| | I've been (and expect for a while to remain) short on time, so I haven't posted in this thread up to this point. I think that Robert is correct about the fact that gender differences exist and must be taken into account. Hong is correct in her identification of those differences as hysteretic - she didn't use the word, but I think that the concept of sub-optimalities that persist after their reasons are history, is precisely applicable here. I'd like to make my own observations available for whatever they might be worth.
If one pays attention to errors in logic, one notices that men commit the error of scope violation much more frequently than women (and I don't want to get at this point into the origin of this fact, just that it is confirmed in reality whenever I keep score, as I usually do.) Scope violation is when one assumes that a conclusion is true outside the contextual scope of its premises. On the few occasions when I hear a woman commit a scope violation, it usually turns out that she is just repeating an argument she learned from a male.
In situations in which men are likely to commit scope violations - when scope tracking becomes difficult - women tend to avoid drawing conclusions at all rather than reason out of context.
A woman will usually assume that if another person is interested in her happiness, that person is also interested in the context in which she is pursuing it. She knows that if you don't know her context, your efforts to collaborate and trade with her for jointly optimal results can turn counterproductive or worse. So a woman's goal for communication may consist of simply bringing your knowledge of her context up to date, so that your initiatives that involve her existential and mental context will take that context into account - and being based on valid contextual logic, will be more likely to achieve your joint goals. She need not know what your future initiatives will be, to know that you need to know her context in order to optimize your mutual cooperation and trade. A man who ignores context is existentially dangerous. If a man is not willing to participate in a mutual context-updating, then he is not likely to be a good mate, or a good father, or even a good friend.
I'll go on a limb here. Rand's other achievement in epistemology, after measurement omission, is her integration of logic with the contextuality of knowledge - and it is an achievement that goes "over the heads" of most male "Aristotelians." I don't know where the female advantage in context-tracking comes from, but I think that Rand's achievements would have been much less likely if she had been socialized, as most men are, to do "universal," de-contextualized "logic."
(Edited by Adam Reed
on 4/09, 11:05am)
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