What, Why & How do we Know ?

Reducing Gender Critical / Radical Feminist Follows

Since initially getting interested in the “TERF Wars” reading Alice Dreger, back here in 2015 (before Maya Forstater and J. K. Rowling, before “TERF” itself even) the number of GC/RadFem supporter follows in my Twitter timeline has snowballed to effectively drown-out most other areas of interest. Ironically those with whom real engagement is needed the Trans-Activists simply block or put you on a list (or worse actively attempt to “cancel”). Some who should know better – in the UK – Michael Cashman, Peter Tatchell, Liz Barker, simply take the hard-line on “radical freedom” and deny any debate, and actively worse in the case of Stonewall itself. Not only is it not a debate, denial means it’s not even dialogue. (Notable exceptions are Ayesha Hazarika, and Justin Webb as I’ve noted before. And two other individual exceptions in Clive Andrews and Justwanttoreadstuff.)

I’m an epistemologist not an activist, though I did once refer to my approach as the “philosophical activist turn”. I care about meaningful truth. My “activism” is academic, conceptual and active in dialogue. Again ironically, that philosophical activist turn now includes the whole “Critical Theory” movement (inc CRT). Far from being a theory, this seeks to use “active positive discrimination” to physically undermine, reverse or deny the whole history and foundations of any philosophical considerations of lived truth and political action. Throwing baby out with the bathwater – rip it up and start again – anti-establishment anarchist revolutionaries. Careful what you wish for. No wonder establishment – white supremacist males, whatever – reject it just as vehemently. Race-wars, gender-wars, religious-wars, climate-emergency, TERF-wars, decolonial-slave-wars, any neuro-atypical / intersectional rights, you name it. When it comes to choosing sides, woke or anti-woke, a pox on both their houses I say. I’m on the side of the freedom of (and need for) constructive dialogue. I have rules of engagement, rules in which personal attacks are exceptions, no-no’s to be used only in the heat of battle of otherwise good-faith discourse. No dialogue without good-faith. All meaningful truth requires reconciliation if the process has involved violence, even attention-grabbing and content-curating verbal violence (@Glinner anyone? [*]).

Incidentally, one of the more interesting and constructive dialogues I’ve had along the way was with @Glinner (before Maya and his going on the offensive campaign) about Michel Foucault and Queer Theory. One where nuanced understanding is needed if we’re not going to throw out the post-modern baby with the bathwater. But that’s another longer PoPoMo story. TL/DR: Foucault isn’t all (or even mostly) bad.

The TERF wars are simply an archetypical current example of my main area of interest, so I really need to prune out – unfollow – a fair number of those who would attract the pejorative anti-Trans label “TERF” on my Twitter timeline. To be clear I (and most of them) are not “anti-Trans” we are simply “anti male-self-ID gender-transwomen’s rights trumping other rights of women and LGB individuals“. It’s all very well tagging TIQ+ etc. onto the original LGB Pride as a statement of solidarity, fill yer boots, but it’s not OK to conflate and deny the many different aspects and rights (*). I wish them all well and will stay attached to a few to keep in the retweet & replies loop.

In doing so, I discover amongst the blue-ticks Martina Navratilova is a keeper. I actually only started following her directly on Twitter quite recently but was previously very positive about the common sense conclusions she came to in her TV documentary about Transwomen in Female sport. The point is fairness and fairness turns out to be a complex topic. In her Tweets she remains grounded and to the point.

[(*) See also – Ban conversion therapy? Under an LGBT banner?]

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Post Notes:

[*] @Glinner got some stick – and his Twitter ban – for his “bullying” tactics in aggressively defending “Gender Critical” feminists being branded “TERF”s by targetting individual Trans-Activists directly. However I still see him on the right side of history here in paying the price for his career decision to go on the attack. Still now in July 2021 here are a couple of mails targetting J K Rowling:

gonna be opening a charity to send rowling a pipebomb https://t.co/cQadsigkHC

�” florane🧦🌐 | 70589400000 (@okyeahhorny) July 19, 2021

Centenaries & Coincidences

Mark Hammond mentioned in a comment the idea that as well as Dante’s Divine Comedy, 2021 was the centenary of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and maybe I should highlight that. Somewhat dismissively I noted that was surely the reason why there were so many new Witt-related pieces (and books) being published in 2021, and that 2022 would soon be the centenary of other important 1922 works anyway. Every year is a centenary of something and setting store by the conjunction of human affairs with the orbits of celestial bodies is the kind of “astrology” I try to avoid. However …

Something I’d noticed before was the significance of 1922 in the sense that 1922 “first” editions of several seminal works – Joyce’s Ulysses and TEL’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom I mentioned, but there’s Eliot’s Wasteland and more … in fact the Tractatus was really published in 1922 too.

And a full Wittgenstein lecture by Jonathan Rée here. (Actually more than a Wittgenstein lecture, a fascinating and free-ranging talk and Q&A on Rée’s attitude to philosophy, and the relationship between philosophy and histories of philosophy – very reminiscent of Pirsig’s Philosophy <> Philosophology distinction – lots on the genuine conversational dialogue form too. Promoting his book: “Witcraft: the Invention of Philosophy in English“. Added to the list …)

The alignment of stars is in the tide of human affairs of course, a world in crisis coming out of WWI, not celestial motions. Tractatus was written in WWI trenches.

1922? It’s a “thing”. A Golden Year for Publishing.

Real or Sokal?

It’s a 2014 paper based on 2010 work … but is it real or is it a Sokal?

�” What, Why & How do we know? (@psybertron) June 22, 2021

The 2014 Physics.Org piece.

The 2014 Source paper about 2010 work.

Lost of tweeting in June 2021 about the physics dark matter / dark energy analogy, so much so that I have my doubts whether the original was real or simply a thought experiment?

Better Fences Needed

I may at last have space to write my Good Fences piece, but first a new reference. “Western” rationality is eating itself.

I particularly like the use of the word special in this piece (which I’ve not fully digested yet) when talking about Western civilisation (as I do when talking about humanity).

We are a failure.

Israeli historian Richard Landes may have written Good Fences before I ever got round to it. And linked it to the woke wave:

“It looks more and more every day that the West cannot control the catastrophic concessions its woke millennialists made over the course of the last two decades… in the name of progressive values.”

In defence of hard-won Western civilisation.
“rare progressive flowers that would wither in the cold air of prime-divider societies”
Excellent https://t.co/p9e08tBvoR

�” What, Why & How do we know? (@psybertron) June 22, 2021

In the words of Creep – “You’re so fucking special.”

Like Landes …

“I’m only sorry that I’ve failed to communicate my understanding to people at a time when it really matters to see clearly.”

Turns out it is actually hard to communicate, and the story that is easy to communicate is the wrong one, the one that’s leading us astray. At root the problem is memetic.

The Death of Argument?

In the recent Radical Feminism vs Trans-Activism case, Chimamanda had said “The assumption of good faith is dead.”

For the rules of engagement (argument / discourse / dialogue) good faith is the essential ingredient that cannot be defined in terms of rules of content.

We’ll see just how clever you are when I misread your entire article in bad faith.

�” Dicko (@OhioDave_) June 18, 2021

Essentially my point being that once bad-faith, or even just the suspicion of bad-faith, enters the dialogue, there isn’t really any option other than pausing to reset good-faith. Without it, no amount of sceptical, critical-thinking, and formal rules of objective-logic over the form and content of an argument can lead to meaningful agreement or progress. (Slightly different if it is a genuinely controlled “debate” with pre-accepted voting on binary outcomes, or the manipulation and critique of objective data in a closed / repeatable scientific context – but most of real life isn’t.)

Having declared the death of good faith, Chimamanda proceeds to fight outrage with outrage, and shows little mercy for her (younger) adversaries. (See AJ Owens comments here.) When I wrote of it, I said we had to take the truth of the 3-part story “in good faith” – which presupposes that, as a “good” writer and campaigner, she was generally a follower of good rules of engagement – and there was a “good-faith” reason for deciding to go on the “attack” as the best form of “defence”. But fighting bad-faith with outrage (however justified) is more war-war, less jaw-jaw.

It was interesting to contrast Ayesha Hazarika response to the fall-out from the Maya Forstater case. Once that appeal was “won” too many GenderCrit-RadFems have been gloating and, sensing blood, “attacking” the “losing” TransActivists – perpetuating the “hateful” “anti-trans” impression. Polarisation is always against an opposing position rather than towards any agreeable conclusion. Ayesha chose not to engage in such a punch-up and took some flak for not overtly declaring the GenderCrit position, remarking on “women kicking lumps out of each other” on both sides.

Well. This caused a wee bit of a stooshie this week but I shall nonetheless be continuing the conversation on my ⁦@TimesRadio⁩ show at 6pm with journalist ⁦@freddymcconnell⁩ & Labour MP ⁦@ToniaAntoniazzi⁩ https://t.co/b1zm7r7Xpz

�” Ayesha Hazarika (@ayeshahazarika) June 19, 2021

Good for her. I’d like to think I maintained the same sense of decorum.

In real life, truth is nothing without reconciliation (the restoration of good faith), hence “truth and reconciliation”.

A J Owens (Staggering Implications) had already picked this up in Chimamanda’s initial outraged response in his comment on my initial post on this. And in fact he pointed out he’d already written the Death of Argument around cancel culture generally, before the Chimamanda case emerged:

The Death of Argument:
Part I – CUT TO THE CHASE
Part II – THE DILEMMAS OF SHTISEL

Worth a read, he’s right,

[Even in enlightened rational argument]
“[It] is a mistake to put our subjectivity and immediacy aside. The only way forward is to engage it. But not on its own ground!”

“Not on its own ground!” (*)

Once the debate is distorted by subjective animosity, there is some reactionary attention-grabbing value in expressing (more) outrage – activism – but it isn’t the route to enlightened progress.

As ever it’s not a choice between objective and subjective, winning and losing binaries, but an integrated conversation.

“We’re having the wrong conversation” is what you say when you’re losing. pic.twitter.com/R8B2T8xbfW

�” Alice, future true crime victim (@AliceFromQueens) June 18, 2021

who wants a conversation

�” Alice, future true crime victim (@AliceFromQueens) June 19, 2021

All of us, hopefully?

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[Post Notes:

(*) Aside – the same remark from Dennett in Bacteria to Bach and Back when trying to change the argument on consciousness … “if you debate on your opponents’ terms, you have already lost”. There is a meta-objective in setting the right argument.

And – a day later – Stephen Mumford on ad-hominem positionality in the same argument. Ad-hominem being one of those no-no rules that demands an interpersonal reset before worthwhile argument can progress.

Also from last week, this Performative Outrage piece from Jesus and Mo:

Hat tip to Stacey Kennedy on Teeside SitP Facebook.]

The Secret Chord

I’ve captured the poetry of a number of important late 20th C song lyrics over the years, just to have a searchable record of them here. Roy Harper, Tommy Womack, Graham Parker, Tom Petty, Nick Lowe, Eric Boyle, Elvis Costello, Peter Gabriel, to name a few. It’s only in the last decade or so I have appreciated Leonard Cohen, mentioned as much here just last year, but never captured any of the poetry until now.

Anthem is important for the crack meme, or “how the light gets in“.

Hallelujah just is. This post prompted by this morning’s Desert Island Discs on BBC R4 where Hallelujah was the first selection from Yo-Yo Ma – stopping me in my tracks when I should have been starting work.

whenever I hear that, wherever I am, I stop what I’m doing …

�” Alex Klaushofer (@alexklaushofer) June 18, 2021

[I’m] not some pilgrim who claims to have seen the Light.

Anthem (Leonard Cohen)

The birds they sang
At the break of day
Start again
I heard them say
Don’t dwell on what has passed away
Or what is yet to be

Ah, the wars they will be fought again
The holy dove, she will be caught again
Bought and sold, and bought again
The dove is never free

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in

We asked for signs
The signs were sent
The birth betrayed
The marriage spent
Yeah, and the widowhood
Of every government
Signs for all to see

I can’t run no more
With that lawless crowd
While the killers in high places
Say their prayers out loud
But they’ve summoned, they’ve summoned up
A thundercloud
They’re going to hear from me

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in

You can add up the parts
But you won’t have the sum
You can strike up the march
There is no drum
Every heart, every heart
To love will come
But like a refugee

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in

That’s how the light gets in
That’s how the light gets in

Hallelujah (Leonard Cohen)

Now I’ve heard there was a secret chord
That David played, and it pleased the Lord
But you dont really care for music, do you?
It goes like this, the fourth, the fifth
The minor falls, the major lifts
The baffled king composing Hallelujah