EMILY C. R. TILTON

RESEARCH

Publications:

• "That's Above My Paygrade": Woke Excuses for Ignorance. Philosophers' Imprint (forthcoming).

  • Standpoint theorists have long been clear that marginalization does not make better understanding a given. They have been less clear, though, that social dominance does not make ignorance a given. Indeed, many standpoint theorists have implicitly committed themselves to what I call the strong epistemic disadvantage thesis. According to this thesis, there are strong, substantive limits on what the socially dominant can know about oppression that they do not personally experience. I argue that this thesis is not just implausible but politically pernicious; it is an excuse for ignorance and silence that stifles our ability to address many injustices. Moreover, I argue that if we are to avoid lending support to the SEDT while working within a standpoint theory framework, we must hold that the socially dominant can achieve marginalized standpoints. So, we must hold that men can achieve feminist standpoints, that white women (and men) can achieve black feminist standpoints, and so on. 

  • You can read a blog post I wrote summarizing and extending the idea in this paper here. 

​

• Rape Myths, Catastrophe, and Credibility. Episteme (2022).

  • There is an undeniable cultural tendency to unjustly dismiss (many) women’s rape allegations. One popular explanation for this tendency is that people think that rape is not that bad. I reject this explanation--it is incompatible with the deadly seriousness with which allegations that black men have raped white women are met. Instead, I argue that rape myths function to distort the epistemic resources people bring to bear on rape allegations. These myths disrupt people’s abilities to accurately recognize most rapes. So, rape allegations are unjustly dismissed because people (incorrectly) judge that there was no rape. Catastrophizing myths play a central role in this story. Centering this category of myths helps to explain why reactions to rape allegations vary along racial lines, and also why rape culture persists in the face of widespread disavowal of rape. 

​

• Not What I Agreed To: Content and Consent. Ethics (2021). (Co-authored with Jonathan Ichikawa).

  • Deception sometimes results in nonconsensual sex. A recent body of literature diagnoses such violations as invalidating consent: the agreement is not morally transformative, which is why the sexual contact is a rights violation. We pursue a different explanation for the wrongs in question: there is valid consent, but it is not consent to the sex act that happened. Semantic conventions play a key role in distinguishing deceptions that result in nonconsensual sex (like stealth condom removal) from those that don’t (like white lies). Our framework is also applicable to more controversial cases, like those implicated in so-called “gender fraud” complaints.

​​​

Works in (Various Stages of) Progress:​

• Anxious Epistemology. ​

  • Epistemology — especially feminist epistemology — offers important tools for analyzing oppression. However, I'll argue that a troubling trend is diminishing feminist epistemology’s political possibilities. Among feminist epistemologists, it is increasingly common to defend politically significant conclusions on (primarily) moral grounds, despite the availability of traditional evidential support. This is a long-standing tendency, though it is made more salient by the popularization of moral encroachment. I argue that the tendency to invoke non-evidential reasons to believe in accordance with feminist values betrays a lack of faith that the facts will bear out feminist commitments. This lack of faith results in what I call anxious epistemology. Anxious epistemology undermines feminist aims, and so cannot be the basis of a viable feminist epistemology. (Draft available soon.)​

​

• The Metaphysics of Mayonnaise.

  • Taking the intersectional nature of oppression seriously has methodological implications that are often underappreciated. It is common for feminists to signal awareness that women's subordination is maintained by multiple, intersecting forms of oppression, but to nonetheless bracket considerations of race, disability, etc. These "complicating" intersectional considerations are left to future work, or even to other people who may be "better positioned" to extend the initial analysis. I argue that this approach fails to take intersectionality seriously, and, consequently, results in distorted theory. I illustrate this by considering competing accounts of rape culture. I argue that rape culture should not be seen as exclusively or even primarily oppressive to women. It is instead a tool that reinforces social hierarchy broadly construed. Thus, there are some crucial respects in which rape culture empowers (some) women relative to (some) men. (Draft not yet available.)

​

• Standpoint Epistemology without Deference. Co-authored with Briana Toole.

  • Standpoint epistemology has been linked with increasing calls for deference to the socially marginalized. As we understand it, deference involves recognizing someone else as better positioned than we are, either to investigate or to answer some question, and then accepting their judgment as our own. We connect contemporary calls for deference to old objections that standpoint epistemology wrongly reifies differences between groups. We also argue that while deferential epistemic norms present themselves as a solution to longstanding injustices, habitual deference prevents the socially dominant from developing for themselves the skills necessary to expand their capacity for empathy, to deftly probe for evidence, and to ask critical questions. We argue that standpoint epistemology must be understood as calling for inclusion, not deference. (Draft available soon.)

​

• Non-Ideal Epistemology

  • Abstract coming soon :)​