binarisms

[George Haberberger]

At 09:49 AM 11/7/96 -0600, Diana York Blaine wrote:
>At the risk of being called a doo-doo brain:
>The question of how to think our way out of binarisms preoccupies feminist
>theorists as well.  Bill Burns asks whether to avoid binary thinking we
>need to "key into some other more intuitive faculty."  Exactly. But
>intuition has been the devalued purview of the feminine since the
>Enlightenment and before (Aristotle's Nicomachean ethics would of course
>be a primary source for binary thought in Western epistemology and one in
>which women fare quite badly).  Since those qualities associated with the
>feminine (dependence, vulnerability, emotion, connection, intuition) are
>peddled as anathema to the normative masculine subject (he who would be a
>REAL man, in other words), we face an impasse unless/until we redefine
>gender construction itself.  I often ask my students to imagine telling a
>professor in the "hard" sciences (now there's a term to ponder...) that
>they arrived at their answer by "gut feeling" rather than calculation.
>When scientists want to claim intuitive insight, they call it a
>"hunch," thereby giving an approbative masculine spin to it. But anyone
>who dares to question science finds herself the object of flaming far
>beyond anything we've seen so far on this list--hence the culture wars 
>raging in the academy today. For feminist critiques on binary thought:

Well, my Aerospace Engineering professors didn't mandate showing your work,
so if you put an answer down on a Structures test based on a hunch, and it
was correct, you got full credit. If it was incorrect, you got nothing,
unless you showed your work, rigorously and thoroughly, in which case you
might get partial credit, and maybe save your grade.

If a hunch or intuition gets you pointed in the right direction, great, many
breakthroughs are made that way, however, I would feel much more comfortable
knowing the design of the wings holding up the airplane was checked with
modelling and math.

Of course, Aerospace Engineering isn't "hard" science, but rather applied
science. I do remember that "The Scientific Method" was stressed repeatedly
in my science classes, starting in high school, to recap, you start with a
hypothesis, test it, and develop a theory, said theory must be consistent
with observed facts and repeatable. If it isn't, reject it and hypothesize a
new theory. I'll agree that once you get beyond the hypothesis stage, there
isn't much room for intuition, but that's by design of "The Scientific
Method". I'm not current with the above controversy, but to condemn "hard"
science for hostility to intuition seems to be ignorant of the foundation of
"hard" science, one might as well condemn the Internet and computers for
ther foundation on binaryism, and suppression of all voltages that are not 0
or 5 volts.

George