From: cortese@skid.ps.UCI.EDU (Janis Maria Cortese)
Subject: Re: Someone Convince Me
Newsgroups: soc.feminism
Organization: University of California, Irvine
Date: 26 Jan 93 00:06:56 GMT

In article <2B647488.22630@ics.uci.edu> tittle@alexandre-dumas.ics.uci.edu (Cindy Tittle Moore) writes:
>In <1993Jan23.155518.27659@wam.umd.edu> rsrodger@wam.umd.EDU (Yamanari) writes:
>
>>	I don't consider that narrow at all.  Science is inherently
>>	less narrow minded than "feelings" because feelings are
>>	centered on the specific individual, while science draws it's
>>	conclusions from *information*.  Often, science forces a
>>	person to accept a conclusion that disturbs their feelings.

You are saying that science is less narrow than feelings because it
takes into account things that science does not.  By your definition,
science is similarly narrow because it excludes feelings.  Feelings are
information as well, and I see no reason for people who have been
trained in the scientific method not to get off their asses and start
applying those wonderful logical analytic mental tools to LIFE in
general, and not just to those billion dollar machines they run all the
time.

>>	Take, for instance, claims that blacks are inferior to whites.
>>	Science can show that blacks and whites seem to have equal
>>	capacity.

You haven't studied as much anthropology as you should ave before making
this statement.  Science for a century was used to explain the natural
black inferiority, using cranial capacity and genetics.  Women were
similarly shown to be naturally mentally inferior to men by the same
methods.

Yet us examine an actual APPLICATION of science to a social probem and
see if it tells us about equality as you claim.  When the Bible was
junked as a true explanation of how the world formed, women all over
Europe and America were delighted because they no longer had to contend
with women's God(tm)-given inferiority to men, and they falsely concluded
that the Truth would out.  Did it?  But no -- the men in the groves of
Academe simpy started using the new science of evolution and genetics to
work out a whole ENW crop of reasons why women were inferior to men!
They did exactly the same thing with black people and asians; you must
study more science before you can make a sweeping statement like that,
and oe so demonstrably false.

Science did NOTHING to "prove" anyone's equality.  It was used as a tool
to prove inferiority, originally, and only after people's FEELINGS about
their purported inferiority came to the fore was science suddenly
applied to divining how smart we all are.

The moral of all this is that science is a TOOL, and is subject to the
biases and prejudices of those who apply it, just as any other
discipline is.  Science is not the tablets from the mountain, not
received truth, not any kind of ipartial judge of the universe.  It is a
tool, and only a tool and must be properly applied before it can get at
anything.  Ergo, it depends on FEELINGS for its motivations and its
judgements.  As a hard scientist, I know this.

>In fact, in my experience, it is those scientists who understand the
>shortcomings of the scientific method that are the best researchers,
>since they take feelings into account.

Also, they take the feelings of those who have come before into account.
They will see a study such as the old "Which side of the brain is
intellience located in?" one that was supposed to prove how women are
stupid and ask, "What were the motivations of the ORIGINAL researcher?"
they take not oly their own feelings into account, but see how the
feelings of those who came before may have built the foundation.

You all know of Rene Descartes, right?  Know why he was so well-liked
and accepted and why David Hume is almost a no-name?  Find out!  You can
learn a lot more about a culture by seeing what they accpet and reject
than simply by putting your brain on autopilot and thinking that "they
couldn't print it if it weren't true," like the readers of the Weekly
World News.

Regards,
Janis C.

P.S.: The study that tried to find out where rational thought was
located is a hoot.  Originally, it was thought to exist in the parietal
sections of the brain -- the sides, over your ears.  All the original
papers by the "scientists" of the time published tons of data proving
that women had smaller parietal lobes than men and larger frontal lobes,
where feelings were thought to reside.  When it was discovered through
studying head injuries that forethought and rationality are intergrated
in the frontal lobe -- well, wouldn't you know it!  Damned if all the
researchers didn't go back and look over their old findings and find out
that women actually had smaller FRONTAL lobes than men!  Amazing how that
could happen.  Keep in mind that, at the time of these studies, they
were thought to be "science," and trusted by those who worhipped it.

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