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And yet, would the feminist science claim that intersubjectivity is the correct view to take? Can it? Or must it be that intersubjectivity is only the view of c

by wfo 10y ago

And yet, would the feminist science claim that intersubjectivity is the correct view to take? Can it? Or must it be that intersubjectivity is only the view of certain feminists and itself depends on the observer -- to some observer, independent observable facts exists, and to some others, they do not as they are intersubjective? I think your position is interesting if odd and completely alienated from the way science is done or thought about in all of human history. I think the downvotes are coming from referring to standard "incorrect" science in your view (as it does not embrace intersubjectivity) as "masculine" and the "correct" view as "feminine" -- to put gender labels on abstract philosophical positions seems contrived and silly to some (me, at least). What does masculinity have to do with belief in objective facts? Why do only women understand that facts depend on the observer? Is it just because the person who introduced reference frames and general relativity to modern science, Albert Einstein, was female? What does adding these incendiary labels to the positions you outline and contrast add to the discussion, other than encouraging your mostly male and mostly skeptical-of-gender-politics audience to not listen?

danharaj 10y ago
Intersubjectivity is a major part of modern psychology. It is a relatively new concept. Its influence grows slowly as more and more people find it usefully applicable to their work. Like most science, actually. Intersubjectivity is not a normative idea or a theory, but more of a point of view. It is a heuristic that says, in order to study a thing, study the subjective experiences of that thing and their relations. Observer-invariance is too strong of a constraint on what is a fact: physics already embraces this. What you want instead is covariance, which is how observations transform when you change the observer. Studying the covariance of observations is intrinsically a study of intersubjectivity, although I need to point out here that I am merely making an analogy between human observers and the abstract observers of physics, which are themselves simplifications of human observers. > independent observable facts Independent of what? Observation? A fact is necessarily tied to how it is observed. That's what I'm talking about here. It is a fundamental aspect of the scientific method that scientific observations can be made by different people and then their results can be compared. The dependence of facts on observation is absolutely crucial, so I'm not sure what sort of independence you're talking about. W.r.t. masculine and feminine, I wrote my first post on a phone while in a taxi and I think one of my paragraphs clarifying this point got eaten by a pothole. I clarified in a sibling post but I'll expound here: I don't mean anything intrinsic to men or women. I am referring to archetypal masculinity and femininity, which are social constructs. Every society has had these archetypes, for example the ideas of Yin and Yang, the feminine and masculine principles of ancient Chinese thought. There is little physical basis as they apply to the human sexual dimorphism for these archetypes and they vary from society to society. There is well established scientific literature observing these aspects of society. For example, women are expected to understand the emotions of others far more than men are. I'm time constrained so I won't cite this; it's not hard to peruse the literature. Does this mean that men can't empathize or that it makes them girly if they do? Of course not! > What does adding these incendiary labels to the positions you outline and contrast add to the discussion, other than encouraging your mostly male and mostly skeptical-of-gender-politics audience not listen? I don't feel like I'm being incendiary. Why are you receiving my words that way? It's an interesting phenomenon. And this might sound pedantic but, I don't care if you're skeptical of gender politics because gender politics are real, and they have been real for thousands of years. Masculinity and femininity as social concepts are real in that sense whether you acknowledge their existence or not. Feminists did not invent gender politics, they merely scrutinize them. There was a time when gender was considered an inviolable concept writ large across the cosmos by a male deity. Was a time? Still a time for hundreds of millions of people. The fact that people, mostly women because they were the most incentivized to do so, started critically engaging these ideas philosophically (thus laying the groundwork for scientific investigation) is a boon to me and you. I would suggest y'all stop taking gendered analysis of social phenomenon personally because it can only enrich your conceptual toolbox. > I think your position is interesting if odd and completely alienated from the way science is done or thought about in all of human history. I did math research a long time ago. I'm still pretty connected to the mathematical research community. These ideas are corroborated by my own experiences. We need to make a distinction between what people say is the way science is done and what the actual way science is done. We need to make a distinction between the way science is thought about and the way people think they think about science is done. This isn't pedantry or navel gazing or postmodern bullshit, this is hard-nosed critical thinking.
- wfo 10y ago
  Thanks for the explanation. >This isn't pedantry or navel gazing or postmodern bullshit, this is hard-nosed critical thinking. I don't think it is any of that -- to me it smells more like a new word for classical philosophical skepticism/relativism. Which is very hard-nosed critical thinking and perniciously difficult to dismiss (see G.E. Moore's 'rejection' of skepticism -- "here is one hand") In fact while you say it is very new, I'd posit that it is very, very old. Thousands of years old. The essence of it from what I understand as you've explained it, minus the unnecessary gendering of the concepts, is taught in undergrad philosophy courses, has been for centuries. My first point was trying to get at this question: we have two ways to approach science, the traditional approach where we choose to believe facts are objective and try to behave that way, and the "intersubjective" one. But which one should we take? What is the right framework to even make such a decision? Even if you simply assume the goal is predictive power, do we assume there is an objective assessment of predictive power that we try to get at, or that these predictions are inherently intersubjective and can't be compared so that no determination can be made? And sure gender politics exist. But not everything is always about gender. I think what people reject is not considering gender politics at all, but for example trying to make science about gender. The relativist/skeptical position does not need to be feminine more than the realist position must be masculine. There are social gender structures that lay the burden of expectation on members in society, yes, but they do not completely pervade and define every moment of every thought of every person -- there are some instances in which we are human first and gendered second. And most I would suggest, believe (specifically hard) science is one of those instances. Or we should treat it that way. The entire purpose of mathematics is that there is no "female mathematics" and "male mathematics". To that point, I would really be interested in hearing a little more about how intersubjectivity plays out in the mathematics research community. This is what skeptical-about-gender-politics is about. Not rejecting gender politics themselves, but rejecting turning every discussion about anything into a discussion about gender. Which often quickly evolves into an attack on men (abusive, 'privilege', implying the work men do means less because of their advantage, etc). Where everything bad is the fault of "the patriarchy" (read: men). Which is tiresome. And not at all what you have done. And as to your request, >And this might sound pedantic but, I don't care if you're skeptical of gender politics because gender politics are real, and they have been real for thousands of years. >I would suggest y'all stop taking gendered analysis of social phenomenon personally because it can only enrich your conceptual toolbox. I would say that you should embrace intersubjectivity in your own position and understand that your posts cannot be objective, they are observed and interpreted by many others, so what matters is not what you say, rather, how it is observed by your audience. If you want it to be a strong argument /to HN/ you should take some steps to avoid throwing up red flags that HN readers are used to using to dismiss arguments out of hand as a tribal attack (this is what I meant by "incendiary" -- I was not incensed by it but the 'men are dumb but women are smart' trope is familiar because it is as ubiquitous as it is uninteresting. Your position is not this at all, but it superficially contains some of the same characteristics). Again thanks for your thoughtful response, I enjoyed it a great deal.

by wfo 10y ago

danharaj 10y ago

Intersubjectivity is a major part of modern psychology. It is a relatively new concept. Its influence grows slowly as more and more people find it usefully applicable to their work. Like most science, actually. Intersubjectivity is not a normative idea or a theory, but more of a point of view. It is a heuristic that says, in order to study a thing, study the subjective experiences of that thing and their relations. Observer-invariance is too strong of a constraint on what is a fact: physics already embraces this. What you want instead is covariance, which is how observations transform when you change the observer. Studying the covariance of observations is intrinsically a study of intersubjectivity, although I need to point out here that I am merely making an analogy between human observers and the abstract observers of physics, which are themselves simplifications of human observers. > independent observable facts Independent of what? Observation? A fact is necessarily tied to how it is observed. That's what I'm talking about here. It is a fundamental aspect of the scientific method that scientific observations can be made by different people and then their results can be compared. The dependence of facts on observation is absolutely crucial, so I'm not sure what sort of independence you're talking about. W.r.t. masculine and feminine, I wrote my first post on a phone while in a taxi and I think one of my paragraphs clarifying this point got eaten by a pothole. I clarified in a sibling post but I'll expound here: I don't mean anything intrinsic to men or women. I am referring to archetypal masculinity and femininity, which are social constructs. Every society has had these archetypes, for example the ideas of Yin and Yang, the feminine and masculine principles of ancient Chinese thought. There is little physical basis as they apply to the human sexual dimorphism for these archetypes and they vary from society to society. There is well established scientific literature observing these aspects of society. For example, women are expected to understand the emotions of others far more than men are. I'm time constrained so I won't cite this; it's not hard to peruse the literature. Does this mean that men can't empathize or that it makes them girly if they do? Of course not! > What does adding these incendiary labels to the positions you outline and contrast add to the discussion, other than encouraging your mostly male and mostly skeptical-of-gender-politics audience not listen? I don't feel like I'm being incendiary. Why are you receiving my words that way? It's an interesting phenomenon. And this might sound pedantic but, I don't care if you're skeptical of gender politics because gender politics are real, and they have been real for thousands of years. Masculinity and femininity as social concepts are real in that sense whether you acknowledge their existence or not. Feminists did not invent gender politics, they merely scrutinize them. There was a time when gender was considered an inviolable concept writ large across the cosmos by a male deity. Was a time? Still a time for hundreds of millions of people. The fact that people, mostly women because they were the most incentivized to do so, started critically engaging these ideas philosophically (thus laying the groundwork for scientific investigation) is a boon to me and you. I would suggest y'all stop taking gendered analysis of social phenomenon personally because it can only enrich your conceptual toolbox. > I think your position is interesting if odd and completely alienated from the way science is done or thought about in all of human history. I did math research a long time ago. I'm still pretty connected to the mathematical research community. These ideas are corroborated by my own experiences. We need to make a distinction between what people say is the way science is done and what the actual way science is done. We need to make a distinction between the way science is thought about and the way people think they think about science is done. This isn't pedantry or navel gazing or postmodern bullshit, this is hard-nosed critical thinking.

wfo 10y ago
Thanks for the explanation. >This isn't pedantry or navel gazing or postmodern bullshit, this is hard-nosed critical thinking. I don't think it is any of that -- to me it smells more like a new word for classical philosophical skepticism/relativism. Which is very hard-nosed critical thinking and perniciously difficult to dismiss (see G.E. Moore's 'rejection' of skepticism -- "here is one hand") In fact while you say it is very new, I'd posit that it is very, very old. Thousands of years old. The essence of it from what I understand as you've explained it, minus the unnecessary gendering of the concepts, is taught in undergrad philosophy courses, has been for centuries. My first point was trying to get at this question: we have two ways to approach science, the traditional approach where we choose to believe facts are objective and try to behave that way, and the "intersubjective" one. But which one should we take? What is the right framework to even make such a decision? Even if you simply assume the goal is predictive power, do we assume there is an objective assessment of predictive power that we try to get at, or that these predictions are inherently intersubjective and can't be compared so that no determination can be made? And sure gender politics exist. But not everything is always about gender. I think what people reject is not considering gender politics at all, but for example trying to make science about gender. The relativist/skeptical position does not need to be feminine more than the realist position must be masculine. There are social gender structures that lay the burden of expectation on members in society, yes, but they do not completely pervade and define every moment of every thought of every person -- there are some instances in which we are human first and gendered second. And most I would suggest, believe (specifically hard) science is one of those instances. Or we should treat it that way. The entire purpose of mathematics is that there is no "female mathematics" and "male mathematics". To that point, I would really be interested in hearing a little more about how intersubjectivity plays out in the mathematics research community. This is what skeptical-about-gender-politics is about. Not rejecting gender politics themselves, but rejecting turning every discussion about anything into a discussion about gender. Which often quickly evolves into an attack on men (abusive, 'privilege', implying the work men do means less because of their advantage, etc). Where everything bad is the fault of "the patriarchy" (read: men). Which is tiresome. And not at all what you have done. And as to your request, >And this might sound pedantic but, I don't care if you're skeptical of gender politics because gender politics are real, and they have been real for thousands of years. >I would suggest y'all stop taking gendered analysis of social phenomenon personally because it can only enrich your conceptual toolbox. I would say that you should embrace intersubjectivity in your own position and understand that your posts cannot be objective, they are observed and interpreted by many others, so what matters is not what you say, rather, how it is observed by your audience. If you want it to be a strong argument /to HN/ you should take some steps to avoid throwing up red flags that HN readers are used to using to dismiss arguments out of hand as a tribal attack (this is what I meant by "incendiary" -- I was not incensed by it but the 'men are dumb but women are smart' trope is familiar because it is as ubiquitous as it is uninteresting. Your position is not this at all, but it superficially contains some of the same characteristics). Again thanks for your thoughtful response, I enjoyed it a great deal.