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From: mcvax!cgch!warw@uunet.UU.NET (Anthony R. Wuersch)
Newsgroups: comp.society.women
Subject: Re: Women's Language and Computing
Message-ID: <5713@ecsvax.uncecs.edu>
Date: 24 Oct 88 08:28:19 GMT
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In article <5611@ecsvax.uncecs.edu> skyler@ecsvax.uncecs.edu writes:
>Lacan argues that babies are at one with the mother.  Then, language
>and logic in the form of the father intervene and separate the mother
>and child.  According to some French feminists like Cisoux, this means
>that language and logic are always an alien territory to women--that
>we are, in essence, foreigners in that land--that language and logic
>distance women from their bodies (because language is phallogocentric,
>that is, it emphasizes male characteristics like power and force and
>keeps female characteristics like flow and nurturance at the fringe.)

Tversky et. al. on human inference say:
1. People who reason from common sense don't follow strict logic.
   For instance, they often add rather than multiply probabilities in order
   to compute joint probabilities (i.e., that two things will happen).

2. They can improve their reasoning with training.

There's similar research in learning computer languages that says that
some people learn them quickly, but when people are given a formal
semantics approach to the language, it takes them longer, but they
eventually achieve the same knowledge as those who learn them quickly.

Is the territory alien from a trained or an untrained perspective?  There's
no reason people can't learn logic in school, if schools decide to teach it.
Especially if they learn it young.

>This theory got me thinking in several different ways:
>
>1)  If the above is true, then the approach which artificial intelligence
>is taking may make women and women's ways of thinking even more alienated.

Alienated in the sense that they lose access to supportive tools that employ
formal reasoning?  Or alienated in the classical sense, that their judgment
loses its self-interest when placed in a close relationship with capitalist
machinery?  The notion of alienation depends on whether tools support people
or people support tools.  Does AI help tools support people or people support
tools?

>2)  This sort of theory makes me very nervous.  It seems as though it's
>going back to lots of theories which were rejected largely on the fact
>that they were unproveable and put women in a second-class citizenship.
>To say that women are alien from logic is very close to saying that
>women just can't be as good at it as men.  That's half a step from
>saying women are cute and should just stick with imaginative writing
>and leave the tough stuff to men.

I doubt the French (critics) would concur with you on this.  They would
certainly agree that the difference between men and women has effects on
hierarchy, but not at all in the same direction (men above, women below).
They're interested in subversion and wisdom and inspiration too.

A lot of classic French stuff draws on Hegel's master-slave discussion (as
does histories of slavery, i.e., Eugene Genovese) as a paradigmatic dialectic
of dependence going both ways over time.

I read Kristeva complaining about Americans who read her as if her opinions
could each independently be given positive or negative scores depending on
how they fitted US feminist politics.  French feel the double-edged dialectic
more strongly than Americans.  There's a *lot* of inherited money sloshing
around in France, for instance.

>3)  This theory, it seems to me, also reflects back on the discussions
>of women and expectations.  If computing involves a lot of logic, especially
>research in ai, and if this sort of theory continues to get as much aca-
>demic respect as it seems to, then even feminists will expect that women
>just can't be as good as men.

Academic respect in which quarters?  It doesn't have respect everywhere, like
physics.

Toni
warw@cgch.UUCP or ..!mcvax!cernvax!cgch!warw