Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[DJ]

And for en core, they'll invent a feminist wheel.

[Reelya]

Postmodern feminism rejects the Aristotlean logic tradition as being a pillar of patriachy

You have this book, for example, where the author rejects all formal logic as being masculine.

Book Description
Publication Date: July 13, 1990 | ISBN-10: 0415902002 | ISBN-13: 978-0415902007
Is logic masculine? Is women's lack of interest in the "hard core" philosophical disciplines of formal logic and semantics symptomatic of an inadequacy linked to sex? Is the failure of women to excel in pure mathematics and mathematical science a function of their inability to think rationally?

Andrea Nye undermines the assumptions that inform these questions, assumptions such as: logic is unitary, logic is independent of concrete human relations, and logic transcends historical circumstances as well as gender. In a series of studies of the logics of historical figures--Parmenides, Plato, Aristotle, Zeno, Abelard, Ockham, and Frege--she traces the changing interrelationships between logical innovation and oppressive speech strategies, showing that logic is not transcendent truth but abstract forms of language spoken by men, whether Greek ruling citizens, or scientists.

Book quotes:

If economics was logical necessity for the Marxists, the science of nature was logical necessity for the Nazis. In nature, it was clear enough that the fittest and best survived, whereas dying and degenerate races were destroyed. The applications of logic to action that Frege had promised came readily to hand. If Jews are a mongrel race, they must be exterminated. 'A thought like a hammer' demanded instant obedience to the dictates of logic.

Desperate, lonely, cut off from the human community which in many cases has ceased to exist, under the sentence of violent death, wracked by desires for intimacy that they do not know how to fulfill, at the same time tormented by the presence of women, men turn to logic.

She Godwins it: "you know who else used logic - Hitler". The link she draws is that one of the founders of modern logic, Gottlob Frege, who died in 1924, mentions being a fan of Hitler in his diaries. But, the guy died even before Mein Kampf was published, and I can't see that Hitler was influenced by Gottlob Frege.

[DJ]

What the hell could you replace formal logic with? I don't really see magical thinking having as much real world application.

[Reelya]

What the hell could you replace formal logic with? I don't really see magical thinking having as much real world application.

Ternary logic, fuzzy logic, probabilities, paraconsistent logic. These are the alternatives being considered.

Apparently only classical logic is patriarchal. And the others listed above, whilst also made by men, somehow worked out less-patriarchal, or even pro-feminist.

Apparently they like paraconsistent logic because predicates can be true and false at the same time, and that gels with a feminist view of the world.

[DJ]

Can mathematics actually work without any formal logic, though? And can *anything* work without mathematics?

[Max White]

Ternary logic, fuzzy logic, probabilities, paraconsistent logic. These are the alternatives being considered.

So things that digital computers are traditionally very bad at.
Well I guess they could build an analog computer and design a programming language for that... They will need a large office block to do what my mobile phone can do, but it is possible.

Can mathematics actually work without any formal logic, though? And can *anything* work without mathematics?

Bitwise logic can easily work without maths, in fact the question you should be asking; Can maths work without bitwise logic? Try defining the addition function without it.

[Reelya]

Actually it won't require that, you can program all that in an object-oriented language easily using abstract data types.

Which kind of outlines the silliness - the one useful feature they're looking at, alternative (but still formal) logics CAN simplify some problem domains, but can easily be implemented without needing new languages.

[DJ]

Isn't bitwise logic a sort of formal logic?

[Max White]

It is a very formal logic! It is hard to get more formal really... Point is that yes, some things can work without maths, but maths can't work without an underlying logic.

[chaoticag]

I guess this could be interesting? But for the most part, this sounds like a thought experiment, and I'm not sure how different logic as it's accepted would look different from logic as critiqued by a feminist scholar, so eh?

I'm not sure how well something like this would help though, and most of what I hear on feminism with programming is about making sure female programmers are more accepted, so I doubt it'd do much in that regards.

[WealthyRadish]

This would make a good episode of the Twilight Zone. A crew of UN astronauts in the near future of the 1980s land on Uranus, where they discover a feminist utopia where math is sexist and data structures have emotional needs. Oh, and the twist is that they never left Earth, but really just crash landed outside of UC Berkeley.

[MrWillsauce]

These guys are gonna love my white supremacist system of musical notation.

[Leafsnail]

A brief look suggests that it's just some bizarre thought experiment. Not really sure I see the point myself but if some people feel it's an idea worth considering more power to them.

Yeah I think this is it.  There are quite a few examples of programming languages being written just to explore ideas/ as a joke rather than as serious tools.

http://www.dangermouse.net/esoteric/

[kaijyuu]

Whatever merit the project may or may not have, calling it "feminist" just seems like a publicity stunt and/or a way to antagonize MRAs and their ilk.

[Guardian G.I.]

This would make a good episode of the Twilight Zone. A crew of UN astronauts in the near future of the 1980s land on Uranus, where they discover a feminist utopia where math is sexist and data structures have emotional needs. Oh, and the twist is that they never left Earth, but really just crash landed outside of UC Berkeley.

It reminds me of an 1984 Polish sci-fi movie "Sexmission" about two guys who volunteer to take part in a hibernation experiment, only to wake up decades in the future due to technical malfunction and find Earth ruled by a totalitarian feminist regime.