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From: pepke@ds1.scri.fsu.EDU (Eric Pepke)
Newsgroups: soc.feminism
Subject: Re: synonyms
Message-ID: <3144@sun13.scri.fsu.edu>
Date: 3 Jun 91 19:32:07 GMT
References: <1991May24.220315.10248@aero.org> <1991May25.125043.23449@panix.uucp> <3084@sun13.scri.fsu.edu> <1991May30.205755.6765@panix.uucp>
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In article <1991May30.205755.6765@panix.uucp> panix!mara@cmcl2.nyu.EDU (Mara Chibnik) writes:

>I don't understand Eric's complaint.

My apologies for being unclear.

It is fairly common in English to indicate agreement with a negative
statement with a negative response.  This is not true in some other
languages.  So, when you said

> But I wouldn't consider the deficiency to come from gender
>  >>bias.

I agreed, and said, "No," as in "No, I wouldn't either," or "No, it
doesn't."  This is as opposed to "Yes, it does."  I admit this was a
bit on the laconic side; however, I thought that what I said afterward
made it clear.  (Obviously I was wrong; it seems that you decided upon
one interpretation of the response "no" and proceeded to be confused
by the explanation rather than using the explanation to clarify the
response.  I obviously failed miserably in getting my point across.)

I then proceeded to extract a piece of information from my thesaurus,
in the style of the original poster, and show how that, using the same
process of taking the information out of context and concentrating on
it alone, one could come to the conclusion that a thesaurus was biased
against men.  This technique is related to the logical argument
"reductio ad absurdum," where the logic of an argument is applied in a
different way to result in an unacceptable conclusion.  The
unacceptability of the conclusion is used as evidence that there is
something wrong in the logic that underlies it.  The informal form of
this technique is known by many names, but I kind of like
"consciousness balancing."  The role reversal experiments that used to
be popular are good examples of this, as is the popular wisdom
expressed in, "before passing judgment, walk a mile in another's
shoes."

The process which, I think, results in people's making such
conclusions involves something which I call "selective perception."
One starts with an a priori assumption.  One sees or experiences or
reads something, armed with this assumption.  The assumption selects
what one percieves, hence the name.  One derives conclusions based on
these perceptions, and, not surprisingly, they agree quite nicely with
the assumptions.  Whereas, in fact, the conclusions need not have
anything at all to do with reality-- they are, at least in part, a
product of selecting the perceptions.  Frequently, when one steps back
and examines the problem in a more complete and objective manner, one
finds that the original conclusions were illusory.  (This is one
reason why scientific methods are so important, but that's another
newsgroup.)

In this case, I think, the selective perception involved choosing the
parts of the thesaurus to look at and choosing the standards by which
the entries would be judged.  I think that the conclusion that
thesaurases are gender biased against women is unsupported by an
objective examination of the evidence.  I further assert that the
original conclusion was probably based on selective perception, and I
give a consciousness-balancing exercise to show the process by which
this works.

Again, I apologize for having been terse.  I am aware of a tendency in
myself toward logorrhea for which I frequently overcompensate.  I can
expand at greater length and in greater detail should it be neccesary.

-EMP