The McGinn Case, Gender, And Philosophy
By Jennifer Schuessler has a terrific article on the Colin McGinn case, putting it into the context of gender discrimination in the field more broadly. First, more detail on what McGinn did:
But Benjamin Yelle, the student’s boyfriend and a fifth-year graduate student in philosophy at Miami, said she had been subject to months of unwanted innuendo and propositions from Mr. McGinn, documented in numerous e-mails and text messages of an explicit and escalating sexual nature she had shown him. In one from May 2012, Mr. Yelle said, Mr. McGinn suggested he and the student have sex three times over the summer “when no one is around.”
Both Mr. McGinn and the student declined to provide any e-mails or other documents related to the case. But Amie Thomasson, a professor of philosophy at Miami, said the student, shortly after filing her complaint in September 2012, had shown her a stack of e-mails from Mr. McGinn. They included the message mentioning sex over the summer, along with a number of other sexually explicit messages, Ms. Thomasson said.
“This was not an academic discussion of human sexuality,” Ms. Thomasson said. “It was not just jokes. It was personal.”
McGinn offers a defense that involves putting some words next to some other words hoping that in the resulting fog you won’t notice that it’s a non-denial denial:
Mr. McGinn said that “the ‘3 times’ e-mail,” as he referred to it, was not an actual proposal. “There was no propositioning,” he said in the interview. Properly understanding another e-mail to the student that included the crude term for masturbation, he added later via e-mail, depended on a distinction between “logical implication and conversational implicature.”
“Remember that I am a philosopher trying to teach a budding philosopher important logical distinctions,” he said.
Even Steven Pinker, who issued an embarrassing defense of McGinn earlier this year, appears to be largely off the bandwagon:
“There’s no doubt he behaved badly,” said the Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, who in June wrote a letter in support of Mr. McGinn but said he has since revised his opinion of the case. “The outcome was too severe, but there definitely should have been consequences.
So all that remains of Pinker’s defense is that “the outcome was too severe.” But as I said the first time I encountered this line of defense, since the tenured McGinn chose to resign rather than go through the process, the point is nonsensical. The university didn’t impose any punishment and is not accused of violating Pinker’s contractual rights, so I don’t know what it means to say that the outcome was “too severe.” Pinker does improve on Elizabeth Sheldon’s by carefully declining to use the word “punishment,” but the fact that the “outcome” was McGinn’s choice makes it unclear how it could be “too severe.”
Schuessler also links to this blog, which is indeed a very useful resource.
…DeLong is excellent on Pinker:
Colin McGinn, University of Miami philosopher, resigns his tenured post precisely to keep the details of his sexual harassment non-public–he thinks keeping it private and resigning is better than the likely outcome from going through the University of Miami’s formal process.
The student he harassed acquiesces because she fears the consequences of a public process for her philosophy career.
Now comes Steven Pinker to say: “There’s no doubt he behaved badly. The outcome was too severe, but there definitely should have been consequences.”
How the hell does he know? The maximum sanction the University of Miami could impose would be his resignation. The fact that he was eager to resign rather than have a public process when the worst outcome for him from the process would have been dismissal tells us that he believes that we will think better of him if we don’t know what he really did than if we do: in short, that what he did was worse than we imagine.
This is elementary.
And Steven Pinker now says–even though Colin McGinn thinks that what he did was worse than Steven Pinker imagines–that the “outcome was too severe”?
If only there were an academic discipline where people could learn how to think through such questions of logic and inference! A branch of cognitive science, perhaps?