On 4/15/07, Marcus G. Daniels <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Michael Agar wrote: > > "Reflexivity" is one of those terms... Nice and neat in set theory, > > a relation R is reflexive in set A iff for all a in A aRa is true. > > > Question is, what is the discrimination power of R? Does it ever say > false? (Unlike, say, Freud's theories or religious dogma), and if so > does it report `true' and `false' in any pattern that rarely would occur > by chance? Are their precise metrics for the features that R draws > upon, or does the meta-analyst just have that convenience?
Suppose person i is a member of the group w. To get to the problem let's think about the durability of the entitivity of w. Let's assume that the status of w as real, living group can be lost or transform or fission or fuse at any moment. w ought to have that possibility (does set theory require that it be an impossibility?). Suppose that i belongs to the group known as "women" (w), for example. The status of i as a member or, even, not a member in the group is necessarily reflexive. It is also necessarily contingent upon the possibility of the word "women" to make sense of a set of people as a unified entity. Where does that possibility come from? One view is that the possibility comes from the possibility of anyone in a system, which would be a different group overlapping with w, call it h, to think about the question "what it means to be a woman" or, even, "what it means not to be a woman." Such a possibility includes i. To address Daniels' question about the discriminative power of a category, I suppose that it depends on your theoretical framework and what criteria exists for giving a category the power to sort people out. It seems that the perception is that sex is a category with lots of discriminative power while gender isn't. There seems to be some merit in this but there also seems to be an emphasis on a purpose for asking the question in a first place. Depending on what community an analyst is looking at 'sex' is a better candidate for answering the question "is person i a suitable mate for sexual reproduction?" than is gender. Gender, of course, is a culturally situated representation of sex (and more) and so it can and is often used to answer the question "is person i a suitable mate for sexual reproduction?". And gender may be a better one for answering the question "why was person i not a suitable person for role x?" where role x includes things that don't have to do with sexual reproduction. Gender is what we use to figure out which public bathroom to use. It's what medical institutions use to design the paperwork nurses and doctors use to categorize newborn babies. Arguably, gender is what is used to figure out the discriminative power of the category sex. We all know, of course, that we can't ignore the fact that female and male genitals exist and that in each individual the differences are robust and persistent. Experts and non-experts can identify the differences fairly easily. The moment, however, that a researcher puts the category to a trial of strength, a trial of its discriminative power, (say that person takes thousands of pictures of male and female genitalia and shows these pictures to a wide sample of people and measures how well male and female genitalia are identified) then the category 'sex' inherits its traits from the discriminative power of the category 'gender.' Gender is why sex is meaningful. But, again, I don't want to downplay the fact that indeed female and male genitalia exist. Here's where I get out of my domain: what are the precise metrics for the features of the category 'gender'. 'Gender' is looking dangerously like it is everything. The category 'gender' has, however, precise boundaries but one must look at the social context in which that category is given meaning to figure out its limitations. Who is in charge of the word 'gender' and why are they giving it the capacity to discriminate? Moving back to the expertise of FRIAM we may ask the same sort of question. Who is in charge of the category 'complex adaptive system' and why are they giving it the capacity to discriminate? > > ============================================================ > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv > Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College > lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org > -- Matthew R. Francisco PhD Student, Science and Technology Studies Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
