An Interview with Associate Professor Laura Schroeter

The School of Historical and Philosophical Studies congratulates Laura Schroeter on her recent promotion to Associate Professor. Specialising in Philosophy of Mind, Philosophy of Language, and Metaethics, Laura has gained international recognition for her work on two-dimensional (2D) semantics and is famed for her ‘jazz model’ of concepts. As long-serving director of postgraduate studies in Philosophy at Melbourne, Laura has played an essential role in fostering the success and wellbeing of research students across all branches of philosophy, in addition to her undergraduate teaching and other leadership and service roles. In this interview with current Philosophy PhD candidate Henry Dobson, Laura looks back on her career to date and sets out her views on a range of current questions in her field.  

You received your BA in History from the University of Wisconsin, Madison and your PhD in Philosophy from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Do you still have connections to the United States?

Well, I was born in the US and grew up there. It was only after getting my PhD at Michigan that I moved to Australia for my first job, a postdoc at the ANU. I’ve been an Australian citizen for more than 16 years now but I still have many ties to the US. My parents and my two sisters (and their families) all live there – in New York, Chicago, Madison and Berkeley. This gives me a lot of nice places to visit and a lot of territory to cover.

I also have deep philosophical ties to the US. Many of those connections go back to grad school in Michigan but most of them are philosophical colleagues and friends I’ve acquired over the years in the US in the usual way – conferences, visiting scholar positions, email communication about overlapping research interests, etc. Once you have been around in the profession for a while you realise that philosophy is a very small world and you get to know the people working on the same topics.

All these research ties to the US are very important for my work. The US is still the uncontested powerhouse in my main areas of research – philosophy of mind, language, bits of metaphysics and epistemology, metaethics and, now, feminism. But I’ve also developed strong ties more recently with colleagues in Europe and, of course, in our neighbourhood in Australasia. I’m looking forward to getting the chance to travel again for conferences!

Another connection is political. I’ve got a strong emotional connection with the US and I’ve been a bit obsessive about following politics there. It’s very scary how bad the political climate has become there. I hope that Australia manages to steer clear of the Trumpian brand of politics.

You joined the University of Melbourne in 2008, when the philosophy department had just gone through a quite dramatic reduction in staff numbers. How did you and your colleagues cope with those difficulties and have you found yourself applying the lessons learnt from back then to the more recent crisis caused by the global pandemic?

When I was appointed at Melbourne in 2008, my partner François [Schroeter] and I thought that life would be easier at last. Like many academic couples, we faced a real challenge in finding two jobs together. We first met at Michigan where I was doing my PhD and François was a visitor on a Swiss postdoc. Then I got a postdoc at the ANU and François followed me to finish his habilitation thesis without being employed. That situation, combined with anxieties about a bleak job market, was very hard on him. Then when François got a continuing position at Melbourne, it was my turn to follow him. I had a part time postdoc at Monash and then that money ran out. Being unemployed was also pretty depressing – my self-esteem was definitely not in a good shape at the time.

Things turned around in 2007, with a five-year ARC fellowship and a continuing position at Melbourne. We were so happy to have finally solved the two-body problem! But, as soon as I took up the position here, the Philosophy discipline lost half its staff due to a fiscal belt-tightening in the Arts Faculty.

The situation was pretty grim in 2008. Everybody was grossly overworked, with only 4.5 staff teaching into the undergraduate program. But the hardest thing was the bleak prospects for the future. Very quickly, it became crystal clear that the Faculty had no plan to rebuild Philosophy. At that point, we could all have gone into what John Bigelow, a dear philosophy colleague at Monash, aptly calls ‘internal emigration’: everyone could have just gone into survival mode, put their heads down, and focused on their own teaching and research. That would have meant saying goodbye to a vibrant Philosophy discipline at Melbourne.

What happened then is, I think, quite remarkable. We really pulled together to try to save the department, in great part because we felt we were the custodians of something much bigger than us. The Philosophy discipline at Melbourne has a proud history, and we couldn’t let it go bust without a very serious fight. Our fantastic students have always been powerful inspiration – we thought we owed it to them to make sure they have the chance to get a serious philosophical education. The rest is history, as they say. There were ups and downs, of course. But, with dogged determination and everyone’s readiness to go the extra mile, we managed to put the discipline back on track and to significantly grow our student enrolments.

For us, the current COVID crisis has been very different from the 2008 catastrophe. This time around, there was no comparable loss of staff and tutors in the discipline. Perhaps the most important thing, though, is that throughout the current crisis the future has always looked fine. There was no fear of a complete wipeout of the discipline.

I also think that management dealt with the current crisis in a much more humane way. Our Dean and the VC deserve a big thankyou for that. And, of course, as usual, our Head of School, Margaret Cameron, has done a truly admirable job at holding the ship together. How she manages to do so much work so well I have no idea. We also have to thank all our staff, starting with our School Manager Marica Banovac, who always go out of their way to help us out.

So what lessons did we apply from the previous crisis to the new one? I think the main one was: we have gone through so much worse, we’ll be able to survive this one.

You’ve gained international recognition for your work in developing what you call the ‘jazz model’ of concepts. As cool as this sounds, can you explain in simple terms how this model works? What do you hope this model will achieve when applied to legal and social kind concepts?

I think I can. The musical metaphor is meant to give an intuitive picture of the structure of the account of shared meanings. One central question about shared meanings is how different speakers manage to coordinate on the same topic with their words. When you hear me say ‘Aristotle’, for instance, you and I both manage to pick out the very same individual in thought – a certain famous Greek philosopher – even though we each might have some very different assumptions about who exactly Aristotle was. How exactly do we coordinate on the same topic?

Classical musical groups provide a good analogy for the traditional approach to meaning and concepts – that’s the view I am rejecting. According to the classical model, we manage to coordinate in a musical performance because we are all reading from the same antecedently fixed score. Similarly, on the classical model of meaning, we coordinate our meanings because we are all relying on the very same core criterion for identifying who counts as ‘Aristotle’.

I claim that the classical model simply doesn’t work. In most cases, we manage to coordinate on the same topic without sharing some matching criterion for determining what exactly we’re talking about: Aristotle, water, what’s morally right, or what have you.

So how do we manage to coordinate on the same topic? My suggestion is that we’re like jazz musicians in a jam session, who manage to coordinate in a musical performance without relying on a particular score that’s settled in advance. Instead, the jazz players are all listening to each other and trying to coordinate their own playing with that of the others. Everyone is committed to making ‘best musical sense’ of the performance so far. As long as the musical sensibilities of the group are not too divergent, this method can lead to a coherent musical performance.

The key idea of the jazz model, then, is that trying to coordinate helps make it the case that we succeed in coordinating. When applied to linguistic coordination, the moral is that we don’t share linguistic rules that settle in advance precisely what we’re talking about.

My approach is consistent with recent approaches in evolutionary anthropology. Influential theorists like, for instance, Michael Tomasello argue that hypersociality is the key to human intelligence and to our capacity to share a language. It is because contingent environmental circumstances forced our ancestors to cooperate much more tightly than other great apes that our intelligence is superior to theirs and that we managed to create a sophisticated shared language. Similarly, I think it is because cooperation is at the core of our linguistic practices that we manage to coordinate on the very same topic in thought and talk.

One application of the model that François (my co-author) and I have explored extensively is the moral case. Peter Singer and Scott Morrison, for instance, seem to be talking and thinking about the very same topic if they disagree about whether abortion is morally permissible, or whether we have a moral obligation to aggressively combat global warming, etc. And, yet, we can assume they have very different conceptions of what it takes for an action to be morally right. Our suggestion is that they manage to coordinate because they participate in a shared cooperative linguistic practice, that is akin to a giant jam session.

But what determines the facts about morality? Which actions are morally right – or, equivalently, what is the reference of our term ‘morally right’? Well, on my approach, reference is a regulative ideal: it is what makes best sense of our shared representational tradition with a term.

Roughly, the idea is that what we mean by ‘morally right’ is determined by the verdicts we would reach if we were fully informed and fully successful in our coordinated efforts to identify what’s most important about our shared practice with the term so far. Trying to get closer to the truth about what’s morally right is trying to approximate that ideal.

All that brings me to your question about legal and social kind concepts. An important question in legal theory is how lawyers and judges manage to think and talk about the very same topic when they disagree about how the law applies to a particular hard case. As you may suspect, my answer is that the key to their coordination is their cooperative efforts in a joint linguistic practice. It is because legal practitioners are all trying to be on the same page that they manage to be on the same page (i.e., that there is a shared regulative ideal).

In many respects the legal case seems to be quite close to the moral case. But there are some important differences. In particular, there is a conventional element in the legal case – a particular law is valid only in a specific legal jurisdiction. This conventional element is absent from the moral case: what’s morally right is supposed to be valid across all social or cultural groups. On the whole, however, it looks like many of the specifics of the moral case also apply to the legal case. Or at least that’s one of the initial guiding hypotheses of the project.

Social kind concepts seem different. François and I have been particularly interested in gender concepts, such as the concept expressed by ‘woman’. There is clearly a biological strand to our understanding of the concept (a woman is an adult human female). Another strand of understanding of the concept involves conventional social roles (a woman is someone who is assigned certain social roles), and a third strand involves affiliative practices (a woman is an individual who identifies as a member of a specific group).

Thus we think there are at least three different core interests at stake in our practice with the term ‘woman’, and these interests tend to pull in different directions when it comes to interpreting the precise meaning. This multi-strandedness, we believe, is an important difference between moral and legal concepts, on the one hand, and the concept of woman, on the other hand.

Feminists have often sought to provide a definition of ‘woman’ that prioritises one of these strands. We believe that’s a mistake: all three strands are important to our concept, and any attempt to reduce what it takes to be a woman to one of the strands will fail to engage with the richness of our shared practices.

One of our goals is to show how the concept of ‘woman’ can be well-behaved – and a helpful theoretical tool for feminism and feminist theory – despite being more heterogeneous (and multi-stranded) than traditionally assumed. The jazz model provides the underlying theoretical framework for that project.

It is sometimes said that we now live in a ‘post-truth’ or ‘post-fact’ world where the truth is determined by popular opinion more than anything else. As someone who studies truth conditions as part of philosophy of language and semantics, what do you make of all this post-truth talk? Does the idea that we live in a post-truth world concern you at all?

That’s a big question, and a very interesting and important one. I think it is helpful to distinguish different debates associated with the question of post-truth.

First, there is an important academic debate about truth as the standard for belief within philosophy and in some parts of the humanities. Second, there is a debate about what is going on in recent political discourse that flouts standards of epistemic accountability – for instance, many observers construe Trump as promoting a post-truth approach to politics. Finally, there is a broader question about the loss of trust in science and other types of expertise in popular opinion in contemporary culture. These last two issues are more about the degradation of our epistemic practices than about truth per se.

I have the most to say about the first issue, which connects with issues about meaning and objectivity. When thinking about truth, it is very natural to start with a very simple model. There are stable objects and properties out there in the world, and the function of words in our language (and of the concepts associated with them) is to represent these stable features of the world. As the later Wittgenstein pointed out, this simple model plays a crucial role in our ‘folk theory’ of meaning.

In other words, when non-specialists are asked to explain what meaning is, they typically appeal to something like the simple representationalist picture. Of course, our folk theory captures something important about meaning and cognition. But a phenomenon as complex and heterogeneous as meaning cannot be reduced to that simple picture. Indeed, a lot of twentieth-century philosophy of language and linguistics has sought to articulate much more sophisticated models of meaning, which could do justice to the different roles played by words in thought and communication.

This is where the question of post-truth comes in. The term ‘post-truth’ often picks out a particularly radical strand within this broad effort to reject the reduction of meaning to a simple representational model. Derrida and friends, for instance, are often seen as rejecting the idea that there is anything stable or permanent in meaning (be it stability in the objects to be represented, or stability in the representational relation itself). In a nutshell, meaning is in constant flux. In a similar spirit, within the Anglo-American philosophical tradition, Rorty also endorses a post-truth approach. I’ll focus on him here, because he has the significant advantage of saying things very bluntly and clearly.

Rorty’s post-truth approach rests on two key theses. First, a pragmatic thesis about the role of meanings and concepts. In Rorty’s view, the function of cognition is not to represent the world, but to allow us to cope with it. In other words, meanings and concepts are useful tools helping us satisfy our interests in our ongoing engagement with the world.

The second thesis concerns the nature of truth. In Rorty’s view, truth is typically understood as a criterion of correctness for representation. If I say, for instance, “Jacinta Ardern is an impressive leader”, I am aiming to represent the way the world actually is, and my utterance will count as true if it succeeds in doing so. According to Rorty, we should resist the natural tendency to construe our language as representing some purported worldly facts (such as Ardern’s impressiveness). Instead, he thinks truth is a matter of conversational norms. If you respond to my utterance about Ardern, “that’s not true”, you are making a special move in our conversational game – in the same way that you might make a specific move in a game of chess. Roughly, the point of your move is to signal that you won’t let me get away with my statement. In a nutshell, truth marks what we can get away with in a conversation. According to Rorty, there is nothing more objective to the notion of truth than marking this type of move in conversational dynamics.

Where do I stand with respect to these debates? Well, I am in broad agreement with the first of Rorty’s two theses. I agree with Rorty that we should not start our approach to meaning and truth with a ‘metaphysics first’ approach – i.e., start by settling the question of what objects and properties there are in the world, and then define meaning and truth in terms of a representation of those objects and properties. According to pragmatists like Rorty, we should start with an ‘interest first approach’. Our linguistic and conceptual systems are a set of flexible tools, which serve different interests, and perform different functions. When thinking about meaning and truth, it is crucial to put these interests and functions at the centre of one’s account. I think that pragmatists like Rorty are right on that front.

My main point of disagreement with Rorty is about deflating truth to a mere conversational norm (what we can get away with). Spelling out that disagreement in detail would be a long story. One example might be helpful to give a rough idea of my position. Take a concept which we have already mentioned and which is currently generating a lot of attention and debate, the concept of ‘woman’. Can we explain the truth-conditions of utterances using the term ‘woman’ by pointing to a single stable feature of the world, which the word ‘woman’ always represents? I doubt it. Can the truth-conditions of these utterances be explained simply in terms of what we can get away with? Again, I don’t think so.

To make progress on the question of the meaning of ‘woman’, I think it’s crucial to get a clearer picture of the different interests at stake when we use that word. As I suggested earlier, our current practice with the word ‘woman’ is complex. We have an interest in tracking a biological kind (adult human female). We also have an interest in tracking the social roles (caretaking mother, being subordinated to men, etc.) typically associated with that term. In addition, we have an increasingly important interest in keeping track of the class of people who self-classify as women (including trans women).

In my view, the complexity of these partly conflicting interests explains why attempts to find a definition of ‘woman’ face so many difficulties, and why ‘woman’ seems to mean different things in different contexts. But this complexity doesn’t provide any support for the view that the truth about who counts as a woman is simply a matter of what we can get away with in a conversation. In sum then, getting clearer about the meaning of ‘woman’ – and who counts as a woman within particular conversations – involves delving into the complexity of our understanding of ‘woman’, not junking the idea of objective truth.

Am I then worried about a ‘post-truth epidemic’ in academia? Not really. Rorty, for instance, is a very useful authority figure for those interested in discrediting mainstream contemporary Anglo-American philosophy without knowing much about it (or indeed, without knowing anything about it). But the more radical aspects of his views (for instance, about truth as what you can get away with) are not popular in informed circles: they are simply too crude and too simplistic. More generally, when I talk to people outside my discipline I rarely detect any strong post-truth commitments, at least not any that would deflate theorising and argument to a mere battle over what one can get away with.

Let’s now turn to the political side of the post-truth debates. When Trump feeds his supporters the big lie (that the 2020 election was stolen), he is making a demonstrably false claim. The post-truth element in his big lie doesn’t concern the meaning (and truth-conditions) of the words he is using. Instead the post-truth element is that Trump doesn’t seem to care whether his claims are true or false. What is going on here?

There is now some interesting literature in the philosophy of language about the use of demonstrably false claims in politics. I am thinking, for instance, about Jason Stanley’s work on propaganda and fascism. Stanley is interested in Hannah Arendt’s famous suggestion that fascist leaders do something much more sinister than simply lie. The point of their big lies, Arendt suggests, is not to open up a fictional world of wish fulfilment in our imagination. Instead, the goal of fascist leaders is typically to persuade people to believe in the unreality they have created, in the hope that indoctrinated folks will eventually help transform those lies into a new reality – a world in which Trump becomes the actual legitimate president.

So the point of this sort of superficially fact-stating discourse is not to convey truths but to create them. And there are important social signalling and group affiliation effects of this sort of discourse. Am I worried about all this? Absolutely. And I assume you are too.

Finally, I don’t have much to say about the post-truth debate about the loss of trust in science and expertise. Our colleagues in HPS are much more qualified than me to talk about that issue of how and why popular trust in science has eroded. One thing we need to be more aware of, I think, is what a privilege it is to be working in an environment like the university where people cannot ‘get away’ with claiming that black is white and up is down. Careful epistemic practice is one of the core values that unites everyone at the university.

It is well known that philosophy as an academic discipline has a gender imbalance and is skewed heavily towards men. As someone who has fought hard for gender equality within academia, what initiatives have you been involved in during your time at Melbourne, and are you confident that academic philosophy is moving towards gender equality?

Actually, I am not sure I have fought that hard for gender equality in academia. I am, of course, very committed to promoting women at all levels in academic philosophy. But, when I joined the discipline in 2008, the big feminist revolution had already happened.

It’s my colleague Karen Jones who should be credited with changing the culture in philosophy at Melbourne. Karen came to Melbourne in 2002. She immediately became a role model for female undergraduates interested in philosophy. One of her most important initiatives has been to change the dynamics in philosophy discussion. In a male dominated environment, philosophy easily degenerates into a combat sport, where the whole point is to win the argument. That approach is rarely the way to make philosophy attractive to women.

Following Karen’s lead, our goal has been to emphasise the collaborative aspects of philosophy. We try to model philosophy tutorials on dinner parties, where (typically) everybody can participate, have fun and leave feeling good about themselves. This approach has really paid off for us as a discipline and we now have between 37 to 45 per cent women in our major. Obviously, we still have plenty of work to do to reach parity, which is our goal. But I think we are on the right path.

Looking at the profession more generally, I think the situation has really changed for the better in the past twenty years. The visibility of women in philosophy has radically improved: there are now so many women producing excellent work in all areas of philosophy. And there has been a real revolution in how feminist issues are on the philosophical agenda and sexist behaviour within our ranks is called out. My sense is that the situation will continue to improve. One nice consequence of greater female representation in philosophy is that I am now able to assign many more readings from female authors in my undergraduate classes. That makes a big difference to our students.

The next step will be to tackle race inequality. All continuing members of the philosophy discipline are white. That clearly needs to change.

On a more personal level, how has philosophy assisted you personally in both living and dealing with the difficulties of the pandemic over the past two years? Are there particular authors or books which you’ve turned to for consolation?

I work in very theoretical areas of philosophy – concepts, reference, metaethics. So I wouldn’t really expect that type of research to provide much direct solace for the difficulties of life. More effective, for me at least, has been regular yoga!

Like a lot of people, I found it pretty hard to concentrate after many weeks in lockdown and tons of hours on Zoom. But I should also say that iso was a lot less hard on me than for many other people. I’m a bit of an introvert, so there’s a sense in which social isolation falls within my natural habits. And I didn’t have any of the added stress suffered by colleagues with children who had the burden of homeschooling on top of everything else.

In addition, François and I benefited from a rather strange bit of luck. At the beginning of COVID, and out of the blue, we were booted out of the house we had been renting for twelve years. All that happened at the beginning of term. As you can imagine, there was quite a lot of stress at the time. But in the end, we found a much better (albeit much more expensive!) place. This meant that we had a very nice new niche to explore during lockdowns. So what initially looked like an absolute nightmare turned out in the end to be a real blessing.

Another bit of luck was that we developed a new friendship with an acquaintance with whom we formed a single bubble. Deepening that friendship has been a really wonderful experience. And as an added bonus, Francois and I both fell in love with our friend’s adorable Jack Russell terrier. François has morphed from being a very determined dogophobe into a true dogophile. Strange things do sometimes happen.

What was especially hard in these COVID years, however, was to see so many of our students struggle through so much. I did a lot of extra handholding in both teaching and supervision. But all too often I still got the very depressing feeling that much more was needed. I am so glad we can now return to a more normal situation with in-person contact. It is really great to see students enjoy each other’s company in the classroom.

Looking ahead, what will be the focus of your work going forwards? What excites you about this work?

François and I have just finished a period of research leave working on a manuscript on concepts. The project is developing well and I am really excited about the progress we’ve made. This is in very stark contrast with the situation before the leave, where I was on my knees, completely exhausted by all the extra work generated by COVID. In fact, I had almost forgotten how exhilarating it is to work on ambitious philosophical projects.

What’s especially exciting right now is that things seem to be really coming together on the research front. I have been working – for the most part in collaboration with François – on different aspects of an ambitious approach to concepts and mental representation. In longterm projects like this, there is always the worry that the different bits will not end up being as mutually supportive as hoped. It can also be discouraging to see how much disagreement (and often misunderstanding!) there often is when presenting one’s views to colleagues who are coming at similar issues from slightly different perspectives. But I feel we now have a really good grip on what’s distinctive about the project, what its explanatory potential is, and how it relates to its main competitors. And we have made really good progress, in this last research leave, on key theoretical questions. Let’s hope things keep progressing that way. Fingers crossed.

 

Laura Schroeter currently teaches Philosophy of Mind (PHIL20033), Philosophy of Language (PHIL30053), Language and Mind (PHIL40007); she also teaches into Big Questions (PHIL10003). She holds an ARC Discovery Grant on Constructing Social Hierarchy with colleagues at the University of Melbourne and MIT (in the US). She is currently finishing a monograph with François Schroeter that articulates the jazz model of meaning and explains how the model helps to address epistemic and metaphysical puzzles about ethical concepts.