"Gender theory" - the answer

[pozorvlak]

OK, it looks like the gender theory quotation thread has reached the end of its life-cycle, so it's time to reveal the answer. Yes, that's right: I knew where the quotation came from all along, and was using it... not really to test you, but to test the author's assumptions. I'm sorry if any of you feel betrayed by this - if it helps, I think you all passed :-)

Anyway, the quotation came (as ryani correctly spotted) from Paul Graham's essay How To Do Philosophy (which some of you might find interesting: I've been out of the phil game for a while, and would be interested to hear comments from some more recent students of philosophy). The surrounding paragraph is as follows:

The field of philosophy is still shaken from the fright Wittgenstein gave it. [13] Later in life he spent a lot of time talking about how words worked. Since that seems to be allowed, that's what a lot of philosophers do now. Meanwhile, sensing a vacuum in the metaphysical speculation department, the people who used to do literary criticism have been edging Kantward, under new names like "literary theory," "critical theory," and when they're feeling ambitious, plain "theory." The writing is the familiar word salad:

Gender is not like some of the other grammatical modes which express precisely a mode of conception without any reality that corresponds to the conceptual mode, and consequently do not express precisely something in reality by which the intellect could be moved to conceive a thing the way it does, even where that motive is not something in the thing as such. [14]

The singularity I've described is not going away. There's a market for writing that sounds impressive and can't be disproven. There will always be both supply and demand. So if one group abandons this territory, there will always be others ready to occupy it.

Footnote 14 then says

This is actually from the Ordinatio of Duns Scotus (ca. 1300), with "number" replaced by "gender." Plus ca change.

Wolter, Allan (trans), Duns Scotus: Philosophical Writings, Nelson, 1963, p. 92.

Given the time he was writing, Duns Scotus (sometimes known as John the Scot¹) was probably writing in Latin, hence my cryptic remarks about sentence structure and inflected languages :-)

On one level, PG's purpose is to show how dense writing can make the reader impute deep meaning that isn't there. More importantly, I think, John the Scot was one of the Scholastic school of pre-Cartesian philosophers, who've had a bad name in philosophy since, basically, Descartes, and are known for hair-splitting, confused, overly complex, overly theological, how-many-angels-can-dance-on-the-head-of-a-pin philosophy: PG was trying to show that modern gender theory is comparable to the worst of medieval philosophy. Which would be a lot more convincing if he'd shown some actual modern writings, rather than relying on their reputation, and if he hadn't chosen a piece that was obviously badly translated from Latin.

[Incidentally, you can often tell when English has been written by someone with a Classical education: they nest clauses in a way that's easy and natural in inflected languages, but very unnatural in English. "These things having been done, they returned to Northampton, in order to show filial piety" sounds ghastly, but "these things having been done" becomes the snappy and idiomatic "res facta" in Latin, and "in order to" becomes simply "ut". I am occasionally guilty of this myself.]

So I thought I'd show this quotation to some people who were knowledgeable about gender theory, and see how they reacted. Unfair? Unethical? Unscientific? Probably, but certainly no worse than the infamous Sokal Affair². I guess I was hoping for someone to say "Hey, this isn't about gender at all! What are you trying to pull?" but that was probably unfair: however, I think you reacted pretty well. steerpikelet gave what I think is a pretty clear and reasonable elucidation of the meaning (s/gender/number/ into what she said, and I think you'll agree). She then disagreed with it, prompting an interesting discussion by half_of_monty, totherme and neoanjou about her assumptions and PG/JtS's assumptions. nou, far from being impressed by the dense verbiage, said "What abominable writing" (and mi_guida agreed - you know you're in trouble when a lawyer thinks your writing is too dense and unclear :-) )

¹John the Scot is the subject of my favourite philosophical story ever. He was once at dinner with the King, who asked him "Tell me, John, what separates a Scot from a sot?". John replied "Only the table, Your Majesty".

Even better than the one about A.J. Ayer, Mike Tyson and Naomi Campbell :-)

²While I think the Sokal hoax proves considerably less about the bankruptcy of postmodernist thought than Sokal claims (read the Wikipedia article for why), I find it especially amusing that hoaxes of this sort have been perpetrated on computer science journals at least half-a-dozen times :-)

Comments

[half-of-monty.livejournal.com]

Hee hee.

I was wondering just yesterday whether I'd fall for the one where they get you to give an actor electric shocks to prove you could have worked in a concentration camp. Mind you, I don't think falling for this trick means I'm necessarily capable of genocide :-)

Interesting about your Latin creeping into English. I think mine is much ropier (having been unable just now to remember what a gerund is), so I don't think I do that, but my written language can get a bit convoluted so I'll see if I can spot myself!

[r-e-mercia.livejournal.com]

A gerund is a sweet fluffy thing which live in a forest as any fule kno.

[pozorvlak.livejournal.com]

A gerund is a... (flicks through textbook under desk) a verbal substantive, molesworth, any fule kno that.

[pozorvlak.livejournal.com]

The other thing is that mathematicians and hackers are more used to dealing with recursion than most people. I often find myself constructing sentences that require nested brackets, and have to force myself to break them up into three or four smaller sentences.

[totherme.livejournal.com]

It would be interesting to see what might happen the language spoken (and written?) by a few generations of isolated hackers.

Actually, it'd be interesting to see what might happen to their technology too...

[totherme.livejournal.com]

what might happen to the language...

Perhaps it'd just degenerate like this...

[michiexile]

I once built a conlang for an SF setting that had a working stack.