Category Archives: biases

Diversify or Die

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There’s an interesting piece in the Stone today on the consequences of philosophy’s Anglo-European blinders: If Philosophy Won’t Diversify, Let’s Call It What It Really Is. Garfield and Van Norden suggest that the systematic failure to address non-Western sources impoverishes the discipline and belies any claim to universality. And what a wonderfully provocative list of addenda they suggest!

We hope that American philosophy departments will someday teach Confucius as routinely as they now teach Kant, that philosophy students will eventually have as many opportunities to study the “Bhagavad Gita” as they do the “Republic,” that the Flying Man thought experiment of the Persian philosopher Avicenna (980-1037) will be as well-known as the Brain-in-a-Vat thought experiment of the American philosopher Hilary Putnam (1926-2016), that the ancient Indian scholar Candrakirti’s critical examination of the concept of the self will be as well-studied as David Hume’s, that Frantz Fanon (1925-1961), Kwazi Wiredu (1931- ), Lame Deer (1903-1976) and Maria Lugones will be as familiar to our students as their equally profound colleagues in the contemporary philosophical canon. But, until then, let’s be honest, face reality and call departments of European-American Philosophy what they really are.

Thus, the more appropriate title for our departments would be “European and American Philosophy.” On balance, I applaud this argument: we ought to aim to live up to the universality of our disciplinary self-conception, or give up that self-conception entirely.

When I think about diversifying my own syllabi, I almost never reach for Asian philosophers. I aim for gender parity first, racial diversity second, and usually end up with only a few thinkers from outside the Euro-American tradition. Sometimes none. I am scared to get Confucius or Mencius or Wiredu wrong, and I’m worried about orientalizing or exoticizing their traditions. These are obviously resolvable anxieties, given a sincere commitment, but they exist. I have a comfort zone, I push against it in some ways but not in others, and there are biases in the patterns of which ways I leave the comfort zone that I must address.

My biases, though, largely reproduce the biases in the discipline as a whole. And it would be much easier for me to correct my individual failings if the profession would work with me, if my training had worked on me. Why didn’t my graduate school train these biases out of me? Kristie Dotson’s How is this Paper Philosophy? is my go-to answer for this question. I think it’s crucial, but it’s hard to excerpt well, so read it!

… … …

Okay, you’re back? Basically, philosophers are constantly engaged in a dual game of legitimating their work as philosophy and working to reconstitute the borders of what counts as philosophy. These practices–simultaneously forcing people to justify their projects and choices in terms of a shifting standard of legitimate philosophical research–are how we end up treating Chinese or Native American philosophy as merely “inert ideas,” or worse, as “religion, mythology, storytelling, poetry, or ‘dancing’ (as Levinas once so generously declared).”

This has the effect of making philosophy a mostly white man’s game, because what Dotson calls “diverse practitioners” usually find that philosophical borders are being continually redrawn to exclude them. Of course, she writes the essay in defense of Black American, feminist, and queer philosophy, but the point stands: Asians are excluded by the kind of discipline that philosophy has become.

So I think it’s not enough to say philosophy has a budget problem. It does! But maybe it wouldn’t have quite as bad a budget problem if there weren’t so many faculty working on the semantics of the left parenthesis. The discipline became scholastic to avoid the big ideological fights of the last half century, and now is paying the price.

Attending to other traditions might produce more majors and philosophy departments would be richer both financially and ideologically and could then be doing better work. But it’s still an open question which traditions to prioritize, since these decisions get made one hire at a time. The Garfield/Van Norden piece gestures towards African and Latin American philosophy, but it’s part of a project to specifically increase attention to Chinese philosophy. That seems good, but I do also want to see a continued? renewed? nascent? long-delayed emphasis on Black American philosophy, as well as a re-commitment to feminism.

Evidence-Based Parenting, Spanking, and Authoritative Parenting Styles: or, How to Get My Daughter to Brush Her Teeth

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Crying Baby, but not My Crying Baby from Flickr user donnieray (CC By 2.0)
A crying baby, but not *my* crying baby from Flickr user donnieray (CC By 2.0)

My daughter doesn’t like to have her teeth brushed. She’s not even two years old, yet, so while that worries me, I guess it’s something we’ve still got time to correct. But one question I often wonder about is whether there’s something we could do differently to change her behavior. She’s maybe twenty-five pounds, right now, so one possibility is to hold her down and force her mouth open. I’ve had to do that to administer medicines, so I know it can work, and that she’ll forgive me afterwards. But frankly it’s terrible, and if it hadn’t been necessary to do to preserve her physical health, I wouldn’t have done it. I tried everything else on the bribe/bargain and disguise/distract continua first, I assure you.

But my personal style, which is also my parenting style, is one that avoids force and authority. Spanking makes me uncomfortable, for instance, though I’m amenable to evidence there too. And it turns out that there’s a lot of data on that.

The American Psychological Association opposes it, and so that’s become something like the default position, sometimes even ensconced in law. Much of the concern there is that open-handed, conditional spanking (i.e. “If you steal from the grocery store, you will get five carefully administered slaps on the buttocks later in the day after an explanation for the reasons for the spanking.”) can lead to more immediate and customary physical abuse, like facial slapping or the use of instruments like belts or canes, when the behavior returns. The evidence seems to suggest that spanking is closely associated with many, many bad outcomes, including noncompliance, aggression, adult spousal abuse, and more.

But that work, primarily linked to one researcher’s meta-analysis, has been seriously challenged in the last decade. It seems reasonable to protest that lumping caring and careful parents in with child abusers may muddy the data a bit, especially when the anti-spanking research was quickly transformed into advocacy that led to outlawing spanking of any sort in more than thirty countries. There was always the risk that the correlation between, say, noncompliance or aggression and spanking ran the other way: noncompliant, aggressive children got spanked because parents had exhausted other options.

So the work of Larzelere and Gunnoe is relevant here. They have also done meta-analyses, but tried to account for more variables, including differences in spanking style and positive developments like school performance. And what they’ve found is that conditional, open-handed spanking for children between two and six years old is associated with positive outcomes later in life.

I think this is a great case for research that challenges the orthodoxy (which is no spanking) but doesn’t actually resolve the question. We thought we knew spanking was unequivocally bad. Now we don’t. That doesn’t mean we know that spanking is good, though.

In fact, even Gunnoe’s research is not clear that spanking is the cause of the positive developmental factors associated with it. In fact, it may well be that willingness to spank is merely a marker for authoritative parenting syles more generally. Being authoritative is associated with both positive outcomes for children and spanking, and Gunnoe tries to argue that it’s really that style that is the cause of the positive developmental outcomes.

Which is a problem. Because even if I was willing to spank my daughter, I don’t think I could do it in a way that evinced authoritarian parenting more generally. Like the medicine I had to force her to take, I’d be deferring to the authority of the experts in my use of force. Call it the Obedient Parenting Style, deferring to the authority of experts. No thanks.

I’m kind of okay with this being a place where the facts are too murky and our values take over. But that makes parsing the data, when it does become available, a difficult task that raises all sorts of concerns about the role of science in law-making, the effects of subtle political biases on research, and the ways that motivated reasoning and motivated skepticism can impact results.