"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

[neoanjou.livejournal.com]

Interesting - now within the original context doesn't the quotation (or at least the bit

"Number is not like some of the other grammatical modes which ... do not express precisely something in reality"

actually make sense? I mean in contrast with gender, number does actually reflect something 'more' objective (people may not agree whether an apple is a male or female thing, but will probably agree whether there are one, two [the dual being an independent number in many languages] or more apples).

I must admit the bit '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' is somewhat dense though and I can't really understand it in anything more that a general impression that it relates impression within the mind with the real world.

[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!

[kake]

I should probably point out that calling bullshit on bad writing is part of my job :)

[r-e-mercia.livejournal.com]

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

[pozorvlak.livejournal.com]

Yes, I think it is meaningful, though the big-wall-O'-text does put one off rather. As for the bit you cite, I think it means "There are things (call them "motives") that cause the intellect to conceive of things in the way it does. Some motives are not something in the thing being conceived of; number is not such a motive." See what I mean about deeply nested clauses? Inflected languages have word endings so it's much clearer what every part of the sentence refers to. And I'll bet that "could be moved to conceive" is all one word in Latin.

[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.

[half-of-monty.livejournal.com]

Doesn't it go without saying that anything about motives is completely inpenetrable?

[pozorvlak.livejournal.com]

Quite possibly :-) This also illustrates the danger in writing something off simply because it's hard to understand.

[half-of-monty.livejournal.com]

Actually, I was disproving my own point - that Wikipedia article is rather good. I should read it properly some time.

(Who writes all the wikipedia maths pages? They are almost universally great!)

[pozorvlak.livejournal.com]

They're not all great, but many are. I don't know who writes them - I've contributed to a couple, and I know that michiexile is responsible for about half of the page on operads. Speaking of which, I must contribute more to that - it didn't contain the definition of an algebra for an operad when I last checked, and all the examples were heavily topological.

[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...

[wholepint.livejournal.com]

You swine. :) I want to reread this later when not at work and let my brain actually think for once because I don't think I actually quite understand it right now.

I was going to post on that earlier thread and say it sounded suspiciously like something taken from a literary theory essay translated from French into English.

[michiexile]

I DID try to algebraisize the examples! However, it seems to have been edited a LOT from UChicago lately, where May holds sway over what an operad is supposed to be, thus provoking a LOT of topology.

[michiexile]

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

[kehoea.livejournal.com]

WP thinks your story (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johannes_Scotus_Eriugena) refers to another John the Scot, btw.

(Please to be excusing the duplicate.)

[pozorvlak.livejournal.com]

Aha! Thanks. I got the story from Russell's History of Western Philosophy, but it's been some years since I read it, and I was never terribly hot on Scholastic philosophers anyway.