The LCC Backlash

About a week ago I wrote a post in which I proposed a Languaged Conference Campaign to highlight the underrepresentation of non-native English speakers in the line-ups of philosophy conferences and volumes. I was expecting this to be a relatively uncontroversial move, since many support the Gendered Conference Campaign, whose aims and methods the LCC was supposed to co-opt. Boy, was I wrong!

After Jennifer Saul kindly posted a link to my post about the LCC on Feminist Philosophers, all hell broke loose (mostly on the social media but also via e-mail/personal message). The objectors seemed to fall into two groups. A first group were NES philosophers who seemed to be mostly intent on trying to undermine the campaign aims and methods, while seemingly asking innocent questions. In the past few days I have been asked numerous times all sorts of questions on all sort of issues related to my proposal (from the vagueness of the definition of "native English speaker" to the difficulties of identifying someone's native language from their name and from public biographical information available about them).

While I agree that there is no 100% reliable method to do that, I suspect that NES philosophers tend to overestimate the number of cases in which there would be much doubt as to whether a philosopher is a native English speakers (I guess that that's part of the point of the campaign). Also, while the definition of "native English speaker" might be somewhat vague (in a number of ways), I suspect the borderline cases are few and far between in the philosophical community (and, anyway, since when has the vagueness of a definition prevented us from applying it outside of the philosophy seminar room?) Also, since it would be practically impossible to flag all conferences/volumes that feature only NES speakers/contributors anyway, my policy would be to desist from flagging a conference/volume whenever the publicly available evidence is inconclusive and, in any case, all one needs is to track reliably NES philosophers.

But, of course, philosophers being philosophers, I was subjected to a barrage of improbable scenarios, possible counterexamples, borderline cases of nativeness, and requests for definitions clarifications, most of which was totally irrelevant and had little or no real-world significance. Some people even questioned the notion that native English speakers tend to be more fluent or have less of an accent than non-native English speakers (probably misunderstanding the notion of NES and thinking one has to speak a language from birth to be a native speaker, which, of course, it's not the case---a native language is a language acquired during the so-called critical period of language acquisition). Many of these requests were posed as innocent questions (but we all know that philosophers often like to dress up what they take to be their most lethal objections as innocent questions (see the translation of "I'm puzzled" here)). Others were posed much more directly as (supposedly) lethal objections to the campaign's aims and methods.

One of the things I found most surprising is that not even one of these "challenges" was preceded by some acknowledgement on the part of the challenger of the enormous privilege and native speakers of (the "right" dialects of) English (roughly British, American, Canadian, Australian English) enjoy within analytic philosophy. In fact, only a handful of NES philosophers have been ready to acknowledge their linguistic privilege (interestingly, not one of them had any "innocent" questions to ask).

Another thing that I found particularly interesting was that many of those who questioned the practice of guessing one's native language from one's name are supporters of the GCC. To be honest, I have a hard time believing that guessing whether a person self-identifies as male from their name is less problematic than guessing whether their first language is English from their name and their publicly available biographical information. First, the gender guesser is probably assuming that the people whose gender they are guessing have names such as "John", "Paul", and "George", but what if the names they are not familiar with such as "Andrea" (which is a male name in some languages and a female name in others), "Kara" and "Maxime" (which is unisex in some languages), or "Aditya" or, indeed, "Gabriele" (which most English speakers assume are female name)? In a philosophical community that were truly representative of the world at large, wouldn't guessing one's gender require guessing at least what language their name is? Second and more importantly, whether's one's first language is English is pretty much an objective question. If you have grown up in an Anglophone country from the age of, say, 5 and have done most of your schooling in English, then your first language is English even if your parents spoke only, say, Urdu at home. Moreover, I cannot see how even falsely assuming that someone's first language is English can be hurtful or damaging to them. I happen to live in a city in which much of the population is non-native English speakers and sometimes my interlocutors falsely believe English is my first language. I cannot see how that could be offensive or hurtful to me in any way. One's gender, on the other hand, is a much more complex, personal, and private issue. What if a trans* woman finds a volume she has contributed to flagged as an all-male volume because the editors of the volume refused to update her name? Note that I am not raising these issues to raise doubts about the GCC, whose aims and methods I support. Rather, I'm trying to argue that guessing a person's gender from their name is not less problematic than guessing their first language (in fact, at most the opposite seems to be true).

One more interesting observation is that the debate quickly turned to a debate about tone. First, it's well known from online discussions of feminism that the tone card is often played to distract the attention from the substantial issues being discussed. Second, I think that it is important to understand that tone is one of the most difficult aspects of a language to master for non-native speakers and that to play the tone card in this context is particularly problematic because it seems to be part and parcel of the issue that is being raised. Tone is very language-, culture-, and context-specific and assessing tone on such a non-transparent medium as the internet is difficult even for native speakers. For non-native speakers, it's only worse. Kieran Healy has two funny tables that "translate" between British English and American English (http://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2013/08/16/academic-feedback/). According to the table, when the British academic wants to say "You are an idiot", they'll say "I'm confused". This is of course a joke but there is some truth in it. British tone is difficult to master for speakers of, say, American English and vice versa. I wish NES philosophers would give some thought to how hard it is to master these different standards of tone for non-native speakers and made as much of an effort to understand that non-native speakers might also have different tone standards just like Brits and Americans do according to those tables.

The second group of challengers were potential allies who thought that the LCC's focus on language is mistaken. One subgroup seemed to think that linguistic bias is ultimately racial bias. While I do not deny that language is often a proxy for race (in fact that's partly the point, as far as I am concerned), I doubt that if you manage to achieve a better racial representation you thereby achieve better linguistic representation. I feel that a scenario in which the philosophical community has achieved a better racial representation by including only people of, say, East Asian and South Asian descent who grew up in America and are native English speakers but without including any people who grew up in Asia and are non-native speakers is far from ideal. In fact, it seems to me that in that scenario the racial problems have not been fully addressed. I would like analytic philosophy to become as global as its intellectual ambitions seem to require.

A second subgroup includes people who think that we should focus first on more urgent and serious issues such as race, gender, and disability. Of course, as I said many times, I take these to be compatible aims. In fact, I think that diversity breeds diversity and that the more diverse and inclusive the philosophical community becomes along a number of dimensions, the better. Second, I don't know how feasible and advisable is to rank biases in terms of strength. It seems to me that insofar as a majority of philosophers enjoys the benefits of an unearned advantage (be it being male, being white, or being a native English speaker) the situation is somewhat unfair and we should try to find ways to make it fairer. The idea that we should address underrepresentation/diversity/inclusiveness problems one-by-one and in order of "importance" seems to miss the intersectional nature of these problems and requires that those who are affected by the problems deemed less "important" wait patiently for the solution to the other problems. But this is just naive. These sort of problems are never completely solved, not until our societies will completely rid themselves of racism, sexism, ableism, which probably won't be for a long time. In the meantime, we should strive to make philosophy more inclusive and hospitable along a number of dimensions.

One more point. Some of the philosophers in the last group were non-native speakers and some NES philosophers used them as a reason to suggest that the language issue might not be really there. If even some non-native speakers do not feel they are subject to linguistic bias, however, this is hardly an argument. Consider an analogy. Many women seem to think that feminism is bad and sexism does not exist  (or at least that it no longer exists in the "Western" world)? But is the fact that some women are oblivious to sexism a reason to think that sexism does not esxist?

Finally, I want to thank all the EFL philosophers who contacted me privately to express their support. I find it a bit chilling that so many of them told me they were concerned about expressing their support more publicly but, to be honest, I don't blame them as I was not expecting the full extent of the backlash I have received. At this point, I really don't know if I have the time, the patience, and the energy to deal with the level of scrutiny and criticism I have been subjected to by so many NES philosophers for the last few days, so I'm not sure what the future will hold for the LCC. It has become clear to me that I have all to lose and nothing to gain from this and, frankly, I don't know how far I am willing to go.

A Little Thought Experiment for Philosophers Who Are Native English Speakers

[This is a second post in a series of posts about doing philosophy in English as a non-native English speaker (the first post is here. All posts in this series will be reachable by clicking on the category "EFL Philosophers" at the bottom of the post; please see here for a disclaimer to all the posts in this series).]

Let me start with a little thought experiment for philosophers who are native English speakers (we are philosophers---we love thought experiments, right?), as, I suspect, some have never thought about this before. Suppose that, tomorrow, all international philosophy journals announce that they will only start accepting only submissions in Spanish (or French, or whatever language you have learned in school as a second language (if you happen to be bilingual, don't cheat---pick a language you are not a native speaker of!)). Your career (and, possibly, your livelihood if you don't have tenure yet) still depends on publishing in those journals and so does your ability to disseminate your work to a wider international audience.

What would you do? You probably would still try to publish in those journals. But how hard would be for you to write a philosophy paper in Spanish (or substitute your non-native language of choice here)? And how likely would it be for your paper to get accepted? Sure, you learned Spanish in school but you are far from being fluent (lo siento, mi amigo/a, pero esa es la triste verdad) and around the world there are many philosophers whose first language is Spanish and who write beautifully and fluently in Spanish without much effort and, as good as your Spanish might be it will never be as good as theirs and, even if it were, it would still be much harder and more time-consuming for you to write as well in Spanish than it is for them.

As you are engaging in this thought experiment, it's a good time to remind you that the Dunning-Kruger effect is a widely confirmed and extremely pervasive psychological phenomenon and you are probably overestimating both your proficiency in Spanish and your ability to get your Spanish-language papers and books written, published, read, and cited.

If you think that this little thought experiment is unrealistic or unfair, we can change the story around a bit and we can suppose that the Soviets won the Cold War and that Russian is the language in which philosophy is taught and communicated internationally. You attended a prestigious PhD program in Moscow and have had a chance to improve on the Russian you had learned in school back in your home country (be it the Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics of North America or the the Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics of the British Isles, or the Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics of the Australia and New Zeland), but your Russian is still far from being as good as that of a native speaker of Russian and, even if it is as good, it is much harder and more time-consuming for you to write an academic paper as well as a native Russian speaker.

Nowadays ESL philosophers (i.e. philosophers whose first language is not English) are very much in the same situation in which you have found yourself in the thought experiment(s) you have just performed and, before writing other posts on the topic, I though it would be helpful for philosophers whose first language(s) is/includes English to contemplate the situation (albeit briefly and only imaginatively) from the perspective of an ESL philosophers.

Who Can Afford to Be Out of the Loop?

Recently, I had an interesting online exchange with a famous philosopher who works in a top department (someone, incidentally, whose philosophical work I admire and who, according to sources I consider reliable, is a really nice person, so none of what follows is meant to cast any shadow on his character). Let me call this philosopher, Prof. X.

The exchange started after Prof. X said on the Facebook thread of another famous philosopher that he hadn't made up his mind about signing the "September Statement" because of concerns similar to those expressed by Alexander Rosenberg in this post. (As a side note, it's incredible how much issues in the professions are discussed behind the walls of Facebook these days! (more on that in a possible future post?)) I replied that I thought that those concerns had been amply addressed in some of the comments below Rosenberg's post. Prof. X told me that he did not have time to read enough blog posts and comment threads to form an informed opinion on the matter and that, in fact, he didn't have time to continue that exchange (to be fair, he said that much more nicely than it might be coming across from my summary!). And than he added something that I have have heard already many times from other philosophers in positions similar to Prof. X's. Namely, he said (more of less verbatim) "I'm not a blogging kind of guy" and "I'm sort of out of the loop".

My reply (and the point I'd like to make more publicly in this post) is that not having enough time and being out of the loop in this sort of contexts can be symptoms of privilege. It's easier to say that one doesn't have time to think about y and take action on y when one is not directly affected (and would be very unlikely to be in a position of being ever directly affected) by a certain (sort of) behaviour. It's easier to say that, say, one don't have time to think whether we should revoke an invitation to speak in our department to someone who has been accused of sexual assault when someone is unlikely to ever be (or have been) themselves a victim of sexual assault. It's easier to say that one does not have time to sign the "September Statement" when one is unlikely to ever be in the position of being publicly attacked by someone in a more powerful position (or when one can easily dismiss those attacks).

What the "out-of-the-loop-ers" don't seem to understand is that we'd all be rather doing philosophy or dealing with the many items on our to-do list rather than spending time thinking and talking about the philosophy profession, but some of us can't afford to do that! (Believe me, I'd rather be working on that paper right now!) So it's a luxury and a symptom of privilege to be able to say "I don't have time to think about this". I often think of all the time and energy so many of my colleagues are putting into making the philosophy profession a more inclusive and hospitable place and I am thankful for that, especially considering that those who are doing so often are the ones that occupy less privileged positions and this takes a further toll on them (what if they spent that time writing or reading or thinking or...?).

If you can stay out of the loop and you don't have time to think about the issue in the profession, it's probably because you can afford it, but remember that this is one of those situations where not to be part of the solution is to be part of the problem, for inaction is just a way to perpetuate an often unjust status quo!