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something goes awry because the audience gives it the wrong uptake. For instance, imagine I am out with my partner, say to them “will you marry me?” intending for this to be a proposal, but my partner does not think I have any intention to be serious and laughs at what I have said. If this happens, there is a very real sense in which I have made a joke, rather than a proposal (Kukla 2014, 443).¹² Furthermore, Davidson’s example of an actor on stage trying to warn the audience of a fire in the back of the theater, but failing to do so because the audience thinks this is part of the performance provides us another example (Kukla 2014, 447). Again, though the speakers have intended to produce one illocutionary act, the whole speech activity was altered by the conversation partners giving the incorrect perlocutionary uptake.

      Building up to our crescendo, Kukla then provides a striking example of a case where this happens as a result of gender—a case of discursive injustice.

      Celia is a floor manager at a heavy machinery factory where 95% of the workers are male. It is part of her job description that she has the authority to give orders to the workers on her floor, and that she should use this authority. She uses straightforward, polite locutions to tell her workers what to do: “Please put that pile over here,” “Your break will be at 1:00 today,” and so on. Her workers, however, think she is a “bitch,” and compliance is low. Why? One possible explanation is that the workers are just being blatantly sexist and insubordinate. They are refusing to follow her orders, which is still a way of taking them as orders. This sort of direct transgression is relatively straightforward. However, a subtler and more interesting explanation is that even though Celia is entitled to issue orders in this context, and however much she follows the conventions that typically would mark her speech acts as orders, because of her gender her workers take her as issuing requests instead. (Kukla 2014, 445–46)

      This difference between requests and orders is quite important, since following an order is obligatory and granting a request is not. Since one can always permissibly decline to grant a request, we often expect there to be thanks from the requestor when the request has been granted. Such gratitude is unnecessary for following an order, though. This means either that Celia can thank her employees and undermine her authority or not thank her employees and be called a “bitch”.¹³

      In addition, Kukla gives other classes of discursive injustice based on grammatical structures other than those in the imperative mood. One particular type of discursive injustice that will become important to our discussion later is in relation to what Kukla calls “entreaties to speak”:

      One way the performative force of a speech act can be derailed is if one speaks as an insider—a player of a game that comes with certain discursive privileges—but is not given uptake as one. (Kukla 2014, 448)

      Unfortunately,

      In many scenarios, I suggest, women have good reasons to believe that they are already participants in a discursive game, until it becomes clear from how their speech receives uptake that their attempted moves within the game are actually functioning as entreaties to join it. (Kukla 2014, 449)

      This is particularly relevant given that philosophy is a field that thinks that outsiders just do not understand quite how we do things in philosophy and is a field dominated by men. As Kukla continues,

      I think we see this kind of discursive injustice frequently when women try to speak as experts in a male-dominated field. Expert speech has a specific kind of default weight. This takes many forms. An expert’s claims about his subject matter, though never appropriately treated as infallible, become more than just truth claims to be subjected to scrutiny and challenge at the whim of any interlocutor. When someone makes a claim about his area of expertise, this claim, though challengeable, has prima facie standing; his recognized expert status itself gives listeners some reason to trust what he says. Conversely, other experts do not get to just overrule his claims in virtue of their own expertise, as they could with a lay speaker. (Kukla 2014, 449)

      So, this will be the type of discursive injustice we will be discussing in relation to our debate—injustice on the basis of gender and unwillingness to recognize expertise.

      Before we do that, though, it is important to note that there is nothing unique about gender here and nothing that requires that the relevant mistaken attitude disrupting the uptake be about hierarchy, even if it creates or perpetuates hierarchy. That is to say, sometimes discursive injustice occurs as a result of a stereotype that does not involve hierarchical concepts like “manager” or “expert,” but which is easily connected to hierarchies. For instance, there are many stereotypes of people with mental illnesses as generally deranged or irrational. As a result, if somebody knows I have a mental illness and hears me assert something about a problem I have observed, they may dismiss my speech acts as not inherently contentful or rational, but rather simply an acoustic blast produced by chemical misfirings in my brain.¹⁴ This may significantly impact my ability to have my problems addressed. Similar examples for many different dimensions of identity can clearly be generated based on stereotypes peculiar to that identity type and how they relate to a listener’s ability to recognize the speaker as meeting the preconditions for their intended speech act.

      §1.5 Discursive Injustice in This Case

      Now that we have been through a section on the explanandum (§1.3) and a section on the essential concept we will use in the explanans (§1.4), it is time to look at my particular application of discursive injustice as a way to explain this case. For this, we will use a simple model for abduction where a plausible inference to the best explanation must first meet Peirce’s general form for abductions:

      “[P1:] The surprising fact, C, is observed.”

      [P2:] But if A were true, C would be a matter of course.

      [CONCLUSION:] Hence, there is reason to suspect that A is true.” (Peirce Collected Papers, 5.189)

      Of course, a good abduction is an inference to the best explanation, so we must follow some further rules above and beyond meeting Peirce’s general form:

      (1) A plausible abduction is compared to other explanations.

      (2) A plausible explanation will be as simple as possible (i.e., abides Ockham’s razor).

      (3) A plausible explanation will be as consistent and coherent with background knowledge as possible (and so will admit of generalization).

      With this model of abduction in mind, we can turn to the principle argument of the chapter to which we have been building. First, the basic structure meeting Peirce’s general form for abductions:

      P1: There is this surprising fact that Marcus has been under-cited, under-taught, under-anthologized, and underappreciated.

      

      P2: If Marcus has been the victim of discursive injustice, then it would be unsurprising that Marcus has been under-cited, under-taught, under-anthologized, and underappreciated.

      CONCLUSION: There is reason to suspect that Marcus has been the victim of rampant discursive injustice.

      Filling this out a bit more, my suggestion is that part of the reason Marcus has not been sufficiently recognized for her contributions to the development of NTR and analytic philosophy, more generally, is because some of her speech acts were given the wrong uptake. In particular, her expert assertions and arguments were treated as mere suggestions because she was working in a field with sexist expectations about gender and expertise. This matters greatly because a suggestion and an argument from an expert put very different expectations on us. It is never expected that one need to respond to a mere suggestion—one can always decide to take or leave it. An argument from an expert carries with it much more weight and much more expectation—one should be prepared to engage with and have something to say about an expert’s argument in their area.

      To give a concrete picture of what I have in mind, I am suggesting that what happened over Marcus’ career was something of an extended version of what I have seen in conference and colloquium presentations all too many times in my career. Somebody gets finished giving a talk and the Q&A session starts. After a while, a woman raises her hand and gives a comment to the presenter who responds

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