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Abstract:A philosophically useful account of social structure must accommodate the fact that social structures play an important role in structural explanation. But what is a structural explanation? How do structural explanations function in the social sciences? This paper offers a way of thinking about structural explanation and sketches an account of social structure that connects social structures with structural explanation.

There is a deep well of rage inside of me. Rage about how I as an individual have been treated in philosophy; rage about how others I know have been treated; and rage about the conditions that I'm sure affect many women and minorities in philosophy, and have caused many others to leave. Most of the time I suppress this rage and keep it sealed away. Until I came to MIT in 1998, I was in a constant dialogue with myself about whether to quit philosophy, even give up tenure, to do something else. In spite of my deep love for philosophy, it just didn't seem worth it. And I am one of the very lucky ones, one of the ones who has been successful by the dominant standards of the profession. Whatever the numbers say about women and minorities in philosophy, numbers don't begin to tell the story. Things may be getting better in some contexts, but they are far from acceptable. OUTRIGHT DISCRIMINATIONThe situation for women in philosophy has been changing over the past several decades and every woman's experience is different. I was in graduate school at Berkeley from 1979 to 1985. I have held tenure-track or tenured positions in five schools. I am now a full professor. But the rank of full professors is broad and there are many women, such as my wonderful colleague and role model, Judith Thomson, who entered the profession decades before me when the situation was very different from and, to my mind, much worse than mine. So, there has been progress. However, there are trends that have continued throughout my time in the profession, because I see evidence of them today.

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This chapter introduces the main themes of the book and provides summaries of background ideas in feminist theory and analytic philosophy that are helpful for understanding the material that follows. Discussions cover issues concerning the sex/gender distinction, externalism in philosophy of language, the methodological aims of critical social theory, and feminist epistemology with an eye to showing how feminist theory contributes to and draws upon debates in metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of language and related areas of analytic philosophy.