Program & Abstracts

Sara Ayhan (Ruhr University Bochum): Queer feminist logic & contradictory logics: A symbiotic relationship

Work in the field of feminist logic is still rather scarce and the field itself remains a contested area of study, but still, it is developing. One approach concentrates on analyzing logical systems with respect to structural features that may perpetuate sexism and oppression or, on the other hand, features that may be helpful for resisting and opposing these social phenomena. Upon this assumption, I want to investigate possible applications of queer feminist views on (philosophy of) logic with respect to a very specific group, namely contradictory logics, i.e., logical systems containing contradictions in their set of theorems. I want to show that, on the one hand, the formal set-up of contradictory logics makes them well-suited from the perspectives of feminist logic and, on the other hand, that queer feminist theories provide a relevant, and so far undeveloped, conceptual motivation for contradictory logics. Thus, applying contradictory logics to reasoning about queer feminist issues may prove fruitful both as a ‘real-life’ motivation for these rather marginalized logical systems and as a formal basis for a philosophical field that is still characterized by a distrust of formalism. 

Leda Berio (Ruhr University Bochum): Grabbing women by the waist: on the relationship between social norms, affordances, and scripts

The specific ways in which we interact with people (and objects) are normatively loaded, and their function and significance can only be fully described in a normative context. It is within a specific system of values and norms (i.e., a patriarchal system) that a specific action (e.g., moving somebody by the waist) becomes permissible when it involves a specific kind of body (e.g., a female-presenting body) but not others. But how exactly should we think of the relation between social norms and the perception of action possibilities? 

It has recently been proposed that social structures and norms can literally affect our perception (Munton, 2019), and in particular our perception of affordances, i.e. possibilities for action (McClelland & Sliwa, 2022). However, the question of how social norms affect the perception of affordances is still open. In particular, there is a debate as to whether or not social affordance perception requires representational content. 

To resolve this tension, we propose to integrate the notion of scripts into an account of (social) affordance perception. In our account, scripts guide the selection of affordances in an implicit and non-reflective way. Scriptscan accommodate the intuition that habit-based preferences play an important role in social affordance perception and that we need not assume explicit knowledge of social norms in order to account for different kinds of normatively guided social interaction. Additionally, the introduction of scripts can accommodate the thought that we need to allow  for some kind of representational content in order to explain the effects of linguistic input with regard to affordance selection and normatively guided social interaction. 

Anna Brożek (University of Warsaw): Research into the Phenomenon of Women in the Lvov-Warsaw School: Current Developments

The academic activity of women in the Lvov-Warsaw School (LWS), a Central-European branch of early analytic philosophy, is a phenomenon on a global scale. Even if we narrow it down to two generations and close it with the outbreak of World War II, we must include 37 women in the LWS. If we extend it to the post-war period, this number will increase to 66 just in the first two generations of the School. These women were not just passive participants in academic life; they often were pioneers in their disciplines and made essential contributions to the areas of their research. Nearly 30 women from the LWS continued their academic careers in philosophy, logic, psychology, sociology, and other disciplines. Others were involved in other professions: journalism, social work, education, etc. Many obtained habilitations and university chairs, making them some of the first 'female' chairs at Polish universities. Among the most outstanding female representatives of the LWS there are Maria Ossowska, Izydora Dąmbska, Janina Hosiasson-Lindenbaum, Janina Kotarbińska, Maria Kokoszyńska-Lutman, and Helena Rasiowa. However, in addition to these most well-known figures, there is a large group of female scholars, making up one-third of all representatives of the LWS. My paper aims to present the current developments in research into the phenomenon of women in the Lvov-Warsaw School: what has been done and what still has been done to describe and explain this phenomenon.

Anne-Marie Søndergaard Christensen (University of Southern Denmark): Wittgenstein, Language and Gender: Entrenchment, Resistance, Engagement 

Central to feminist thinking is the discussion of difficulties of expression and working with language to allow for the articulation of experiences and perspectives of women, a discussion re-vitalised in recent philosophical work on transgender identities. Drawing on examples, I will unfold how Wittgenstein's later view of language as a multiplicity of language-games embedded in practices and connected by 'a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing' (PI §66) is a productive starting point for thinking about what is at play in such developments of language. My primary aim is to use resources from Wittgenstein's philosophy to discuss various stances that may be in play in the encounter with unfamiliar or new ways of talking about us as gendered – blindness, entrenchment, refusal, resistance, consideration, acceptance, engagement – and the attitudes, emotional responses and forms of imagination called for in relation to that which is unfamiliar, new or hard to express. 

Silke Körber (University of Vienna): L.S. Stebbing: The Quest for Clarity and Happiness

The case of the British philosopher L. Susan Stebbing (1885–1943) is interesting as she is a ‘figure of transition’ - rooted in more traditional concepts of philosophy and science, but also positioned against a one-sided, top-down transfer of knowledge and an authoritarian understanding of education characterised by social, cultural or religious boundaries. She was not only a renowned and well-connected philosopher, but also a public intellectual and advocate of ‘scientific humanism’. Nevertheless, until a few years ago, her oeuvre was rather neglected and essentially regarded as secondary to that of G. E. Moore. At the same time, she is not recognised as one of the pioneers of feminist philosophy either, even though her philosophical and political stance and work, as well as her career in a maledominated field, were an expression and act of feminist thought in themselves, as Frederique Janssen-Laurent has pointed out.

This paper attempts to expand on this view using sources from Stebbing's collaboration with Vienna Circle member Otto Neurath (1882–1945) from the 1930s onwards, as well as her own publications. Both agreed that the role of philosophy, science and scientific expertise needed to be reconsidered and that the formation of modern democracies and an egalitarian world society needed to be actively supported. The aim was to improve the lives of as many people as possible, contribute to their happiness and promote their cognitive and emotional development as social beings. In addition, it was important to train clear and critical thinking and the judgement of facts and data in order to develop an independent, questioning attitude towards public institutions, politics and the media.

The modernity and relevance of Stebbing’s ideas for current discourses lies in the focus on the everyday use and communication of knowledge, in the questioning of the unlimited authority of science, individual experts and the role of philosophy - in favour of a more processual approach and support of social change. Her understanding of analysis, modern science and emancipatory (democratic) practice can, I argue, also serve as a basis for a reassessment of her relationship and role within feminist analytic philosophy (of science).

Marius Thienenkamp (Technical University Dortmund): Engineering the Gender Octonary

This presentation will relay the current ideas for my dissertation project of the same name. My goal in this project is to present and defend a possible amelioration of our dominant binary category system of gender that 1) takes into consideration the interests of cis- and trans-identified persons; male-, female- and non-binary-identified persons alike and 2) is suited for medium-term implementation. I understand myself to be working within the field of Conceptual Engineering, which seeks to improve our representational devices. After briefly introducing both existing discourses surrounding non-binary genders and the field of Conceptual Engineering, my plan will be as follows: Firstly, I will advocate for a pluralist understanding of the relationship between gender and gender identity that centers internalist considerations. Secondly, I will present my view of what it should mean to have a gender identity, which I call the Counterfactual Desire View (CDV) of gender identity. According to this view, a gender identity is the intrinsically felt and desired gender categorization in relation to a given class system of gender one would have under conditions under which one holds a sufficiently small amount of pernicious social beliefs. Thirdly, I will then, on this basis, argue for a re-engineering of our gender category system that includes the additional gender concepts NON-BINARY, GENDER-NEUTRAL, GENDERFLUID, AGENDER, DEMIMAN and DEMIWOMAN as well as revised versions of MAN and WOMAN. These concepts are such that, e.g., to be non-binary is to have a non-binary gender identity (under CDV) and to be a man is to have a male gender identity (under CDV) etc., though I will leave space for secondary “sibling concepts” such as MAN-AS-CLASS that track social class membership. I call this the Ameliorative Octonary View (AOV) of gender. I will briefly defend both CDV and AOV against some possible objections.

Jasmin Trächtler (Technical University Dortmund): The Usefulness of Philosophy – Wittgenstein's Descriptive Method for a Feminist Metaphysics

In the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein famously writes that "philosophy may in no way interfere with the actual use of language" but can "only describe it" (PI, 24) in order to 'therapeutically' treat and resolve philosophical problems (cf. PI, 133), which is why Wittgenstein's ordinary language philosophy has sometimes been called 'quietist', even 'conservative'. Such a metaphilosophical view is diametrically opposed to the objectives of ameliorative projects in feminist metaphysics and philosophy of language: Rather than describing the use of our concepts in everyday language, such ameliorative projects are concerned with the normative question of what socio-ontological concepts such as 'woman', 'man', 'race' or 'sexuality' ought to mean  so that they can be used as effective tools for the goals of social justice.

Against the background of this supposed opposition, in this talk, I will address the question of the task and method of philosophy. To this end, I will first present Wittgenstein's descriptive philosophical method and then critically discuss two ameliorative approaches of feminist metaphysics with regard to their normative claims towards ordinary language. I will conclude with the conciliatory suggestion that Wittgenstein's descriptive method – properly understood – is a valuable tool for a feminist metaphysics, insofar as it serves above all to criticize the injustices and prejudices in our concepts and conceptual classifications – and this, according to Wittgenstein, is precisely the usefulness of philosophy. 

Sara Uckelman (Durham University): Logic Teaching as Feminist Practice

Feminist philosophers such as Andrea Nye have argued that logic is a fundamentally anti-feminist activity, participation in which only reinforces the patriarchy.  Arguments for such claims are often based on the philosophers' own personal experience of being taught logic, which underscores how important it is that we pay attention to how logic is being taught.  In this talk, I will argue that -- contrary to what Nye and other feminists have argued -- logic itself is not inherently anti-feminist, and in fact by adopting trauma-informed pedagogical techniques, we can turn logic classes into inclusive spaces which help equip people for taking down the patriarchy. 

Kim Ann Woodley (Ruhr University Bochum): Hidden Normativity in Emotion Detection Technology

Emotion detection technology (EDT) is supposed to descriptively detect emotions. EDT is designed and implemented with various methods and in various fields in societies all over the world (Misselhorn, 2021; Hernandez et al., 2021). Historically, EDT is strongly tied to the concept of human basic emotions and to the method of human facial analysis as substitution of measurement methods for emotion detection (Picard, 1997; Weigel, 2020; Weber-Guskar, 2023). Yet since emotion expression has been stigmatised and discredited throughout all of human history, especially but not solely in western civilisation, it has been exposed to normative standards for centuries. To fully understand the effects of this exposure and how these effects may manifest in EDT in unwanted ways, we must therefore reconstruct the historical development of EDT from a perspective that can dismantle normative influences. Drawing from the critique of the value-free ideal in science (e.g., Intemann, 2020), in my talk I show that EDT is not free of non-epistemic values but entangled multidimensionally in norm-giving patriarchal power structures because the technology builds on a concatenation of other scientific results that were already affected.

References

Hernandez, Javier, Lovejoy, Josh, McDuff, Daniel, Suh, Jina, O’Brien, Tim, Sethumadhavan, Arathi, Greene, Gretchen, Picard, Rosalind and Czerwinski, Mary (2021). Guidelines for Assessing and Minimizing Risks of Emotion Recognition Applications. In: 2021 9th International Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction (ACII). Presented at the 2021 9th International Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction (ACII), Nara, Japan: IEEE, p. 1–8, doi: https://doi.org/10.1109/ACII52823.2021.9597452.

Intemann, Kristen (2020). Feminist Perspectives on Values in Science. In: Crasnow, Sharon and Intemann, Kristen (eds.) The Routledge Handbook of Feminist Philosophy of Science. Routledge, p. 201–215. https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/9780429018213/chapters/10.4324/9780429507731-19.

Misselhorn, Catrin (2021). Künstliche Intelligenz und Empathie: vom Leben mit Emotionserkennung, Sexrobotern & Co. Ditzingen: Reclam.

Picard, Rosalind W. (1997). Affective computing. Cambridge (Mass.): MIT Press.

Weber-Guskar, Eva (2023). Berechenbare Gefühle? Grundlegendes zu einer Ethik der digitalen Emotionserfassung. In: Schweiger, Gottfried and Zichy, Michael (eds.) Zwischenmenschliche Beziehungen im Zeitalter des Digitalen. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer Berlin Heidelberg, p. 95–113. https://link.springer.com/10.1007/978-3-662-66931-0_8.

Weigel, Sigrid (2020). Der konventionelle Code als buckliger Zwerg im Dienste der Emotion Recognition. Internationales Jahrbuch für Medienphilosophie, 6(1), p. 47–80, doi:10.1515/jbmp-2020-0003.