Hello, I’m Shelley Tremain and I’d like to welcome you to the fourteenth installment of Dialogues on Disability, the series of interviews that I am conducting with disabled philosophers and post here on the third Wednesday of each month. Dialogues on Disability is designed to provide a public venue for discussion with disabled philosophers about a range of topics, including their philosophical work on disability; the place of philosophy of disability vis-à-vis the discipline and profession; their experiences of institutional discrimination and personal prejudice in philosophy, in particular, and in academia, more generally; resistance to ableism; accessibility; and anti-oppressive pedagogy.
My guest today is Bryony Pierce. Bryony is a research associate at the University of Bristol, where she recently completed her Ph.D. Her research interests include consciousness, philosophy of action, free will, and experimental philosophy. Often, when she is not working, Bryony can be found crouching in the undergrowth, camera in hand, in pursuit of aesthetically pleasing insects or other similarly inspiring sights.
Welcome to Dialogues on Disability, Bryony! You are a founding member of the Experimental Philosophy Group UK and specialize in experimental philosophy. Please tell us about your background and how you became involved in the formation of this group.
Many thanks for inviting me to contribute to this series, Shelley. My first degree was in modern languages, and I only started studying philosophy in my early forties, after closing down my translation company and leaving my part-time job (at a disability consortium), just before I had my youngest child. I took up philosophy because I needed a fresh intellectual challenge.
When I wrote my Ph.D. research proposal, in 2005, on the role of consciousness in action, it included the (then quite controversial) plan to carry out surveys on the folk notion of free will. I wanted to test my hypotheses and be able to refer to empirical evidence related to quite specific questions. I later discovered that other people had already had the same idea—that of using the methods of experimental psychology or other empirical work in order to address philosophical questions—and were calling it “experimental philosophy”.
After a rejection from the philosophy department at one university (the idea of using “questionnaires” hadn’t gone down at all well), I decided to look for the ideal supervisor for my project, rather than focus on practical or geographical considerations. This led me to contact Susan Hurley, who was enthusiastic about interdisciplinary work, knowledgeable about relevant scientific research, and had no reservations about my plan to gather empirical data. Susan encouraged me to apply to the University of Bristol, where she was about to take up a Chair, and became my first Ph.D. supervisor.
My work isn’t predominantly in the field of experimental philosophy (x-phi) but, in 2008, I decided to set up an x-phi lab at Bristol. In 2010, I was invited to give two keynote talks—one defending x-phi and one presenting data from my experiments—at an x-phi conference in Wroclaw, Poland. Stephen Stich was also a keynote speaker at the conference, and when I mentioned that I wanted to set up a group in the UK, he told me about his time at the University of Sheffield, where he’d taught a graduate course in x-phi. James Andow and Robin Scaife were both at Sheffield at the time, I think, and after Tom Wysocki, the Wroclaw conference organizer, gave me James’s email address, the three of us set up Experimental Philosophy Group UK, with Stephen a fourth Founder Member.
The Group’s inaugural meeting took place in Bristol later that year. I was expecting a small informal gathering, but about sixty people registered, and the group has flourished, attracting speakers and delegates from the wider international x-phi community every year. We’ve just had our seventh annual conference at the University of Reading, the proceedings of which are due to be published next year in Ratio.
Some feminist philosophers have argued that experimental philosophy is masculinist, male-defined, and reinstates dominant power relations. How would you respond to such charges?
Not having read much feminist philosophy, I was surprised to learn this. First of all, I want to say that my experience, as a woman within the field of experimental philosophy, has been overwhelmingly positive. Next, I think we need to distinguish between criticism of x-phi as a methodology; criticism of the culture within the x-phi community; and specific cases within the x-phi literature, where questions have been approached in a manner that has attracted criticism.
The methodology for which x-phi is renowned is that of applying the methods of experimental psychology to philosophical questions, especially the use of surveys testing intuitions in response to thought experiments. In a broader sense, it includes any empirical work aiming to address philosophical questions. Feminist philosophers have argued, I’ve now discovered, that the methods of experimental philosophers fail to allow for critical analyses of the social structures that underpin the concepts and attitudes under investigation, perpetuating sexism and racism. But the methods used in x-phi don’t automatically exclude other types of analysis. Experimental studies are done within a wider context, often complementing other methodological approaches, and shouldn’t be viewed in isolation. X-phi isn’t restricted to operating independently of theoretical work—the theoretical work is an essential part of the process, as is further work to replicate, clarify, or challenge initial findings, before any firm conclusions can be drawn.
I think the emblem of the burning armchair, which is used to represent x-phi, tends to lead to a misconception. The objective of x-phi symbolized by the burning armchair is to challenge reliance on armchair methods alone, in some contexts, not to substitute philosophy-oriented psychology for philosophy. I, for one, spend a lot of time in my armchair, before, during, and after running experiments, both literally and metaphorically speaking.
Lisa Schwartzman objects that the subject matter of thought experiments is typically determined by white middle-class males. Even if that’s the case, on balance, that wouldn’t be a consequence of the particular methodology used, but of the preoccupations of the people using it, so the methodology itself isn’t the problem. I do think that, increasingly, people in other demographic groups are becoming involved in x-phi, and hope the trend will continue, in which case the subject matter will presumably reflect the interests of a more diverse group.
Schwartzman also criticizes the reliance of x-phi on data viewed as factual or scientific and on highly abstract thought experiments. This doesn’t have to be the case and needn’t deter anyone who doesn’t want to take that approach, although I admit that it may contribute to women’s under-representation. I’ve used highly abstract thought experiments, and enjoyed doing so, but in some of my work I’ve used open questions and presented participants with real-world scenarios. One of my studies asked people what they’d say to a child who asked them to explain what “free will” meant, for example. Also, I used parents and carers at local toddler groups and schools, to get a more representative sample of the “folk” than if I’d used undergraduate students—I think undergraduate students are far from ideal, as participants, unless one’s objective is to study what university undergraduates think. I feel that some of Schwartzman’s arguments against the methodology we use suggest too limited an acquaintance with the wide range of work undertaken in x-phi.
My inclination is to defend the x-phi community, too, although I can only go by my own experience. It’s the area of academia where I’ve encountered the strongest commitment to inclusivity, not only for women, but for other minority groups within philosophy. At this year’s Experimental Philosophy Group UK conference, for example, three out of four keynote speakers were women, and the topics we discussed included racial and caste discrimination, implicit bias, and gender biases. I know there has been a lot of influential work in philosophy in recent years to raise awareness of the need to combat sexist practices. It is regrettable, for many reasons, that women and minorities are still under-represented in x-phi, but this is the case throughout philosophy, rather than something especially associated with x-phi, and it’s notoriously difficult to establish why various groups are under-represented in philosophy. In fact, experimental philosophy is relatively well placed to investigate how this situation might be improved and to provide data that could encourage change.
Turning to specific cases, I acknowledge that there must be examples in the x-phi literature of work vulnerable to criticism, once feminist principles are brought to the fore, as well as anecdotal evidence of ill-advised comments. That isn’t to say that the sub-discipline as a whole need be characterized as masculinist or male-defined. One x-phi paper that has been criticized by Schwartzman and, more recently, Gaile Pohlhaus is Buckwalter and Stich’s “Gender and Philosophical Intuition”, particularly for its narrow focus on experimental data, rather than on how sociological factors contribute to differences in women’s and men’s intuitions. But Buckwalter and Stich do explicitly acknowledge that historical, sociological, and economic factors are likely to be part of the explanation for these differences, as are gender-based discrimination and sexist attitudes and behaviour. They also point out that further work is needed in this area, and not just in experimental philosophy.
When I first read this paper, I did feel a little uncomfortable, though—for reasons not raised explicitly by Schwartzman or Pohlhaus. Buckwalter and Stich speculate that women might be under-represented in philosophy because they tend to have different intuitions about a number of standard thought experiments. They say women might then feel “puzzled or confused or uncomfortable or angry or just plain bored”, and so become disenchanted with philosophy. My concern is that they omit to mention the possibility that a woman in a philosophy class whose intuitions differ from those of other students might respond by wanting to challenge the assumptions being made (“angry” doesn’t quite capture that attitude). Why not think that women might, in some cases, be unimpressed by appeals to intuition and thus become critical of the methods and dismissive of the discipline more generally? One explanation for the low number of women in philosophy that Buckwalter and Stich present as plausible is that many women become convinced that they are no good at philosophy, so drop out. That could be the case, but isn’t it equally plausible that they might become convinced that the fault lies with the philosophers whose intuitions they don’t share? Intuitions are compelling, yet the authors appear to assume that many women wouldn’t trust their own judgement, if told their intuitions weren’t correct. There are many possible explanations for the under-representation of women in philosophy, but the ones Buckwalter and Stich suggest don’t show women in a positive light.
Bryony, describe how your experiences as disabled have influenced your philosophy and how your work in philosophy and psychology has enabled you to strategize about events that have accrued to you as a disabled person.
Academic philosophy can and should have some application, even if only indirectly, to how we live our lives, relate to others, and understand the world around us. I think that if the principles and values we espouse in our work don’t guide us in our everyday lives, something is wrong. And it’s a two-way process—our lived experiences can and should influence our work, too. The effects of the experience of chronic illness and disability on our thinking have been highlighted in Havi Carel’s thought-provoking work on the philosophical role of illness. There can be positive outcomes of many kinds—a disability acquired later than infancy, or any similarly life-changing event or process, can have a major impact on the way we think, although I believe that this principle applies to all manner of experiences. An article that I happened to read recently, by Mark Vanhoenacker, illustrates this nicely: He writes about the way that working as a pilot has influenced his perception of the world, from the roundness of the planet to the nature of time. The more out of the ordinary our experiences, the greater their power to alter our way of thinking.
When disability is acquired, whether suddenly or gradually, rather than present from birth, we can certainly be led to review our opportunities and prospects, our roles vis-à-vis others, and our underlying values. This process of re-evaluation can lead to insights at many levels, as well as to a new vulnerability to the words and actions of others. When I used a wheelchair, I remember someone asking the person with me whether I was “allowed a mince pie”. A more disturbing incident occurred when I was hospitalized and urged nurses not to lift me by my arms, because my arm was broken (the head of the humerus, as well as the wrist). I was on diamorphine, at that time, which was causing hallucinations, so the nurses ignored my protests, assuming that I had fractures only where they could see splints or plaster casts. Whereas the mince pie incident made me laugh, the nurses’ decision to move me, because they too assumed that I lacked the mental capacity to make decisions about my own welfare, still gives me occasional nightmares, over thirty years later. Would it seem far-fetched to say that maybe the urge to make my views known to others, which is what philosophers do, and to have them taken seriously, stems from my time in hospital?
I should explain that I became disabled after a hit-and-run accident that caused multiple fractures, leading to arthritis, scoliosis, restricted mobility, chronic pain, sleep loss, and chronic fatigue. I was also diagnosed with PTSD. I have reservations about classifying myself as disabled, because I can do so much, but the residual problems undeniably have a significant effect on what I can and cannot do, and they are problems for which medicine has offered no satisfactory solutions. I have adapted to living within certain constraints, developing my own strategies to be able to function as well as I can, and to manage pain (without medication).
Developing strategies to live one’s life within a set of constraints can take the form of a philosophical process, and solving practical problems in my everyday life has often required skills and methods surprisingly similar to some that we use to deal with abstract philosophical problems. Analyzing pain and the accompanying affective responses involves an experiential component and a theoretical component. The sensation provides directly observable empirical evidence for theorizing: any time that I want to examine the sensation of pain, it is readily available. And the theorizing can be used to achieve a reduction or partial elimination of pain, as previously conceptualized, within my subjective experience. I discovered that the worst element in my pre-theoretic notion of pain was not the sensation per se, but the underlying feeling of fear. By recognizing these two things as distinct components, I became able to separate the pain and the fear, re-assess the appropriateness of fear, and, when the pain was familiar, rather than something novel that might indicate a new, alarming problem, tolerate the pain more easily.
In parallel with this process of gaining a better understanding of pain, I was developing theoretical positions on motivation—aware that fear had taken on a stronger motivational force, for example—and the role of consciousness in action production. I was questioning my own altered motives and trying to make sense of them. In time, this resulted in the claim that one function of consciousness is to act as an interface between cognition and emotion. The interface provides a common currency for communication between the cognitive and motivational systems, allowing values to be updated and new goals to be set, as conscious affective responses to situations and commodities provide new information. Reasons for action are grounded in the qualitative character of these affective responses—we judge things, non-inferentially, to be good or bad on the basis of their affective valence, and this knowledge stops the infinite regress of “whys?” that might otherwise arise when we engage in reasoning about what we ought to do. Grounding in biological utility, as proposed by Dickinson and Balleine, fails to stop the regress: we can still question why we should care about our survival or the reproduction of our genes; in addition, there are times when these aren’t our highest priorities. So another type of grounding is necessary.
As I learned more about psychology, through my Ph.D. research and my involvement in the Consciousness and Experiential Section of the British Psychological Society (BPS), I discovered that the strategies I’d developed to manage pain, insomnia, and anxiety had led me to use, as a coping strategy, what other people call “mindfulness”. Learning about mindfulness and how others applied this technique enabled me to develop new strategies to enhance the quality of my life, rather than merely cope with negative aspects of it. For example, I now regularly go out into the garden with my camera to take close-up photographs of insects, arachnids, flowers and raindrops, or in colder weather, ice, frost and snowflakes.
Two of my photographs appear below. The photograph on the top is of a cluster fly standing on the yellow stamens of a flower, with pinkish petals rising up behind the fly and showing through its raised wings. The photograph on the bottom is of patches of snow that have melted and refrozen into fragile, semi-translucent interconnected shapes, some jagged, some rounded and some containing air bubbles, suspended in mid-air from the green leaves of a plant.
Alongside my research and work organizing conferences, I run a community philosophy group, as part of the national organization, Philosophy in Pubs. I trained as a facilitator and set up the group in order to offer people in my local area a chance to discuss philosophical questions, in the hope that they’d find doing so beneficial. At this month’s meeting, the group tackled the question of how we should make decisions on behalf of those thought to lack the capacity to make decisions for themselves, including young children, people with severe learning disabilities, people with brain injuries or dementia, and people who don’t communicate. Should we be guided by what we think people who formerly could make decisions for themselves would have wanted? What they have stipulated, if anything? What they appear to want now, however irrational that may seem to us? Or what we believe to be in their best interests? My experiences in hospital have led me to form strong views on reliance on living wills. I don’t believe that people are able to predict what they will want, without having first experienced what it’s like to be confined to a bed, in severe pain, in a state of mental confusion, and so on. Even people who have experienced these things can’t know how they’ll feel if they find themselves in the same situation again, years later, under different circumstances.
The ways in which my experiences have contributed to my work are subtle and complex, but there certainly are a few key moments that have prompted me either to pursue certain lines of thought or to re-evaluate my views. I remember that people expected me to be angry with the hit-and-run driver, especially when the police told me that they believed he’d been drinking, then had reported his car stolen and persuaded friends to provide alibis so that he wouldn’t lose his licence.
My feeling was that there was nothing to be gained by being angry or by blaming the driver for what had happened. I felt a bit sorry for him, if anything. I hadn’t given free will a great deal of thought at that time, but realized that it was because my assumptions about freedom of the will, and even my reactive attitudes, were different from most other people’s that my response seemed surprising to them, and this got me thinking about blame, moral responsibility, and, again, how action is produced. Many years later, I developed, in greater detail, what came to be one of the key claims in my Ph.D. thesis, which is that all action is a type of reaction, or higher-order reaction. In my account of action as reaction, all behaviour is caused, ultimately, by external factors, so there is no free will and no blameworthiness, although that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t set up criminal justice systems or impose sanctions, for pragmatic reasons.
How might experimental philosophers incorporate disability into their work? Can you suggest some experiments about disability that philosophers could devise?
There is already some work in x-phi in the area of disability. At our recent conference in Reading, for example, Luis Favela gave a very interesting talk on experiments that use vision, a cane, or an enactive torch—a device developed by Tom Froese and Adam Spiers—to assess the width of a gap in order to determine whether a person can pass through it easily. One of the findings to emerge from this work is that the functional ability of people with visual impairments can be preserved, in contexts such as this one, when sensory substitution systems are incorporated into the perceptual system—the three modalities were functionally equivalent. This work has both an educational function, in promoting a different attitude towards visual impairment, and a practical application within the development of new sensory substitution systems. It’s important for people to realize that x-phi isn’t just about conducting surveys to establish what people’s intuitions are in response to thought experiments—any experimental work that addresses philosophical questions falls into the category of x-phi.
If I were to design a study on disability, I might start by doing some qualitative research, exploring the ways that people with a range of different types of disability—present from birth or acquired later in life—describe a welcoming environment or a beautiful place. I could do a follow–up study, showing participants images or providing detailed audio descriptions of places—theatres, beaches, street scenes, restaurants, and so on—asking them to list key features, and might also ask them to evaluate the aesthetic appeal of the place (checking for order effects). The study would test the hypothesis that the salience of certain things that restrict or enable access—such as ramps, stairs, sign-language interpreters, dim/glaring light, narrow spaces, crowds, and uneven floors—would have an impact, not only on what people listed, and in what order, but on people’s assessment of the aesthetic features of a scene. I’d also be interested in any other correlations that might show up unexpectedly. But I’d need to give this more thought—it isn’t something I’d ever considered doing, until you asked the question.
Another area that would be interesting to investigate is attitudes to the classification of patterns of behaviour as “disorders,” including whether people who have been diagnosed with various disorders and/or their carers consider their so-called symptoms to be a constitutive part of who they are—and thus internal causes of action—or something external that could potentially be eliminated. Such a study would relate to both my existing work on philosophy of action, which discusses the way that people tend to classify causes of behaviour as internal or external, and recent work by Rachel Cooper on revising the DSM.
I’d like you to say more about the application of principles of accessibility in the context of x-phi. You regularly organize conferences for the Experimental Philosophy Group UK and make noticeable efforts to ensure that the conferences are accessible to a wide range of philosophers. Please describe your efforts to improve conference accessibility and why you think doing so should be regarded as standard practice.
The Experimental Philosophy Group UK conferences are organized by a small committee, with one person usually acting as local organizer, so my contribution varies from year to year, depending on where the conference is held. I have also been on the conference committee of the Consciousness and Experiential Psychology Section of the BPS for several years.
I do what I can to book venues that are accessible, when possible, publicize information about accessibility, and offer free registration for personal assistants. There are obvious ethical reasons to make events as inclusive as possible, as well as benefits to be gained by having a more diverse group of participants, but it is also necessary to do everything we reasonably can to provide access in order to comply with legislation.
The Disability Discrimination Act in the UK makes it clear that organizations, businesses, associations, etc. that provide services to the public, or a section of the public, are legally required to take all reasonable steps to ensure that people with disabilities are not denied access or treated less favourably than others. A lot of event organizers in academia don’t seem to be aware of this legislation, so it’s good that information about best practice is being distributed and that people are increasingly encouraged to consider accessibility.
It can be quite a challenge to make events accessible. A lot of university buildings in the UK are old, with steps at entrances, rooms up steep flights of stairs, narrow doorways and a lack of parking space. Administrative staff can be dismissive sometimes when I ask, as an organizer, for accessibility information, questioning whether there will be any participants who will actually need the facilities, before we’ve even announced the event. Induction loop systems aren’t always set up and ready to be used, even when we’ve checked that they’re available. Tight budgets, as well as other constraints, can make it hard to provide all the services that I believe we should routinely advertise, in case people need them, such as the provision of documents in Braille or sign-language interpreters.
Some people prefer not to disclose that they have a disability, so this is one reason why it’s important to get as much information as possible available online when publicizing events. Another is that if we expect people to contact organizers to find out about access, they are obliged to spend more time and go to more effort, just to decide whether coming to the event is feasible, than people without access needs need expend, which is a form of indirect discrimination in itself.
There are subtle ways in which organizers can aim for greater inclusivity, too. When I’m the person dealing with enquiries, I try to anticipate needs—for example, offering a family room to a speaker who mentioned having been on maternity leave—and make sure people feel able to approach me with any additional requests or questions. I also try to send a high proportion of personalized emails. The organizer is primarily a facilitator, whose role is to make things run smoothly for everyone, disabled or non-disabled, and it’s much more rewarding to do that to the best of one’s ability than to do the bare minimum.
I’m sure that many readers and listeners of this interview are very grateful for your efforts to increase the accessibility of conferences and other events, Bryony. I’d like to end this interview by asking what resources—articles, books, videos—you would recommend to readers and listeners who want a solid introduction to experimental philosophy.
I would recommend Experimental Philosophy by Joshua Knobe and Shaun Nichols, which includes “An Experimental Philosophy Manifesto”, as well as lots of other key papers. There’s also Joshua Alexander’s Experimental Philosophy: An Introduction. I’d suggest visiting the Experimental Philosophy Page for additional resources, including links to papers. There are also videos on x-phi and there’s an Experimental Philosophy blog.
Or, why not attend an x-phi event? Our next conference in the UK won’t be until next year and the same goes for the Experimental Philosophy Group Germany, but the Buffalo Annual Experimental Philosophy Conference is coming up in September and should be good.
Bryony, thank you very much for these recommendations and for your informative and provocative remarks throughout this interview. You have given us a great deal upon which to reflect.
Readers/listeners are invited to use the Comments section below to respond to Bryony Pierce’s remarks, ask questions, and so on. Comments will be moderated. As always, although signed comments are encouraged and preferred, anonymous comments may be permitted. Many thanks, once again, to Bryce Huebner, as well as to Thomas Nadelhoffer, both of whom generously provided technical support in the preparation of this interview.
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Please join me here again on Wednesday, June 15th at 8 a.m. EST for the fifteenth installment of the Dialogues on Disability series and, indeed, on every third Wednesday of the months ahead. I have a fabulous line-up of interviews planned. If you would like to nominate someone to be interviewed (self-nominations are welcomed), please feel free to write me at s.tremain@yahoo.ca. I prioritize diversity with respect to disability, class, race, gender, institutional status, nationality, culture, age, and sexuality in my selection of interviewees and my scheduling of interviews.
So exciting to see an interview with Bryony Pierce! I am really grateful for all the work she has done in experimental philosophy, and it's wonderful to have a chance to learn not only about her philosophical views but also about the inspiring story of her background.
I was especially delighted to see this discussion of issues at the intersection of experimental philosophy and feminist philosophy. This is an area with enormous potential, and it's also been one in which there have been a number of important recent findings. As Bryony helpfully notes, some early studies suggested that there might be differences between the philosophical intuitions of men vs. women in particular cases. However, subsequent studies have consistently found that there are actually no gender differences in intuitions in those cases. See these two papers:
http://philpapers.org/rec/ADLDMA
http://philpapers.org/rec/SEYOGA-2
A similar point applies to the issue about cultural differences in epistemological intuitions. Early studies found differences between cultures in certain cases, but subsequent work has consistently found no differences even when looking at those exact cases. For example:
http://philpapers.org/rec/KIMNCD
http://philpapers.org/archive/SEYONA-2.pdf
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/nous.12110/full
I think I speak for all experimental philosophers when I say that we would love to foster further connections with work in feminist philosophy, and it would be especially exciting to have feminist perspectives on the specific findings coming out of recent experimental studies -- which in this case indicate that people's intuitions on these cases *do not* differ by gender or culture.
Thanks once again to Bryony and Shelley! This was an absolutely fascinating interview, both on a philosophical level and on a personal one, and I really look forward to hearing other people's thoughts on it.
Posted by: Joshua Knobe | 05/18/2016 at 02:25 PM
Thanks, Josh, especially for providing those links to more recent work on whether there are differences in intuitions related to gender or culture. In focusing on addressing some specific points made by feminists, I didn't get round to discussing what further work had actually been done, so this is very useful.
Posted by: Bryony Pierce | 05/18/2016 at 04:36 PM
Thanks Bryony! I definitely didn't mean to be criticizing your answer or anything like that. I just thought it might be helpful to pass along this further information in case it proved helpful to other people working in this area. In any case, I hope that other folks will pick up on other aspects of this fascinating interview, and I look forward to reading more about anything they might have to say.
Posted by: Joshua Knobe | 05/18/2016 at 08:20 PM
Very cool interview! I haven't been doing much experimental work recently, but I'm getting back into it with a colleague in psych here at GU. I think that there's an enormous amount of interesting work to be done in thinking about how people understand disability, as well as understanding the kinds of ableist biases and exclusionary practices that lie at the heart of much of our thinking about human universals, human variation, and the cultural shaping of human cognition. One thing that came up a couple of times in the interview is a fairly common assumption that disabilities are deficiencies that should be corrected. It would be interesting, I think, to see how stable that kind of intuition is, and whether it can be nudged around with psychological interventions. I'm not sure exactly what the right kind of experiment would be, but I'm sure that there are cool things to think about...So thanks Bryony for getting me thinking about this!
Posted by: Bryce | 05/19/2016 at 10:53 AM
Awesome interview, Bryony! I agree that experimental philosophy is gender imbalanced, but I too have found the criticisms you discuss underwhelming.
(A small addition to Joshua's remark: Large data sets suggest that there may well be some gender differences for some cases:
http://psp.sagepub.com/content/early/2015/03/12/0146167215575731.full.pdf?ijkey=95MUFaGj2hbfaUz&keytype=finite)
edouard
Posted by: Edouard Machery | 05/19/2016 at 01:23 PM
Another interesting interview - thanks Bryony and Shelley!
Posted by: Komarine | 05/19/2016 at 03:02 PM
Josh – yes, that was very helpful, thank you.
Thanks for your comments, Bryce. On the topic of assumptions about disabilities, it worries me that assumptions are often made about what people ought to value, and then these values guide the process of providing whatever treatment or support is available. Even if those offering options are trained to ensure that each decision is based on individuals’ needs and preferences, these will inevitably reflect social pressures, so people may value painful or risky interventions to conceal or eliminate differences that would be no obstacle, were it not for others’ prejudices or were society not set up the way it is. I’ll be very interested to hear about any ideas for experiments.
Hello Edouard, and thank you. A point about gender imbalance I made recently in correspondence, following an event at which I was the only female speaker, is that what is more important than attaining a certain proportion of women or people from minority groups that merely corresponds to some other proportion, in some wider social setting, is whether others within a community treat those who are in some sense under-represented with respect and make them feel welcome and accepted. Maybe looking at numbers isn’t the best way to approach this.
I did wonder about the apparent lack of evidence in follow-up studies and whether statistically significant results might be obtained with larger samples, but am not up-to-date on the literature in this area. There are clearly individual differences in intuitions, at least (I know some of mine are non-standard), even if these don’t correlate with clear-cut distinctions in terms of sex or cultural background, so it would be good to continue to look for some kind of pattern.
Posted by: Bryony Pierce | 05/19/2016 at 03:06 PM
Thanks, Shelley for conducting another wonderful interview. And, Bryony, what a pleasure! Much to think about here, but more than anything, I wanted to say how much I valued seeing your magnificent photographs, and learning about ways you have dealt wit disability, both personally and in promoting accessibility.
I was delighted to hear your thoughts on ex-phi too, and about ways in which the community has been welcoming and methodologically open-minded, while also noting that that there are issues and bias that must be addressed. Chiming in with the others on the Buckwalter and Stich project, I want to also mention a paper forthcoming by my former student, Geoff Holtzman, in Hypatia. He re-analyzes the earlier data and finds that the intuitions of female philosophy students actually align more with faculty's intuitions than their male peers'. This suggests that the high attrition rates are more likely due to other forms of discrimination and harassment. Despite these decisive objections to Buckwalter and Stich, I do think their initial project made a contribution by bringing the issue of gender ratios into empirical focus. One shortcoming of this research is that much of it has been conducted by men, and men may lack insight into the phenomenology of discrimination, so their hypothesis space is limited. Another problem is that the focus on women vs. men tends to overshadow other subpopulations who may experience other forms of discrimination--ethnicity, religion, class, disability to name a few. Not to mention the issue of intersectionality: we are all members of multiple categories, and sometimes the combined effect of two or more is different than the impact of each individually. With you, Bryony, i think empirical methods can help explore some of these differences, and is, thus, an important tool in addressing discrimination within the field. I was also pleased to see you mention qualitative methods. A superb student in my lab, Amanda Huminski, is doing some work exploring ways in which the preference for quantitative research (including most of ex-phi) may reflect biases.
Thanks again for sharing so much of your story, Bryony, and for your leadership in promoting methodological diversity in the UK and beyond. And, Shelley, thanks for sharing so many voices with all of us, and for fostering such an effective mix of philosophy, personal insight, and activism.
Posted by: Jesse Prinz | 05/20/2016 at 04:05 AM
Hello Jesse,
Thanks for your response, and I'm very glad you enjoyed the photographs. I agree that the Stich and Buckwalter paper is valuable, like many experimental philosophy papers, in getting people to start thinking about a particular question or set of questions. I also like your point about people being members of multiple categories. I imagine it may take a huge amount of work to make progress on why women are under-represented in philosophy/experimental philosophy, and maybe gathering qualitative data from women who have taken courses and found them unappealing, or from women (and men) who would never consider studying philosophy, would be a more fruitful avenue than examining quantitative differences in responses to surveys. The quantitative data has a role to play, too, but I think many complex questions benefit from initial exploratory work that is qualitative. I look forward to hearing more about Amanda's work on biases.
Posted by: Bryony Pierce | 05/20/2016 at 09:42 AM
Thanks to everyone for the terrific comments thus far.
I'm glad that Jesse has drawn attention to the fact that the findings of analyses in x-phi that don't take account of intersectionality and the synergistic effects of multiple oppressions are likely to be as skewed as the findings of other forms of analysis in philosophy that don't take intersectionality and multiple axes into account. The Buckwalter and Stich article is one example. The responses to their article that also use a (narrow) focus on gender alone replicate the problems that such a constricted space of inquiry generates.
I'm also glad that Bryce raised the issue of how biased assumptions about disability can shape the work in x-phi that takes disability as its subject matter.
I really hope that practitioners of x-phi will begin to develop studies and experiments that follow from a critical approach to disability, that is, an approach that recognizes the political character of disability, rather than naturalizes it. It seems to me that the close proximity between x-phi and philosophy of mind, cognitive science, experimental psychology, etc. leads to experiments and studies in x-phi, cognitive science and cognate fields, and so on that rely on, and are motivated by, assumptions according to which disability is a personal disadvantage or lack, a functional deficit, or defect. I hope that practitioners of x-phi, philosophers of mind, philosophers of cognitive science, and so on will (begin to) read and take seriously the work of philosophers of disability and disability theorists. (Are Jesse, Bryce, and Shen-Yi Liao exceptions?) The experiment that Bryony suggested on the aesthetic judgments of disabled people seems promising.
On that note, I want to say that I would love to read some ideas about experiments that could be done to test for biases and other mechanisms of power relations with respect to disability. I know that Bryce and his colleague are going to start work on a project. Jesse and I have had some very preliminary discussions about an experiment that I would run (with his assistance) to test a claim that disability theorists, activists, and philosophers of disability routinely make. That is, the claim is commonly made that many of the prejudices and biases that disabled people confront are grounded in deep-seated fears that nondisabled people harbour (and other disabled people too have) about their own mortality, vulnerability, etc. I am skeptical about this claim. For one thing, I think that these sorts of claims (there isn't really only one of them, more like a cluster of them) naturalize social biases, representing them as innate, primordial, or something like that. If the fear of disabled people is innate or elemental, why should people be too concerned to change it or held responsible for it? I'm happy to say more about my skepticism or to be challenged on it.
Posted by: Shelley | 05/20/2016 at 10:41 AM
I really enjoyed this awesome interview, Bryony and Shelley!
One of the papers linked above (http://philpapers.org/rec/ADLDMA) actually replicates some gender differences in knowledge attributions observed by Buckwalter and Stich. (The paper mischaracterized the replication as "not statistically significant" @ p = .003.) A few years ago, reviewing data from my own research on knowledge attributions (N = ~5000, ~40% female), I found a small, statistically significant gender difference in knowledge attributions whereby women were more likely than men to attribute knowledge. Overall, in light of the evidence to date, I think that (English-speaking U.S.) women are more likely than (English-speaking U.S.) men to attribute knowledge, but this effect is probably small and definitely poorly understood.
Also, another paper linked above (http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/nous.12110/full) reports the most impressive cross-cultural difference in knowledge attributions observed in experimental philosophy to date (amidst some noteworthy cross-cultural similarities).
Posted by: John Turri | 05/20/2016 at 06:21 PM
Dear Bryony and Shelley,
Thank you for sharing such a wonderful interview about your experiences with experimental philosophy. It was very moving to read for me on a personal level. I just wanted to write in to say that I deeply regret that reading our paper made you feel uncomfortable. I definitely did not mean to suggest in it that sociological factors don’t contribute to different perspectives or preferences people might have about philosophy, philosophical cases, or methodology we choose to study it. Contrary to Schwartzman or Pohlhaus’ critiques, this work was an honest, albeit limited and clearly fallible attempt to begin to include more perspectives in the conversation.
I was also thinking that some recent evidence might support your idea when you write that “Why not think that women might, in some cases, be unimpressed by appeals to intuition and thus become critical of the methods and dismissive of the discipline more generally?” Two recent papers have indeed suggested that this precise thing could be a contributing factor in these matters:
http://philosophycommons.typepad.com/xphi/2016/02/public-perceptions-of-philosophical-research.html
https://feministphilosophers.wordpress.com/2016/03/31/why-do-undergraduate-women-stop-studying-philosophy/
All the best,
Wesley Buckwalter
Posted by: Wesley Buckwalter | 05/20/2016 at 08:44 PM
Thanks for your comments, Shelley. I agree that it would be interesting to look at the cluster of claims you mention, although I think that, whilst an exclusively naturalistic account would neglect many important factors, we shouldn’t presuppose that there is no innate bias. An approach that allows the possibility that such responses might also contribute to some aspects of prejudice needn’t be incompatible with raising concerns about prejudice, legitimately expecting change or holding people accountable.
Many thanks, John, for confirming that there is evidence in support of the original claim that there are statistically significant differences in intuitions, and for mentioning your own findings. I’m glad you enjoyed the interview.
Wesley, thanks for commenting, and please don’t worry at all about having made me feel uncomfortable – ‘uncomfortable’ probably wasn’t the best word to use; it was more of a niggle, and I really enjoyed reading the paper. I can tell from the acknowledgements that you and Steve went to a great deal of trouble to consult people on the way you presented your findings, and it was very clear that you acknowledged the role of sociological factors, and that your paper was speculative, addressing only one aspect of the debate, and calling for further work from a range of perspectives. I didn’t think any of Shwartzman or Pohlhaus’s objections to your paper were defensible. I was very interested to see the 2016 paper about why women leave philosophy, so thank you very much for adding those links.
Posted by: Bryony Pierce | 05/21/2016 at 09:23 AM
Thanks to Komarine, too, for expressing your appreciation. Glad you like the interview.
Posted by: Bryony Pierce | 05/21/2016 at 09:56 AM
I have really been getting a great deal out of this discussion, and I very much appreciate all of the comments that have appeared thus far.
It's funny, conversations about gender and philosophy these days are often so toxic, but this one has been exactly the opposite. People have disagreed on certain specific issues, but everyone has been making excellent points, and everyone has been very respectful of alternative views. I suspect we have Shelley and Bryony to thank here, for creating just the right atmosphere to start things off.
In any case, I really appreciate the comments from Edouard and John, and I think what they have to say here adds an important counterpoint to my original comment. As they rightly emphasize, the result coming out of existing work in experimental philosophy is definitely not that gender and culture never make any difference to people's philosophical intuitions. Rather, it might be better to say that the result is that there is a striking degree to which intuitions are robust across these variables. In other words, prior to there being any work in experimental philosophy, I would have guessed that there would be a certain amount of gender differences and cross-cultural differences in philosophical intuitions. What existing experimental research has shown is not that there are no differences at all but rather that there is much less difference than one would have expected prior to seeing these studies.
Further philosophical work could therefore explore the implications of either side of these findings. On one hand, it would be interesting to look at the philosophical implications of the general tendency whereby philosophical intuitions seem to be surprisingly robust across gender and culture. However, on the other hand, as Edouard and John point out, there are specific cases which gender and culture do have effects, and it would also be interesting to look at the philosophical implications of the differences observed in these cases.
Posted by: Joshua Knobe | 05/21/2016 at 11:05 AM
Thanks, Josh. It seems likely to me that those taking part in this discussion would be respectful of other views expressed here regardless of the atmosphere created, so you should take some credit, too.
Does anyone know of work looking at the under-representation of women in philosophy in terms of risk aversion, as a possible contributory factor among others? Women have been found to be more risk-averse when it comes to financial/career-related decisions (I had a quick look for evidence and found this: http://www.pnas.org/content/106/36/15268.full, which focuses on testosterone levels, so it would be good to find something that considers social factors, too). Pursuing a career in academic philosophy might be perceived by many students as quite a gamble. Competition is fierce and the majority of the jobs on offer tend to be in academia, whereas there are lots of ways in which maths or science, say, can be applied outside academia, arguably making investing time and resources into majoring/doing a higher degree in those subjects less risky a strategy.
Posted by: Bryony Pierce | 05/21/2016 at 01:01 PM
I agree with Josh that this has been a great space to discuss these issues in a refreshingly cooperative and positive way.
I also agree with Josh's take on the current state of research on the potential role that gender and culture play in philosophical judgments. The amount of robustness observed to date is definitely remarkable! Moving forward, I think there's more potential for discovering substantial cross-cultural differences, primarily because there's been comparatively less attention paid to culture than to gender thus far (which, in turn, is primarily because it's so challenging to conduct good cross-cultural research).
Bryony asked about risk-aversion potentially contributing to decisions to avoid philosophy. I think this is a plausible hypothesis, not just regarding women but also more generally for economically vulnerable people (to pick one social factor). I'm unaware of any work directly on this topic, though. One resource that could be helpful in launching a research project on the topic is the Society of Judgment and Decision Making's list of risk attitude measures (http://www.sjdm.org/dmidi/Risk_Attitude.html).
Posted by: John Turri | 05/21/2016 at 03:17 PM
Sorry, the link at the end of my previous comment is broken. Here it is fixed:
http://www.sjdm.org/dmidi/Risk_Attitude.html
Posted by: John Turri | 05/21/2016 at 04:48 PM
Thanks, John. Having worked as a translator for many years, I'm particularly wary of how questions or scenarios are translated, if translation is necessary (and ideally comparisons wouldn't be restricted to users of one language), when conducting cross-cultural research. Someone I met at a conference had been investigating free will in Japan, for example, but explained that the questions used in his surveys, if literally translated back into English, were about whether a person had actually done something, not about whether they'd done so freely.
The risk attitude measures look very useful, thank you. There's an interesting blog post about the effects of past appointments on women's under-representation here: http://www.newappsblog.com/2016/05/women-in-philosophy-1930-1979-what-can-it-tell-us-about-diversity-today.html (Thanks to Eric Schwitzgebel for drawing my attention to this in a Facebook post.)
Posted by: Bryony Pierce | 05/22/2016 at 05:58 AM
I hadn't seen that post, Bryony, thanks!
Posted by: John Turri | 05/22/2016 at 01:29 PM
Bryony,
Great interview (which has led to an interesting and insightful comment thread). I briefly wanted to touch upon a worry you raise in your final comment with respect to translation and cross-cultural work. You mention some researchers who were doing work on free will beliefs in Japan and the problems they were having translating their materials into English in a way that didn't reveal that the materials were not commensurable. This is always a potential risk, but I don't think it's insurmountable. For instance, my wife and I have been working with a team in Brazil to collect data on free will beliefs in Brazil using a Portuguese version of the Free Will Inventory (Nadelhoffer et al. 2014). This took several steps. First, a team of native Portuguese speakers and a native English speaker translated the materials into Portuguese. Then, importantly, these materials had to be back translated into English to make sure there was a close fit. I suspect this two step process can help address some of the worries you raised--although there may surely be some cross cultural differences that can't be pasted over in this way.
That said, I agree it is important that more cross cultural work be done--which is best done as a team effort! If nothing else, more (or less) gender differences in intuitions may be found if we broaden the scope of our investigation. The most recent work by Stich and company seems to be the most promising in this regard given the sheer volume of data and the number of countries involved (nearly 30, if my memory serves me).
Posted by: Thomas Nadelhoffer | 05/23/2016 at 07:57 AM
Thanks for responding to this point, Thomas. Yes, the example I gave was a case where insufficient thought had probably been given to the the wording and/or to the implications for the findings. To go into a bit more detail, there is a worry that remains, for me, in some cases only, even if every effort is made to ensure correspondence. Some pairs of languages may not have the kind of mapping of concepts onto words or phrases that is needed for a given project (e.g. if there is no phrase in use that means 'free will' or there are different terms for 'knowledge', with different applications). Even fairly minor changes in wording can influence responses, e.g. intended/did intentionally. So it seems that it's only when very precise and unambiguous literal translations are possible that results should be taken as reliable indicators of cultural differences in intuitions about the same problem case.
Posted by: Bryony Pierce | 05/23/2016 at 01:24 PM