Logic versus Rhetoric in Philosophical Argumentation

A few nights ago, I watched the first few minutes of Particle Fever, a documentary on the ATLAS project (I ended up only watching a bit of it but that's a different story). As an ESL philosopher, I was immediately struck by how much more inclusive physics appears to be from a linguistic point of view when compared to analytic philosophy.  Of the first four physicists that appear in the movie, three are clearly non-native speakers of English. Two of them (Savas Dimopoulos and Nima Arkani-Hamed) work at two elite American universities and each is introduced as one of the most brilliant theoretical physicists of his respective generation. The third (Fabiola Gianotti) used to be the project leader of the ATLAS experiment (interestingly, she is the only one who is (sometimes) subtitled in the 12 minutes of the movie I have watched). Now, admittedly, this is a very small sample, but the numbers of the ATLAS experiment are telling: the project involved about 3,000 physicists (plus 1000 students) from over 177 institutions in 38 different countries (http://atlas.ch/what_is_atlas.html). Even a superficial look at a top physics journal seems to show that physics, which is hardly known as a beacon of diversity, is much more diverse and representative of the world population than analytic philosophy. An equally superficial look at the faculty of the physics departments and philosophy departments of elite American universities seems to confirm (albeit in a very non-scientific way) this impression. (Of course, we would need some solid data to confirm the hypothesis, but the admittedly anecdotal evidence I have provided seems to suggest that the hypothesis is plausible. In any case, not much of what I am about to say hangs on it.)

The observation that physics is much more inclusive than philosophy from a linguistic point of view, I think, can be partly explained by the fact that, in physics, fluency in mathematics is much more important than fluency in English. Since raising the issue of language in analytic philosophy, I have heard many people say that fluency in English is, in the current historical circumstances, a conditio sine qua non for being able to contribute to and fully take part in analytic philosophy as a discipline. The most prestigious philosophy journals are in English; the most prestigious presses publish predominantly in English; the most prestigious conferences are held in English; the most prestigious philosophy departments are in the Anglophone world. But this seems to be true of physics as well. English is the lingua franca of physics (along with mathematics ;-) ) as well as that of analytic philosophy. It just seems that in physics one does not need to master the language beyond a reasonable level for a non-native speaker in order to be at the top of one's game, so to speak. In analytic philosophy, things seem to be different.

To my mind, this is a sign that, perhaps, our self-image of philosophy is not very accurate. If, in physics, fluency in mathematics is much more important than fluency in English, one might think that, in analytic philosophy, fluency in logic is much more important than fluency in English. We usually think of argumentation in philosophy as being a matter of logic, not rhetoric. And one does not need to master the language beyond a reasonable level for a non-native speaker in order to offer a logically strong argument. So could it be that part of the linguistic underrepresentation I have been discussing in this blog is a result of the fact that arguments in analytic philosophy rely on rhetoric more than we would like to think and that one need to have not only strong logical or analytical skills (which all philosophers who have a working knowledge of English can easily master) but also strong rhetorical skills (which are so much harder to master for non-native speakers)?

I find this an interesting and somewhat worrisome hypothesis. Think, for example, of two of the most influential analytic philosophers of the 20th century: Quine and Lewis. Both are exquisite writers, but do they always use their writing skills for good? I have often had the impression that they don't. I have often had the impression that when they run out of arguments or when there is a loophole in their argument or when they want us to accept a controversial premise, they resort to the nice turn of phrase, the witty one-liner, instead of giving us arguments. I'm not going to pick any specific examples of this tendency because they would all be philosophically controversial, but I invite my readers to go through the work of highly influential analytic philosophers such as Lewis or Quine and take note of how often the nice prose is used as part of an argumentative sleight-of-hand, a practice that is unthinkable in disciplines that favour a dry, plain, and slightly formulaic writing style, such as physics and mathematics.

I have long suspected that an aesthetically pleasing prose is ultimately at odds with the aims of analytic philosophy because it's easier to hide the flaws in one's arguments when one writes nicely. Human beings are easily swayed by rhetoric and unmoved by logic and, as philosophers, we often think of ourselves as being above that. We think we only attend to the substance of the arguments not to the allure of their linguistic formulations, but maybe we are underestimating the major (and, I would argue, negative) role that rhetoric plays in philosophical argumentation and (I cannot believe I am writing this!) maybe we should strive to make our prose as dry, plain, and slightly formulaic as that of physicists or mathematicians. It might make reading and writing papers less fun but it might be truer to the spirit and aims of our discipline and it might also contribute to making it more inclusive from a linguistic point of view.

Is Linguistic Bias Unfair or Just Unfortunate?

In a guest post at Feminist Philosopher, Sara Protasi argues that, while gender and racial biases are unjust, linguistic biases are merely unfortunate (click the link "ESL philosophers" at the bottom of this post to see my posts on the topic so far). Since I take this to be an argument against my attempt to raise the issue of linguistic bias, I would like to respond.

Before addressing Protasi's main argument, I should note that what we might call the unfairness argument is only one of the arguments that I have offered so far to the effect that we should start thinking about linguistic bias in academic philosophy. A second argument is the cross-cultural variation argument---much philosophy relies heavily on intuitions about how concepts apply to specific cases (pace the few philosophers who have argued that it doesn't) and one worry is that these intuitions might be somewhat affected by one's cultural/linguistic background (a worry that has been raised, for example, by experimental philosophers). In my view the best way to address this worry is to make sure that the analytic philosophy community is more diverse and more representative of the overall world population. A third argument, the rhetoric argument, is that, if analytic philosophy is about logic as opposed to rhetoric (as its practitioners claim), then it is not clear why one should achieve more than a certain level of fluency to practice it. (More on this in a future post!).

Anyway, even if the only argument in favour of discussing and trying to remedy linguistic bias were the argument from unfairness, I don't find Protasi's objections convincing. In fact, I think that her argument relies on very questionable assumptions and it has questionable consequences. Here is what I take to be the core of Protasi's argument:

"[The fact that the best analytic philosophy departments are currently in the Anglophone world and] the fact that analytic philosophy journals and conferences and even Facebook discussions take place in English, [are] very unfortunate. But it doesn’t seem to me to be unjust. That it is not unjust doesn’t mean that we should not try to alleviate the difficulties of people like me, or people who fare much worse than me. We should help non-native speakers to achieve the level of fluency required to succeed at philosophy in the context in which they want to do philosophy [...]. But it’s not an injustice in the same way that racial and sexist and ableist and homo/transphobic discrimination is. Being able to speak good English is essential to do good philosophy. Being White, or male, or straight, or gender-conforming, or able-bodied is completely irrelevant."

First, I would like to note that Protasi concedes that, even if linguistic bias were not unjust it does not follow that one "[...] should not try to alleviate the difficulties of [non-native speakers]." So, I'm not exactly sure why the distinction between "unjust" and "unfortunate" matters to this debate. Since Protasi seems to agree that we should do something to address linguistic bias (even if it's not unjust) I'm not sure exactly whether we are disagreeing on anything here (I have never claimed linguistic bias was unjust---I only claimed it was unfair insofar as it makes the playing field less level).

Second, I would like to note that it seems to be plainly false that "[b]eing able to speak good English is essential to do good philosophy", as Protasi claims. I can only assume (or at least I hope) that Protasi didn't really mean what she said (although, after reading Brian Leiter's post at 3am, nothing surprises me anymore in this department). I hope Protasi would not deny that excellent philosophy can be done (and has been done) in Arabic, Sanskrit, (Ancient) Greek, and German just to pick four uncontroversial cases. I take it that, at most, what is essential to do good philosophy is to be able to speak some natural language or other.

But what did Protasi mean then? I'm not sure but the problem is that, as soon as her original claim is weakened, it is not clear if the distinction between unjust and unfortunate can withstand scrutiny. I take it that what Protasi meant was something along the lines of "In the current social/historical context, fluency in English affects one's ability to do philosophy, while being white, or male, or straight, or gender-conforming, or able-bodied do not." But, if this is Protasi's criterion for distinguishing the unjust from the merely unfortunate, not only her claim seems to be patently false but also her criterion seems to have extremely troubling consequences. Consider, for example, how, in the current social/historical context, being sighted affects one's ability to do philosophy. Just to take two examples,  one need to read papers that are often filled with formulas and symbols that are very inaccessible to screen-readers and other devices used by people who are blind or visually impaired and conference presentations often rely on slides and handouts that contain crucial bits of information that cannot be easily accessed on the spot by people who are blind or visually impaired. Contrary to Protasi's claim, being sighted would seem to be highly relevant to one's ability to do philosophy (in the current ableist context). However, according to Protasi's criterion, the fact that philosophy is so inaccessible to people who are blind or visually impaired may be unfortunate but it is not unjust.

Clearly, something has gone wrong with Protasi's argument! I think the problem is that Protasi tries to draw a moral distinction that doesn't exist. Any unearned advantage is to some extent unfair (or unjust if you prefer). The only distinction that matter is the one between the cases in which we can mitigate to some extent the consequences of those unearned advantages so as to make the situation fairer and the cases in which we can't mitigate them at all. Of course, in the real world, the difference between the two is usually just a matter of degree. The effects of unearned advantages can be often only mitigated and not completely eliminated. This is probably the case with language and with sight and, hopefully, it is not the case with race and gender. Hopefully, one day we'll manage to completely eliminate all unearned advantages people enjoy in virtue of their gender or their race and live in a post-gendered/post-racial society, but until then the best we can do is to work as hard as we can on trying to mitigate the effects of those unearned advantages as much as possible. So, Protasi's distinction between the unjust and the unfortunate seems to be ill-conceived.

One last note. Towards the end of her piece, Protasi writes:

What worries me the most, of this discussion, is that we seem to be slipping all too easily in the usual wars about who is the most disadvantaged, but at the same time forgetting that *it does make sense to worry about who is the most disadvantaged*! What I mean is that it is a psychologically harmful tendency: we should all unite to fight injustice of all kinds!

But, as far as I can see, Protasi just engaged in the sort of behaviour she is denouncing here---she seems to be the one who just tried to convince us that some disadvantages (the ones that are unjust) were worse than others (the ones that are unfortunate). And, although it does indeed make sense "to worry about the most disadvantaged", first, it is important to remember that to be able to even consider pursuing a career in academic philosophy is in itself a symptom of a huge amount of privilege, the sort of privilege that most of the world population can only dream of, so that even the most disadvantaged among us are still extremely privileged compared to the majority of the world population and, second, it seems a non sequitur to think that, in order to worry about the most disadvantaged, we have to focus exclusively (or even predominantly) on the "worst" disadvantages. As far as I can see, it would be like saying that we are not going to work on a cure for diabetes until we have found a cure for cancer. Even if the mortality rate for cancer is much higher than the one for diabetes, it seems that, nevertheless, we can (and should) work to try to find a cure for both insofar as we can. It would seem extremely callous to tell someone who suffers form diabetes that we'll only focus on diabetes after we have taken care of cancer. Moreover, contrary to what Protasi is claiming, it is exactly by prioritizing some privileges over others that we might end up pitting underprivileged groups one against the other. Finally, given the intersectional nature of privilege, the most disadvantaged are likely the ones that are subjected to multiple negative biases especially when there is significant overlap (as in the case of language and race).

I said it already many times but I'll repeat it again---diversity breeds diversity in these circumstances. The more diverse and inclusive our discipline is the more diverse and inclusive it will become.

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.

"Do NES Philosophers Even Care?"

Since I have started writing about EFL philosophers (click on the label "EFL philosophers" below to see my posts on the topic so far), I have been contacted by many EFL philosophers who wanted to express how happy they were that someone was finally raising these issues in a public forum (if you want to call this blog a public forum). One of the questions I have been asked by these philosophers is: "But do NES philosophers even care?" "Do NES even read your posts on the topic?"

The answer is, of course, that some do. However, so far, most NES philosophers seem to be ignoring my posts about EFL philosophy. I think that this is normal. If we have to take philosophy's attitude to its gender and race problems as a model of these processes, first the issues are totally ignored, then they are denied, then they are belittled and ridiculed, and only when those who raise the issue keep raising it over and over again and won't shut up (and usually when they find some allies), people might finally start giving it some thought. So, all things considered, I'm not surprised that, so far, NES philosophers have by and large ignored the issues I have raised in my posts (there are a few exceptions, of course!).

What I find most discouraging, though, is the silence from feminist philosophers who happen to be NES. I tend to see philosophy's diversity issues as interrelated---to my mind, the more diverse and inclusive analytic philosophy, the better and you cannot make philosophy truly more inclusive in one dimension without also making it more inclusive in other dimensions as well. But, so far, I have not heard one spontaneous comment from any of my many NES feminist philosopher friends. Maybe, this is because they think this is not their fight (as if the problem were not intersectional and there were no philosophers who are both female and non-native English speakers). Or maybe it is because they think that the issue of language is small potatoes compared to the huge gender problem philosophy has (again, assuming the two issues are largely distinct and not at all overlapping). Maybe they might even think that focussing on issues other than gender is going to detract from the little amount of attention the discipline has finally decided to pay to its serious gender issues. I'm not sure. All I know is that I was expecting the silent majority of philosophers to be silent---that's what silent majorities do, isn't it? and that is what maintains the status quo from which they benefit---but I cannot deny I am disappointed by the silence I have heard so far coming from the feminist philosophers' camp.

UPDATE: There is now a post on Feminist Philosophers about the LCC. I take this to be a positive development and I hope that it's a sign that the pessimism I express at the end of this post was mistaken.