Neutrality as a Philosophical Ideal | Prof Jason Stanley (2015)

so i realized with great terror when professor butler was delivering her perfectly structured remarks over the past two days that there's a cultural difference uh where some disciplines read papers and others make stuff up as they go along so uh so my so i'm going to be doing the latter so what i what i'm interested in today um is actually a project that i know from the inside i know it from the inside because when i was an assistant professor at cornell before i moved to michigan i uh i was a roommate of a butler scholar in 1995 to 97 my friend jordana rosenberg who is constantly we're screaming each other until five in the morning about gender trouble and you know it's unclear i can't understand it and so then after those huge arguments you know uh you know i know what people say when they try to delegitimize things because then i then i would use jordana's arguments after that to show people that this was philosophy and they were they were uh they were using these strange disciplinary divisions to uh they were they were they were employing notions like clarity in ideological ways and so what i wanted to do was sort of systematize what what what's happening now in philosophy i think it is a revolution led by some of the figures that maria mentioned langton saul hasslinger christie dotson charles mills i would add patricia hill collins audrey lord but uh the uh uh that makes us rethink that makes us think of the disciplinary distinctions we draw in philosophy as itself a subject of philosophical discussion like how did that happen how did we start thinking that way how did we start drawing these distinctions now in discussing marx wendy brown usefully distinguishes critique from criticism she writes mere criticism marks religion as false critique connects religious illusions and the need for them to the specific reality generating and necessitating religious consciousness and i think what we need to do is we need to uh both criticize the apparatus the arguments that are intended to draw these exclusionary boundaries uh in philosophy that say exclude critical race theory and feminism from being philosophy we need to criticize those arguments in brown sense and we also need to critique them we also need to say what what leads people what is it in people's identity that leads them to give such bad arguments so uh so um now so what i'm going to do uh here um it's of a piece of it's of a piece with professor butler's uh uh what i've been reading maybe because this is what i'm thinking about lately is the sort of problematizing agency uh thinking about new ways to think about agency other than the liberal one i want to think about neutrality and how how coherent neutrality is as a philosophical ideal because i think think something like neutrality is going on with critiques of philosophy with with the disciplinary um uh divisions that i grew up with and i think and i'm going to draw on the work of the figures suzanne who influenced me um i think the paper that's most influenced me is by christy dotson uh how is this paper philosophy also a great title so um so but also eileen o'neill charles mills the other people who've been theorizing for decades about what the heck you know like uh you know i remember telling my yale colleague who's also my rutgers colleague jonathan kramnik you know when i took hume i was told that hume's hobby was history like so in other words hume's historical interest had nothing to do with his philosophical interests you know what was going on with that or like hume when i was writing my book on ideology and propaganda i discovered that hume was like wow hume it's weird that he doesn't have a political social and political philosophy given that he's just talking about ideology all the time and then i discovered first principles of government i was like oh i wonder why that's not taught um so uh so so it's not just it's not just areas of philosophy it's not just um i mean i think i think what what we what we have to realize and this is why elena eileen o'neill's work and early modern is so important and charles mills work uh uh in the racial contract and and um and ideal theory is ideology is so important um because they call our attention to the uh the particular historicity of of our moment and uh and how the exclusions function uh not just to exclude certain groups but also to exclude the also to exclude famous dead white men like john dewey is only read by critical race theorists anymore in philosophy you know that's like uh because you know what's going on with that well it's because he thinks philosophy education is central to democratic political theory and if you think philosophy of education is very central to democratic political theory maybe you're gonna have to read elizabeth katie stanton maybe you're gonna have to read a whole bunch of other figures who write on education who aren't white men or you know do are you going to talk about pragmatism and that affects elaine locke and a bunch of um theorists thinking about race so uh or lisa shapiro made to me the point she's like yeah and it even affects i mean i guess i just made this point with hume even affects what we read within in the canon like i read in my political philosophy class in graduate school i have to admit i was highly turned off to normative theory and hence i became a philosopher of logic because i was like that's not about oppression that's about shining cities um so uh so uh so you know we read rousseau's social contract but we never read a meal you know because emil well i don't know what's going on with that um so uh and that's because philosophy of education gets cut out um so uh and it's it's important to emphasize this isn't even true of the analytic tradition okay frankie had some political writings don't read them please um but uh but uh but russell wrote a book on power susan stebbing the founder of analysis the journal analysis has two books on ideology thinking to some purpose and her uh and um in 1939 in a book in 1941 i'm now blanking on the name but both are on ideology uh um yeah i uh run and so it's not like and noam chomsky is an analytic philosopher and his political philosophy you know deeply influences me as a political philosopher i don't know why it's not considered part of the canon so i think that of the uh part of analytic political philosophy so i think we have to ask like what's going on it's a very interesting philosophical question it's actually a question of you know like how possibly did things end up this way and that's what you have a bunch of people thinking about right now so my hypothesis having been in this position arguing with my roommate at 4am in 20 years ago now is that there's a certain conception that i'm going to call neutralism and like any like many ideological conceptions and i'll say more what i mean by ideology soon and you know a third of my book is about what i mean by ideology so i'll wheel that in um it's uh highly connected with with i think butler's um discussions uh so um so i think there's there's a a view i'm calling it neutralism uh the view that there's a philosophical ideal of neutrality and that's what i want to both subject to criticism and critique here so um i'm not going to say that neutralism makes sense because i don't think it makes sense i think it's what it's so it's something that people who pride themselves on making sense presuppose but i don't think that makes it means it makes sense i don't think it makes sense and i'm gonna argue that it doesn't make sense um so i'm gonna sketch it but don't like get mad at me when you notice immediately that it doesn't make sense because that will be my point so um so so i think neutralism uh so according to neutralism the domain of philosophy is restricted to topics that are universal and not only and not even chiefly accessible from certain experiential perspectives the claims in a philosophical argument do not cite particularities of fact as history does for example and do not persuade by a listening emotion as a narrative or literature philosophical reasoning only appeals to inferences and principles that are recognized as valid by anyone capable of reason in an important sense since such principles are not ideological in a way i will explain the arguments also possess a clearly articulable and recognizable structure that demarcates them as instances of such neutral and universally acceptable reasoning patterns now i'm going to need to say what i mean so i think i think the idea and tell me if you've heard this i'm sure everyone has who uh uh oh feminist philosophy critical race theory uh that's ideological and what do they mean by that what they mean by that is something like this um it's people want a certain result it's political it's connected to their identity in some way and so it isn't really properly what we do you know because if political then ideological ideological then not neutral something like that okay so um so i'm going to criticize this uh ideology from a number of directions um so um now but first a little bit more about the ideology the ramifications of accepting this kind of ramifications of accepting neutrality as a philosophical ideal so what if you thought this was like what philosophy is well then you'd think that philosophy would be explicable by what one might think of as abstract problem solving so the use of neutral reasoning and neutral perspective independent reasons in the resolution of various philosophical puzzles the standard tools would be something like logic and probability and indeed we find that those tools are i mean some of my best friends are logicians i mean i use those tools i'm not dissing those tools i'm just saying i'm dissing the restriction of inquiry to those tools i'm saying neutralism would lead you to think that those are the legitimate tools so if philosophy is guided by neutralism by this sort of sort of vague thought of neutralism as i've sketched it then successful philosophers will be thought sought among those who are stereotypically regarded as having a high degree of abstract problem-solving skills rather than insight gained from life experience or broad cultural historical knowledge now i think as many flop many of you know because of all the process gotten over the past few weeks sarah jane leslie with co-authors has published a paper in science called expectations of brilliance underlie gender distributions across academic disciplines and she asked 1800 people in 30 different disciplines uh what whether you think success in the discipline is due to hard work or raw innate knowledge and what she found is philosophy even more than math is raw innate knowledge of all disciplines american philosophers respond raw innate knowledge now it's only 50 philosophers who responded so there's still a um and i worry about the setup because i worry about the dichotomy between hard work and raw innate knowledge does not leave a gap for perspective and experience so i have critiques of leslie's setup because i think it can play into the hands of those who who want to who want to exclude because those aren't the only options success can be due to a position of exclusion um you know i did an author meets critics on my book in cheshire correctional facility with lori groons laurie groon this political philosopher has been teaching these 13 prisoners for five years political philosophy and they you know i've never been in a group of 13 people who've done 10 semesters of political philosophy i mean who's done that she's like yeah i'm running out of stuff to teach them uh you know uh it was actually like i patronized them like halfway through the first question and i was like okay um so but but you know this is an although laurie is a uh so most of them are lifers and although and uh and you know although laurie is an analytic political philosopher and unlike me does not love people who hate our people like carl schmidt i'm very into carl schmidt and uh so these students somehow discovered all of this by themselves and they're like professor stanley i know you analytic types don't like a gambin but you given your book you really need to read the state of exception and so you know what i realized and there's one six-year-old guy i kept on calling i called him clyde the carl schmidt guy because he's so into carl schmidt i mean this is a group of political philosophers whose favorite concept is the concept of the exception and that's because they're serving life sentences in prison you know and so that tells you that life experience gives you a certain philosophical vision so i worry that that's not a node in leslie's framework and i'm already seeing philosophers using leslie to say oh look we don't need to change the topics of philosophy we just need to tell people it's hard work rather than brilliance so be careful of that so i'm going to praise leslie i think we all need to be warned we all need to be beware wary that some people are out there saying oh it's just hard work and not you know uh whereas i think it's clear that some you know gramsci's prison notebooks had a lot to do with where they were written so uh okay so so i think but neutralism is i think an explanation for what's going on with uh with um or introduction to mathematical logic was also written in prison uh so uh uh i would be as russell says i'd be writing this even if i were dead from the waist down and not merely in a prison cell so um so so neutralism is uh um so let's so if if you thought neutralism was the right model of philosophy it's clear why you would think that philosophy was math-like in its features although math requires a ton of hard work so i uh you would think you know uh raw i think so i'm i i suspect that this kind of conception of what philosophical inquiry is underlies the raw innate knowledge thought oh yeah and then and then leslie discovers that gender exclusion the more uh uh is a function uh largely of this feature so sorry i for those of you don't know this so she she discovers that the more raw innate knowledge is thought to be explicable of for of of success and discipline the fewer women there are in it um now again i worry so philosophy is very highly thought of as involved i mean of all disciplines it stands out as most marked by successes due to raw innate knowledge and so hence that's the explanation of the diversity problem now again now that i've explained that i think you can see the previous worry i raised in even more detail because i like to make a distinction between in my head between content feminists and and procedural feminists so when when i gave a talk on christy dotson at the apa uh nancy bauer set up you know she had set up this session men behaving splendidly how to organize a gender balanced conference with all men setting me up uh giving talks she's like yeah we did a session on gender balance conferences last year and eight people showed up you know and it was all women so if you thought let's make it controversial do you mind so it was like rough um but uh so uh but it was packed it worked and uh but i gave a talk arguing that um following datsun that it was exclusions of topics that were responsible for exclusion of topics and methodologies that were responsible uh for lack of diversity and to give you a sense of the content versus procedural feminism dichotomy one of my former students i won't say her name but raise your hand said i don't know what jason was talking about because but can we get back to blind refereeing so that would be the divide there's some people who think the diversity problem has to do with procedure we just shift our procedures and we'll get suddenly blacks and women rushing into philosophy once we do more blind refereeing and others of us think that it has to do with an exclusion of topics where suddenly dubois is not you know social theory social theory is suddenly not philosophy so you know um so so you can so leslie i think is being used by people who think it's all procedural so but nevertheless you can see that if neutralism is correct you would you would you would if if neutralism were the ideology um a people would be would be drawn to a view that philosophy is math-like now okay so now were were i think familiar with i mean there's a number of criticisms in feminist philosophy about the gendered nature of the discourse of rationality and objectivity and this is paytman's point and sexual contract mills point in the racial contract that uh uh michelle alexander's point in uh uh mass incarceration in the age of color blindness uh uh so the idea is that there are these these ideals of these ideals of uh neutrality have an exclusionary function um now uh so uh but i think that there's uh there's uh so my my first um uh my my first so some of those i'm not going to discuss i'm not going to discuss uh since we're familiar well in particular there's a criticism of neutrality that's like geneviva lloyd's man of criticism of rationality and man of reason that the social meanings of rationality talk are gendered um and i'm sympathetic to that view but it's so explored that that's not going to be my criticism of neutralism um my criticism of neutral so um so the so i've i have four other criticisms so um the first objection is that it's unfair to some people and hence in an important sense fails to be neutral i'm just going to mention this objection as a social justice point so patricia l collins argues in black feminists thought that black women intellectuals have been drawn to projects that have a chance to improve ordinary social practices and that very different kinds of thought and theories emerge when abstract thought is joined with pragmatic action if she's right then restricting the methodology of philosophy to abstract problems solving exercise problem-solving excludes certain traditions of philosophy and this is a double injustice when those traditions are once favored by groups that were previously unjustly excluded simply on the basis of race and gender and this is a point you find in datsun's work as well like every point i make as usual as in dawson's work um so um the second point is about ideology so i said and this is i think the most of the our 2am bar talks arguments with our fellow philosophers this comes up um if it's political then it's ideological so what is that so and if it's ideological it's not philosophical so let's ask let's interrogate that let's ask what ideological belief is so i have just written a book on the nature of ideology um so i'm not going to rehearse all of that here although we'll discuss that um maeve i think's comments are going to be on that um part the theory of ideology in my book oh you changed it oh propaganda okay so okay so uh so so let me say just a little bit about my view of ideology and i think it's a widely shared one um because i saw repercussions of i saw it i see it in butler's work and uh and and lots of others so i think um sally hasslinger has a nice way of thinking about it ideology is a representation of social life that serves in some way to undergird social practices the idea is an ideology is is the precondition for your social identity and this is the theory i take in my in my book what a theory of ideologies trying to explain is so here's how i think of the theory of ideology what it's trying to explain is why some beliefs and conceptual schemes don't get revised in light of experience why they stay why even though no matter how much evidence you have against them they stay the same and this is and that's what you want to explain and the way i want to explain it and when i say i i think this is a very wide way of thinking of ideology widely shared in the an electrician it's hasslinger who's most who's articulated it i think most clearly it's uh is that well ideological beliefs or ideological conceptual schemes are so resistant to revision because they're part you're committed to them as part of your identity and so abandoning them means abandoning your friends and abandoning the stability that that has been so that that gives you your sense of self and this is not just ideological beliefs but um but i do but ideology cannot is not just as as miranda fricker and many others have argued ideology is uh an ideology is also conceptual schemes so iris murdoch and the idea in the the idea of perfection talks about a mother and a daughter-in-law and the mother thinks that the daughter-in-law is vulgar undignified crass and uh and then she comes then after a few years the mother-in-law starts to think hmm i'm awfully jealous of my daughter-in-law maybe i've been thinking with this set of concepts that orders the social world into hierarchies because i'm jealous let me rethink here and then she realizes that what she had thought of as undignified as undignified was in fact spontaneous she decides to adopt a new set of concepts that don't order the social world this way so you can have a conceptual scheme being ideological being you you endorse murdoch's point as you think of the social world with this conceptual scheme because of your social identity and i want to um and i want to emphasize following hasslinger that an ideology is neutral and that's crucial to my discussions of ideology uh i think when you start off you know with propaganda and ideology start off okay they're bad let's do the bad thing and you realize you can't really theorize with a non-neutral notion you know uh so so i theorize with following hassling with we all have ideologies we all have social worlds we all have ideologies we all have the beliefs that make us who we are and many ideological beliefs are instances of knowledge like i'm a cosmopolitan northeastern intellectual who you know who doesn't like to conceive himself as existing outside new york city i'm ideologically committed to the theory of evolution for example i'm ideologically committed to all people are equal like tolerance um now i think i know those things are true but it's still the case that in some far-off distant world where we where you know uh creationism were correct i would still probably be a theory of evolution guy so person so uh so i have these commitments that are so you can have an ideological belief that's your ideological belief because it's who you are but you still know it i mean it's there's no contradiction between something being ideological and something being a core case of knowledge this actually scotches a number of theories of ideology like you might say an ideological belief is one that's formed that has the wrong causal source like think a hume on causality or religious belief it has the wrong causal source and so it isn't knowledge because it doesn't derive from the facts well i don't think that's correct i think we should say instead an ideological belief is one that is connected to our social identity it's one that or and concept a set of concepts is one that we think with because those are the concepts that someone with my social identity thinks with now um uh uh so now i've said that everyone has a social identity in her discussion in her well-known discussion of sovereign individuality judith butler notes that of course some people act as if they were never formed i mean the one talk she just gave and butler rightly points out that sovereign individuality is itself a social identity so that you know uh if there were sovereign individuals they wouldn't have ideologies but that is of course i think an ideology that there are sovereign individuals and so that's why i'm quoting the previous talk in this one so um so uh now there's 60 years of social psychology on uh on ideology and this is these are things i connect i discuss a lot in my book um so uh so for instance in haskell and kantral's 1954 paper they saw a game uh they i think it's the harvard yale game they asked yale students and harvard students about controversial calls that were made and it turns out yale students and harvard students had very different views about the calls um uh so uh and they seem to firmly have those views and so there's 50 years of research 60 years of research so my colleague dan kahan um has this paper in the 2012 paper called they saw a demonstration and he presents he's the same video it's a building and there are some demonstrators and police heard the demonstrators off the sidewalk and further away from the building and he splits he gets conservatives and progressives and splits them into four groups shows them the same video all four groups one group of conservatives is and he asked in the following question did the police violate the protesters first amendment rights to free speech first amendment means something very different in india by the way so uh there it's the opposite uh but uh so did they did they did the police violate the free speech rights of the protesters so the first uh the first group of conservatives is told it's an abortion clinic the second group is told it's a military recruitment center uh the group that's told it's an abortion clinic over 70 says the police violated the free speech rights of the demonstrators the group that's told it's a military barracks a military recruitment center only 13 of the conservatives say the police violated the first amendment rights of the demonstrators now sadly i think dan kahan i mean i love him dearly and he's the only person i've ever experienced where you send him a manuscript the night before 200 pages he reads the whole thing and meets with you for six hours um but uh but he's in the ideology of neutralism all of his work is like conservatives act the same as progressives which is depressing because i like to think we're right um but um but it's just reversed with my team we do the same thing we're like oh yeah if it's an abortion clinic they violated their rights uh sorry if it's an abortion clinic uh they acted correctly if it's a military recruitment center they violated their rights so um so there's just a ton of work on how our social identities affect our firm beliefs and that is i think i just think that there's uh there's um and there's just a ton of different uh of different social psychology i won't go through all of it here but i try to assemble that like what i try to do in my book is assemble that and connect it with critical social theory connect the social psychology with critical social theory so okay so what i've said is we all have ideologies some of them we can know we can have an ideological belief can be knowledge my belief the theory of evolution is true is ideological and it's definitely knowledge um so being ideological is not an epistemic criticism in and of itself it's just pointing out it's a belief you're not going to give up but then people could say oh wait that's not philosophical not to give up beliefs in the light of evidence you know um so let's look at the practice of areas of philosophy that are regarded as as not having this feature of ideological of not being ideal uh ideological if those areas if say disputes and logic were governed by neutralism we're not ideological in this sense we might feel justified in accepting various exclusionary consequences of embracing neutralism as an ideal the second objection i want to level against neutralism is that logic enjoys no such privileged status there's no universal agreement on the logical laws and philosophy today there's no universal agreement about the correct methods of reasoning there are extremely smart people with a lot of theorems to their name who disagree about by valence about excluded middle about almost any claim fundamental principle of logic timothy williamson rightly warns us quote to be suspicious of any attempt to bound logic or metalogic to the insubstantive the non-ideological much though we may long for such a neutral arbiter to discipline philosophical debate we cannot always have one unquote and this is a claim about disputes and logic williamson of course is a is a fervent advocate of bivalence so what does williamson mean well there is no what i think we've learned as a result i mean dumb it seeks sought this but it wasn't successful i think everyone in the philosophy of logic accepts that if you've got two people who disagree about a fundamental mode of reasoning there just is no neutral way to adjudicate between them the only thing to do is both of them just should go theorize with their id with their fundamental belief and then see which overall picture of the world it has more elegance has more plausibility coheres together whatever virtues whatever you know difficult to describe virtues there are about a full world view that's how you do it in logic and well what about williamson's attraction to bivalence is it political well anyone who knows timothy williamson knows that it's political it's his commitment to realism and you know and he thinks you know his political stance is that his uh realism and you know epistemic norms are the only norms and realism is true i mean he's deeply committed to realism and part of his social identity he's a he came into oxford when everyone was an anti-realist it's part of his identity defending realism grand priest's attraction to non-classical logic is connected to his deep uh uh involvement with eastern philosophy he's this incredible martial arts person who spends every year like for long periods of time immersed in eastern philosophy and you know hence when a jainism when he talks about his his defenses of non-classical logic are deeply connected to who grand priest is and there is no neutral method by which you can decide between non-classical logic and classical logic in the semantic meta theory you're always appealing to whatever principles of logic you want to justify so you know people with different views about the nature of logic will appeal to meta theories where they presuppose their own views and we're all familiar with that in the philosophy of logic so now hume is engaged in critique when he discusses religious belief but so is williamson when he discusses vagueness um williamson says in 1994 his 1994 book what he's trying to account for is why people believe that vague predicates have fuzzy boundaries he has a long argument trying to explain why it's natural to believe that even though it's false that's kind of because for him vague predicates of sharp boundaries that's like hume's arguments about religious belief why it's natural to believe uh why why we're sort of compelled to have religious belief independently of whether or not it's true so that kind of the methodology of critiquing a view not just criticizing it is part and parcel of what philosophers do um yeah so three more minutes um okay now uh now uh yeah uh so um now let me um let me i've already covered the third criticism which is that the one and it's familiar from the works of eileen o'neill and charles mills so which is that if neutralism if all the philosophers in the recognized historical canon were guided by neutralism it would have the historical centrality that is useful in an exercise of disciplinary taxonomy but the fact that the western philosophical canon begins with the works of plato which is narratively rich and suggests a certain degree of hypocrisy in excluding contemporary works from the domain of philosophy that substantively employ narrative and myth and the final point i want to make which i think is very important is that it's inconsistently applied think of think of so with neutralism says matters of particular fact aren't really relevant we want sort of logic probability things that hold in every possible world but look at look at how science is treated in philosophy in philosophy departments we all know we need people who know tons of physics and tons of biology physics of course gets privileged because the littler things are the more fundamental they are apparently um gender not fundamental uh the uh so uh so um so the fourth objection is that it's inconsistently applied like everybody is like oh we need people who know lots of particular facts about physics so why don't we need people who know a lot of why don't we need normative theorists in political philosophy who know a lot of particular facts about history why don't we need people who know facts about narrative why about literature so it seems that there's a radical distinction between how we treat metaphysics and how we treat political philosophy so so i think that i hope that i think it's a a very interesting question why we ended up with neutralism and i hope i've given some reasons to think that that the view itself is incoherent thank you you

Channel: UCD - University College Dublin

Views: 6,811

Keywords: UCD, University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland, UCD - University College Dublin, myucd, ucddublin, Country Neutrality, Philosophy (Field Of Study), Professor (Job Title), Jason Stanley, Judith Butle, Neutrality, Yale University (College/University)

Id: cqmulEGTutY

Length: 39min 54sec (2394 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 05 2015