Diversity Reading List

Comment: This paper was published as the opening chapter of the first ever edited volume devoted exclusively to experimental philosophy. It positions experimental philosophy vis-à-vis the traditional philosophical method of conceptual analysis. It discusses three ways in which experimental findings can have philosophical significance. Along the way, it also addresses three common objection to x-phi.

Comment: According to what Michael Bratman has called “The simple view" of intentional action, an action φ is intentional only if the agent had an intention to φ. In this short paper, Joshua Knobe presents the results of two experiments that strongly suggests that ordinary people do not ascribe intentionality in accordance with the simple view. Rather, whether they judge a side-effect to be intentional seems to depend on whether the side-effect is good or bad. This effect came to be known as “the side-effect effect” or “the Knobe effect.” Subsequent experimental research has shown that moral considerations influence the folk ascriptions not only of intentionality, but also of other intuitively descriptive notions, such as knowledge or causation.

Comment: In "Naming and Necessity," one of the most celebrated philosophical works of the XXth century philosophy, Saul Kripke presents a series of thought experiments meant to discredit the description theory of proper names. For a long time, many in the profession believed that Kripke’s intuitions about these cases are universally shared. Machery and colleagues challenge this orthodoxy by presenting the results of two experiments, in which they asked American and Hong Kongese populations about their intuitions regarding Kripke’s cases.

Comment: Louise Antony distinguishes between two types of explanation of the gender disparity in philosophy: “different voices” and “perfect storm.” The latter – Antony’s preferred model – explains the disparity in terms of the convergence of non-domain specific phenomena: academic philosophy features a unique combination of factors hampering women’s success. The former, in turn, appeals to the different ways in which men and women think. According to Antony, the different voices model is not only empirically unsupported, but also its very pursuit could have negative social consequences. Her paper also features an extensive critique of Buckwalter & Stich’s paper, both from a methodological and from a feminist perspective. As such, it offers important lessons as to how feminist x-phi should be practiced.

Comment: Helen Beebee and Anne-Marie McCallion argue that Antony misunderstands the conceptual commitments of the different voices model. Once the confusion is removed, the authors claim, it becomes clear that its pursuit is of positive social value.

Comment: Hamid Seyedsayamdost presents the results of the replications of three classes of studies invoked by Buckwalter and Stich in support of the claim that philosophical intuitions vary across gender. Most of the studies fail to replicate the original results. Although the paper is rather technical in focus, working through (some parts of) it may help the readers better understand the methodology of x-phi and assess the credibility of results published in x-phi papers.

Comment: In this paper, Joshua Knobe challenges the widespread view that philosophical intuitions are variable across the demographic groups. Instead, he argues that the actual results show that philosophical intuitions are surprisingly stable across demographic groups.

Comment: The authors of the paper are the leaders of the recently concluded “Geography of philosophy project”, which studies “diversity in people’s conceptions of understanding, wisdom, and knowledge around the world, and seek to promote cross-cultural research in cognitive science.” In this response piece, they accuse Knobe of cherry-picking the results to support his conclusion. They supply an impressive list of 100 papers that have found diversity in philosophical intuitions across demographic groups. In addition to claiming that Knobe’s view is false, they also argue that taking it seriously may have harmful consequences for the way philosophy is practiced.

Comment: In this comprehensive paper, Knobe further unpacks his claim about the stability of intuitions across demographic differences. He scrutinizes some of the studies invoked by Stich & Machery, and argues that many of them do indeed provide evidence of stability.

Comment: Pohlhaus begins by presenting her argument as a critical response to both Buckwalter and Stich's controversial article, and Antony's (2012) reply to it. What follows is an argument about the way x-phi practicioners have failed to fully incorporate feminist insights about the significance of intuition difference. For Pohlhaus, a discovery that some one or some groups has a different intuitive response to one's own is the jumping off point for a potentially transformative conversation, rather than a result that either puts to rest a philosophical concept, or needs to be explained away.

Comment: Schwartzman mounts a critical argument about x-phi's feminist potential. She argues that the sorts of methods that are central to much x-phi are uncritical of the ways in which intuitions can be shaped by a variety of prejudicial and ideological forces, and are unable to reveal the existence of the sort of structural injustice that is responsible for professional philosophy's radically unrepresentative demographics. Importantly, along the way she recruits empirical work about the nature of implicit bias and stereotype threat.

Comment: Content warning: details of rape. This article presents a series of experimental studies that have an important result for understanding a legal puzzle that has plagued many feminist theorists. Sommers argues that the dominant explanation of the puzzle has been wrongly diagnosed by feminist theorists, and that attention to folk intuitions about the nature of consent can explain the law's inconsistent treatment of consent that is procured by deception.

Comment: The existence of testimonial injustice is widely accepted. Despite this, Rodrigo Díaz & Manuel Almagro contend that no one has attempted to test for it directly. They present the results of two survey experiments which found no evidence of testimonial injustice. Yet, they do not take their results to cast doubt on the existence of the phenomenon.

Comment: In this excerpt, Miranda Fricker introduces the concept of testimonial injustice.

Comment: Migdalia Arcila-Valenzuela and Andrés Páez argue that it is impossible to detect an individual instance of epistemic injustice. Their case relies on a review and analysis of the recent research on implicit bias. The key theoretical premise of their argument is that it is impossible to establish, for any individual situation, what is the minimum degree of credibility that the speaker is entitled to. However, they still think we can measure general testimonial injustice, which they construe as “a behavioral tendency of a prejudiced hearer.”

Comment: This is a written transcript of the James Baldwin lecture, delivered by the computer scientist Arvind Narayanan, at Princeton in 2022. Narayanan's prior research has examined algorithmic bias and standards of fairness with respect to algorithmic decision making. Here, he engages critically with his own discipline, suggesting that there are serious limits to the sorts of quantitative methods that computer scientists recruit to investigate the potential biases in their own tools. Narayanan acknowledges that in voicing this critique, he is echoing claims by feminist researchers from fields beyond computer science. However, his own arguments, centered as they are on the details of the quantitative methods he is at home with, home in on exactly why these prior criticisms hold up in a way that seeks to speak more persuasively to Narayanan's own peers in computer science and other quantitative fields.

Comment: Cokley and Awad are both psychologists, whose work seeks to redress the wrongs of past injustices against marginalized groups, and who both use quantitative methods to do so. In this article, they sketch some of the historical reasons why members of marginalized groups are sometimes rightly suspicious of the use of quantative techniques. However, they both argue that quantitative methods are not necessarily oppressive, but can be put to good use provided their practioners are committed to social justice. They offer some examples, from their own work, of how this sort of quantitative work can help to further the cause of social justice.

Comment: This 1900 essay is seminal in feminist theory and black studies. Wells paves the way, appealing to empirical evidence, for theorizing on the role that white women's sexuality plays in black people's oppression in the US context. This is part of her broader argument for why lynching should be considered a moral catastrophe in the US.

Comment: In this article, Skorburg argues that Jane Addams – the 20th Century activist who worked for poor and immigrant communities in Chicago – can be appropriately understood as an early experimental philosopher. In making the argument, Skorburg distinguishes between narrow and broad senses of what it means to do x-phi, as well as a narrow and broad sense of what it means to be a pragmatist. If we accept broad sense of both x-phi, and pragmatism, Jane Addams counts as both a pragmatist, and an experimental philosopher.

Comment: In this book, published in 1902, Jane Addams makes a case for why politics must be done with an eye to the personal, interpersonal, and lived. She argues that ethics and democracy cannot be properly conceived outside of the realm of the social. Addams thinks of social friction as productive and illuminative. Abstract and passive belief in doing good and being democratic without actually speaking to those who are oppressed or marginalized is not sufficient to do good and be democratic. One cannot be democratic without actually involving oneself with people who are different than you. Addams foreshadows later arguments about multiculturalism, diversity, and participatory democracy.

Comment: In this book Jennifer Morton, a philosopher of education and political philosopher, revisits the question of upward mobility and the difficulties under-privileged college students face in completing college. She argues that they face huge, yet-unacknowledged costs: "ethical costs," that impact not just them but their wider (often-marginalized) communities. Her theses in this book therefore touch not just on the individual experiences of marginalized college kids but also on broader issues of social oppression and social change. To make her claims Morton draws on her own lived experiences as an immigrant and a philosopher teaching in a public institution. One might describe this empirical method as autoethnography, although she does not. She also draws upon interviews conducted with the population of students she's interested in, "strivers." Morton's book addresses the phenomenon of upward mobility, the ethical purposes and drawbacks of going to college, and dignifies the experiences of people from marginalized backgrounds who want to make a better life for them and their communities.

Comment: Katherine Womack and Norah Mulvaney-Day identify some shortcomings of survey experiments, which are the dominant method of x-phi. They argue, from a feminist standpoint, that x-phi would benefit from the inclusion of qualitative methods.

Comment: "Ought implies can" is a principle widely held by philosophers. The results of survey experiments have been recruited to argue that the folk reject the principle. In this paper, Kyle Thompson presents the results of a qualitative study that provides strong reasons for thinking that extant survey experiments on the topic might have painted a distorted picture. Thompson's paper is a compelling demonstration of the value of supplementing quantitative methods with qualitative ones.

Comment: James Andow suggests that experimental philsophers should incorporate more qualitative methods into their toolkit. He also addresses a potential objection to this claim, according to which experimental philosophy is interested in intuitive, as opposed to reflective, reasoning.

Comment: Lisa Guenther, author of the 2015 book "Solidarity Confinement: Social Death and its Afterlives," gives a quick overview of "critical phenomenology" and how it is different from classical phenomenology. The boundaries of critical phenomenology are still being drawn, but Guenther's concise explanation has already become canon. Understanding, in broad brush strokes, what critical phenomenology is will be important to engage with many conversations on feminist philosophy, especially in the continental tradition, since feminist theorists (inspired by Simone de Beavoir and Frantz Fanon) often appeal to lived experience in their theorizing of oppression.

Comment: Sara Ahmed is a renowned critical phenomenologist who resigned from her job at Goldsmiths over sexual harassment in her department and the university's handling of it. In this 2021 book, she draws on an interdisiplinary corpus, and her own ethnographic skills, to research and theorize complaint against power abuse, broadly conceived. Important are her own experiences and supportive relationships with students that led to her resignation. One thing this book argues is that complaints, and the process of complaining, are an important part of changing the university, and are in themselves useful political tools, since they challenge (and hence illuminate) hidden parts of institutional life.

Comment: Sara Ahmed is a renowned critical phenomenologist who resigned from her job at Goldsmiths over sexual harassment in her department and the university's handling of it. In this 2021 book, she draws on an interdisiplinary corpus, and her own ethnographic skills, to research and theorize complaint against power abuse, broadly conceived. Important are her own experiences and supportive relationships with students that led to her resignation. One thing this book argues is that complaints, and the process of complaining, are an important part of changing the university, and are in themselves useful political tools, since they challenge (and hence illuminate) hidden parts of institutional life.

Comment: Content warning: Details of cruelties of slavery, sexual assault. In this 1971 text written while incarcerated, Angela Davis makes an argument against the truth of a stereotype of the black enslaved woman. She argues that, contrary to popular belief, the stereotype of a black woman under slavery as the “matriarch” (i.e., dominating the men in their lives and colluding with the white slaver in black people’s oppression) is not true. Instead, she argues, appealing to empirical evidence and marxist theory, that black women’s position in the community of slaves uniquely positioned them to aid in liberation struggles. She argues it is empirically borne out that they in fact were crucial to both explicit and everyday resistance efforts.

Comment: An excerpt from her landmark 1991 text, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment, this text sees Patricia Hill Collins outline four “controlling images” that contribute to black women’s oppression, appealing to cultural and literary devices, as well as social science literature. In the parts of this chapter not excerpted Hill Collins argues that stereotypical images and symbols of Black womanhood manipulate society’s perception and ideas about Black womanhood and, by extension, Black women which contributes to justifying their oppression.

Comment: Content warning: very explicit details of cruelties of slavery, sexual assault. In this seminal black feminist theory text, the Foucauldian scholar Saidiya Hartman considers the “archive” which is what she terms the collection of historical evidence that one writes about the past with. She reckons with the difficulty and ethics of writing about past figures and people who were subject to immense violence, degradation and oppression, since often the only records left of their existence are those written or approved by their oppressors or people who were complict in their oppression, and those records are often at best only caricatures of the person they pretend to represent.

Comment: In this 2017 paper, historian Joanna Radin explores how reusing big data can contribute to the continued subjugation of Akimel O’odham, who live in the southewestern region of the US, otherwise known as the "Pima". This reading also illustrates how data can, over time, become used for what it was never intended or collected for. Radin emphasizes the dangers of forgetting that data represent human beings.

Comment: In this 1977 article, Patricia Bell Scott explains how social sciences had theretofore been racist, sexist, and classist in their research of Black women. She identifies concrete failings and biases in the approach of socials sciences towards Black women, and suggests concrete agendas for research institutions, moving forward.

Comment: Serene Khader is a feminist and political philosopher whose work engages deeply with empirical work beyond philosophy. In this article, she responds to several replies to her 2018 book, "Decolonizing Universalism." Familiarity with the arguments of the book are not necessary to follow the arguments Khader makes in this piece, and to appreciate the way she recruits empirical work beyond philosophy in order to fruitfully inform her position on several key philosophical disputes. In this short excerpt, readers can gain a glimpse of one of the ways in which contemporary philosophers are opening up new pathways for theorizing precisely because of their interdisciplinarity.

Comment: In this 2019 article, Matthew Longo and Bernardo Zacka make a case for why ethnography, in generating what Ian Shapiro calls problematizing redescriptions, is useful for political theorists: it can capture complex social phenomena in very nuanced, fine-grained ways and can thus advance our collective reflection on concepts.