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A
Out of the vat.
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Hello. Welcome to out of the Vat, a podcast where we talk to philosophers about their work and about their lives both inside and outside of philosophy. I'm Ewan Rogers. Today I'll be speaking to Kathryn Fuhrman. Kathryn is a philosopher of public policy. She currently teaches at University College Cork, where she directs the MA in Health and Society. In January 2020, she'll be moving to the University of Liverpool where she'll lecture in philosophy, politics and economics. Okay. Hello, Catherine, thanks for coming.
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C
Hi, thanks so much for having me.
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B
Can you first tell me a little bit about what you're working on at the moment?
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C
I'm just starting to write a book called Going It Alone Epistemically, and it's about people who resist the experts. So this comes out of my PhD work, which was on Thabo Mbeki's AIDS denialism in South Africa. He became suspicious of mainstream AIDS science because he thought that there was some racism going on there. And he seriously went it alone epistemically. He seriously resisted the experts and engaged in large scale independence, evidence gathering, and came to believe all kinds of strange things about aids. Mostly that HIV doesn't cause AIDS and that the medication that people need if they have AIDS is in fact toxic. And so anti atrovirals, which is the medication that you need if you have AIDS, didn't become available in South Africa until 2004. This had huge public health implications. 171,000 avoidable new infections, 340,000 deaths. So by the time I came to the end of my PhD, I thought no one should ever go it alone epistemically. People should always just trust the experts and the things that they're experts about. But then I kept on encountering cases where people went it alone epistemically and, and were really successful and they were right to resist the experts. And so the book is kind of an exploration of various cases of people resisting the experts more or less successfully. And I'm hoping that by the end of it I can kind of write a little like, guide at the end about if you're thinking about going alone epistemically. Is this a good idea for you? Are you going to become like Tagu Mbeki, who everyone ended up dead, or are you going to end up in one of these more successful cases?
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B
Okay, can you just kind of tell us a bit more about what you mean by going it alone epistemically?
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C
I mean, whenever people decide that they're going to engage in their own evidence gathering to try and become something like their own experts. The going it alone bit is kind of a misnomer because typically people don't become their own experts as individuals. Tabu Mbeki is a rare outlier in this. Typically they do it in groups. So think about your favorite cases of people who try to train up as their own expert. Climate denialists, anti vaxxers, you know, pick your own group. They're typically not doing it as individuals, they're doing it as small collectives resisting the experts. And so what I'm really interested in is this moment of resisting the experts and the various ways in which people do that.
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B
Okay, can you tell us a little bit more about these successful cases of people going alone?
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C
Sure. So I think that one of the most interesting successful cases that I've been reading about recently is a group called the Jane Collective, who, who were a group of radical feminists operating in Chicago in the late 60s and early 70s. And this was pre Roe versus Wade in the United States. So abortion was properly illegal. They started as a group of women who just wanted to hook other women up with safe abortions and it turned out that that was totally impossible. And so instead they self trained as abortionists and basically ran their own independent abortion service, but got like thousands of people successfully through their self trained abortion facility before the law changed and then they didn't have to do that anymore. And so that's kind of case of like an extremely successful going it alone case where they, they just had no option of turning to the experts because of the law at the time. And so they self trained in this extremely successful way. And part of what might have made them successful was that they didn't need to know a huge amount about medicine. They could just get trained in kind of one skill. It wasn't embedded in this big, bigger body of knowledge. And so it might have been the isolated nature of the problem that allowed them to do it.
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B
So, so you, you, you grew up in South Africa, right? And is this, is this maybe connected to why you've worked on AIDS denialism?
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C
Absolutely. So I came of age in the midst of the South African AIDS crisis and I started out my PhD being super angry about that, that there were so many people who'd been so majorly let down by the government. And I was really angry. But the more I worked on it, the more I came to see Thombeki, the main guy behind all of this, as kind of more of a tragic hero rather than a villain. So I think he got everything horribly wrong, but I think that he was Kind of trying his best and was making errors that any one of us in a similar situation could have made. But it started out as an angry project. Given the scale of the tragedy in South Africa.
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B
Can you tell us about the most controversial philosophical position you've ever held?
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So my most controversial philosophical position, I don't think should be a controversial philosophical position. And I think in practice it probably isn't. Okay, so here it is. I think that it should be permissible for philosophers to engage in real world cases and real world practices as a legitimate part of their philosophical practice. And there's a way, there's a sense in which a lot of mainstream analytic philosophy really doesn't like that and thinks that people who do too much applied work may be a little bit stupid. And there are clearly loads of people who are engaged in philosophy, philosophy that's very close to practice, that are very smart and doing interesting work, but often from the position of being on the defensive. So Kusim Kassam has a new book called Vices of the Mind, which is about various ways in which people's vices can impede them from having good beliefs. And he starts out that book by kind of defending his practice of engaging in lots of real world cases of vices of the mind. And so he starts, even as a really famous prominent professor of philosophy, by defending the practice of engaging in practice. Similarly, Sabina Leonelli, who won the Lakitache Prize last year, one of the most prestigious philosophy of science awards, has this book called Data Driven Science, in which she starts with the practice of data in biology and develops philosophy of biology out of that. But if you read the book, she's also very defensive that this should count as legitimate philosophy. And so my most controversial philosophical view is one about method, which is that philosophers should be allowed to, as part of their practice, engage in this really messy real world stuff. And part of the reason I don't think this should be controversial at all is because I'm not saying that this is the only way philosophy should be done. If you want to work on whether or not color is a primary or secondary quality, I also think that's great. I just think this should be allowed.
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Okay, sure. And so why do you think this does seem so controversial?
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I have no idea. I think there's a lot of peculiar gatekeeping around philosophy about what counts as legitimate philosophy. And it might be that historically philosophy was a more encompassing domain, and other bits of philosophy have now become things like sociology and anthropology. And so I don't know why this is Controversial, really?
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B
What philosophical position have you changed your mind about?
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C
So I've been thinking about this a lot, and I don't think I've had any, like, major philosophical mind shifts over time. But I think that I frequently change my mind around specific things that I'm reading and working on at the moment. And that's because I'm just kind of deeply, philosophically gullible. So I believe everything I read the first time around. I'm just kind of like, yeah, of course. That's a great idea. And then I'll read something that's in direct opposition. I'll be like, that's also a great idea. And then I have to do something to revise my beliefs, because it's everything can't be a great idea. And so I don't think I've had any major shifts in my views, but I do think that given that I believe everything I read the first time around, I have to frequently change my mind about stuff.
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B
So I guess you've also maybe changed your mind about whether going to learn epistemically is always a bad idea.
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C
Yes, you're absolutely right about that. When I got to the end of my PhD, I was like, and everyone dies. Except, actually, while I'd been researching for my PhD, I'd already encountered examples of people who'd gone it alone really successfully, and I just sort of ignored them. So there's this great book called Impure Science by Stephen Epstein. If I could write half as well as Epstein, my life would be different. And Impure Science is entirely a book around early AIDS activism, and particularly looking at the urban American gay scene and the way in which gay men in places like San Francisco and New York were resisting the experts on early AIDS treatment in a way that was so successful that they basically became the experts and were brought in as advisors for early doses of antiretrovirals. And so there was some, like, part of the back of my mind that knew that, you know, you could successfully go it alone epistemically because of this great book. But I just sort of ignored it because I was so horrified by the magnitude of the disaster of the AIDS crisis in South Africa.
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B
Right, yeah, sure. It gets interesting. You say, so they became the experts. So I guess what determines whether someone's an expert or not? Is it just the amount of knowledge, or is it something more social?
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C
Oh, man, that is such a hard question. So social epistemologists would say that being an expert just means that you are more likely to have more true beliefs than false ones. But that's really unhelpful. So typically when I'm talking about experts, and this doesn't apply to the early AIDS activists, I mean, people who are credentialed and who part of the mainstream scientific community. But when people try to become their own experts, they're not trying to become credentialed or mainstream in quite the same way. They're trying to do something closer to what the social epistemologists think. They're trying to, like, get more true beliefs than false ones. And so I think that's a super hard question about, like, who counts as an expert? And there are lots of excellent philosophers who are trying to figure that out, and hopefully one of them will just give me the right answer.
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B
Now, what is the most recent work of fiction that you've read?
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C
So I've just started reading a book called the Quiet Violence of Dreams by K. Selodiker, and I picked this up at the airport leaving South Africa. I've just come back from holiday back home, and I think it's about a young black man who develops psychosis. And it's not clear whether or not the psychosis is caused by his marijuana use or if it's more a result of kind of living in South Africa, a hostile environment if you are a young black man. And so I've been desperately trying to get my hands on this book for ages. Couldn't find it anywhere in the uk. It was extremely expensive to order in. And sure as heck, as I was about to board my flight, I found a coffee at the airport. And so I've only just started to read it. So I think that's what it's going to be about.
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Okay. And before that.
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So I've just finished reading a book that I thought was really good called Look Up. Her Name is on my phone. It's called the Red Word by Sarah Henstra. It's about rape culture at an Ivy League American institution. And I really enjoyed it because it took me back to my experience of being an undergraduate student in South Africa. Bizarrely, I didn't go to an Ivy League university. None of this should have been familiar to me because it's so far away. And the novel is largely set around sororities and frat houses and the rape culture in that place. But at my university, there's no frats and no sororities. It was like a liberal arts college in the middle of nowhere, but the whole university was structured around houses, and houses operated a lot like the sororities and frat houses. So I was a bite girl. And you knew what all of men's residential halls were. And they were kind of. They were kind of unspoken rules or maybe some of them were quite spoken about, which men's residences you could go near and when. So don't go to Smut's house after dark. And so all of that was really familiar from the novel. But also part of what I liked about the novel was kind of more personal than that. So the protagonist finds herself living off campus for a portion of time in this radical feminist lesbian house. And for a little bit of my time at university, I find myself living in a radical feminist lesbian house. And we did radical feminist things the way you can only do in your early 20s. So we, we put on the Vagina Monologues and had a nude photo shoot, which was up at the university. And so there was a lot in the novel that made me kind of remember what it was like to be at that portion of my life. But obviously the novel's exaggerated form of all of it. But it was interesting to kind of go back.
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B
What's your favorite TV show?
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C
So this is a hard one. I watch a lot of tv. I'm like the queen of the Netflix binge. But I think that almost everything I watch is kind of terrible.
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B
That's okay. You can still be your favorite.
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C
Well, I know, but then it's difficult to kind of like pick out of like all of the terrible, like what you think is vaguely possible. So something I have enjoyed quite recently was Good Girls on Netflix, which is like three women who found themselves in tough circumstances, mostly financially caused. And so they decide that the way they're going to get themselves out of this is to commit one crime, which is to rob their local grocery store. And it becomes substantially more complicated than that. And they find themselves deep in the criminal underbelly of their town. And so I thought that was thoroughly entertaining. I liked that.
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B
Can you now tell us what you wanted to be when you grew up?
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C
I thought for a really long time that I was going to be an artist. And I was such a. Such a prolific painter as a small child. There's no way to say that in a non pretentious way. And my mother had to go to the local newspaper and buy rolls of newspaper print for me to paint on to keep up with my strong paper demands as a toddler. And I really believed I was going to be an artist until I was about 16 or 17. And then I needed to make my final subject selection for school and was told that science would be A more sensible subject choice than art, and ultimately became a philosopher, which is clearly a very sensible career option. But I strongly believed I was going to be an artist from a toddler all the way through until a teenager.
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B
Do you still do any arts?
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C
I mean, not. Well, I'm actually no good, really. I frequently think that I'm gonna, like, reclaim my mental space from work anxiety by drawing. And then I draw, like, stupid little pictures of chickens and nonsense like that.
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Nothing wrong with that.
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C
Well, totally. Like high art. Like, my chicken illustrations are not gonna make me a fence.
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B
Now, can you tell us what you like about being a philosopher?
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C
I think what I like about being a philosopher is probably true for any kind of academic job. So I really enjoy teaching. I run a master's program in philosophy and health, and I just have great students. And so I really like teaching. I really like supervising students work. I really like interacting with students on the more professional end of the spectrum, I suppose. I really enjoy all the intellectual autonomy I get. All the projects I do are entirely my own. I don't have to defer to authority. Authority when figuring out what I'm working on. And so I really enjoy the intellectual autonomy of being able to kind of pick my projects and make them my own. But I think it would be true for any academic job. So I think classicists and literary people and academic accountants have similar kinds of freedoms.
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B
Yeah. Okay. So is there anything specific about the philosophy world that you like?
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I really enjoy the intellectual playfulness about philosophy. So. So in philosophy, there's a sense that you can kind of pick any problem you're interested in and play with it. And there are kind of very few rules of engagement around that. And so I enjoy that. Academic philosophy provides the space to kind of be intellectually playful in a way that I suspect I wouldn't be able to have in other careers.
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B
And what don't you like about being a philosopher?
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C
So again, I suspect that some of the things I don't like about being a philosopher are problems that I have with, you know, universities in general. So having an academic job involves doing lots of extremely boring paperwork. So much more paperwork than I ever realized an academic job could involve. So I don't like that. But again, that'd be true in any kind of academic job you do. I think there are problems that are specific to philosophy. So some of those problems are. I think there's quite a lot of snobbery around what does and doesn't count as philosophy. I've already mentioned that before, and clearly we have a sexism problem in philosophy, there are very few women philosophers professionally. I think that's a real problem. And I think being taken seriously and tackling that problem is also difficult. And so I think that don't like the intellectual snobbery around who gets to count as a philosopher and not don't like the sexism problem that's resulted in so few women philosophers in the discipline.
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B
Okay. Thank you very much, Katherine.
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C
Thanks so much.
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You've been listening to out of the vat, a podcast brought to you by the Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method, the Forum for Philosophy, and the Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Science, all based at the London School of Economics and Political Science.