© 2015 BY THE AMERICAN PHILOSOPHICAL ASSOCIATION ISSN 2155-9708 FROM THE EDITOR Margaret A. Crouch ABOUT THE NEWSLETTER SUBMISSION GUIDELINES NEWS FROM THE CSW ARTICLES Saray Ayala Philosophy and the Non-Native Speaker Condition Megan M. Burke Specters of Violence BOOK REVIEWS Shelley M. Park: Mothering Queerly, Queering Motherhood Reviewed by Sarah LaChance Adams Feminism and Philosophy NEWSLETTER | The American Philosophical Association VOLUME 14 | NUMBER 2 SPRING 2015 SPRING 2015 VOLUME 14 | NUMBER 2 Sarah LaChance Adams: Mad Mothers, Bad Mothers, and What a "Good" Mother Would Do: The Ethics of Ambivalence Reviewed by Dana Belu Clara Fischer: Gendered Readings of Change: A Feminist-Pragmatist Approach Reviewed by Marilyn Fischer Catriona Mackenzie, Wendy Rogers, and Susan Dodds (eds.): Vulnerability: New Essays in Ethics and Feminist Philosophy Reviewed by Erinn Gilson Margaret R. Holmgren: Forgiveness and Retribution: Responding to Wrongdoing Reviewed by Hailey Huget Susanne Lettow (ed.): Reproduction, Race, and Gender in Philosophy and the Early Life Sciences Reviewed by Mark William Westmoreland ANNOUNCEMENTS CONTRIBUTORS Feminism and Philosophy MARGARET A. CROUCH, EDITOR VOLUME 14 | NUMBER 2 | SPRING 2015 APA NEWSLETTER ON FROM THE EDITOR Margaret A. Crouch EASTERN MICHIGAN UNIVERSITY The issue of the newsletter includes two articles and a significant number of book reviews. My thanks to all those who submitted articles, reviewed books, and to those who acted as reviewers of submissions for this issue. Saray Ayala writes on a topic that has not received much attention in her essay "Philosophy and the Non-Native Speaker Condition." Ayala demonstrates that biases against accented English by native English speakers have the same sorts of effects on perceptions of philosophers' competence as biases against gender or ethnicity. Furthermore, there are also implicit biases against those who speak accented English. In addition to the harms to the individual that can result from such biases, Ayala argues that there are also harms to philosophy. Because the views of those with accented English receive less credibility from their audience, the content of their work may not have the influence it could otherwise have on the discipline of philosophy. This impoverishes philosophy, not only because the views of individuals are not taken up, but also because there are reasons to think that different languages might offer different intuitions and perspectives. Ayala's essay is a wonderful introduction to this topic. She provides important empirical data, as well as suggestions for how to eliminate the effects of this bias. The recent newsletter on diversity in philosophy offered additional ways of correcting for bias against non-native English speakers. Megan M. Burke's Specters of Violence explores the idea that sexual violence haunts the lived experience of women and girls, and how this haunting presence affects, in particular, how they experience freedom. Burke provides a profound analysis of "the existential harm of rape culture and how rape culture is integral to the production of feminine subjectivity." In her conclusion, she offers suggestions for getting rid of these specters. For anyone who has experienced gendered or sexual violence, she provides a way of understanding why one feels as one does, and what it means for how one lives one's life. She also offers hope. ABOUT THE NEWSLETTER ON FEMINISM AND PHILOSOPHY The Newsletter on Feminism and Philosophy is sponsored by the APA Committee on the Status of Women (CSW). The newsletter is designed to provide an introduction to recent philosophical work that addresses issues of gender. None of the varied philosophical views presented by authors of newsletter articles necessarily reflect the views of any or all of the members of the Committee on the Status of Women, including the editor(s) of the newsletter, nor does the committee advocate any particular type of feminist philosophy. We advocate only that serious philosophical attention be given to issues of gender and that claims of gender bias in philosophy receive full and fair consideration. SUBMISSION GUIDELINES AND INFORMATION 1. Purpose: The purpose of the newsletter is to publish information about the status of women in philosophy and to make the resources of feminist philosophy more widely available. The newsletter contains discussions of recent developments in feminist philosophy and related work in other disciplines, literature overviews and book reviews, suggestions for eliminating gender bias in the traditional philosophy curriculum, and reflections on feminist pedagogy. It also informs the profession about the work of the APA Committee on the Status of Women. Articles submitted to the newsletter should be limited to ten double-spaced pages and must follow the APA guidelines for gender-neutral language. Please submit essays electronically to the editor. All manuscripts should be prepared for anonymous review. Each submission shall be sent to two reviewers. Reviews will be shared with authors. References should follow The Chicago Manual of Style. 2. Book Reviews and Reviewers: If you have published a book that is appropriate for review in the newsletter, please have your publisher send us a copy of your book. Each call for papers also includes a list of books for possible review. To volunteer to review books (or some particular book), please send the editor a CV and letter of interest, including mention of your areas of research and teaching. APA NEWSLETTER | FEMINISM AND PHILOSOPHY 3. Where to Send Things: Please send all articles, comments, suggestions, books, and other communications to the editor, Dr. Margaret A. Crouch, at mcrouch@emich.edu. 4. Submission Deadlines: Submissions for spring issues are due by the preceding November 1; submissions for fall issues are due by the preceding April 1. NEWS FROM THE COMMITTEE ON THE STATUS OF WOMEN NEW EDITOR FOR THE NEWSLETTER ON FEMINISM AND PHILOSOPHY Margaret Crouch, who has for many years served the newsletter well and faithfully, is stepping down as editor of the APA Newsletter on Feminism and Philosophy after the fall 2015 issue. Beginning with the spring 2016 issue, the new editor will be Serena Parekh (Northeastern University). DIVERSITY CONFERENCE Plans for the Diversity Conference, to be held May 28 to May 30, 2015, at Villanova University, are now complete. The unusually rich program, sponsored jointly by Hypatia and CSW, can be found at http://www1.villanova.edu/ villanova/artsci/hypatiaconference/program.html. Additional features of the conference include professional workshops on publishing feminist philosophy, a workshop on sexual harassment and bystander training, and the APA/ CSW site visit training workshop (May 31). Modest travel grants are available for presenters who could not otherwise attend. Many thanks to those of you who gave so generously to make the conference and training programs possible. SITE VISIT PROGRAM Now in its second year, the Site Visit Program continues to do its important work. The directors of the program are reminding all parties to these visits that Site Visitors are not Title IX Investigators, as a confusion over this has caused a problem in the past. Two site visits were conducted in the fall of 2014 and two more are scheduled for spring 2015. The directors of the program are Carla Fehr, Peggy DesAutels, and Sally Haslanger, and CSW has just approved the addition of an associate director. CSW WEBSITE The CSW website, at http://www.apaonlinecsw.org/, continues to feature bimonthly profiles of women philosophers. Links to excellent resources include one to a database on teaching with articles and readings, another to the crowd-sourced directory of women philosophers, and one to the APA ombudsperson for nondiscrimination, who will receive complaints of discrimination and, where possible, serve as a resource to APA members regarding such complaints. TASK FORCE ON INCLUSIVENESS The CSW, in response to a suggestion from Kathryn Pogin, has asked the Task Force on Inclusiveness to recommend that the APA adopt a general policy against bullying. Such incidents often occur via social media sites, philosophy blogs, and so on, where victims cannot readily control what is said about them, and CSW endorsed the thought that bullying and harassment in all forms merit the APA's concern. CSW SESSIONS AT APA MEETINGS The CSW-sponsored sessions at APA meetings held in 20142015 were well attended and well received. Eastern Division: Informational Session on the Site Visit Program Sally Haslanger Valerie Hardcastle Central Division: Best Practices in Publishing Kieran Healey "Gender and Citation Patterns in Generalist Philosophy Journals, 1993–2013" Sally Scholz "Referees, Gender Neutrality, and Diversity in Publishing Feminist Philosophy" Colin Allen "Editorial Strategies Concerning the Participation of Women at the SEP" Due to faulty communication between the Pacific Division program coordinators and CSW, the Pacific Division session on how to do a climate survey was not scheduled. Steps have been taken to prevent this problem in the future. ARTICLES Philosophy and the Non-Native Speaker Condition Saray Ayala SAN FRANCISCO STATE UNIVERSITY INTRODUCTION In this note, my aim is to point out a phenomenon that has not received much attention; a phenomenon that, in my opinion, should not be overlooked in the professional practice of philosophy, especially within feminist efforts for social justice. I am referring to the way in which being a non-native speaker of English interacts with the practice of philosophy.1 There is evidence that non-native speakers are often perceived in prejudiced ways. Such prejudiced perception causes harm and, more importantly, constitutes wrongdoing. As in other cases of prejudiced perception and biased behavior, it would be pretentious and misguided to expect philosophers and the philosophy profession to be free from this vice. There are good reasons to think that this prejudiced perception is bad not only for the persons who PAGE 2 SPRING 2015 | VOLUME 14 | NUMBER 2 APA NEWSLETTER | FEMINISM AND PHILOSOPHY are perceived in such a way, but also for the profession, for it might make us miss important things that could improve philosophy in general. I claim we should be more sensitive to this phenomenon, both out of concern for justice, and for the sake of doing better philosophy. 1. EMPIRICAL RESEARCH ON BIASED PERCEPTION OF NON-NATIVE SPEAKERS Many of us might recognize the following scenario: at a philosophy conference at which English is the main or only official language (a very common thing nowadays in many countries, including those with an official language other than English), a presenter starts giving a talk, and the audience notices that the speaker's English is accented. At the beginning they might find it difficult to understand what the speaker is saying, which can be frustrating. However, unless the speaker's command of English is extremely poor, in less than a minute of exposure their perceptual system is likely to adapt to the speaker's accented pronunciation completely, eliminating the initial decrease in processing speed (Clarke and Garrett 2004) and allowing them to engage fully with the content of the talk. Nevertheless, by then, part of the audience might disregard the speaker as incompetent and stop attending to the talk. This scenario does not paint an unrealistically pessimistic picture. A large body of research in psychology shows that non-native accent can have profound detrimental effects on perception of abilities and competence. Non-native speakers are generally perceived as less credible and skilled (Brown, Giles, and Thakerar 1985; Giles 1973), as having lower status (Nesdale and Rooney 1996; Ryan and Carranza 1977), as being less intelligent (Bradac 1990; Lindemann 2003), and as being less competent (Boyd 2003).2 Similar to the gender bias that Steinpress, Anders, & Ritzke (1999) found in evaluations of the curriculum vitae of female versus male applicants,3 Huang, Frideger, and Pearce (2013) documented a bias against non-native speakers in evaluations of applicants for a managerial position. Participants examined resumes and listened to recorded interviews with fictitious candidates speaking English with native or non-native accent. The resumes were the same across conditions, and interviews followed identical scripts. The only difference was the applicant's accent. Strikingly, participants were significantly more likely to recommend hiring the native speaker than the non-native speaker. This effect held regardless of the perceived race of the candidate (half of the resumes included a photograph of an Asian male, who "spoke" either with a native accent or Japanese accent during the interview; the other half of the resumes showed a photograph of a white male who "spoke" either with a native or Russian accent during the interview). Another line of research suggests that one does not even need to embrace an explicit bias against accented English or foreigners to exhibit such biased treatment. As happens with gender and racial biases, prejudiced perception might be a result of implicit bias. Pantos and Perkins (2012) measured explicit and implicit attitudes of graduate and undergraduate students in the United States towards the U.S. accent and foreign accents using the Implicit Association Test (Greenwald et al. 1998) and self reports. Unsurprisingly, explicit and implicit attitudes to accented speech diverged: while participants reported a pro-foreign attitude, their implicit attitude favored the U.S. accent. It is important to mention that accent is not necessarily correlated with a deficient command of the language. Accent is importantly different from language competence and fluency. Speaking with a non-native accent might simply consist of keeping the phonology (including intonation) of one's native language while having a perfect command of the second language (Giles 1970). This raises a question of how justified "accent penalties" are for otherwise proficient speakers. A number of studies make it evident that a non-negligible part of the problem stems from biased perception, rather than from direct communication impediments caused by accented speech. For example, Rubin and colleagues demonstrated that even when listeners wrongly believe that the speaker is a non-native, they start reporting hearing highly accented speech, and their listening comprehension drops significantly (Rubin 2002). Listeners' attitudes to accented speech appear to play an important role. Lindemann (2002; reviewed in Lindemann 2011) measured attitudes of native-speaking U.S. college students towards Korean-accented English; the students were subsequently paired with Korean-accented speakers who had to communicate how to draw a route on a map without using gestures. Both the perception of the success of the communication and the success itself (measured by how accurately the native speaker listener drew the route on the map following the non-native speaker's instructions) were influenced by native speakers' attitudes towards their non-native partners. Participants with positive attitudes were more likely to succeed on the task than participants with negative attitudes, even though both groups received instructions from the same Korean-accented speakers. Most strikingly, even though most of the participants with negative attitudes did succeed on the task, none of them rated the communication as successful! Clearly something in common is going on in all of these cases: it is not the accent causing trouble, but the participants' beliefs about it. Going back to our initial scenario, of course people in the audience at the philosophy conference who chose to "tune out" and/or judged the non-native speaker presenter as incompetent might have been responding to the presenter's lack of communicative skills, rather than their accent. Although this is definitely a possibility, the research reviewed above suggests that instead of assuming that the audience had good reasons for their judgment, it could be illuminating to consider the possibility that they might have done so due to (possibly implicit) bias against non-native speech. The prejudiced perception of non-native speakers has many real consequences. Documented disadvantages range from discrimination in employment (in the form of lower earnings (Davila, Bohara, and Saenz 1993) and lower-status positions (Bradac and Wisegarver 1984)), to discrimination in housing (Zhao, Ondrich, and Yinger 2006). Frumkin (2007) suggests that non-native accent SPRING 2015 | VOLUME 14 | NUMBER 2 PAGE 3 APA NEWSLETTER | FEMINISM AND PHILOSOPHY could even deflate credibility granted to eyewitnesses (see Gluszek and Dovidio 2010 for a review). What could biased perception be doing to non-native philosophers? 2. ACCENT, SOCIAL IDENTITY, AND EPISTEMIC INJUSTICE Accent is one of the first cues that listeners get about a speaker's social identity. According to the Linguistic Stereotyping hypothesis (Bradac, Cargile, and Hallett 2001), accent carries information about the speaker that might activate stereotypes about non-native speakers in general (e.g., stereotypes about immigrants, see Lindemann 2003; Ryan 1983), or about a specific group the speaker is assumed to belong to (Giles, Williams, Mackie, and Rosselli 1995; Irvine and Gal 2000; Lindemann 2003; Nesdale and Rooney 1996), or both (Hosoda et al. 2007). For example, Hispanic-accented English may activate stereotypes associated with the Hispanic identity or with the very category of immigrants, or both.4 In contrast to clearly morally problematic practices of profiling speakers on the basis of race, ethnicity, sex, gender, sexual orientation, ability, or class, accent provides a surreptitious way to profile speakers that is generally seen as less morally problematic (Lippi-Green 1997). One illustration of this phenomenon can be found in jokes and comments about someone's accent: in contrast to equivalent comments about, e.g., race, many accentrelated comments are generally considered appropriate. But given the association between perceived accent and assumed social identity, accent perception is interestingly and problematically related to forms of injustice associated with social identity. Accent might be a mediator for some kinds of identity discrimination (e.g., discrimination based on immigration status, or on membership in other socially marked groups associated with certain accents or language styles). The negative perception of non-native speakers, in particular attributing to them deflated levels of credibility, sets the stage for a particular kind of injustice of special relevance to the philosophy profession, i.e., epistemic injustice. Systematically attributing a deflated level of credibility to a speaker as a consequence of a prejudiced perception of his or her identity can be understood as a case of persistent testimonial injustice, a subcategory of epistemic injustice (Fricker 2007). Independently of the bad consequences this might have, it is wrong to systematically dismiss the strength of someone's claims on the basis of their perceived social identity. The speaker (e.g., the non-native presenter in our example, or a non-native-speaking instructor teaching a class) is systematically granted insufficient credibility, and is excluded from the community of epistemic trust, that is, from the community of knowers and knowledgeproviders.5 I rely on Miranda Fricker's analysis of the harms of testimonial injustice, and specifically on her distinction between a primary and a secondary harm (ibid., chapter 2, section 2.3). Independently of the secondary harms that this exclusion might cause to the non-native speaker (e.g., reducing their chances to get a job given their perceived incompetence at an interview; increasing the chances of getting negative student evaluations due to the students' impression of instructor's lacking skills;6 and as a predictable consequence of the above, making them lose confidence in their intellectual abilities), a primary harm is the very harm of the non-native speaker being wronged in their capacity as a giver of knowledge. And this is bad enough, even if no other damage follows. Being discarded on the grounds of being unable to transmit knowledge is bad in all domains, but perhaps especially bad in philosophy, where there's no recourse to data from an experiment that could support the soundness of one's reasoning. Compared to data-based disciplines, in philosophy the credibility of a speaker relies more strongly on how convincing they sound. If you are not granted a minimal starting level of credibility (if you are excluded from the very beginning from the community of bearers of philosophical knowledge), your intervention will likely sound less convincing than it would have been had you started from a higher position on the credibility scale. If we accept the results of the aforementioned research, perceived convincingness is positively correlated with perceived nativeness of speech. When a speaker can only rely on how convincing they sound, rather than on external resources lending credibility to their intervention, a nonnative speaker has to work extra to make a contribution that would be seen as valuable. There are other particularities of the philosophy discipline that amplify the effects of prejudiced perception of nonnative speakers. In philosophy, language is not only a tool to analyze problems and a means of expression, as it is in other disciplines, neither is it just a platform to sell your ideas, as it happens in business. In philosophy, language is often the subject matter itself. It is reasonable to think that if the perceived quality of your work tracks, among other things, your perceived command of a language, a non-native-speaking philosopher working on language is under special scrutiny. The research showing that judgments about a speaker's language proficiency are affected by listeners' negative attitudes towards non-native accent and non-native speakers (Kang and Rubin 2009; Lindemann 2003) suggests this scrutiny might be an unfair extra demand due to bias against non-native accent, and not (always) the result of an unbiased evaluation of the speaker's actual command of the language. In addition to the above, an eloquent expression of an argument or criticism is a sine qua non to be considered a good philosopher. If your accent or your command of English adds noise to your intervention and promotes prejudiced perception, your standing as a philosopher is jeopardized. We might still resist the idea that a non-native accent is really what explains audience's negative judgment about the (apparently incompetent) speaker in our example. Academics don't care about other academics' personal particularities, and look solely at their research and the quality of their ideas. However, when it comes to implicit biases, academics do not fare any better than non-academics (see, e.g., Steinpreis et al. 1999; Wenneras and Wold, 1997; Trix and Psenka 2003). Even though philosophers are trained in critical thinking, it does not prevent us from exhibiting sex/ gender, race, ability, class, or nationality biases, to name PAGE 4 SPRING 2015 | VOLUME 14 | NUMBER 2 APA NEWSLETTER | FEMINISM AND PHILOSOPHY but a few, given that we also have ideologies, unconscious processes, and live in a society with strong schemas around sex/gender, race, ability, class, and nationality that guide our behavior and beliefs, not only at home but also at work. Philosophical practice is not at all free of the biggest evils of our society. Different kinds of discrimination abound in our departments, mostly unrecognized and often difficult to pin down. Thus, it seems we have good reasons to expect prejudiced perception of non-native speakers to be also present in the philosophical practice. Complicating the story, philosophers who are non-native speakers of English are often affiliated with or received their B.A. or Ph.D. education in little-known schools. The fact that many of us are completely unfamiliar with these institutions might make us skeptical about their reputation. In the era of information, one might wonder, why haven't I heard already about this school? Perhaps because there is nothing interesting to hear about, one might reason, relying on the recognition heuristic. Whether we are aware of it or not, we are likely to react to unknown institutions with caution, starting with a default approach of suspicion. As if, somehow, there is a burden on the philosopher associated with such an institution to prove that they are philosophically trustworthy, something we do not demand from a person affiliated with a well-known school or who received their education there. If, back in our example, the name tag of the presenter with an accent reads "Harvard," our patience with the speaker's accent will probably stretch, even if only a little bit, for the institution's reputation functions as a warranty of competence and the promise that our time won't be wasted. If, however, we read the name of some unknown university, our patience probably shrinks. Now we don't have additional reasons to trust the speaker's capacities and everything is left to the quality of their intervention, which, if I am right, is distorted by our perception of their accent. Now the standard is higher: it must be a superb intervention to override the effects of their accent and suspicious affiliation. In spite of knowing that competent philosophers are everywhere, not only in a few well-known institutions, we fall victims to the "big name" effect.7 It is, therefore, difficult to distinguish between the effects of association with foreign, small, or unknown institutions, and the effects of perceived non-native accent, for our doubts about the capacities of non-native philosophers might go hand in hand, at least sometimes, with our doubts about their (past or current) schools' reputation. These effects might reinforce each other, or alleviate one another. Even when the big name effect boosts a philosopher's perceived competence, the non-native effect can still play a role, perhaps weakening the perceived competence brought about by their affiliation, or even cancelling it out. So far I have only considered spoken English and perceived non-nativeness via detection of an accent. But it seems reasonable to think that when a philosopher's written English reveals their non-native condition (not only due to grammatical mistakes, but also, and more importantly, to a unique or peculiar use of words, or lack of idiomatic expressions), the quality of their philosophical work might be undervalued by referees and editors, and by job and grant committee members. Written work appears to be even more susceptible to unfair judgment of quality, compared to spoken interventions, for when a written text somehow violates the expectations of the reader (due to some peculiar use of a verb or adjective, for example, or to some unusual grammatical structure), the likely immediate reaction is to become suspicious of its content. In a conversation, we can still ask the speaker or use cues other than the spoken words themselves to alleviate the feeling of uncertainty and suspiciousness. In a written text, however, there is no chance for clarification or compensation of that initial impression. And again, philosophy is especially vulnerable to these effects, given the role that clarity plays in our standards of what good philosophy is. If wording of a philosophical text raises doubts, it is likely going to be attributed to the low content quality and the author's lack of philosophical competence. As we explain in more detail below, clarity demands by themselves should not, however, result in any disadvantage for non-native speakers. 3. DO WE HAVE A NON-NATIVE SPEAKER PROBLEM IN PHILOSOPHY? Whether or not we accept that non-native speakers are perceived in prejudiced ways in our profession, there are good reasons to look into the question. Recent data on the most cited philosophers and works in the philosophical community show an imbalance that calls for an explanation. Given that there are more people in the world with English as a second language than native speakers of English, and given the reasonable hypothesis that this is also the case for the philosophical community, it is at least surprising to find out that, according to these data, philosophers who are non-native speakers comprise a very (very!) small minority among the most cited contemporary authors. In a blog entry titled "Analytic Philosophy and the English Language," Gabriele Contessa reports counts based on Eric Schwitzgebel's (2010) list: out of the top 100 authors most cited in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, only six philosophers are non-native speakers of English. We get similar numbers when we look at the most cited philosophy works. A list posted by Kieran Healy (2013), and also analyzed by Gabriele Contessa, shows that out of the 500 most cited works published between 1993 and 2013 in four of the top general philosophy journals (Philosophical Review, Journal of Philosophy, Noûs, and Mind), only 5.8 percent are authored by non-native speakers. What is going on here? It seems possible to explain the aforementioned imbalance between native and non-native-speaking authors by appealing to writing style. It is needless to say that native language gives one more freedom and control over their written style. We are also likely to write in a more enchanting way when we write in our native language(s) (although we all know of a few remarkable cases of authors with exceptional style in a non-native language). And it makes sense to think that stylistic considerations play a big role in editors' and referees' decisions to reject or accept a paper for publication. Thus, it could be the case that nonnative speakers, with their perhaps "less stylish" writing, get rejected more often, even when content-wise their written work is equally valuable to a text with a better style written by a native speaker. This could also be the case for SPRING 2015 | VOLUME 14 | NUMBER 2 PAGE 5 APA NEWSLETTER | FEMINISM AND PHILOSOPHY general readers' perception of the work's quality and their willingness to engage with it. Thus, stylistic considerations might explain why there is an underrepresentation of nonnative speakers in the lists we mentioned above. If so, it is not clear that this should count as an unfair disadvantage (perhaps, rather, an unfortunate one). I suspect, however, that there is something else, besides stylistic considerations, that contributes to this imbalance. The writing style (a property of the author) interacts with expectations of the reader. When these expectations are violated by idiosyncratic and peculiar ways of expression (a likely product of combining eloquence in one's native language with doing all of one's professional academic writing in English), the reader can be taken aback. What could be taken as a virtue in a work of literature8 may interfere with the perceived flow of a philosophical text. Importantly, for this to happen we don't even have to assume any prejudice on the part of the reader; mere unfamiliarity with the style and low predictability of the text can do the job. In this case, it is worth wondering if this should count as a morally relevant disadvantage for nonnative speakers, and as demanding adjustment from both parties. It is important to acknowledge that in the absence of data on how many non-native speakers actually submit works to those journals, we can't make any strong claims about the origins of imbalance. But even if the relative rates of acceptance did not differ for native versus non-native speakers, the fact of underrepresentation of non-natives would still call for an explanation. It may help to draw a parallel with other cases of underrepresentation, for example, of women in science and technology careers, or, even closer to home, in the philosophy profession. Most would agree that low numbers of women applying for graduate degrees in these disciplines do not straightforwardly reflect women's preferences and/or skills. Factors like a lack of encouragement and support, implicit bias, stereotype threat, and structural constrains limiting women's choices throughout their lives play a big role and explain much of the underrepresentation we observe (see Antony 2012). Similarly, given the research on existing prejudices and discrimination against non-native speakers, we can, and should, consider the possibility that the non-native speaker condition might be a dimension of discrimination. In thinking about all this, at some point we arrive at the question of whether or not English is the appropriate, or an appropriate language to do philosophy. Or a more modest and interesting question: In which ways is the kind of philosophy we do (in English) constrained in unrecognized ways by the English language? I am not saying that it is necessarily bad if most of our philosophy were specific to the English language. I do want to say that it is bad if that were the case and we don't recognize it, for then many of us are doing bad philosophy (i.e., many of us would be doing English-constrained philosophy that aspires to be universal). It is true that when we do philosophy, our arguments often rely on our intuitions about expressions in English, i.e., whether or not an expression is widely used, whether it sounds awkward, whether it makes sense or not to say something in one way or another. It could be the case that when analyzing a concept, both as individual philosophers and as a community, we are not tackling the (universal) concept itself but how that concept behaves in English. Thus, our conclusions about the concept are importantly restricted to the English language, in a way that we might not recognize. Contessa offers an example suggesting that treatment of knowledge-how as a form of knowledge-that might be a result of such English-constrained reasoning. In languages that descend from Latin, such as Spanish or Italian, there are two different lineages of words for the concept of knowledge (coming from the Latin "sapere" and "cognoscere"), and only one of them is used to express knowledge-how. Thus, native speakers of Spanish or Italian could propose a different relationship between knowledgehow and knowledge-that which may or may not map well on the Anglophone's treatment. Other linguistic differences potentially relevant for philosophical diversity abound: the distinction between Spanish "ser" (used with permanent properties) and "estar" (used with temporary properties) collapses in English into "to be" that features prominently in a wide range of philosophical discussions of object properties (and in Portuguese there is still a third option, "ficar," that also gets translated as "to be"). Whenever we refer to naturally or unnaturally sounding statements in support of our philosophical claims, we either must assume universality of such judgments, or we may need to admit that we are talking about "naturalness for English-speaking philosophers" and restrict our claims accordingly. From the existence of these differences it does not follow that the philosophy we are doing, discussing, and publishing in English is necessarily constrained to the English language and fails to be universal (e.g., making accurate translations and testing our English-shaped intuitions against intuitions shaped by other languages should bridge the gap and solve the problem). It does follow, however, that we should be aware of the possibility. Another interesting question that would be worth exploring is how these differences among languages affect the kind of philosophy that non-native speakers do. It is true that many non-native philosophers not only discuss their work in English and publish in English but probably, depending on different contextual factors, also think in English. But likely for many it was not like that from the very beginning. If you are a non-native speaker of English, at some point in your career you stop reading translations into your native language and discussing philosophical arguments in your native language, and start reading English texts, attending philosophical events in English and writing, and discussing in English.9 I wonder if in adopting English as the language of their philosophical practice, non-native philosophers leave behind some intuitions and ways of reasoning that were perhaps shaped by their native language, and adopt new ones. And if so, are these new ways a blueprint of other native speakers' intuitions and reasoning styles, or a hybrid of their previous native language-shaped ways and the new English-shaped ones? It seems that the market of philosophical ideas can only benefit from a variety of reasoning styles. Even if we do not accept the strong claim that different languages carry with them different PAGE 6 SPRING 2015 | VOLUME 14 | NUMBER 2 APA NEWSLETTER | FEMINISM AND PHILOSOPHY conceptual schemas that carve the world at different joints, we can still hold that our intuitions about how much sense an expression in English makes or how to understand a particular English sentence might be nevertheless affected by the languages we speak, and in particular by whether or not English is our native language. For example, a native speaker of English may have different intuitions about appropriateness of providing both teleological and mechanistic explanations in response to the "why"-question compared to a native-speaker of Spanish accustomed to selecting among different explanation-requests, "Para qué" (for what) and "Por qué" (due to what). If it is the case that different languages bring with them a broad variety of intuitions that can serve as analytical tools in our philosophical work, then non-native philosophers could enrich philosophy. This cannot happen if, however, non-native philosophers, for whatever reason, have little or no influence in the philosophical practice. Finally, we can ask: When we do philosophy in English, is linguistic competence a part of philosophical competence, or, rather, a prerequisite for expressing philosophical competence? Perhaps from the standpoint of some native speakers, it is the former. That is, you cannot be a good philosopher if you cannot communicate your ideas in a clear way, and clarity in communication requires linguistic competence. This alone does not have to create a problem for non-native speakers.10 As we already mentioned, accent does not necessarily conflict with clarity, and it is not a reliable indicator of poor linguistic competence. What can be problematic is how much weight is tacitly given to accent in our judgments of a speaker's linguistic competence and fluency, and how much accent and other linguistic peculiarities proper of non-native speakers authors distort, via explicit or implicit negative attitudes towards accented English, listeners' comprehension (or their impression of comprehension, as Lindemann's (2002) results suggest). If readers' and listeners' expectations are tailored to a standard English language and violations of those expectations lead to negative judgments of a speaker's clarity and linguistic competence (even though those violations wouldn't conflict with clarity in case of an ideal unbiased audience on the receiving end), then we must accept that the measure of what a good philosopher is has a strong bias against many people, not only with a foreign accent but also with other non-foreign accents and styles (e.g., regional accents). Another question to raise about this belief (i.e., that linguistic competence is part of philosophical competence) has to do with its origin. Is it postulated a priori? Or is it a conclusion based on generalization of one's interactions with nonnative speakers who didn't cause a good impression? Could this impression be a result of prejudiced perception? If so, perhaps we need to reconsider our opinion about the role of linguistic competence. 4. CONCLUSION AND PRELIMINARY PROPOSAL FOR ACTION If, as suggested by the results in Huang et al. (2013), in the business sphere non-native entrepreneurs hit a glass ceiling because their ideas receive less financial support and they are less likely to be promoted to executive levels than native competitors, could non-native philosophers be facing similar barriers in their profession? There are good reasons (and some supporting research) to think that philosophers who are non-native speakers of English might be subject to some kind of testimonial injustice, both in their spoken and written contributions. There is also data suggesting that they are underrepresented in the main publications. If a philosopher's philosophical competence and actual philosophical influence (measured by citation rates but also in a more general sense, by engagement of others with their work) is undermined by their perceived status as a non-native speaker, we can say that together with other kinds of discrimination (like the ones related to sex/gender and race/ethnicity) there is a non-native speaker problem corrupting much of our philosophical practice (at least in those philosophical communities in which English is nowadays the main language to do philosophy). The non-native speaker problem results in a community of practitioners that excludes several groups of people, including non-native speakers. This vice is not only bad for those who are excluded, but also for the philosophical enterprise itself, for we are excluding many voices from the pool of contributions that count as worth engaging and discussing, and this impoverishes the range and variety of considered ideas. Discrimination based on accent is difficult to resist and fight, in part due to a lack of public awareness, and in no less part due to a lack of institutional and legal tools to fight it. In the United States, for example, even though the law prohibits discrimination based on national origin,11 it does not say anything about accent, which often leaves victims of this kind of discrimination helpless in proving their case (Matsuda 1991; Nguyen 1993; Lippi-Green 1994). Recognizing the "accent dimension" as a dimension of discrimination at the institutional level (different from, although intersecting with dimensions of ethnicity, race, sex, gender, ability, class, sexual orientation, and age) will help improve our personal and professional good practices. Acknowledging the "non-native condition" problem should motivate us philosophers to seek ways to improve the situation. I emphasize improvement as opposed to either seeking who or what to blame, or establishing a discrimination hierarchy. There is no benefit for anyone if we get stuck in victimizing or playing the "Oppression Olympics." Although writing and presenting your work in a non-native language is often expensive in several senses (e.g., it takes longer to write, you need to ask natives for proof-reading, etc.), that would not by itself mean that the profession has a problem. The fact that professional philosophy excludes different groups of people constitutes the problem, and we should do something about it. I propose, as part of the list of good practices for our profession, that we welcome exposure to foreign-accented speech (which will increase our capacity to quickly adapt to non-native philosophers speaking at conferences and in classrooms; Sidaras, Alexander, and Nygaard 2009), and maintain acute awareness of potential perception biases SPRING 2015 | VOLUME 14 | NUMBER 2 PAGE 7 APA NEWSLETTER | FEMINISM AND PHILOSOPHY when we judge quality of work that reveals non-native use of language. The very first step towards developing good practices is to raise awareness about the "non-native condition" in philosophy. This piece is my own attempt to do just that,12 with the goal of improving not only diversity in the profession but also the quality of the philosophy we do. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am grateful to Nadya Vasilyeva for discussions and insightful comments on earlier drafts of this work. I am also grateful to an anonymous referee for their helpful suggestions. NOTES 1. Here I focus on the philosophical community that nowadays mostly works in English, as opposed to those that mostly work in other languages such as German, French, Chinese or others. 2. These effects have been documented in a number of countries. For example, in the United States Hispanic-accented English speakers are seen as less competent (Ryan and Carranza, "Ingroup and Outgroup Reactions Toward Mexican American Language Varieties," in Language, Ethnicity, and Intergroup Relations, ed. H. Giles, 59–72 [London: Academic Press 1977]; Ryan, Carranza, and Moffie, "Reactions Toward Varying Degrees of Accentedness in the Speech of Spanish-English Bilinguals," Language and Speech 20 [1977]: 267–73; Giles, Williams, Mackie, and Rosselli, "Reactions to Angloand HispanicAmerican-Accented Speakers: Affect, Identity, Persuasion, and the English-Only Controversy," Language and Communication 15 [1995]: 107–20) and less suitable for higher status occupations (de la Zerda and Hopper, "Employment Interviewers' Reactions to Mexican American Speech," Communication Monographs 46 [1979]: 126–34); similar negative perceptions apply to English speakers with German (Ryan and Bulik, "Evaluations of Middle Class and Lower Class Speakers of Standard American and German-Accented English," Journal of Language and Social Psychology 1 [1982]: 51–61), Malaysian (Gill, "Accent and Stereotypes: Their Effect on Perceptions of Teachers and Lecture Comprehension," Journal of Applied Communication Research 22 [1994]: 348–61), Chinese (Cargile, "Attitudes toward Chinese-accented Speech: An Investigation in Two Contexts," Journal of Language and Social Psychology 16 [1997]: 434–43), or Korean accent (Lindemann, "Koreans, Chinese, or Indians? Attitudes and Ideologies about Nonnative English Speakers in the United States," Journal of Sociolinguistics 7 [2003]: 348– 64). Other countries where negative perceptions of non-native speakers were documented include the United Kingdom (Giles, "Evaluative Reactions to Accents," Educational Review 22 [1970]: 211–27), Canada (Munro, "A Primer on Accent Discrimination in the Canada Context," TESL Canada Journal 20 [2003]: 38–51), and Australia (Nesdale and Rooney, "Evaluations and Stereotyping of Accented Speakers by Pre-Adolescent Children," Journal of Language and Social Psychology 15 [1996]: 133–54). 3. In Steinpreis, Anders, and Ritzke ("The Impact of Gender on the Review of the Curricula Vitae of Job Applicants," Sex Roles 41 [1999]: 509–28), participants (academic psychologists) were asked to evaluate a curriculum vitae of a fictitious job applicant and decide whether they would hire the candidate. The CVs were identical with the exception of the applicant's name: it was either a name typically given to men or to women. This manipulation of participants' beliefs about the gender of the applicant revealed a clear gender bias: the evaluations of applicants' teaching, research, and service record were higher for men than women with identical records. Men were also more likely to get hired than women (when the CV was characteristic of an average applicant in the field). 4. And according to the Reverse Linguistic Stereotyping hypothesis (Kang and Rubin, "Reverse Linguistic Stereotyping: Measuring the Effect of Listener Expectations on Speech Evaluation," Journal of Language and Social Psychology 28, no. 4 [2009]: 441–56), the identification of a speaker as a member of a group can distort listeners' perception of speaker's speech style and language proficiency. For example, categorizing a speaker as an immigrant or foreigner, or as a member of a more specific group (e.g., of Hispanic origin), might in turn distort perception of their speech. The studies reviewed in section one provide support for these claims. 5. Miranda Fricker already pointed out the possibility of nonnative speakers being subjected to testimonial injustice. Fricker, Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing (Oxford University Press, 2007), 17. 6. Rubin provided relevant evidence of biased perception in the classroom affecting instructor evaluations: students' assessment of teaching skills of a non-native speaker was predicted by their beliefs about accentedness (rather than the actual level of accent). Rubin, "Nonlanguage Factors Affecting Undergraduates' Judgments of Non-Native English-Speaking Teaching Assistants," Research in Higher Education 33, no. 4 (1992): 511–31. 7. The reputation of these well-known schools is in general justified, but it is also often boosted for no good reason, by the mere functioning of the recognition heuristic we apply every time we think of institutions. The more we ignore and refuse to use and remember the names of foreign or small universities, the more weight we give to the few big-name schools, and the less likely other universities are to join the group of recognizable names. 8. This violation of readers' and listeners' expectations due to a peculiar usage of language is not necessarily something bad. Quite the opposite, it can on occasion be a source of literary pleasure, the pleasure of discovering richness of expression in new combinations of words. In the context of professional philosophy, however, these potentially enriching peculiar usages can be interpreted as interfering with content. 9. 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