Re: Women's Ways of Knowing Study (Applied to physics

[Leigh Palmer <palmer@sfu.ca>]

> 	I read this book about a year and a half ago so my memory may not
> be that good on it.  However, I do recall the stages Jane has listed.
> What bothered me about the research was the end of the book it which it
> seemed to me the authors exhibited a distinct political bias which made me
> question all the conclusions they had reached in the previous chapters.
> In particular I remember a story they cited in which they indicated was
> typical of the insensitivity of physical science professors to women.  In
> that story a student was very distressed in the first day of class because
> the instructors brought in a jar of marbles and asked to class to estimate
> the number in the jar.  The authors seemed to claim that this was a prime
> example of insensitivity to the way women learn.  I showed the passage to
> one of our astronomers, and a mathematician who are women and they stated
> that they too had read the book and felt it was a biased study that did
> not recognize the necessities that are entailed in learning physical and
> mathematical sciences.
>
> 	I thought the authors made a good case until the end of the book
> but hurt their credibility by their political attacks.

You have yielded to a human weakness. The political leanings of the authors
should have no logical bearing on your acceptance of their previous
arguments *per se*. You may, of course, attack their conclusive arguments
based upon the logical continuity of those arguments with the previous
arguments, but to change your acceptance of the previous arguments based
solely upon a personal distaste for their ultimate implications is not
logically defensible. Of course an argument based upon disproof by *reductio
ad absurdum* may be constructed to attack the premises upon which an
otherwise sound argument is based. However it is improper to use this method
of proof while there exists at least one fallacy within the argument itself.

Of course one should always evaluate arguments based upon their intrinsic
merits alone, but if one has emotions as well as intellect then the emotions
will play a significant role in determining one's acceptance of arguments.
You have made the logical error of accepting an autonymously constructed *ad
hominem* argument. A similar error could (and did) lead a physicist who
understood completely the development of special relativity by Einstein to
reject relativity upon being told that Einstein is a Jew because of his
personal inclination to distrust Jews.

I have similar prejudices* regarding the rantings of many - no, nearly all -
radical feminists. Those prejudices have always served me well as a guide to
*where I should seek* the errors in their arguments, but they have never
made me (or at least never should make me) reject honest attempts at rational
argument out of hand. Picking logical holes in the argument of a radical
feminist (or any other zealot) often merely infuriates one's adversary. That
is because the zealot validates his arguments by the unquestionable validity
of its conclusions, another logical error (one for which I've never known
the technical name).

Leigh

* I have always maintained that "prejudice" and "wisdom" are, unaccountably,
exact synonyms with opposite pejorative polarities. Think about it.