Quill R Kukla

The concept of gender dysphoria, typically understood as a pathological experienced mismatch between one’s “inner gender identity” and one’s body, has been central to defining and “diagnosing” transness. Gender euphoria, which I define as joy, excitement, or pleasure in one’s gendered embodiment (including the social reception and emplacement of one’s gendered body), is an important notion in trans communities, but it has received little attention from academics, health care systems, or mainstream culture. Beginning from the reality and central importance of euphoria allows us to better understand everyone’s gendered experience and embodiment, and to avoid the substantial conceptual and ethical harms inflicted by a mental health model of trans identity that centers dysphoria. Organizing our understanding of trans identity, desires, and experiences around trans joy is conceptually clarifying; helps ground better medical and legal policy; and is more accurate than when we organize it around trans tragedy and pathology, even while we retain our realism about the fact that trans tragedy and dysphoric suffering are real and important.

We explore the various ways in which terms and utterances can be weaponized, particularly in the service of establishing and defending an authoritarian regime. While there exists an extensive philosophical literature on how speech can harm, our more specific interest in this essay is on the processes of weaponizing speech. That is, we explore how language that does not begin as a weapon can be engineered into a variety of weapons that inflict different kinds of harm. The Trump administration, we argue, has been particularly effective at building a well-stocked and diversified discursive arsenal that enforces and defends authoritrianism. It has engaged in a multifaceted discursive engineering project to retool and retrofit language in order to entrench its own power, amplify its goals, delegitimize opponents, and render dissent from its ideas or resistance against its authority risky and difficult.

This chapter argues that inclusion in a city or neighborhood requires more than the right to physically reside in it; it requires what Henri LeFebvre, Don Mitchell, and others have called the “right to the city.” The right to the city is not just a formal right to be inside a city without being thrown out; it should be conceived, according to this chapter, as a right to _inhabit_ the city. This requires that we have voice and authority within a city; that we be able to participate in tinkering with it and remaking it; and that we belong in it rather than just perching in it. The chapter explores the complex relationships between public spaces, inclusive spaces, and the right to the city. It examines what sorts of spaces city dwellers need in order to have a flourishing urban life and exercise their spatial agency. It explores some of the barriers that different kinds of bodies face to being included in urban spaces and speculates about what it would take to build a more just and inclusive city.

Collaborative authorship is the overwhelming norm in science. Yet philosophical issues that arise in this context have received little direct attention. The chapter examines several difficulties inherent in establishing authorship in the context of collaborative research. Using case studies, the chapter considers collaborative research that relies on multiple authors, collaborative research with a single author and many collaborators, and radically collaborative research that is distributed widely over disciplinary expertise, time, and space. The chapter argues that the first two types of collaborative research leave a standard understanding of authorship untouched, while the third yields a novel class of significant challenges for our common understanding of authorship.

This chapter explores the landscape of Johannesburg, taken as a city that shapes the agency of its inhabitants, and it show hows, conversely, the residents of Johannesburg have remade spaces in their city to suit their needs. Johannesburg is a _repurposed city_: it was built to support a series of spatial and political orders that are now defunct, and its material structure must now be reused by different residents inhabiting a different order. The materiality of the city was shaped by apartheid, which sharply controlled how its residents used and occupied space. The residents of postapartheid Johannesburg find ways of creatively tinkering with the city, whose landscape still reflects that past era. This chapter looks at how apartheid continues to mark the landscape of the city, and how current residents are creatively repurposing this landscape. It begins with a spatial history of Johannesburg and an analysis of its current spatial logic. It then provides detailed explorations and readings of several repurposed spaces within the city, comparing their present and past uses and meanings, and situating them within the history and spatial logic of each city.

This chapter explores the landscape of Berlin, taken as a city that shapes the agency of its inhabitants, and shows how, conversely, the residents of Berlin have remade spaces in their city to suit their needs. Berlin is a _repurposed city_: it was built to support a series of spatial and political orders that are now defunct, and its material structure must now be reused by different residents inhabiting a different order. In particular, the Cold War division of Berlin into east and west, divided by the Berlin Wall, fundamentally shaped the space of the city, and postunification residents must find ways to creatively repurpose this space. The chapter begins with the spatial history of Berlin and an analysis of its current spatial logic. It then provides detailed explorations and readings of a series of repurposed spaces within the city, comparing their present and past uses and meanings, and situating them within the history and spatial logic of each city.

This chapter concerns gentrification, which is one of the most important ways in which urban spaces are transforming. Gentrification is a powerful example of how dwellers and spaces change by shaping one another, and of the struggles and tensions that surround competing forms of agency that are simultaneously trying to establish territory in conflicting ways. Moreover, gentrification almost always provides us with powerful examples of power differentials between dwellers, who are unequally able to exercise spatial agency and enjoy a smooth fit between the spaces they inhabit and their own practices and needs. In keeping with the overall themes of this book, this chapter examines gentrification through the lens of micronegotiations and movement through space. Drawing on original fieldwork, it uses Columbia Heights, a neighborhood of Washington, DC, as a case study.

This brief chapter introduces the notion of a _repurposed city_. A repurposed city is one that was built to support one spatial order with specific economic, social, and political relations, but in which that spatial order has now collapsed, so that the city has to accommodate radically new uses, users, and purposes. In turn, residents have to find ways of using and adapting a material city built for something quite different. In repurposed cities, new dwellers must find ways of tinkering with urban spaces and reinvesting them with new meanings in order to use them in new ways. Their uses are constrained by the material forms of the past order, while conversely, they creatively remake those forms.

This chapter develops a philosophical picture of spatially embedded agency and perception, and argues that spaces and their dwellers mutually constitute one another. It lays out a philosophical framework and builds a philosophical toolbox for exploring cities and city living. It defends the strong philosophical claim that as spaces and dwellers make one another, they also generate _ecological ontologies_. In an ecological ontology, the kinds of _real things_ that populate a particular environment are, in the most literal sense, to some extent constituted by the interactions between dwellers situated within that environment and between dwellers and their environment. The chapter ends by considering what makes a space ‘alive’ or ‘dead.’

This chapter offers a philosophical account of what is distinctive about urban spaces and urban subjectivity. It proposes four features distinctive of city life that concern dwellers’ bodies and how they use and move through space: (1) proximity and shared space with many people, including a wide and diverse range of strangers; (2) unpredictability; and (3) slow locomotion combined with (4) fast switching between skills, stances, and perceptual expectations, which requires a wide, fluid, and flexible set of metaskill_s_ for moving between skill sets. Drawing on empirical sociological literature, the chapter explores how city dwellers see and judge risk and safety, order and disorder. It also develops the notion of an urban territory, and explores how territory is claimed, used, and bounded through bodily micronegotiations.

At each stage of inquiry, actions, choices, and judgments carry with them a chance that they will lead to mistakes and false conclusions. One of the most vigorously discussed kinds of epistemic risk is inductive risk—that is, the risk of inferring a false positive or a false negative from statistical evidence. This chapter develops a more fine-grained typology of epistemic risks and argues that many of the epistemic risks that have been classified as inductive risks are actually better seen as examples of a more expansive category, which this paper dubs “phronetic risk.” This more fine-grained typology helps to show that values in science often operate not exclusively at the level of individual psychologies but also at the level of knowledge-generating social institutions.

A great deal of contemporary epistemology is driven by a kind of _moral panic_ over the worry that there are no “pure” epistemic practices, perspectives, or standards detachable from the social situation of knowers. Kukla argues that we cannot do epistemology without fundamental, central attention to social identities, power relations, and the social institutions and structures within which epistemic practices happen. But this result is of no threat to our usable notions of objectivity, justification, and the like. The quest for purity is unnecessary. We should recognize it as a product of ideology and become comfortable with situatedness as an everyday phenomenon. Kukla ends by arguing that a proper _naturalized, non-ideal epistemolog_y—one more continuous with the empirical sciences—will treat situatedness not as something spooky or epistemologically threatening, but just as an empirical fact about our epistemic practices.

This chapter argues that Dennettian stances, including the intentional stance, should be understood as collections of embodied strategies for coping with objects and coordinating with others. A stance is a way of readying your body for action and worldly engagement. The entities that show up from within a stance are loci of norm-governed behavior, resistance, and explanatory power. But there is no separate question to be asked as to whether these entities are literally real. The notion of the literally real only gets a grip from within a specific stance—one that I dub the “interpretive stance.” Outside the interpretive stance, questions about the reality of intrastance entities generally deflate to practical questions about the success of various coping strategies. By these standards, beliefs and desires and intentional systems are straightforwardly real. But there is no extrastance perspective from which to assess the correctness of a stance.

The widespread conception of thinking in terms of the model of inner speech is deeply suspect and ought to be rejected. This paper criticizes four theses that Sellars sought to combine with his otherwise commendable social pragmatist outlook on language: the isomorphism of speech and thought; the essential innerness of thought; the idea that for each speech act, or case of ‘overt verbal behavior’, there is a distinct correlative event of thinking; and the helpfulness of thinking of thoughts as inner utterances. This conception of thought as inner speech is rendered unnecessary by a proper analysis of the pragmatic character of the speaking/thinking distinction, according to which thought is essentially private and speech is essentially public, and which has nothing to do with the location or epistemic accessibility of either. Thus thought is neither ‘inner’ nor ‘speechlike’ in the ways thought to support the ‘inner speech’ model.

This chapter argues that deflationism is in the first instance a claim about the explanatory role that the concept of truth and the truth-maker/truth-bearer relationship ought to play in philosophy and kindred disciplines—more specifically, the claim that there is no such role. We propose a strict criterion for what counts as a deflationary theory of truth and we use our strict criterion to distinguish between deflationist and pragmatic theories of truth. We also use it as a tool for sorting out the debate over deflationism and so-called non-factive discourse. We argue that deflationist commitments are orthogonal to debates over the metaphysical status of domains of discourse such as ethics and theoretical science, whose factive _bona fides_ have been called into question. The metaphysical consequences of deflationism are, we argue, quite minimal; we think that both sympathizers and detractors have taken deflationism as having more robust metaphysical consequences than it in fact has.

Many recent theorists have argued that the self is socially constituted, or “decentered” by its social world. With surprising consistency, and in various ways, this decentered self has been gendered feminine, by feminists and non‐feminists alike. In this paper I explore whether there is any special link between femininity and decenteredness. I distinguish between two different ways that the self might be decentered – by its position within a cultural order, or by its interactions and relations with particular others. I then ask whether either of these potential forms of decenteredness bear a specific connection to femininity, and I try to spell out several such connections that are suggested by contemporary feminist theoretical writings. I argue that most of these cannot be made plausible or coherent. However, I conclude that there are some senses in which feminine selves are especially decentered, although it appears that the link depends upon women's disempowered social position, and not upon anything to do with femininity as a distinctive identity.

Reasoning well about risk is most challenging when a woman is pregnant, for patient and doctor alike. During pregnancy, we tend to note the risks of medical interventions without adequately noting those of failing to intervene, yet when it's time to give birth, interventions are seldom questioned, even when they don't work. Meanwhile, outside the clinic, advice given to pregnant women on how to stay healthy in everyday life can seem capricious and overly cautious. This kind of reasoning reflects fear, not evidence.

We cannot understand epistemic competence without embedding agents in the social world of epistemic collaboration. Being a competent epistemic agent essentially involves being competent at specific sorts of social interactions and negotiations. More specifically, suspending judgment is a skill, and it is a skill that can only be understood as embedded in our social practices of epistemic collaboration. We cannot understand the epistemic skills that enable apt suspension, or the role that suspension plays in epistemic agency or the promotion of epistemic goods, without careful attention to the social skills we need in order to effectively promote collaborative epistemic projects. These skills are both constitutively social and ineliminably epistemic. Although social practices of suspension are always shaped by practical values and interests, they are essential to our epistemic competence and not just our practical or ethical competence.

This essay examines the ethics of retraction, using the tools of speech act theory. We are fundamentally imperfect beings who make mistakes, as any ethics usable in the actual world needs to acknowledge. Because we make mistakes, repair is an essential category of ethical action. Retraction has many uses, and not all of them are reparative. But, I will argue, retraction is a central tool of repair. We use retraction to repair ourselves, and to repair the social world, including our relationships. Thus understanding the ethics of retraction is philosophically pressing. I begin the essay by offering a pragmatic analysis of retraction and its success conditions. I will then make the case for why retraction is ethically substantive, and for the need for a developed ethics of retraction. After that, I divide my analysis into three parts. I ask: When is retraction possible; when is it ethically permissible; and, finally, when is it ethically advisable or obligatory, as part of a project of repair. This final section explores what kinds of repair retraction can accomplish, and when retraction is the best tool of repair.

I urge caution when building a pragmatist, pluralist conception of health. It is tempting to let the definition of health expand almost indefinitely, so that all dimensions of life and well-being become ‘health issues.’ Such expansionist conceptions of health intersect dangerously with our pervasive cultural healthism, which is the idea that health is an indefeasible value and caring for health is always a primary responsibility. Allowing the concept of health to expand indefinitely against a background of healthism enables it to be weaponized by stakeholders with social power and by institutions with specific interests in ways that undermine social justice and become tyrannical and elitist. In short, when every dimension of our well-being starts to count as part of health, then healthism starts to control every dimension of well-being. I look at three case studies, each of which is a domain in which the concept of health has expanded and become weaponized in toxic ways: healthy eating, healthy sexuality, and healthy gender identity. I end by arguing that we can understand the weaponization of health as a kind of elite capture.

We are proud to introduce this special issue of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal, which contains nine essays on neurodiversity and madness.Scholars have long discussed madness and neurodivergence, yet rarely from the perspective of mad and neurodivergent people as agents or as producers of knowledge, culture, or even thought. In recent years, mad and neurodivergent scholars have made significant headway into fields that have traditionally contributed to their epistemic and material harm. Prior scholars of neurodivergence and madness have explored the legacies of neuroableism and sanism in various disciplinary fields, including rhetoric and composition, philosophy of mind, technology, public policy... Read More.