Explaining our premises

Bitch PhD writes:

As a woman, as a writer, as an academic, as a feminist, as a mother, and as a teacher: I grow tired of the way that women, when they write--especially, perhaps, but not exclusively, on politics--are constantly interrogated about fundamental premises; are constantly held up from following a line of thought by silly, disruptive questions about basic starting points, questions that turn into arguments. Sometimes, perhaps often, these questions are sincerely meant, similar to the way that questions from college freshmen often slow things up terribly but are, after all things they need answered. When one teaches, one has to consider this, and one has to spell out the premises again, and again, and again, and be willing to clarify and explain. At the same time, though, one has to reach a point where one says, "it is time, now, to move on. If you still need help with this, do some more reading on your own."

As a woman, a feminist, and an aspiring academic, I respectfully disagree. As long as you want to talk to people who don't share your basic premises, you've got to keep explaining yourself. It's not just feminists who have to keep explicating. Anyone who has radical beliefs is in the same position: atheists, Darwinists, act utilitarians, aesthetic minimalists, libertarians, gun nuts--anyone. If you didn't question the conventional wisdom, you wouldn't be a radical.

Admittedly, it's not a foregone conclusion that you want to talk to everyone you disagree with. Nor that you owe it to either the interlocutor or "the cause" to derail your train of thought every time somebody needs remedial theoretical attention. Some discussions are of purely academic interest. Some controversies are "internal questions" of interest only to those who share a theoretical orientation. Some nights are Adult Swim.

Comments

[Sean]

Please don't tell me that being a Darwinist counts as a radical position. Even if it's true, I don't want to know.

Maybe it's the conciliator in me, but I don't think you're disagreeing very much. You are certainly correct to emphasize that people with radical ideas have more of a responsibility to justify their assumptions than people in the mainstream. And Prof. B is also correct that eventually you want to move on to the more advanced implications (as you admit). A matter of emphasis.

[Lindsay Beyerstein]

I didn't think being a Darwinist was a radical position until I moved to the US. Back home, evolution was something everyone took for granted. Here it's a radical view relative to the background beliefs of most people.

I think our disagreement is about the feminist/non-feminist emphasis. I think Dr. B. is casting this as a feminist or women's issue. I'm saying it has more to do with having an atypical belief system, per se.

[Decnavda]

I find one of the problems for unconventional thinkers explaining their premises to conventional thinkers is that conventional thinkers asking the questions often do not understand THEIR OWN premises, so the answers don't make much sense, because the questioner doesn't know why he thought it was weird to begin with.

I think your inclusion of Darwinism is a bad example in your disagreement with Bitch PhD. You are right that Darwinism is considered radical to many people here in the U.S. But that fact is a horrible black mark on the soul of the country that introduced Enlightenment thinking into the practical operation of the real world. But anti-Darwinism persists in part because the mainstream in the U.S. continues to take anti-Darwinism seriously. At some point, which is long past with regard to Darwinism, it is time to put your foot down and declare that people who refuse to accept Darwinism are not serious thinkers and their views should not be considered as worthy as those of their chimpanzee cousins they have disowned. At the very least, it should be the anti-Darwinists forced to explain their radical premises, not us.

So the question should be: Have we as a society advanced to where the premises of feminism should be accepted as the default? (Every time I try to write down what my answer to that question is, I come up with a radically different version of "maybe", so I won't even try to answer it.)

[Lindsay Beyerstein]

My disagreement with Dr. B. was about how to interpret incessant (and often unreasonable) demands to articulate basic premises. She's seeing it as a gender/feminist issue. I prefer to see it as a more general phenomenon that arises whenever people with really different worldviews engage each other.

I think Darwinism is a good example of a belief system that's overwhelmingly justified, but far from universally accepted. It's radical relative to background beliefs of the large numbers of people who challenge it.

In that sense, Darwinism is a lot like feminism (IMO). If you want to talk to non-Darwinists, you'll have to do a lot of justification of premises. A lot of people decide, quite reasonablly, that it's not worth it.

[david]

A related point: All compelling arguments begin with assumptions with which your target audience agrees. This is an obvious point, since if your target audience doesn't already agree to your starting points, then no matter how brilliantly you use those starting points to demonstrate your conclusion, your opponents won't be swayed at all. But this point is significant for people with "radical" views. It means that if you want to present a convincing argument for a radical view, you have to sort through the beliefs of people with non-radical views and find something in there you can use to draw the conclusion you want. This is usually a distasteful task. Pro-lifers are nauseated by the prospect of sifting through the beliefs pro-choicers; Darwinists are nauseated by the prospect of sifting through the beliefs of creationists. So it's perfectly understandable for people with "radical" views to be irritated by challenges from people with conventional views. These challenges often translate into the command: "I don't accept your 'radical' starting-points. Start over. Find something in my pool of conventional beliefs which you can use to convince me that your views are correct." Unfortunately, though, this command is perfectly legitimate; it's telling the radical to do something she already should be doing.

[Decnavda]

david-
While I basically agree with you, I think what frustrates the radical often is what I mentioned in my previous post. Yes, "Find something in my pool of conventional beliefs which you can use to convince me that your views are correct," is the comand, and yes, it is legitimate. But if the conventional thinker himself doesn't understand what is in his pool of conventional beliefs, how the @#$%&! is the radical supposed to find anything?

[bitchphd]

Oh, hi. Didn't see this trackback for a while.

I agree with what you're saying about "radical beliefs" (though I don't really think either feminism or evolution counts). But I do think it's a specific feminist problem, to some extent, in that women, more than men, are often not given "credit" for knowing what the hell they're talking about. I believe it is true, for instance, that women are more frequently interrupted. I don't think it's *only* a feminist problem by any stretch, though, and if I gave that impression I was in error. I just meant that it's a problem women are somewhat more likely to have, and that therefore refusing, sometimes, to explain stuff that people can perfectly well find out on their own with a minimal amount of effort can be a feminist act. Kinda like saying to one's kid, "go find your own damn shoes."

[Lindsay Beyerstein]

Hi, Dr. B.

I see what you mean. I also remember that statistic about women getting interrupted more often.

My take is that women are often unfairly blamed for getting exasperated. Lots of people with non-standard beliefs face the same annoying choice: Do I start back at square one with this person, or do I ignore them and state my claim to the informed members of the audience? I think women are expected to uphold a higher standard of patience and intellectual nurturing.

When a man faces a stupid question, he's often allowed to either ignore it or make fun of the person who asked it. Women can't get away with that so easily. I think it's true that people are more likely to assume than a man knows what he's talking about. They're also more likely to feel that he's entitled to say "If you don't get it, it's obviously your problem."

The epithet "shrill" used to be applied almost exclusively to women, until the right wing blowhards figured out that they could use it to simultaneously impugn their opponents' masculinity and their sanity.