has generally had a positive reaction to the readings assigned thus far in the course but had a negative, even hostile, reaction toward the latest article they discussed, a marvelous piece by Miranda Fricker called "Scepticism and the Genealogy of Knowledge."
My colleague is a contextualist, a feminist, and a pragmatist anti-skeptic. "I just realized how, if I wanted to, I could once and for all turn the class opinion against the skeptic," he confided. "All I'd have to do is to consistently refer to the skeptic as 'she'."
2 comments:
I'm familiar with Fricker, but not this piece in particular. (And I haven't had enough caffeine yet to parse the abstract.) Did your colleague explain what it was about his students' reactions that made him think they were critical because Fricker is a woman?
No he didn't, specifically. He did note that the language they used to critique her was expressed in gendered terms. Were her arguments too soft? Was she wishy-washy? On what did she base her authority as an epistemologist (as though these students--many of them in their first upper-division course) can judge these questions.
I have an additional clue as to what he was thining. In a different conversation he referenced the book he's reading: Cordelia Fine, Delusions of Gender.
One of Fine's points, he says, is that how people think about gender depends in large part on how gender is framed. So I suspect that he's thinking of the gendered culture of both my institution and of philosophy, and of how that culture is self-reinforcing using various gender frames. The background ratio of men to women students here is 2:1, but our upper-division courses usually include 1 to 3 women out of about 30 students in a course.
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