Hello, I’m Shelley Tremain and I’d like to welcome you to the forty-first installment of Dialogues on Disability, the series of interviews that I’m conducting with disabled philosophers and post here on the third Wednesday of each month. The series is designed to provide a public venue for discussion with disabled philosophers about a range of topics, including their philosophical work on disability; the place of philosophy of disability vis-à-vis the discipline and profession; their experiences of institutional discrimination and personal prejudice in philosophy, in particular, and in academia, more generally; resistance to ableism, racism, sexism, and other apparatuses of power; accessibility; and anti-oppressive pedagogy.
I acknowledge that the land on which I sit to conduct these interviews is the traditional territory of the Haudensaunee and Anishnaabeg, covered by the Upper Canada Treaties and directly adjacent to Haldiman Treaty territory. I offer these interviews with respect and in the spirit of reconciliation.
My guest today is Stephen Yablo. Stephen works in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is interested in metaphysics, mind, language, and logic, especially paradox, causation, ontology, metaphor, and subject matter. Aboutness is the answer to everything, in Stephen’s view. Stephen cooks everything in an Instant Pot and will pick up the guitar again any day now. Meanwhile, he plays with genealogy and two dogs and watches Nordic noir from the back of an exercise bike.
Welcome to Dialogues on Disability, Stephen! You first recognized a philosophical problem when you were in Hebrew School and went on to begin your formal philosophy education in the undergraduate program in philosophy at the University of Toronto. Please fill us in on the details of your upbringing and background and why you decided to pursue a career in philosophy.
I had a typical conservative Jewish upbringing in the northwest suburbs of Toronto. My parents had moved there in the late 1950s with the idea that their kids, my brother Paul and me, would attend York University, which was then under construction a mile or two away. We never did, though I worked at the bookstore there for a while.
Saul Yablo, my father, had come to Toronto in 1933 from Lomza, Poland. My mother, Gloria Yablo, née Herman, was born in Toronto, but her parents were recent arrivals from Romania. I went to a regular day school, but also attended Hebrew School three times a week. Many of the teachers there were Holocaust survivors. So, we heard a lot about the Nazis and I remember being confused about how Hitler chose his victims. What was the common thread that supposedly ran through Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, and disabled people? It was mentioned that Goebbels was not persecuted for his “deformed” foot, as if to say that the Nazis were hypocrites on top of everything else.
I think the "philosophical problem" that you're alluding to might be this: On the one hand, it was stressed that God was unknowable. Speculation was natural, but futile. Somehow, though, my own speculations could be seen, through this otherwise impenetrable veil of ignorance, to be definitely mistaken. I found it a bit suspicious that the known facts about God included mainly the negations of all my hunches. At the same time, I really liked the idea that one shouldn't hope to understand everything, that some notions went too deep to achieve a proper perspective on. You just had to go along with them if you wanted to get out of bed in the morning.
I started college in 1975 expecting to go into English or psychology. This is strange as I'd been reading a lot of philosophy. A counsellor lent me Martin Buber and Santayana at summer camp and, at the end of an appointment, my Cuba-loving communist uncle, who was also a doctor, handed over a book about Nietzsche. I read this stuff without, I guess, knowing that philosophy was its own thing. When eventually the light dawned, I wound up taking jillions of courses in the area.
At the time, the University of Toronto had the biggest English-speaking philosophy department outside of Oxford, maybe still does. My parents wanted me to take something with Emil Fackenheim, a rabbinical Hegel scholar who would turn up every now and then at synagogue, not that I was still attending. He opposed intermarriage partly on the grounds that it would be giving a posthumous victory to Hitler—though, it turned out, he himself had intermarried. The two philosophy courses that I best remember from my time in the department at Toronto are The Philosophy of Bertrand Russell with John Slater and The Inexpressible with Hans Herzberger. The latter went back and forth between Teresa of Avila's mystical writings and Tarski on the inexpressibility of truth. That's where I first learned of Kripke's theory of truth, which became an obsession with me for some years.
After graduation, came a year in India at the University of Pune. Hans Herzberger was in south India that year, where his wife Radhika taught at a Krishnamurti school. I was lucky enough to be able to stay with them for a few weeks and, with his help, made a start on my first published work in philosophy, "Grounding, Dependence, and Paradox." I don't know if you've heard of the once-famous "love guru" Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, who previously had been a philosophy professor. Rajneesh was in Pune when I arrived in 1979, but he left in 1980 to form an ashram in Antelope, Oregon. It's an amazing story involving drugs, guns, local politics, Rolls-Royces, and, ultimately, murder. They tell it in the recent Netflix documentary "Wild, Wild Country."
There then followed five or six years in the Philosophy Department at UC Berkeley, where I got my Ph.D., working with George Myro and Donald Davidson. In 1986, I started a job in the Philosophy Department at the University of Michigan. In 1998, I moved with Sally Haslanger to MIT. We'd been friends at Berkeley; but didn't pair up until the late 1980s.
[Description of coloured photo below: Stephen, a white man with a beard, tousled hair, and glasses, is looking to his left at us, somewhat bashfully, and faintly smiling. He is sitting on his scooter in a brightly-lit room, with his right arm outstretched to his right.]
Stephen, tell us about your recent and current research.
Just about the time I was diagnosed with MS (2005), I started getting into subject matter and aboutness. There was a paper called "Semantic Arithmetic," never in the end published, in which I tried to bring subject matter to bear on Wittgenstein's old problem of what is left when my arm's going up is subtracted from my raising it. This question blew up into three lectures on aboutness that I gave at Princeton in 2008. I was already getting weaker—I remember hesitating to walk to the board at those lectures, for fear of falling—and did not necessarily expect to be able bring the project to a finish.
I decided, in any case, that there was no reason to ever work again on anything else because the philosophy of subject matter was so glorious and cool. Shockingly, the book Aboutness did at last appear in 2014 and I still hadn't run out of steam. I have since put that proposition—the proposition that there is no reason to work on anything else—to the test. The papers coming out of it in the last couple of years are the following:
"Models and Reality," which relates truth in a model (thought of as an idealized world) to truth about a certain aspect of the real world.
"Parts and Differences," which tries to explain how content-parts, defined in terms of subject-matter inclusion, can be like material parts, when material objects don't have subject matters.
"Relevance and Minimality," which asks what relevance to an outcome can mean in cases where nothing is minimally sufficient for that outcome.
"Ifs, Ands, and Buts," which analyzes conditionals A → C on the model of C's incremental content over A, aka what remains if you subtract C from A (remember Wittgenstein's arm-raising example).
"If-Thenism," which brings incremental conditionals to bear on certain famous objections to if-thenist doctrines in the philosophy of mathematics and elsewhere.
"Nonexistence and Aboutness," which tries to explain how I can truly say that Pegasus does not exist, when Pegasus is not there to be talked about. My suggested answer is this: We are here to be talked about—the things that do exist—and the statement is true about us.
"Knights, Knaves, Truth, Truthfulness, Grounding,...," which asks how one can truly say that they always tell the truth when such a statement is on standard theories ungrounded. One suggested answer is this: The statement, although not true simpliciter, may yet be true about THE FACTS.
What motivates you to research and write about the questions that you work on? Does your social position and status as a disabled person present you with philosophical problems that hadn’t occurred to you before you became disabled?
This is hard.
I am drawn, at least some of the time, to ideas that may seem not to be real philosophy or to pass philosophical muster, but that nevertheless feel natural and illuminating. Quine had a distinction in this neighborhood between “clarity" and "fluency." Fluency is like what used to be known as speaking with the vulgar. He used the term fluency somewhat as an insult and was inclined to patronize ways of talking and thinking that he couldn't fit into his system. I'm more inclined to think that it's the system that's letting us down in these cases. This is somewhat connected to Sellars on the manifest conception of reality, to "naïve metaphysics" as advocated by Kit Fine and Friedericke Moltmann, and to the idea in, for instance, L. A. Paul and Tim Williamson of metaphysics as modelling. Some of my older stuff on proportionality, modality, and color fits this mold, and the stuff on aboutness fits it too, maybe, in a different way.
So, for instance, Frege says somewhere that truth does not admit of a more or less. A "half-truth" is false, full stop. But does Frege really think that there is no difference at all between, say, "Abelard and Heloise are dogs" and "Sparky and Heloise are dogs," a difference that leads us to see more truth in the second than the first? For a sentence to be false, full-stop, doesn't mean that it is wholly false any more than a substance's being poisonous means that it is pure poison. Poisons can obviously be more or less pure, according to how much non-poison they contain. Falsehoods, likewise, are more or less pure according to how much truth they contain.
The problem is to say what “the truth in S" could possibly mean. Its true consequences? But every sentence has those—just tack on a true disjunct—and not every sentence is partly true. 0=1 doesn't get something right by virtue of entailing 0=1 or Snow is white. I want to say that a sentence's content has parts—not just consequences—and it's the true parts that confer partial truth on S. To explain content-parts, you need subject matter: R is part of S if the inference S, therefore R, is both truth-preserving and subject-matter preserving. This is not unintuitive, I think. But it is easy to overlook in a climate of tough-minded skepticism about aboutness. Aboutness is associated in the popular imagination with the work of Brentano and Husserl, which gives the notion a continental feel, maybe.
Let me admit up front that, until this interview, I hadn't thought much at all about disability's relations to philosophy. For me, the two have been running down separate tracks; they've—since I can't seem to stick to a single metaphor—been like ships passing in the night. There is really no excuse for this, since I have been given, more than once, the opportunity to connect them.
I remember a bunch of years ago, as my walking was getting worse, turning up late for the first talk at a conference in Berlin. I could walk three city blocks or so at the time, which should have been enough to get there from the hotel, except my navigational instincts are not too good either, and I started off in the wrong direction. The way back was a torture. I stumbled into the hall a sweaty, off-balance mess, to find there was nowhere to sit. I had to jam my way through the crowds, whacking people—not on purpose, mostly—with my cane. The talk, by Kit Fine, was just ending, though I doubt people could hear his conclusions through all the clatter. I sat in the empty room wondering what I was going to do with myself, or even how to get something to drink without tripping over my own feet.
If this is sounding like a sad, self-pitying story, well there you have it. I came home from the conference dejected. But then an email from Elizabeth Barnes arrived that helped to put things in perspective:
at the risk of being really weird, I wanted to mention how encouraging it was to see a visibly disabled person navigating all the social and logistical complexities of a philosophy conference like they were no big deal. I have a degenerative illness, and in the back of my mind, I've always worried that my conference-going days are very numbered—I guess in part because I pretty much *never* see visibly disabled people at philosophy conferences. So to see a person with a disability being awesome at a conference. . . It's hard to explain, but for some reason I'm less worried about that aspect of the future than I was five days ago.
This woke me up and probably added a year or five to my working life. Barnes is, of course, the author, more recently, of The Minority Body: A Theory of Disability, which has been waking me up some more, along with work by you, Shelley, among others. I told Elizabeth that “I was back there mentally crossing conferences off my list of things still doable without making a spectacle of myself. But you're not a spectacle if you don't look that way to others. So maybe I won't give up just yet.”
Eight years later, this is still sort of true. Right now, Sally and I are getting ready to go to the World Congress of Philosophy in Beijing from August 13-20. My new rule, if I have one, is to go to (i) World Congresses and (ii) conferences on the work of Stephen Yablo, which occur about as often as the World Congresses.
Are there philosophical issues that might not have grabbed my attention if not for being disabled? I'll tell you what I'm thinking about now, which might or might not fit the bill. Sally has been writing a lot about structural explanation—for instance, the way curb cuts change the flow of strollers and scooters; or how the reasons one does or doesn't get an A change, if the class was graded on a curve; or the way gender-based salary differences reinforce themselves as the better paid partner keeps working while the lower paid partner quits to be home with the kids.
These types of explanation link up with two ideas that interest me too: first, causes (or explainers) should be proportional to their effects—or, what they explain; second, explanations may be either of effects E, or of other events C being thus and so causally related to E, e.g., why C was in a position to cause E, or why E wasn't caused already by an event other than C.
Brad Inwood pointed out to me that Plato had this second idea already in the Apology, when he distinguished the cause from "that without which the cause would not be a cause." Plato's example, interestingly enough, was this: Socrates's properly functioning bones and sinews, rather than themselves causing his behavior, were a that-without-which-his-decisions-would-not-have-caused-his-behavior.
I had more or less ignored this example in my own use of Plato's distinction, in "De Facto Dependence.'' But it clearly relates to the causal/explanatory role of disability. The lesioned condition of my spine, rather than causing me not to run, or move my limbs in the expected way, figures in the reason why my desire to run (or move in the expected way) does not cause me to run (or …)
Now, the condition of my spine may not look like a structural explainer in the sense that is of interest to social theorists such as Haslanger. But its role in directing the flow of nerve impulses seems, on reflection, not all that different from the influence of curb cuts on the flow of stroller and scooter traffic. I mention this because Brad Skow among others (following Dretske in Explaining Behavior) has been suggesting that structural explainers are often determinants of causal traffic flow, more than outright causes. They tell us why C causes what it does rather than why that effect occurred. Skow's book is forthcoming later this year and the first chapter of it is available online.
This is all pretty crude. But it brings out a potential analogy between the intrinsic aspects of disability—the condition of my spine—and the extrinsic aspects—the presence or not of curb cuts—that would allow me to cross the street on my scooter. Medicalized understandings of disability emphasise the first, social theories the second. I'm wondering if the structural-explanation perspective might give us a way to think about the two together. (Note that nondisabled bodies are just as much structural explainers as disabled ones.) I'm wondering, too, how this might all hook up with Aristotle on immanent causation and persistence, as discussed by Haslanger in "Persistence, Change, and Explanation" and by others elsewhere. Skow's "Agent Causation Done Right," the final chapter of his book, could be illuminating on these issues as well.
Stephen, the Dialogues on Disability series aims, among other things, to educate members of the philosophical community about ableism and lack of accessibility, including accessibility in their departments, at the conferences and workshops that they organize or attend, in their classrooms, and so on. You have indicated to me that your department at M.I.T. has been exemplary in providing you with what you need in order to continue to do your job. Please tell us what sorts of resources and adjustments your department has provided for you to be present in the department itself, to work throughout your university, meet with your students, and so on.
Glad to, and I'd even like to name a few names. All my teaching is done in the same building as my office (thanks, Jen). A lot of it is done in my office. When the weather is bad, students will even come to my house—the Washington Street Branch Campus, as it is called by me and Kelly (thanks, Kelly). I do less teaching than my colleagues, and less committee work too (thanks, Richard and Alex). I still do the occasional regular grad course, but some kind soul is apt to co-teach with me in case I fall apart (thanks Agustin, Sally, and Justin). I have been allowed to do more than my share of independent studies courses, with two or three students at a time (thanks, Brad). Permission has been granted to use research funds on academically helpful mobility equipment, such as a smaller scooter battery to take to China where the power limits are lower (thanks, Mary). I feel some awkwardness about this because, when I was chair, I frowned on not dissimilar requests myself. People help me with copying and bring the mail by if it starts piling up (thanks, Matt). I got help with dictation software (thanks, Chris). People offer me their chairs and bring me handouts at talks (thanks, all). If it comes to that, I will be able to go on long-term disability at some fraction of my current income (this goes with working at MIT).
Disabled people encounter numerous problems when they try to travel: airlines damage wheelchairs, trains don’t have working lifts, hotels advertise accessible rooms that they simply don’t have, and so on. As a philosopher who receives multiple invitations to present at universities outside of the northeastern U.S., what sorts of experiences with inaccessibility have you encountered in travelling to conferences? Have you modified or limited your travel to conferences due to the burdens that inaccessibility has imposed?
Let's see. I mentioned Mary's help getting me a battery for China. The backstory is this. AeroMexico confiscated my super groovy, 35-lb. collapsible scooter last Spring in Mexico City. They wouldn't even let United bring the scooter back for me, which United was happy to do. Lithium ion batteries have, in all fairness, been known to blow up on planes. But the International Air Transport Association (IATA) took this history into account, I think, when they made up the rules. And AeroMexico wouldn't stick to the rules—though, they'd raised no objections a few weeks earlier on essentially the same route. This incident left me almost housebound for a couple of months. On the other hand, I was given a NEW and better scooter in the end.
Europe, for all its vaunted liberal squishiness (not for long, I know), is less accessible than the U.S., thanks to the Americans with Disabilities Act. Oxford didn't at first know what to do with me when I gave the Locke Lectures in 2012. Usually people are put up a couple of miles away, which would have been difficult. But All Souls had just installed in their visitors' quarters a huge, state-of-the-art, disability-friendly bathroom . It was some kind of pilot project and had everything you can possibly imagine, perhaps for testing purposes. There was a hoist arrangement, which I never used myself, but found impressive.
Anyway, I was given the room right beside this bathroom, along with a day room down the hall. I would have had the entire floor, come to think of it, but for Jennifer Nagel eking out a miserable existence (joke!) in the corner space that remained. To get the scooter out onto the street, one had to lift it through an elevated pass-through cut into the large wheeled gate at the end of the driveway. This was not as hard to do as it sounds and eventually it was revealed that the porter would look with favor on the application that I could make for an electric remote for the gate itself, which solved the problem completely.
You asked about modifying or limiting travel plans. I almost never travel alone these days. I wait for times that Sally is willing and able to come with me. This is not a disaster because one doesn't always want to travel. Armed with my new excuse not to travel, I find it easier to think clearly about which trips it makes sense to take. This choice is an unheralded benefit of disability more generally. I start out, like many people, inclined to do whatever I'm asked to do, or whatever seems expected, in a given situation. Why would they be asking, if it weren't important? Now that this is impossible, I must make choices. But then I get to make choices. Disability, in this way, breeds autonomy.
Stephen, would you like to say anything else on any of the subjects that you’ve discussed in this interview or recommend any articles, books, or other resources?
Did I mention that I’m not terribly well-informed? Here are some of the things mentioned above, along with other stuff that I’m hoping to get to soon:
L.A. Paul, “Metaphysics as Modeling: The Handmaiden’s Tale” and Timothy Williamson “Model-building in Philosophy,” both of which conceive metaphysics as constructing models of puzzling phenomena rather than setting out discursive theories of them.
Friederike Moltmann, “Natural Language Ontology,” Kit Fine, “Naive Metaphysics,” and Emmon Bach, “Natural Language Metaphysics,” all of which concern the ontology implicit in ordinary ways of talking and thinking, represented as worthy of study in their own right.
I'm interested in the remaining things for lots of reasons, but especially for the light they shed on structure—both physical and social—and the nature of structural explanation: Alan Garfinkel, Forms of Explanation: Rethinking the Questions in Social Theory, Sally Haslanger, Resisting Reality: Social Construction and Social Critique, Brad Skow’s forthcoming book, Causation, Explanation, and the Metaphysics of Aspect, Elizabeth Barnes, The Minority Body: A Theory of Disability, and Shelley L. Tremain, Foucault and Feminist Philosophy of Disability.
Stephen, thank you very much for these recommendations and for your fascinating and informative remarks throughout this interview. You have given readers and listeners a great deal to consider.
Readers/listeners are invited to use the Comments section below to respond to Stephen Yablo’s remarks, ask questions, and so on. Comments will be moderated. As always, although signed comments are encouraged and preferred, anonymous comments may be permitted.
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Please join me here again on Wednesday, September 19th at 8 a.m. EST for the forty-second installment of the Dialogues on Disability series and, indeed, on every third Wednesday of the months ahead. I have a fabulous line-up of interviews planned. If you would like to nominate someone to be interviewed (self-nominations are welcomed), please feel free to write me at s.tremain@yahoo.ca.
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