Abstract: Philosophical exchanges can go awry in a wide variety of ways. One interlocutor may mistakenly assume that their interlocutor knows nothing. Interlocutors may not share the same set of hermeneutic resources, and may therefore talk past each other. Pairs of interlocutors might enter interactions seeking different outcomes. Aside from occasionally yielding frustrating outcomes, I argue that these conversational failings have a more damaging outcome: they contribute to the exclusion of philosophers who claim traditionally marginalized or excluded identities.
Following Hesni (2024), I take social scripts both to structure social interactions both to better facilitate conversational cooperation and to serve as a mechanism to uphold social norms, including those that reinforce social hierarchies. I examine one social script familiar to anyone in academic philosophy: the one that begins with “What do you work on?” Depending on how each instance of this conversation evolves, it can lead one interlocutor to a double bind in which they either must cooperate and adopt a role in the conversation that is both passive and degrading while claiming a modest social benefit, or otherwise behave disruptively and incur social costs. With inspiration from O’Connor (2019), I model these interactions as a social coordination game played iteratively between pairs of interlocutors. I then show how this game, when played iteratively by biased agents, counteracts efforts to diversify philosophical communities. If this game is an adequate toy model of social reality, this shows why it is that ordinary, non-resistant participation in academic philosophy is not neutral; it strengthens the structures of oppression that keep white men on top while simultaneously driving out those philosophers who claim traditionally marginalized or excluded identities.
References:
Hesni, Samia (2024). How to Disrupt a Social Script. Journal of the American Philosophical Association 10 (1):24-45.
O’Connor, C. (2019). The origins of unfairness: Social categories and cultural evolution (First edition). Oxford University Press.
The PoP-Grunch (Philosophy of Physics Graduate Lunch) is a weekly informal seminar in which graduate students in Philosophy of Physics present their work in progress.
Philosophy of Physics Graduate Lunch Seminar Convenor: Paolo Faglia
