CFP: Canadian SWIP

Canadian Society for Women in Philosophy Conference 2007
October 12-14, University of Alberta, Edmonton

Conference theme: Communicating Feminisms

The 2007 Program Committee invites submissions on any feminist philosophical topic that relates to the conference theme, broadly construed.

Keynote speaker: Dr. Moira Gatens
Australian Research Council Professorial Fellow
Department of Philosophy, University of Sydney

Feminist scholarship continues to contribute massively to knowledge across the disciplines, to public policy formation, and to popular discourse. Yet as feminist research has become more diverse and developed, perceptions of it are often reductive or one-sided; this has tended to limit the extent to which feminist methods and insights are communicated in extra-academic contexts. This conference seeks to develop new strategies for representing feminism and communicating feminist research to audiences within the academy and beyond. How can feminist theorists be in conversation with empirically-minded scholars? How can scholars of feminist philosophy draw on the experiences and insights of the world outside the university to make better theory? How do feminists of different theoretical schools and political persuasions collaborate across our intellectual differences? What connections might be drawn between extra-academic feminist political practice and feminist philosophy?

Submissions of long abstracts (1000 words) are invited (for eventual presentations of 20 minutes, or not more than 3000 words). Submission reequirements and full contact information can be found at
http://www.arts.ualberta.ca/~cheyes/research/CSWIP.htm

DEADLINE: March 12 2007.

Scientific outreach and training

Alan Leshner has an editorial in last week's Science (12 January 2007, p. 161) calling for scientists to be better trained in public outreach.

He distinguishes between public education and public engagement:

Efforts that focus simply on increasing public understanding of science are not enough, because the problem is not merely a lack of scientific comprehension. In some cases, the public generally does understand scientific content in a fundamental way but still doesn't like it.

I wish that Leshner had space in the editorial to elaborate. He seems to be thinking about the debate over teaching evolution in schools, among other issues. Of course, not all scientists are working in areas that are in need of spokespeople to resolve public controversy, so his proposal for across-the-board training of graduate students in public communication is inefficient. One of his other suggestions is that academic institutions should reward people who engage in public outreach. This certainly seems true. Sometimes such efforts count as "service," which is widely considered less important than teaching and research. Arguably, though, communication with non-scientists is also a form of teaching.

I have two additional thoughts. First, when it comes to communicating about science and policy issues, what is lacking is not just the media and communications training that Leshner mentions but also training in normative reasoning and the role of science in society. Often, scientists are discouraged in their training from thinking about the normative assumptions in their research. Second, public outreach about scientific issues that affect policy can be (and is) undertaken by scholars outside of science. Philosophers are just one group that have played a key role in communicating about science and ethics with regard to biology education, the stem cell debate, species conservation, and disposal of nuclear waste.

Evolution and social constructivism

I attended a talk last night by David Sloan Wilson on "Evolutionary Social Constructivism."

His thesis is that evolutionary theory provides a "unique" theoretical framework for understanding not just the diversity of life and patterns of anatomy, behavior, etc. in living things, but also for understanding human behavior and human experience. The humanities and social sciences, he argued, are only just beginning to recognize the power of evolutionary thinking. He argues for increasing access of students and academics to training in evolutionary theory and for recognition of the value that evolutionary frameworks will have for fields as diverse as economics, psychology, politcal science, social work, literature, and religion. He also believes that there are schools of thinking in the humanities (he mentioned "potmodernists," whoever they are) which are "anti-evolution" (whatever that is), which I suppose (this was not clear) means that they treat humans as disembodied thinkers without situated biological bodies and ancestral histories.

I think he meant two things by "evolutionary theory." For one, he meant the history of human evolution, including how the story of human evolution explains our range of behaviors and psychology. For instance, in their book Unto Others D.S.Wilson and Eliot Sober examine how altruism, or prosociality, can be explained by group selection. Second, by evolutionary theory he also seem to mean any process that involves replication and selection. He included recent and short-lived phenomena in cultural evolution among the things that we humanists could better understand if we embraced evolutionary theory more whole-heartedly.

I'm in favor of promoting education in evolutionary theory--for undergraduates, for academics, and in grade schools. And I think that Wilson is right that "thinking through evolution" will be a fertile method with as-yet-undiscovered applications in the humanities and social sciences. But I fail to see the connection with social constructivism or how the term "evolutionary social constructivism" adds something useful to discourse.

"Social constructivism" already means too many different things to too many different people. In education, it indicates the philosophy that learning is collaborative. In social theory, it is a way of conceiving of social reality as created by interactive social processes--social constructivists investigate the actions and texts that support institutions and norms. In philosophy, it is both an anti-realist ontological thesis (that categories of things are not given but are human inventions) and an epistemological thesis (that knowledge bears some mark of the social context of its production).

What would "evolutionary social constructivism" mean? According to Wilson, it is a program of studying the effect of human evolutionary history on the objects of study of the social sciences--on rationality, on social behaviors, and so on. But this seems to be in opposition to social constructivism, not a revision, modification, or refinement of it. Social constructivism emphasizes the contingency and open-endedness of what we know (and of social institutions, learning, etc.). Although there is an element of historical contingency in how our evolutionary past happened to play out, evolutionary explanations tend to emphasize a way in which behavior or abilities or knowledge is determined. It also seems to be a thesis at a different level than a social constructivist thesis--it does not make a claim about what there is (ontology) or what we know (epistemology). It is a program of study.

Standpoint epistemology and dinner conversation

Last month I aired my frustration about a situation in which a logic professor dismissed any and all testimonial evidence on the basis of a (misapplied) informal fallacy.

In blog comments, Khadimir said he would have tried to figure out what "in the person's constitution" led her to reject the legitimacy of public assistance programs. These sorts of dinner-table political arguments do usually call for an exchange of political beliefs about the proper role of government, the trade-offs between positive and negative liberty, whether someone's station in life is a mark of their character, and whether suffering builds a sense of personal responsibility. And, in reality, the conversation did take these directions.

But I'm interested in the practical epistemology of the social situation, and also in Khadimir's comment. I'm tempted to diagnose this libertarian position as being the result of privilege. But psychologizing is too easy. And too easy to refute. Privilege doesn't cause someone to dismiss the needs of the poor and disabled in any straightforward sense of 'cause'. A more subtle analysis of the knowledge claims and social conditions is needed.

How can some people claim to know that they are harmed by welfare programs when others claim to know that they are not harmed, even though they are not receiving payments themselves? I assume that none of us at the dinner table that night had received social security payments, or disability benefits, or WIC or food stamps or Medicaid or Pell grants. Where does our knowledge of public assistance programs come from? Why do some of us know that they make our civil society run better and more fairly? Why are some of us glad that these programs exist, just in case, even though we think we can count on our educations, our training, our job experience, and our families to get us out of the kinds of financial binds we are most likely to face?

I think we can look to social epistemology to explain the differences in what people know about social fairness and about social luck. Social epistemology also has something to say about why some of us do actually know something about public assistance. We know it in a very real, very detailed way because we know people who have depended on public assistance and who have tangled with its bureaucracies. This is knowledge that comes from personal experience, and there is no "mere" about this kind of anecdotal evidence.

Miranda Fricker has a term for the systematic misrecognition that allows someone of privilege to believe that what she "knows" about public assistance (or any kind of oppression) is on a par with what someone who is oppressed (or identifies with the oppressed) knows about being dependent on aid. She calls it "credibility overspill."

Norms of credibility track power. At the dinner table, our conversation about politics was also guided by subtle (and not-so-subtle) power relations. Gender, professional status, argumentation skill, comfort with adversarial methods.

In addition, the libertarian was able to deny the credibility of any source of justification that she encountered. Why? Because any knowledge--first- or second-hand--of what it was like to need public assistance would have been clouded by being a recipient of financial aid. And those recipients could be dismissed in two ways. First, they just have a greedy interest in receiving money they do not "earn." And second, their station--as poor, as needy--lowers their epistemic status. Their testimony is not as trustworthy as a college professor's testimony about how the political landscape looks from her perspective.

Is "credibility overspill" also a barrier to learning new things? If you're in a position of privilege, you can afford to not notice certain things about what everyday life is like for the less privileged.

Philosophers grab at research funds

The Leiter Reports blog links to a faux grant proposal that will make philosophers giggle: a program for nano-philosophy.
(The .pdf by Robert Stainton and colleagues at University of Waterloo is here.)

This is an exciting time for consumers – but also for researchers who can count on endless grants in nano-engineering, nano-computing, and so forth.

In an effort to bring philosophy on board, members of University of Waterloo’s
Department of Philosophy began the search for very, very small philosophical questions.

Feminist philosophy has a role to play in examining the tiny question:

Is abortion always obligatory?

And philosophers of science, likewise, may address the compelling question:

Can science be naturalized?

I would also like to suggest that in the modern endeavor to press inquiry all the way to the bottom, there's a role for positive--and not simply critical--philosophy, with metaphysical conjectures such as:
"I exist, therefore I am."
"Where there is nothingness, there is not; where there is being, there is."
"DASEIN: there you are."

The Source of Knowledge in Experience

Someone just asked me why this blog, with its dual interests in analytic feminist theory and philosophy of science (and, especially, in their intersection) is called "Knowledge and Experience."

Identifying the source of knowledge as being in personal, but also (and necessarily) shared experience is a presumption of both feminism and of science. Naturalism is therefore a fitting methodology for investigating social groups and gender relations, as it is for investigating natural phenomena. A recurring theme we have taken up in the blog is how experience grounds knowledge, how experience shapes what investigations are taken up and which theories are accepted, and how a failure to take experience into account is often to blame for misconceptions about how the natural and social worlds work.

Philosophers who theorize about inquiry and about social action, as we do, have an interest in doing philosophy in a way that touches, moves, nudges, directs the world outside of academic philosophy. We fall short when we are unable to communicate the importance of theory outside of our circle. In endorsing pragmatism (and dismissing a certain kind of metaphysical posturing), William James wrote that

the only things that shall be debatable among philosophers shall be things definable in terms drawn from experience. (Things of an unexperienceable nature may exist ad libitum, but they form no part of the material for philosophic debate.)

Women in Science: Strategies for success

The New York Times published an article in yesterday's (Dec. 19) Science section about women in academic science--barriers to equitable participation and the advice they receive about overcoming hurdles. The article is called "Women in Science: The Battle Moves to the Trenches," but it will be freely available for only a week, so here are my comments, which serve as a summary.

It's not clear what precipitated this news article. Many of its references are to a September 2006 National Academies of Science report on the status of women. The NAS report repeated several well-known points, such as that although women make up more than half of graduates from biology programs, they account for only about 15% of full professors in science departments at top-tier research universities.

The challenge it offered to universities to reform academia was stronger than previous reports. It places the burden of reform squarely on the shoulders of university administrators to show that they are doing everything they can to promote parity for women, and not just to show that they are doing nothing to hold women back. It strongly recommends policies that provide for paid parental leave, on-site child care, and revised tenure clocks for parents.

The National Academies also reported that although men publish slightly more than women in the sciences, they also receive more financial support through grants and university leave, and that when this factor is controlled for, men and women publish at about the same rate.

Although bias against women's research may be small for any given project, it adds up over the course of a woman's career. Likewise, women are more likely to be assigned administrative service work, a burden that may be small at any given time but which adds up over the course of years.

The NYT also mentions an article (no citation available) which showed that letters of recommendation written for women job applicants were six times more likely to mention the candidate's private life than letters written for men. Women are more likely to be evaluated on their teaching in recommendation letters, while men are more likely to be evaluated on their research. Since top jobs often value research over teaching, this subtle bias may contribute to women's difficulty in getting top research jobs.

Philosophers at a dinner party

The scene is a lovely dinner party (thanks to Catherine), hosted by philosophers for philosophers, non-philosophers, and some precocious children (who were introduced during the evening to the concept of a "wet willie," no thanks to Greg). What do philosophers talk about when they get together off the clock, so to speak? Temporary and accidental intrinsics? Modal adverbials? Borat and how funny we find his racist humor in spite of ourselves?

Not these philosophers. They talk politics. One of their number, Ivy educated and with an AOS in metaphysics, proclaims herself a libertarian. Not that kind of libertarian. Not the kind whose main concern is to secure reproductive freedoms. Well, yes to those liberties, she concedes, but our primary political problem is taxation, and all the lazy folks who rely on welfare because they would rather not work a real job.

Another dinner party-goer, defending some of the folks who are on disability and drawing social security, offered up some personal experience in support of government support for those unable to find or hold a job for medical reasons. Another, a criminal defense attorney who deals with people on federal assistance, also tried to defend the importance of federal aid to maintaining civil order (at the very least). But our libertarian friend held her ground.

Why? Because she doesn't accept "appeals to authority" as good reasons. And now we come down to it. For what do we teach Introduction to Logic?

A logic professor brushing aside personal testimony (first- and second-hand) with the 5-cent fallacy "appeal to authority" has lost the key to epistemology. How can there be knowledge if we don't base it on experience? If all appeals to authority were suspect, we would know precious little, including how to interpret our own experience.

CFP: Society for Social Studies of Science

Next year’s theme for the 4S conference is similar to the theme of a conference held at Penn State’s Rock Ethics Institute in 2004. That conference was called “Epistemologies of Ignorance” and had its origins in an NEH seminar on feminist epistemology. There has also been an issue of Hypatia on the theme “Feminist Epistemologies of Ignorance” 21(3), Summer 2006. And the conference theme also recalls the book by Belenky et al, Women’s Ways of Knowing (1986). So, next year’s 4S conference theme should be fruitful for exploring topics in feminist philosophy of science.

Call for Papers:

Annual Meeting of the Society for Social Studies of Science
October 11-13, 2007, Montreal, Canada

Theme: “Ways of Knowing”
Abstracts for sessions or papers due on February 1, 2007.

The theme for the conference is ways of knowing.
By this we mean several things: implicitly, that there are many ways of knowing any particular object, process, or event; that some of these ways of knowing have historically been more valued than others; and that processes of adjudicating ways of knowing have usually been neither nice nor neutral.
So we are interested in processes of valuation (from the language of debates to acts of censorship) that result in one way of knowing as “the right one” or “the natural one.” We are interested in how people, groups, or cultures hold more than one way of knowing, and whether this is stable, durable, or problematic.
-When different ways of knowing are triangulated, how is this actually done in practice?
-What is lost and what is gained in the triangulation process?
We are interested in how certain ways of knowing are deemed to be “non-scientific,” (for example, magic, divination, astrology, etc).
-Several other interesting areas spring from this mixture of questions: historically, what is kept, or what is ignored, in studies of knowledges and paradigm shifts? (Including here questions of collective memory and collective forgetting.)
-How do new regimes of record keeping, such as the electronic patient record or the full text data base, affect what is remembered and what is forgotten? (This may be true across a large numbers of fields.)
All sorts of questions about translation arise in discussing these issues:
-Who chooses what is to be translated?
-Who does the translation?
-Does the quality of the translation impact the nature of knowledge, and if so, how?
-In Howard Becker’s famous concept, “hierarchy of credibility,” he claims that information coming from the top of a hierarchy (e.g., a bank president) is more credible than that coming from a disreputable person (e.g. a street person, or a drug addict, or a “seedy character.”) Given that our conference will be in Quebec, one of the sites where language (as a marker) difference are really bitterly disputed (up to the point of a gun), we must examine the idea that language is a powerful source of dispute, even war.
-Finally, there are different ways of knowing that are formed by gestures, by ways of pronouncing words, or by how names are heard and understood.
-Sometimes ways of knowing are different with respect to quantitative vs. qualitative; visual vs. textual, or statistical vs. enumerative. These only suggest the ways knowledges may frame findings, thus mirroring a final finding.

A final word about themes: these are suggestions to draw together work and a suggestion of a question or women and work. As always, themes are meant to suggest and encourage, not provide an iron cage. So, the Program Committee welcomes work that is outside the sketches drawn here; submissions are welcome from any of the variety of areas normally addressed by 4S (or even those not normally addressed, but which need to be).

Find more information and submit abstracts and session proposals at http://www.4sonline.org/meeting.htm.

Evidence in medicine: Fetal monitoring

A new study has indicated that fetal oxygen monitoring does not improve outcomes during childbirth. The randomized, controlled study was large, involving 14 hospitals and over 5,000 subjects, and the results have been published in an article and editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine. The study had been designed to enroll 10,000 subjects, but the findings were so clear that it was halted early.

The hope behind the technology was that by monitoring both heartrate and oxygen level, obstetricians would be able to discern which babies were truly in an emergency situation, thus lowering the rate of Cesarean sections. That is, the additional monitor, it was hoped, would correct for the failure of heartrate monitoring alone to lower infant mortality rates and the rate of complications such as cerebral palsy. The fetal oxygen monitor will now be discontinued.

This study is important because it was performed before the technology was widely adopted, in contrast to fetal heart monitoring. A number of studies have shown that routine fetal heart monitoring, too, is no better at predicting fetal distress than a trained nurse with a fetoscope, but that it does increase a woman's chance of having a C-section (not to mention that it constrains a woman's movement during labor and that internal monitoring is an invasive procedure for both mother and fetus). Nonetheless, obstetricians have come to rely on fetal heart monitoring, and 85% of births are so monitored. The C-section rate rose again last year to 30.2% of all births, a 46% rate increase in a decade. (An editorial about the shortcomings of fetal heart monitoring, with references, is here.)

Philosophers and low self-esteem

I've noticed a sort of self-loathing combined with exceptionalism among philosophers.

What we do is theoretical, but to what end do we do theory? Philosophers of science, for instance, are sometimes cautioned not to be so presumptious as to believe that our normative statements about good scientific reasoning should guide scientists. Who are we to tell scientists how to reason or how to arrange their institutions? Who are we to even judge which practices are best? How can we know science better than scientists themselves? But if we have no legitimate means of influencing scientific practice, then what is the point of our work?

But this attitude is not just pressed on us from the outside. It is readily embraced. Some philosophers do believe that what philosophy can best contribute to inquiry is, for example, a theory of universals, and that philosophy as a whole suffers when the importance of this lofty but impractical goal is overlooked.

And what benefits are promised by a career in philosophy? What jobs are there for philosophers other than the job of training and speaking to other philosophers?

The self-endorsed view that philosophers are sorrowfully misunderstood and that we suffer for this reason was put in front of me again recently when filling out a survey for my undergraduate college, where I majored in philosophy. The survey asked the standard questions that might be needed to evaluate and update curricula: "What courses served you the best?" "Were you well prepared for graduate school?"

In addition, there was this question:
"How was majoring in philosophy a burden to you after graduation?"
Would a business college ask the same question?
"How has your accounting degree held you back in life?"
Or about a degree in science,
"How has studying chemistry changed your life for the worse?"

CFP: Philosophy of Biology

The International Society for the History, Philosophy, and Social Studies of Biology (ISHPSSB) is meeting July 25-29, 2007 in Exeter, England. Proposals are due February 15:

Biennial Meeting of the International Society for the History, Philosophy, and Social Studies of Biology (ISHPSSB)

Exeter (Great Britain), July 25-29, 2007

Since its inception, the International Society for the History, Philosophy, and Social Studies of Biology (ISHPSSB) has brought together scholars from diverse disciplinary backgrounds to discuss historical, conceptual, epistemological, political, institutional, and ethical issues of the life sciences in an open and informal setting. Over the past twenty-odd years, attendance has increased from about 60 participants to about 350 in Guelph, 2005. In 2007, we hope to continue our tradition of an inclusive and experimental approach, while meeting the challenge of increased attendance.

Scholars wishing to attend the meeting are now invited to submit session and paper proposals on the ISHPSSB website (visit http://www.ishpssb.org/meeting.html). Deadline for submissions is February 15, 2007, and abstracts should not exceed 500 words.

While individual paper submissions are welcome, we strongly encourage submission of session and panel discussion proposals. For the 2007 meeting, we especially seek sessions that

• are innovative and cross-disciplinary in content and/or format;
• strengthen the lines of communication among historians, philosophers, social scientists, and biologists;
• open conversations that lead to new ways of thinking about the life sciences and the disciplines that study it;
• bring together people of different disciplinary and national backgrounds.

The Society is open to proposals on any topic connected with the history, philosophy and social studies of the life sciences. For the 2007 meeting, we would especially welcome sessions in the following areas:

• Interdisciplinarity.
  
• Anthropology of the Life Sciences.
  
• Biology and Politics.
  
• Systems Biology.
  
• Biology beyond the Evolutionary Synthesis.
  

Upcoming conferences: PSA, 4S, HSS

In Vancouver this week, from Nov. 1 - 5, there are three concurrent science studies conferences:
the Philosophy of Science Association, the Society for the Social Studies of Science, and the History of Science Society.

The PSA, I am disappointed to say, seems to be featuring no talks explicitly on the topic of feminist approaches to philosophy of science, though a session on Friday afternoon may be smuggling them in. It is titled "Towards a more political philosophy of science." Some of us on this blog would rather not find feminist approaches always categorized as political, since the label seems to imply a particular bias. It is the exclusion of women and of feminist thought from science and philosophy of science that is biased, not the exploration of diverse points of view.


The 4S conference has feminist inquiry scheduled throughout, too many sessions to catalog here. But we will point out those sessions of particular interest to philosophers of science:
1. Our own, of course, scheduled for Thursday morning:
"How central are values in scientific reasoning?"
2. On Friday morning, a panel of papers on Miriam Solomon's social empiricism
3. A session of author meets critics on John Zammito's A Nice Derangement of Epistemes: Post-positivism in the Study of Science from Quine to Latour on Friday afternoon.

Book announcements: Women & Technology

Two new books have recently appeared on women and technology:

Women, Gender, and Technology
Mary Frank Fox, Deborah G. Johnson, and Sue V. Rosser, eds. (University of Illinois Press, 2006).

This is an interdisciplinary investigation of the complex relationship between gender and technology. Each of the ten chapters explores a different aspect of how gender and technology work--and are at work--in particular domains, including film narratives, reproductive technologies, information technology, and the profession of engineering. The volume's contributors include representatives of over half a dozen different disciplines, and each provides a novel perspective on the foundational idea that gender and technology co-create one another.

Unfortunately, the table of contents is not yet available for viewing either at Amazon or at the University of Illinios website, so it is impossible to know who has contributed to the volume and on what topics without buying the book. Deborah Johnson is an ethicist who has written a textbook on computer ethics, so we can expect that there will be some contributions of interest to feminist theorists.

The other book is
Women and Information Technology: Research on Underrepresentation
Joanne McGrath Cohoon and William Aspray, eds. (MIT Press, 2006).

Computing remains a heavily male-dominated field even after twenty-five years of extensive efforts to promote female participation. The contributors to Women and Information Technology look at reasons for the persistent gender imbalance in computing and explore some strategies intended to reverse the downward trend. The studies included are rigorous social science investigations; they rely on empirical evidence--not rhetoric, hunches, folk wisdom, or off-the-cuff speculation about supposed innate differences between men and women.

This volume is focused on sociology rather than theory, but it will be interesting to examine the various types of explanations that are given for the continuing disparity in IT as well as evaluations of the remedies that have been implemented in educational settings.

Women in Philosophy: Making up a syllabus

One of the simplest things to do in promoting the full inclusion of women in careers (and other public spaces) where men are the predominate participants is to include them ourselves. For me, this means putting women's writing on my syllabi, inviting women lecturers to speak on campus, and encouraging my colleagues to do so also.

I'm teaching a course in Environmental Philosophy for the first time, and I've had less success in designing an inclusive syllabus than ever before. Among the required readings, there are 23 authors, and 4 of them are women (17%). This is a higher percentage than in many of the Environmental Ethics textbooks I looked at, but it's nothing to be proud of. Part of the difficulty is that the course centers on topics that have an epistemological or philosophy of science cast to them rather than being ethics-based, so I haven't assigned any ecofeminism. (I resist including feminist readings merely for the sake of including women because I think it tends to reinforce an artificial separation between 'mainstream' philosophy and feminist philosophy.) Among philosophers who write on issues in ecology and environmental science, Kristin Shrader-Frechette is the only woman I'm aware of, but suggestions would be appreciated!