Imperfect Cognitions

This post is by  Martina Rosola . Martina is a researcher in Philosophy of Language. Her main interest is the role of language in systems of injustice and how it can serve to either perpetuate or dismantle them. Within this perspective, she specialized in gender-fair language. Martina Rosola Evaluating gender-fair strategies in Italian Do you want to avoid the masculine generic and struggle to choose among the many gender-fair alternatives? This post is for you. Gender-fair language strategies abound and greatly differ from one another: some are hard for the reader, others for the writer; some aim to better represent women, others focus on non-binary people. But which one is “the best”? Being a philosopher, I cannot but reply “it depends”. If you have a word limit, visibility strategies, which repeat the masculine words in the feminine too (e.g., “lui o lei”, he or she), are counter-suggested. Innovative neutrality strategies substitute masculine words with neologisms (e.g., “lai”,...

This post is by Ruby Hake (University of Birmingham), one of the authors of 'Autism and Gender', a chapter in a volume forthcoming for Routledge,  Contemporary Philosophy of Autism . The chapter offers an in-depth discussion of essentialism and argues that critical phenomenology is well placed to prevent this issue going forward. Ruby Hake Essentialism has been a problem in autism and gender diversity research from the beginning. For example, the biological-essentialist theory of the extreme male theory of autism ( Baron-Cohen 2002 ; 2012 ) has been used to explain the prevalence of autistic trans men ( Murphy et al. 2020 ; Nobili et al. 2018 ; Kung 2020 ). The theory cannot explain the prevalence of autistic trans women, however, and ignores the experiences of non-binary autistic people.  It has also been common in medical literature to argue that “symptoms” of autism, such as ‘black and white thinking’, ‘obsessions’, ‘developmental rigidity’ etc. can cause gender dyspho...

Today's post is by Annalisa Coliva on her new paper Hysteria, Hermeneutical Injustice and Conceptual Engineering  ( Social Epistemology , 2024). Annalisa Coliva In this paper, I dive into what Miranda Fricker calls "hermeneutical injustice" in her work  Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing  (2007), exploring how it plays out in the medical field. Using the long and problematic history of hysteria as a case study, I argue that this concept was misused as a diagnostic tool for centuries, until it was dropped in 1980 with the DSM-III. The reason for this lies in deep-rooted power structures shaped by prejudice against women. I propose that hysteria perfectly fits Fricker's idea of hermeneutical injustice, but it also reveals the need to broaden the concept itself. This approach is crucial for two key reasons. First, rather than treating the medical field as a passive arena for testing philosophical ideas, I show how medical history can actively refine ou...

In this post, Kathleen interviews Matthew Cull (University of Edinburgh), Jules Holroyd (University of Sheffield), and Fiona Woollard (University of Southampton) on their funded exchange project ' Inclusive Language in Perinatal and Postnatal Care '.  Poster from https://engagedphilosophy.org/inclusive/ Hello! Can you tell us a little bit about your recent project? The project is a knowledge exchange project, about how to make language gender inclusive in perinatal and postnatal care. We’ve recently written a paper, which we’re nearly ready to submit for publication, about how standard approaches to inclusive language tend to be ‘monistic’: they aim to use one strategy, either making language gender-neutral (e.g. replacing ‘pregnant women’ with ‘pregnant people’) or gender additive (e.g. writing ‘pregnant women, trans men and nonbinary people’). Working through a number of case studies, we find that no single strategy can meet the moral and communicative goals in all contexts....

Fiona Woollard (University of Southampton) is a moral philosopher who has worked in areas that have been traditionally neglected by analytic philosophy, such as pregnancy and motherhood. See for instance, her recent piece for The Conversation .  In this interview, she shows us that philosophy can make a difference to how we think about maternal duties and choices in pregnancy and early motherhood. Fiona Woollard Lisa Bortolotti: To start with I'd like to ask you how you got interested in pregnancy and motherhood. Fiona Woollard : Thank you, Lisa. It feels to me that I was part of a fortunate group of women philosophers who felt able to be philosophers while still being women, without having to downplay the interests that we have as women. In the past it had been seen as possible to succeed as a woman in philosophy. But it was harder to get recognized as a philosopher if you were dealing with things that were thought to as women's issues.  And it felt as if there wa...

Today's post is by Nuria Gardia, a Mental Health Master’s student at University of Birmingham with a newly discovered passion for Philosophy. Her interests lay in the intersection between philosophy and psychology to better understand how the mind “overcomes” trauma and the relationships between mind-body and self-world. Specifically, how trauma affects human experience and thus, human reality.  This is part of a series of posts by students of the Philosophy and Ethics of Mental Health and Wellbeing module at the Institute for Mental Health. They share some of their views on key topics discussed in the module. Nuria Gardia Autistic women navigate a world made by-and-for neurotypicals within a society that ignores their strengths ( Russell et al. 2019 ), and wrongfully denies their capacity as knowers ( Catala et al. 2021 ), by underdiagnosing them and excluding them from research ( D'Mello et al. 2022 ). Moreover, without a diagnosis, autistic women are wrongly deprived vital ...

Today's post is by Veronica Valle, philosopher of perception and of the cognitive sciences, who recently completed a doctoral project at the University of Macau. Here she discusses some of her work on the Moral Roots of Quarantine project . Veronica Valle The war metaphor has been largely dominating the public discourse around the COVID-19 pandemics worldwide, with many voices having highlighted the potential and factual negative effects of such a rhetoric. Our paper focuses on one aspect that has been overlooked: the interplay between deeply rooted gender stereotypes and the use of the war metaphor. We carried out an investigation of the embedded use of gender-specific images in the war narrative that characterized the anti-pandemic public discourse in Italy during the first wave. By employing textual semiotics and theories in pragmatics, we analyze a relevant selection of texts (e.g., social advertising ads, newspaper articles, statements made by politicians, etc.). The results o...

In this post, part of a series on the new journal Memory, Mind & Media , Katie Laker interviews Robyn Fivush, whose article, co-authored with Ariel Grysman, is entitled: ' Narrative and gender as mutually constituted meaning-making systems ’ and is available open access. Robyn Fivush KL: Firstly, thank you for being part of the Memory, Mind & Media inaugural collection. Why was MMM a good fit for your paper? RF: The two core constructs that we explore in our paper, narrative and gender, are inherently interdisciplinary and culturally mediated. No single discipline can fully define or even describe either of these constructs; they require a broad synthesis across multiple ways of knowing. And both are fully culturally mediated; both narrative and gender derive from socially and culturally saturated lenses that find expression in multiple media formats, from books to memes.  MMM is committed to fostering conversations at the intersection of cognitive, social and cultural app...

In this post, Antonella Mazziotta, MSc student at the  Institute for Mental Health  at the University of Birmingham, discusses Gender Dysphoria. Gender Dysphoria is a topic not so well understood by scientists and society with this being reflected in the type of treatments and stigma around LGBTQ+ communities. Antonella's research interests include exploring Gender Dysphoria in childhood as well as language comprehension and production in Mental Health conditions. Antonella Mazziotta I had the opportunity to observe how dysphoria affects transgender people, especially children, and how society plays a vital role in the psychological outcomes of treatment for young people. This led to my interest in researching the pathological features of Gender Dysphoria. Do we believe that transgender children are aware of their inner identity or simply confused and therefore have a mental disorder? The DSM-IV called this condition ‘Gender Identity Disorder’ which was changed to ‘Gender Dysp...

This post is by Natalia Garcez, Brazilian graphic designer currently based in Vienna. If you want to know more about her work, check out her research  and the project she discusses in the post. Contemporary European kindergartens were born in the first half of the 19th century. Pedagogues such as Fröbel and Montessori helped to create a model of education which motivates children to develop all their abilities, giving equal opportunities to every kid to learn what fits better their personal talents and personality. Though the traditional European methodologies are the closest from a model of education which promotes equity among boys and girls, many early childhood educational spaces still do not guarantee a process of raising children free of stereotypes and gendered roles. One example was observed in a kindergarten located in the east of Germany. The place is deeply inspired in Montessorian methodologies, offering children the most varied spaces which all children have...

This post is by Boudewijn de Bruin (pictured above), Professor of Financial Ethics in the faculties of Economics and Business, and Philosophy, at the University of Groningen. In this post he writes about gender disparity and epistemic self-trust.  Women pay about half a percentage point higher interest rates on comparable mortgages than men. Why is that? Is it discrimination? And are the countless similar disparities among many other different social groups discrimination? Research is still going on, but the received opinion among economists writing on what they call gender disparity seems to be that, no, there is no discrimination. (And they are the ones informing policymakers.) Their argument is that the disparity can be attributed to differences in tastes or preferences among men and women have about ‘search behaviour’ rather than on the mortgage lender actively discriminating against women. Men, according to this explanation, have a preference for searching the w...