Lucy Vollbrecht

While intellectual grandstanding is a gender-neutral concept, it presents a practical level of diffi culty for women and feminist thinkers. This is the case on at least two fronts. First, men often get a pass for grandstanding, while women do not. Second, women are more often the target of grandstanders. Because grandstanding is often comparative, and women are seen as less rational than men, they are easier foils to use to build one’s own intellectual status. Seeing women as emotional, and thus irrational, occasions men to use them as props for intellectual grandstanding. And, when women have unwelcome things to say, accusing them of being overly emotional is a quick way to silence them. These phenomena, I’ll argue, are two sides of the same coin. Both are a result of the gendering of reason in the Western intellectual tradition. In what follows, I’ll look at just how this works.

Is moral grandstanding actually bad? Justin Tosi and Brandon Warmke (2016; 2020) think so. Neil Levy, in “Virtue Signaling is Virtuous,” (2021) counters their view. He argues that grandstanding, or what he’ll call virtue signaling, is not just morally permissible, but necessary. In this paper, I seek a line through their accounts. First, I’ll address two important interpretative differences between them. I’ll consider the fit between ‘virtue signaling’ and ‘grandstanding.’ And I’ll interrogate Levy’s identification of grandstanding as a primarily epistemic issue. Next, I’ll argue that, even if it were a primarily epistemic issue, second-order evidence won’t contribute much. Lastly, squaring these accounts, I’ll claim that grandstanding is both a common social error and moral bad. Grandstanding can be understood as a kind of moral progressor’s temptation. As progressors, we require external checks to measure our moral development. But that same approval distracts us. It introduces a temptation to target gaining praise for our virtues, rather than actually developing them. Inasmuch, grandstanding is a bad that often comes along with becoming a better person. Its dual status reflects a tragic truth about our moral and social lives.

ABSTRACT There is a growing body of literature on virtue signaling or moral grandstanding, but relatively little has been said about virtue signaling’s cousin, intellect signaling or intellectual grandstanding. This article develops a working definition of intellectual grandstanding as it occurs in argumentative contexts. With this definition in hand, this article argues that intellectual grandstanding impedes epistemic success in argument on each major model of argument today. Intellectual grandstanding in argument fails to respect other arguers, it sustains disagreements, and it produces little reliable epistemic justification. Given this convergence of reasons, the article concludes that intellectual grandstanding poses a serious epistemic problem for argumentative exchange and deserves our immediate attention.

What is the value of Pyrrhonizing skepticism today? As an epistemologist, I am sympathetic to skepticism, but as a feminist, I am concerned by it. In this short paper, I’ll interrogate the troubled relationship between skepticism and feminism. More specifically, I’ll ask: Can feminists be skeptics? In the first half of the paper, I’ll articulate one feminist objection to skepticism. In the second half, I’ll suggest a pathway forward by which feminists can harness the power of the skeptical method to antiskeptical ends. Part 1 of my analysis engages Brian Ribeiro’s recent book Pyrrhonizers (2021), and Part 2 engages Jennifer Saul’s “Skepticism and Implicit Bias” (2013).

The Argumentative Adversariality debate is over the question of whether argument must be adversarial. A particular locus of this debate is on skeptical challenges in critical dialogue. The Default Skeptical Stance in argument is a practical manifestation of argumentative adversariality. Views about the on-the-ground value of the DSS vary. On one hand, in “The Social & Political Limitations of Philosophy”, Phyllis Rooney argues that the DSS leads to epistemic injustice. On the other, Allan Hazlett in his recent piece “Critical Injustice” argues for the virtues of the skeptical stance in terms of epistemic justice. Both Rooney and Hazlett are concerned with the role skeptical engagement plays in argument, but they assign opposite values to it. In this essay, I review Rooney and Hazlett’s examples and show that the epistemic dysfunction in the two scholar’s going cases is one and the same, and argue that the cause of both is a lack of proper skeptical engagement. Skeptical engagement is a requirement for epistemic justice. Together and constitute an initial defense of the Adversarialist position against objections regarding the social epistemic risk of the skeptical stance.