Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!csdev!ll1a!spl1!laidbak!att!rutgers!mcnc!ecsvax!skyler@ecsvax.uncecs.edu
From: skyler@ecsvax.uncecs.edu
Newsgroups: comp.society.women
Subject: Logic and Intuition
Message-ID: <8526@spl1.UUCP>
Date: 3 Nov 88 20:46:59 GMT
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Approved: skyler@ecsvax.uncecs.edu (Moderator -- Trish Roberts)
Comments-to: comp-women-request@cs.purdue.edu
Submissions-to: comp-women@cs.purdue.edu

Logic and intuition are not opposites.  And I don't think the
Lacanians want to suggest they are.

We need to distinguish between discourse and language.  There is
an attitude towad discourse in the West which is often categorized
as "male."  It is that we solve problems through an essentially
adversarial mode--you throw your ideas out and I throw mine out
and we fight them out.  The one that wins is the best.  This assumes
that discussion should be a kind of battle and that some things have
to win and others lose.  Feminists like Adrienne Rich have (rather
eloquently) suggested a different view (as have social theorists
like Habermas.)

This is different from language use.  Logic generally involves what
Prisig calls the knife--you cut the world up into little categories.
That form of logic is _perfectly_ compatible with intuition--you might
intuit different categories, or connections among categories.  (It is,
as you might guess, perfectly compatible with connectionism in ai.)  It
is not compatible with Lacanian feminists' ideas about language use.
They think there are two things which language does (as we presently
practice it) which alienate women (or force women to alienate themselves
from their own bodies): cause us to define distinctions among the world,
to categorize; cause us to the put some things above others, some things
at the center and others at the fringe.

Does this help?  (And those lurkers out there who are far better
informed about this than I am, is that a fair summary?)

-Trish