I mentioned that in her early work Marcus suggested that ordinary proper names might be Russellian logically proper names. (Soames 1995, 192, my emphasis) and
In her later work, especially the 1961 paper cited by Smith, Marcus adopted these theses of Smullyan and Fitch, essentially suggesting that ordinary proper names might be Russellian logically proper names. (Soames 1995, 193, my emphasis)
Yet again, my aim here is not to single out Soames and Burgess. My point is to give another representative example, which is close to the heart of this debate and continues the kind of pattern I have been illustrating for several sections now. And with general patterns in mind, it is important to remember that an explanation in terms of sexist discursive injustice coheres well with what we know about the discipline as a whole. It should be no shock that the rampant sexism we find throughout the history of philosophy (and almost all institutions that have ever existed) would make its way into the twists and turns of the literature like this.16 In fact, quite sadly, it coheres quite well with what we know about Marcus’ career in academia.
From the time she arrived at Yale for graduate school, she was subjected to regular patriarchal structures and misogynistic actors—through “separate but not equal” housing for women, exclusion from parts of the library, and being asked by the department chair to not take her duly elected position of president of the philosophy club (Marcus 2010, 80–81). Furthermore, as Diana Raffman pointed out in her obituary of Marcus17:
She would tell of having to fend off the unwelcome advances of a male professor (thankfully not a philosopher!) with a coat hanger, of being barred from all undergraduate classrooms at Yale while studying there for her Ph.D., and of being forced to publish her landmark papers under her married name. (Raffman 2012)
This is appallingly and criminally sexist behavior going far beyond the type of gendered stereotyping and conversing suggested in the preceding argument. So, again, it seems that the simplest explanation that fits in with our background knowledge best is that Marcus’ reception has been a result of discursive injustice.
Given that my primary thesis was gotten at via abductive reasoning, we should consider some alternative explanations and see how they fare in comparison to mine. Again, abduction is inference to the best explanation, rather than inference to any old explanation. To plausibly make such a claim, we have to show a comparison to some competing explanations. Beginning with those that have been suggested in the dialectic under discussion and branching out to explanations that have been offered in the conversations I have had with other philosophers about this matter, I will briefly consider five alternative explanations and point out where I think an argument showing they go wrong would begin.
[E1] Marcus’ work on NTR occurs over too few pages.
Reply: This alternative explanation suggests that it would be far outside of the norm for a significant philosophical contribution to be recognized from just a few pages. As Smith points out, though, “F. P. Ramsey is generally credited with priority for the Dutch book argument for justifying the axioms of probability on the personalist or subjectivist interpretations of the axioms. But this accreditation is based on exactly two sentences” (Smith 1995b). Furthermore, in the exact same year that Marcus (1961) actually came out in print, Edmund Gettier published his famous paper that has been cited roughly 4,000 times and that comes in under three pages (Gettier 1963). This either involves an implicit assumption that women cannot achieve such significant contributions or requires an argument that Marcus’ work is not of that caliber. The first would also be sexist and the second would be implausible.
[E2] Marcus’ work is overly technical and not as accessible as Kripke’s.
Reply: This misses the fact that, throughout its history, analytic philosophers have been extremely interested in, and influenced by, symbol-crunching. Nobody leaves Principia Mathematica out of the history of analytic philosophy because it is not accessible. This response also misses the fact that Marcus’ work ranges from highly technical work on quantified modal logic (Marcus 1946a, 1946b, 1947) to philosophical discussions on abstract issues, which engages with formal results (Marcus 1961) to practical discussions informed by work in logic, but fully accessible to those without a formal background (Marcus 1980).
[E3] Marcus’ proofs are not as elegant as Kripke’s.
Reply: If this were the case, then the recognition that Marcus has received should be similar to the credit Kurt Gödel receives for proving the completeness of first-order logic, despite the fact that Leon Henkin gave the proof of the result that has become standard. Nobody would fail to mention Gödel in relation to this work, though, quite like they have with respect to Marcus, modal logic, and NTR.
[E4] Marcus’ work does not exhibit the “genius” of Kripke’s work.
Reply: While one could obviously argue against the basic premise here, I think it is more important to recognize that there is misogyny built into distribution of these honorifics.18 That said, for those wishing to see an argument for the genius of Marcus’ work, please see chapter 2 of this book.
[E5] Smith’s list does not encompass the import of Kripke’s work.
Reply: This is absolutely right. That said, this does not separate Kripke from Marcus, because the list (T1–T6) does not encompass the import of Marcus’ work either! As we will see in the next chapter, we have a great deal that can be learned from Marcus’ work on the relationship between logic and ethics, especially in Marcus (1980).
§1.6 Concluding Thoughts on Discursive Injustice in the History of Philosophy
I have not tried to provide anything more than the beginning of a reply to each of these alternative explanations, because I only want to make it clear that my claim that Marcus has been insufficiently recognized and this has been because of discursive injustice coming from systematic sexism serves as a plausible explanation. Simply establishing this plausibility is worthwhile because both Soames and Burgess have tried to say that this whole discussion should have never happened. In addition to Burgess’ quotations already discussed, Soames began his reply, “My task today is an unusual and not very pleasant one. I am not here to debate the adequacy of any philosophical thesis. Rather, my job is to assess claims involving credit and blame” (Soames 1995, 191). It is true that Smith made this debate much more about blame directed at Kripke than it needed to be. That said, the focus was always primarily on credit for Marcus and only secondarily on Kripke. And, while Smith certainly got quite sloppy in the details, Soames and Burgess miss the importance of this primary focus of Smith’s work. Importantly, this phenomenon of insufficient credit is something that is to be expected given that the discipline has been a part of sexist (and otherwise oppressive) social structures throughout its history. Because of this, if we look throughout the history of philosophy, we should expect to find such stories and, in fact, we do.19
For example, many recent works have recognized that traditional histories of early modern philosophy are wildly exclusionary. For the last three decades, much work has been done in response to create a sophisticated, specialized subfield of work on women in early modern philosophy. Perhaps the most distinguished thinker in this field, Eileen O’Neill, has herself pointed out that this has not been as quickly followed by corresponding changes in the larger history of modern philosophy and history of philosophy, generally, though (O’Neill 2005). Because of this, we need to develop more tactics for changing people’s minds on the need for them to include previously excluded women in their teaching and work. Given that many of the best pieces on the mechanisms and mistakes of exclusion focus on external criticisms, in this chapter I tried to focus on an almost-entirely internal critique of standard scholarship on early analytic