skyler@ecsvax.uncecs.edu (11/04/88)
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
jeff%aiva.edinburgh.ac.uk@NSS.Cs.Ucl.AC.UK (Jeff Dalton) (11/10/88)
In article <8526@spl1.UUCP> skyler@ecsvax.uncecs.edu writes: >Does this help? Not very much. You start by saying: >Logic and intuition are not opposites. And I don't think the >Lacanians want to suggest they are. You then say we need to distinguish between discourse and language and go on to say something about discourse in the West. Ok, but so far nothing about logic or intuition. The next paragraph goes on to language use, where you say that logic (cutting up the world) is not incompatible with intuition but is incompatible with Lacanian feminists ideas about language use. This says something about the Lacanian views on logic, but I still don't know what they think about intuition. It sounds like they don't really care about logic vs. intuition at all but think some other distinctions are important instead. >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. What strange things to think. Language alienates women but not men? I prefer the "eastern" view that distinctions are ultimately false for everyone, especially since the idea then is not to be deceived by them rather than not to make them. (Well, for practical purposes, I would say there *is* a difference between the potato and the dirt it's in.) And then: language (?) causes (?) women to put some things above others. I suppose a woman wouldn't value her own body over the nearest teaspoon (for example) if not for language. If so, why isn't language a good thing? And: language as we presently practice it? I doubt language is possible without drawing distinctions. We'd have a bit of trouble with nouns anyway. Shall we get rid of them? -- Jeff
roskos@ida.org (Eric Roskos) (12/20/88)
[This was originally mail to me. I thought it would be of interest to everyone and asked permission to post it. TR] >I really would like the details. If you'd like, you can do it as >an article. I'd also love references. Hello. I was just rereading your posting. I wasn't entirely clear on what the underlying points were to what you were saying, possibly because I don't generally think of these things in terms of issues of "feminism" and the like; I think that feminist issues may be one instance of the problem, but I don't think the problem is peculiar to feminism. On the one hand, you seemed to be talking about what epistemologists call "contextualism". A good friend of mine, Lee Rowen, who is incidentally both a good feminist and a good philosopher, did a lot of philosophical work on the topic of contextualism for her PhD dissertation. However, she was concerned with philosophy of science. The basic idea behind her work was that our views of "truth" are biased by the words we use to describe them, or the "context" in which we discuss them. Thus, scientific truth and the direction taken by science is highly biased by what people have previously discovered, and how they describe what they have discovered, such that what they perceive as the "truths" of science are in some sense relative to the context of ideas in which they think. This sounds like what you were were suggesting when you said: >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. She is currently a professor of philosophy at CalTech; she has published various papers on the subject, but they are generally very hard to read, since they are very abstract. However, underlying the whole idea of contextualism, I think, is the more general concept you seemed to be pointing towards, the distinction between "logic" and intuition. It is currently my belief, based largely on John Hopfield's research in artificial neural networks (one of the "connectionist" models you allude to, although one that is much more generally applicable than followers of the recent "neural networks" fad seem to realize), that "intuition" is the basic method by which people think. That is to say, human thought, and also processing by networks of the sort Hopfield describes, do not proceed by traditional formal logic, but instead using mechanisms that more closely resemble the traditional basic properties of physics (such as gravity in n-space). I think this is the mode in which people think most effectively, although I also think there are limits on what can be "accomplished" by pure intuitive reasoning. Built on top of intuitive reasoning is symbolic reasoning, or "logic" in its various forms. This includes verbal reasoning and verbal conceptualizing, in which things are represented by words or "labels" rather than by some internal representation of perceptions. These are inherently restraining simply because words are imprecise; T. S. Eliot in "Four Quartets" mentions this, the failure of words to convey ideas. It is also fundamental to the Zen Buddhist concept of enlightenment (and their method of teaching, although it is an unusual and imprecise method). Symbolic reasoning is, I think, necessary to "construct" things. People tend to feel most "fully functioning" when they are acting intuitively, which is a reason for the appeal of things like athletic activities ("Bull Durham" was about this idea); but symbolic thinking is a "tool" like other tools for constructing concepts. It essentially requires creating "models" of things in the (intuitive) mind, and then using various rules to manipulate the models. It is also necessary for communication of "higher concepts"; you can communicate feelings and even ways of doing things nonverbally, and tend to understand others' actions intuitively, but conveying specific ideas such as principles of physics or engineering tend to be done symbolically simply because the symbols provide a way to communicate abstractions for things rather than the things themselves. This is both their strength, and their weakness, since symbolic reasoning and communication is good for cases of abstraction and construction, but like all abstractions it abstracts away ideas. I think people function best when they are able to use both of these ways of thinking, but that most people rely largely on one or the other. The Myers-Briggs test's distinction between "Intuiting" and "Sensing" personality types tests for this difference in orientation. What is particularly intriguing about this is that in modern-day people, there tends to be a split between the intuitive and symbolic selves, such that people tend to have two distinct identities in many cases. Schizophrenic individuals tend to have the most severe separations of these identities, but they seem to exist in most people. Wilson Van Dusen's very amazing paper, "The Natural Depth in Man," which is published in Carl Rogers' book _Person_To_Person:_The_Problem_of_Being_Human_, discusses Van Dusen's discovery of what seems to be his intuitive self manipulating verbal symbols to communicate ideas that are outside of his consistent, conscious self. There is also some suggestion that the concept of the "ego" is actually an approximation to the verbal self; an intriguing example of this is the psychologist Helen Schucman's book, "A Course in Miracles," in which a woman who has been constrained to live a "domestic" life for most of her life seems to have developed an elaborate and largely intuitive theory independent of her external life, which she tries to communicate in a curiously intuitive way in this book, through religious symbolism. (The book makes much broader and larger claims than that, and I don't know if I disagree with the book's broader claims; rather, the above is just a commentary on how the book seems to have been written, rather than on its content.) I don't have many specific references on this subject, because it is the result of several years of thinking and reading in an attempt to solve a specific problem, the question of how to convey architectural principles in the design of computer systems to others. It is an example of the sort of thing that seems to be largely nonsymbolic and intuitive in nature, but which is particularly hard to communicate because people in this field refuse to accept, for the most part, any results which are not symbolically representable. My very recent paper, "Minix Policy Model," which I presented last week at the AIAA conference in Orlando, is an example of an attempt to find a symbolic representation for architectural ideas that are actually largely intuitive in nature. It doesn't have anything specific to do with the concepts I've described here, although I do allude to them a few times in the paper. The paper is about an OS architecture, symbolically represented. Note, of course, that all *ideas* are inherently symbolic at one level, since they are represented in the mind. The distinction between the "intuitive" reasoning and the "symbolic" reasoning I've been referring to is that the symbolic reasoning uses recognized, distinct symbols, whether they are the symbols from symbolic logic, or words like "women" and "feminists," to represent things by abstraction. The intuitive representations of things are fairly direct representations of how the things were originally perceived (or how they will be carried out, in the Bull Durham sort of examples), rather than abstractions that are "freed" from the full perceptual representation in order to be manipulated. -- Eric Roskos, IDA