NetNews Usenet Archive 1993 #3/NN_1993_3.iso/spool/soc/feminism/3419

Internet Message Format | 1993-01-28 | 5.3 KB

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From: [e-mail] (Russell Turpin)
Subject: Science & feelings, again  (was: Someone Convince Me)
Nntp-Posting-Host: alexandre-dumas.ics.uci.edu
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Summary: Why is it a hoot?
Newsgroups: soc.feminism
Organization: CS Dept, University of Texas at Austin
Approved: [e-mail]
Lines: 88
Date: 27 Jan 93 19:14:21 GMT
References: <[e-mail]>

-*----
In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (Janis Maria Cortese) writes:
> Yet us examine an actual APPLICATION of science to a social probem
> and see if it tells us about equality as you claim.  When the Bible
> was junked as a true explanation of how the world formed, women all
> over Europe and America were delighted because they no longer had to
> contend with women's God(tm)-given inferiority to men, and they
> falsely concluded that the Truth would out. ...

I have a hard time relating this sentence to anything I know
about modern history.  The Bible has not yet been "junked as a
true explanation of how the world formed."  Among the minority who
did so, many traditional views continued to hold sway.  Consider,
for example, J. S. Mills views on women compared to those of his
female writing companion and lover.

> ... Did it?  But no -- the men in the groves of Academe simpy
> started using the new science of evolution and genetics to work out
> a whole NEW crop of reasons why women were inferior to men!  They
> did exactly the same thing with black people and asians; ...
>
> Science did NOTHING to "prove" anyone's equality.  It was used as a
> tool to prove inferiority, originally, and only after people's
> FEELINGS about their purported inferiority came to the fore was
> science suddenly applied to divining how smart we all are.

Again, I see little reality in this story.  There were feelings on
both sides of the issue both before and after the wrong scientific
claims regarding differential gender and racial intelligence.  The
mistake was corrected not by a battle of feelings, but by better
science.  (Were the former the case, there would be no basis now for
calling it a mistake!)

To take the paradigmatic example, Cyril Burt's work was undone not by
contrary feelings, but by the progress of science finding the flaws in
his methodology and, later, in his data.  The usual reference on this
wrong turn in science is Stephen Gould's "The Mismeasure of Man."
This is an excellent work, in part because its arguments are
scientific in nature rather than emotional.

If these things are merely a matter of pitting feelings against each
other, I have no way of judging between Cyril Burt's feelings and
Stephen Gould's, nor, for that matter, between the feelings of a
creationist and a biologist regarding evolution.  There is no reason
to think that modern feelings are any better than traditional
feelings.  But in science I can see progress by objective measures,
and the flaws of Cyril Burt's work and creationist science are now
clearly demonstrated.  (I do not know what it would man to find a flaw
in their feelings.)

Undoubtedly, science will take wrong turns in the future and
undoubtedly some of these wrong turns will be motivated by various
scientists' feelings on certain issues.  But in science, there is a
way to correct such mistakes, and to see the nature of these mistakes.
(Some may see this as a fairly rocky road, but at least it does make
progress.)  In battles of feelings, there is no way to *ever*
determine that a feeling is wrong.  There are still people who feel
that women are dumber than men, that blacks are dumber than whites,
that people appeared suddenly only six millenia ago, etc.  Purely as a
matter of feeling, these are no worse than their opposites.  Only with
reference to evidence, analysis, and critical discussion can these
views be labeled incorrect.

> ... The study that tried to find out where rational thought was
> located is a hoot.  Originally, it was thought to exist in the
> parietal sections of the brain -- the sides, over your ears.  All
> the original papers by the "scientists" of the time published tons
> of data proving that women had smaller parietal lobes than men and
> larger frontal lobes, where feelings were thought to reside.  When
> it was discovered through studying head injuries that forethought
> and rationality are intergrated in the frontal lobe -- well,
> wouldn't you know it!  Damned if all the researchers didn't go back
> and look over their old findings and find out that women actually
> had smaller FRONTAL lobes than men! ...

Excellent example!  Why is this a hoot?  The only reason for deriding
it so is that we, now that science has improved, can look back and see
how piss-poor their methodology was.  If, on the other hand, Janis
Cortese's "hoot" derives from her feelings, then I see no reason to
give it more weight than the feelings of those who did these studies!

Russell

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