NOTES
1. I mean this in the sense in which there is something true in saying “Hacker (1996)’s history has Wittgenstein as the culmination of analytic philosophy” or “Soames (2003a, 2003b)’s history has Kripke as the culmination of analytic philosophy.” While this is not quite right, it has something to do with saying the best way to tell a history of analytic philosophy, which allows you to get the most combined historical accuracy and theoretical insight is with the culminating philosopher as protagonist. In this way, I think that the best way to tell a history of analytic philosophy, which rates highest with respect to a combination of historical accuracy, theoretical insight, and political expediency is with Bright, Dutilh Novaes, Haslanger, and Mills as protagonists.
2. This summary, which can be found in her abstract for chapter 7 at https://chicago.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.7208/chicago/9780226464589.001.0001/upso-9780226464305-chapter-008, is far from an exaggeration as well. As Moi later points out, Gellner says that ordinary language philosophy and/or common sense “is conservative in the values which it in fact insinuates” (Gellner 1959, 296), Marcuse that “[i]t leaves the established reality untouched; it abhors transgression” (Marcuse 1964, 173), Butler that it supports “nefarious ideologies” (Butler 1999), and Žižek concurs that rather than supporting a “non-ideological common-sense form of life” this type of philosophy supports “the spontaneously accepted background which is ideology par excellence” (Žižek 2009, 21). Moi rightly argues that there is a significantly problematic elitism built into these responses where “[b]ecause they trust the ordinary, and believe that perfectly ordinary people are at least as capable as philosophers of making relevant and useful distinctions, Marcuse assumes that Wittgenstein and Austin must be marching in lockstep with dominant ideology” (Moi 2017, 152).
3. This Kripke quote and ones similar to it can be found in his interview with Andreas Saugstad, “Saul Kripke, Genius Logician,” accessed June 7, 2019, http://bolesblogs.com/2001/02/25/saul-kripke-genius-logician/.
4. Krishnamurthy’s piece “Decolonizing Analytic Political Philosophy” can be found on her blog at https://politicalphilosopher.net/2016/06/03/meenakrishnamurthy/, accessed June 7, 2019.
5. It should be noted that, while I think this has not been generally accepted, it is certainly not absent from prominent discussions, either. Hacker, for example, seems to be implicitly recognizing this when he says both that “in a loose sense, one might say that all, or the bulk of, philosophy is analytic” (Hacker 1996, 3) and “one (Russellian) root of this new school might be denominated ‘logico-analytic philosophy’ . . . the other (Moorean) root might be termed ‘conceptual analysis’” (Hacker 1996, 4).
Race, Gender, and Analytic Philosophy (The Method)
Discursive Injustice and the History of Analytic Philosophy
§1.0 Overview of the Chapter
The method that analytic philosophers emphasize involves, at the very least, a commitment to the utility of linguistic and logical analysis. In this chapter and the next, I discuss ways in which we can connect such close attention to the philosophy of language and logic, respectively, to issues of social importance where race and gender are particularly salient. These chapters are intended to give direct case studies, which illustrate the need for, and potential of, combining the history of analytic philosophy with considerations of justice. In this chapter, I try to illustrate both sides of this coin by looking at one particular case study—the Ruth Marcus / Saul Kripke dispute over who deserves most credit for initiating the new theory of reference.
While it led to years of heated discussion, which got overly personal at times, I do not believe this debate got to any reasonably settled point. As was mentioned earlier, I hope to show that, while Soames is right that Kripke cannot be accused of plagiarism, there is good reason to believe that the entire discipline should be accused of discursive injustice in its treatment of Marcus’ works. That is to say, because Marcus was a woman in a field dominated by men,1 her speech acts were not given the correct uptake—her expert assertions and arguments being treated as mere suggestions. I begin with this as a case study because it allows us to see a clear case of analytic tools being used to identify a distinctive type of injustice and shows us how analytic tools can actually help us fight such injustices.
§1.1 Quentin Smith on the New Theory of Reference, Ruth Marcus, and Saul Kripke
I began the introduction with a number of quotations from philosophers with vastly different positions on how connected work in analytic philosophy is to goals of moral significance like that of increasing social, gender, and racial justice. I believe the existence of such different positions can be explained by the fact that there is much potential for critical analytic work, but this potential has all-too-rarely been realized. The theorists who are hopeful about this relationship focus on that potential and those who are despairing of this relationship focus on the actual absence. Here, I illustrate both sides of this coin by looking at one particular case study—the Marcus/Kripke dispute.
More than twenty-five years ago, Quentin Smith gave his paper at the APA on the relative priority of Ruth Barcan Marcus and Saul Kripke with respect to the “new theory of reference”—that cluster of views on naming, reference, and semantics, which took the field away from the descriptivist theories of Frege, Russell, and Wittgenstein. While this led to years of heated discussion, which got overly personal at times, I do not believe the debate got to any reasonably settled point. In this chapter, I show that, while Soames is right that Kripke cannot be accused of plagiarism, there is good reason to believe that the entire discipline of philosophy should be accused of—what Rebecca Kukla (2014) has called—discursive injustice in its treatment of Marcus’ works. I begin with this as a case study, despite the fact that it comes closer to the end of the era, which I will focus on, because it:
(1) allows us to see a clear case of analytic tools being used to identify a distinctive type of injustice,
(2) allows us to see why analytic philosophy as an institution needs to—as a perpetrator of injustice—pay more attention to thinking about injustice, and
(3) gives us a model for thinking about how this can be done more going forward.
Given just how central Kripke’s work is to the institution of analytic philosophy over the last fifty to sixty years, such a case exhibiting all of (1)–(3) should not be overlooked. Before we can get to any of that, though, we must first set the stage that we will be discussing with some basic historical facts.
The saga under consideration began in December of 1994, when Quentin Smith gave a paper at the Eastern APA in Boston, which “argued that Ruth Barcan Marcus’ 1961 article on ‘Modalities and Intensional Languages’ originated many of the key ideas of the New Theory of Reference that have often been attributed to Saul Kripke and others” (Smith 1995a, 179). At the same session, Scott Soames gave a strong reply, which argued that “Smith does Kripke a grave injustice” since “providing [Marcus and others] with proper credit does not result in a reassessment of the seminal role of Kripke and others as primary founders of contemporary nondescriptivist theories of reference” (Soames 1995, 208). Consistent with APA practice, Smith also gave a reply to that reply in which he argues