While the empirical evidence pointing to a gender gap in professional, academic philosophy in the English-speaking world is widely accepted, explanations of this gap are less so. In this paper, we aim to make a modest contribution to the literature on the gender gap in academic philosophy by taking a quantitative, corpus-based empirical approach. Since some philosophers have suggested that it may be the argumentative, “logic-chopping,” and “paradox-mongering” nature of academic philosophy that explains the underrepresentation of women in the discipline, (...) our research questions are the following: Do men and women philosophers make different types of arguments in their published works? If so, which ones and with what frequency? Using data mining and text analysis methods, we study a large corpus of philosophical texts mined from the JSTOR database in order to answer these questions empirically. Using indicator words to classify arguments by type, we search through our corpus to find patterns of argumentation. Overall, the results of our empirical study suggest that women philosophers make deductive, inductive, and abductive arguments in their published works just as much as male philosophers do, with no statistically significant differences in the proportions of those arguments relative to each philosopher’s body of work. (shrink)

This article examines whether people share the Gettier intuition (viz. that someone who has a true justified belief that p may nonetheless fail to know that p) in 24 sites, located in 23 countries (counting Hong Kong as a distinct country) and across 17 languages. We also consider the possible influence of gender and personality on this intuition with a very large sample size. Finally, we examine whether the Gettier intuition varies across people as a function of their disposition to (...) engage in “reflective” thinking. (shrink)

In this article, I explore some harms that emerge from the call for charity in academic philosophy. A charitability gap, I suggest, exists both between who we tend to read charitably and who we tend to expect charitability from. This gap shores up the disciplinary status quo and (re)produces epistemic oppression, which helps preserve philosophy's status as a discipline that is, to use Charles Mills's language, conceptually and demographically dominated by whiteness and maleness (Mills 1998, 2). I am particularly interested (...) in calls for charity made in response to critiques of racist or sexist authors/texts. I suggest that in these cases, interpretive charity perpetuates epistemic violence by creating conditions for testimonial smothering (Dotson 2011); that it functions as an orientation device (Ahmed 2006) designed to bring “unruly” philosophers back in line with disciplinary practices and traditions; and that it requires resistant philosophers to remain in oppressive worlds (Lugones 2003a; Pohlhaus 2011). Although charitability is risky—and charity is disproportionately demanded from already marginalized philosophers—I am hesitant to abandon charity entirely. The outright rejection of charitable orientations toward texts or others commits philosophers to a purity politics that, following Alexis Shotwell, I suggest we resist (Shotwell 2016). (shrink)

In recent years, the "science of science" has combined computational methods with novel data sources in order to understand the dynamics of research communities. As the name suggests, science of science is primarily focused on science and technology, with less attention to the humanities. However, many of the questions investigated by science of science are also relevant to academic philosophy: To what extent can the discipline be divided into subfields with different methods and topics? How are prestige and credit distributed (...) across the discipline? And how do these factors interact with other factors, such as gender, to shape job market outcomes? In this paper, we provide some empirically-informed answers to these questions by applying computational methods to job market data for Anglophone academic philosophy. We find, first, evidence that is consistent with the analytic-continental divide, but is also consistent with other, more complex ways of organizing academic philosophy into distinct intellectual traditions; second, a clear prestige hierarchy, dividing PhD programs into two distinct prestige categories; and third, evidence that gender, prestige, and country have notable effects on academic job market outcomes for recent philosophy PhDs. (shrink)

Dans les discussions concernant la sous-représentation des femmes dans le domaine de la philosophie professionnelle, ceux et celles qui sont sceptiques quant à l’explication par la discrimination suggèrent souvent que les différences de genre dans les intérêts constituent une autre hypothèse possible. Certain.e.s croient que si les intérêts différents des femmes expliquaient la sous-représentation, les interventions suggérées par l’hypothèse de la discrimination ne seraient pas nécessaires, voire seraient risquées. Je maintiens qu’on doit considérer la façon dont les stéréotypes exerceraient une (...) influence sur les intérêts, et que ce faisant, on peut offrir une évaluation plus équilibrée des risques découlant des interventions proposées. (shrink)

On average, women make up half of introductory-level philosophy courses, but only one-third of upper-division courses. We contribute to the growing literature on this problem by reporting the striking results of our study at the University of Oklahoma. We found that two attitudes are especially strong predictors of whether women are likely to continue in philosophy: feeling similar to the kinds of people who become philosophers, and enjoying philosophical puzzles and issues. In a regression analysis, they account for 63% of (...) variance. Importantly, women are significantly less likely to hold these attitudes than men. Thus, instructors who care about improving the retention of women undergraduates should find ways to improve these attitudes – for instance, by demonstrating the ways in which professional philosophers are like them. We will discuss some tentative but intuitively plausible suggestions for interventions, though further research is required to establish the effectiveness of those interventions. (shrink)

This chapter has two aims. First, I distinguish between two forms of testimonial injustice: identity-based testimonial injustice and content-based testimonial injustice. Second, I utilize this distinction to develop a partial explanation for the persistent lack of diverse practitioners in academic philosophy. Specifically, I argue that both identity-based and content-based testimonial injustice are prevalent in philosophical discourse and that this prevalence introduces barriers to participation for those targeted. As I show, the dual and compounding effects of identity-based and content-based testimonial injustice (...) in philosophy plausibly contribute to a lack of diversity in the social identities of practitioners and the discourses in which practitioners are engaged. (shrink)

This article examines whether people share the Gettier intuition (viz. that someone who has a true justified belief that p may nonetheless fail to know that p) in 24 sites, located in 23 countries (counting Hong-Kong as a distinct country) and across 17 languages. We also consider the possible influence of gender and personality on this intuition with a very large sample size. Finally, we examine whether the Gettier intuition varies across people as a function of their disposition to engage (...) in “reflective” thinking. (shrink)

Helen Beebee, Anne-Marie McCallion ABSTRACT: Louise Antony draws a now well-known distinction between two explanatory models for researching and addressing the issue of women’s underrepresentation in philosophy – the ‘Different Voices’ and ‘Perfect Storm’ models – and argues that, in view of PS’s considerably higher social value, DV should be abandoned. We argue ….