skyler@ecsvax.uncecs.edu (Patricia Roberts) (10/20/88)
I've been reading about Cisoux and Lacan recently. They have some, um, interesting ideas about language. And those ideas got me thinking about artificial intelligence and computers. 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.) 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. 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. 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. -Trish skyler@ecsvax.uncecs.edu
mhnadel@gryphon.CTS.COM (Miriam Nadel) (10/20/88)
In article <5611@ecsvax.uncecs.edu> skyler@ecsvax.uncecs.edu (Patricia Roberts) 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.) > This seems really bizarre to me. Even if we equate "power and force" with maleness and "flow and nurturance" with femaleness (something which seems like excessive generalization to me), not all languages have the "power" emphasis. And computer languages certainly differ significantly from "natural" language in this respect. A further problem seems to be this equation between language and logic. I find it suspicious since so many things about language are inherently illogical. (If English were logical, we wouldn't have some of our more peculiar spelling. Or irregular verbs.) Finally, I would be interested in knowing how this theory accounts for women's observed superiority in language skills over men (as borne out by the very same test scores which claim male superiority in math skills.) >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. > Which approach within AI are you referring to? If you're looking at ideas involving natural language, I think there is a danger if AI designers fail to recognize differences in ways that men and women use language. But there are a lot of aspects of AI beyond the search for natural language processing. >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. That's the danger of generalizing about characteristics which have wide individual variations. A friend of mine used to claim that when he taught introductory programming classes, he could tell within a week or so what his students' final grades would be. People have different inherent abilities and maybe the ability to use sequential logic (the type of reasoning needed to write programs) is one of these. But unless you can prove *no* women have this ability, you have no basis for expecting an individual woman not to be good at computing. AI is a different matter. Problems like pattern recognition (which is one of the hot fields even for mechanical engineers like me, with its obvious connection to problems ranging from machine vision to multi-target tracking) are not best approached by sequential logic. There may be areas in which abilities which women are more likely to have than men are (for whatever reasons, be they genetic or cultural) are just what's needed. Miriam Nadel -- "I deny that I have ever given my opinion to anybody" - George Bush mhnadel@gryphon.CTS.COM <any backbone site>!gryphon!mhnadel
rsp@pbhyf.PacBell.COM (Steve Price) (10/20/88)
In article <5611@ecsvax.uncecs.edu> skyler@ecsvax.uncecs.edu (Patricia Roberts) writes: >I've been reading about Cisoux and Lacan recently. They have some, >um, interesting ideas about language. >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.) 1) Can anyone supply some more details about Cisoux & Lacan and their theories on language and culture? Are they considered important thinkers in that area? 2) Without reading Cisoux & Lacan for myself, I can not be sure of what they are claiming or what their evidence is, but to state that "language is phallogocentric" (that word pricked my interest) strikes me as rather absurd -- an emotional overgeneralization. What specific language or language group do they mean? Do they imply that ALL languages are in essence the same in their parsing of reality? Do they assume that there is some universal logic that all languages convey with merely regional semantic variations? Have they ever heard of the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis? 3) Does English language emphasize one over the other? Can we prove that? How? 4) Do Chinese languages emphasize one over the other? Can we prove that? How? 5) Are "power and force" exclusively male attributes? Can women exist without them? 6) Are "flow and nurturance" exclusively female attributes? Can men live with them? Steve Price pacbell!pbhyf!rsp (415) 823-1951
marla@Sun.COM (Marla Parker) (10/21/88)
In article <5611@ecsvax.uncecs.edu> skyler@ecsvax.uncecs.edu (Patricia Roberts) writes: >I've been reading about Cisoux and Lacan recently. They have some, >um, interesting ideas about language. Who are they? And what field are they in - linguistics? psychology? something else? I only have a vague idea of what you teach and might be reading, so it is difficult to put the views of these two authors (?) in any sort of context. Marla Parker (415)336-2538 {major backbone}!sun!marla marla@sun.com
brantley@vax1.acs.udel.edu (brantley) (10/22/88)
In article <5611@ecsvax.uncecs.edu> skyler@ecsvax.uncecs.edu (Patricia Roberts) writes: }I've been reading about Cisoux and Lacan recently. They have some, }um, interesting ideas about language. And those ideas got me thinking }about artificial intelligence and computers. } }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.) Some how, I just can't take this argument seriously. I haven't read either Cisoux or Lacan, but the idea that "language and logic are always an alien territory to women" just doesn't seem reasonable to me. In what way is language alien to women?? Do girls acquire their language skills more slowly than boys? Do women not reach the same degree of comfort or familiarity with their native language that men do? Do women in general have more trouble learning a second language? It doesn't seem that any of my questions have any support in real life. I would be interested to hear of any research in this area. And how can language be "phallogocentric" (assuming this word means what it looks like it means :-)? The idea that language emphasizes male characteristics instead of female ones sounds like a gross over-generalization/ simplification to me. Boy, and I haven't even touched the issue of women and logic yet. :-) Well, that's just my two cents worth for now. brantley -- ******************************************************************************* * ask me if i care, go ahead, ask me * * brantley@vax1.acs.udel.edu * *******************************************************************************
aefrisch@uunet.UU.NET (AEleen Frisch) (10/22/88)
>>I've been reading about Cisoux and Lacan recently. They have some, >>um, interesting ideas about language. > >Who are they? And what field are they in - linguistics? psychology? >something else? First of all, it's Helene Cixous. Jacques Lacan was a French psychoanalyst whose work has been extended by others to many other fields as well. Cixous writes on psychoanalysis, feminist theory, and literature (for starters). Her most famous piece is "The Laugh of the Medusa," which was published in Signs several years ago. It may also be helpful to know that Lacanian and post-Lacanian thinkers don't find the distinction between psychoanalysis and linguisitics to be valid/relevent/helpful/...
warw@uunet.UU.NET (Anthony R. Wuersch) (10/24/88)
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
gsh@cbnews.att.com (Gigi S. Hanna) (10/26/88)
The article I'm addressing was uneasy about the implications of Cixous' women/language theory. The various French feminists have been tending for a long time toward theories about the "universal feminine", and feminists around the world are in disagreement about the political consequences of espousing this "feminine" rather than insisting on "equality" (disregarding difference) in the male world. But I think that when we define certain qualities as masculine or feminine, we always do so in a male language context. So that the outcome always regards the masculine qualities as BETTER in terms of political power, and the feminine qualities as better in terms of human/spiritual power. I say that there are aspects of ourselves, both men and women that remain unknown to us because of our male language and our EVALUATION of masculine/feminine qualities. The feminist language theories can only point out to us the inadequacies of our language and often they attempt to destroy that language in order to see what's behind it. To relate this to artificial intelligence: I don't think it's possible for AI to surpass our own intelligence. If we are going to base it on "logic" (as it seems we must currently), aren't we going to build into it the same biases, evaluations, blindness of our own logic/language. The question is not whether women can perform in the realms we've decided to call masculine (or vice versa), but how can we look past the language to find out what we can REALLY do (both men and women) without the restrictions of that language. geeg
khb@Sun.COM (Keith Bierman - Sun Tactical Engineering) (10/29/88)
In article <5680@ecsvax.uncecs.edu> brantley@vax1.acs.udel.edu (brantley) writes: > > stuff from the ongoing debate about language > >Some how, I just can't take this argument seriously. I haven't read >either Cisoux or Lacan, but the idea that "language and logic are >always an alien territory to women" just doesn't seem reasonable to me. >In what way is language alien to women?? My advisor in school (I was a math major) was a woman. She would be very surprised to learn that math and logic were foregin (as spelling is to me :>). She lived and breathed number theory. I suspect that Adele Goldberg, Jean Sammet, Grace Hopper and the famous women of computing would also be amazed to find this out. >skills more slowly than boys? Do women not reach the same degree of comfort >or familiarity with their native language that men do? Do women in general >have more trouble learning a second language? My cousin (female) is a much better linguist than I. I worked at German, Hebrew, Aramaic, and Japanese .... the only one that really stuck was hebrew. She did french, spanish, russian, hebrew + ?; all of it stuck. I have an edge in fortran, c, etc. but that's probably her lack of interest, not innate skill. Just my $.02/worth. Keep :> Keith H. Bierman It's Not My Fault ---- I Voted for Bill & Opus
robinson%SOE.Berkeley.EDU@jade.berkeley.edu (Michael Robinson) (11/19/88)
In article <5611@ecsvax.uncecs.edu> skyler@ecsvax.uncecs.edu (Patricia Roberts) writes: >I've been reading about Cisoux and Lacan recently. They have some, >um, interesting ideas about language. And those ideas got me thinking >about artificial intelligence and computers. > >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.) I'm in the process of doing a research project on exactly this-- psychoanalytic and cognitive models for the masculinization of objectivity. The first thing to note is that the association of objectivity with masculinity is a commonplace--it is simply taken it for granted by most people without question. The interesting thing about it is that almost every discipline which has anything at all to do with the mind or the brain, from psychoanalysis to anthropology to biology, has attempted to justify this commonplace in terms of its own language, models and metaphor. The sociobiologists, for example, explain it in terms of hormones and genetic structure. Freudian psychoanalysts, such as Lacan, explain it in terms of the Freudian developmental metaphor of mother, father, sexual identity (phallus), etc. Also interesting is that the explanations fielded by one discipline often contradict those of another, and so on, while always arriving at the same conclusion. With this research project, we're taking a sample of different psychoanalytic and cognitive accounts, and doing a close rhetorical analysis of the premises, intentions, and arguments in each, with the goal of finding out what is really going on here, and whether it has any relation to reality. For anyone who simply wants a plausible explanation, and are unconcerned with why there is such a need for an explanation, Jeanne Block, _Sex-Role Identity and Ego Development_, is probably "best" (most credible to a Usenet audience). If anyone is interested in our results, let me know, and I can email you a copy of our paper when it's finished.