Re-engendering Logic: Feminism and the History and Philosophy of Logic

Dr. Michael Beaney
Department of Philosophy
Open University Milton Keynes MK7 6AA England

Michael Beaney Professor of Philosophy, University of York

MA, BPhil, DPhil (Oxon)

Previous posts inclOctober 13, 2010 Humboldt Research Fellowships at the Universities of Erlangen-Nürnberg and Jena, and lectureships at the Universities of Manchester, Leeds, London (Birkbeck College) and Sheffield

Research interests in the history of philosophy

History of nineteenth and twentieth century philosophy, especially analytic philosophy Conceptions of analysis from ancient Greek thought onwards Creativity Research projects

Conceptions of analysis in the history of philosophy Logic, methodology and philosophy of mathematics in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with particular reference to Frege, Russell, Moore, Wittgenstein, Collingwood and Carnap Creativity in the history of art and science Analytic philosophy and historiography Editorial work

Associate Editor, British Journal for the History of Philosophy Editor, The Oxford Handbook of the History of Analytic Philosophy, Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2010 Series Editor, Book Series on History of Analytic Philosophy, Palgrave Macmillan Series Editor, Series of 8 Volumes on the History of Philosophy, Continuum Books, LondonThis essay was originally e-published at: The Centre for Interdisciplinary Gender Studies (CIGS) at the University of Leeds http://www.leeds.ac.uk/gender-studies/ The Centre for Interdisciplinary Gender Studies (CIGS) at the University of Leeds is the largest research centre in Gender Studies in Britain, bringing together over 170 academic staff from twenty-seven departments across the arts and humanities, social sciences, medicine and healthcare studies. Information concerning Study Courses may be obtained here: gender-studies@leeds.ac.uk

As an initial simplification, feminist work in and on philosophy can be divided into three main areas, which may be broadly characterized as historical, philosophical and sociological/psychological, although fruitful work in any one of these areas inevitably draws on and develops ideas and themes in the other two. Firstly, there are attempts to contextualize and recanonize the work of philosophers, 'reading' the philosophies of the 'great white males' in the light of the wider intellectual, social and political backgrounds, exposing underlying (sexist) assumptions and prejudices, and, in more revisionary mode, unearthing women philosophers and planting them more firmly in the philosophical canon. Secondly, there are philosophically informed critiques of the supposed 'maleness' of philosophy - deconstructing the oppositions that are traditionally lined up alongside the male/female distinction (reason/emotion, rationality/intuition, mind/body, form/matter, etc.) and deflating the conceits of so-called 'phallogocentrism', for example; and, on the positive front, feminist reworkings of traditional philosophical conceptions - developing, most notably, new conceptions of 'situated' objectivity, embodiment and identity, and feminist ethics. Thirdly, there are studies of the practices and institutions of philosophy, both within and without the academic profession. What kind of person becomes a philosopher? What qualities and skills are valued by philosophers? Why is it that there have been so few women philosophers in the past, and why, even now, is the proportion of women in the profession so low? Is there something intrinsically 'masculine' about the practice of philosophy? Is it the confrontational style of philosophical discourse that attracts men and alienates women?

Compared to the tremendous blossoming of feminist activity in the philosophical subdisciplines of epistemology and ethics over the last two decades, however, feminist work on logic has barely got off the ground. This might seem surprising, given that, for many philosophers, logic lies at the very core of their discipline, and logical skills are seen as essential attributes of any 'serious' practitioner. Furthermore, work on logic would seem to offer an ideal way of pursuing simultaneously the issues in all three of the areas identified above. For if it is the discursive practices of logic, in particular, that most deter women from philosophy, then an historically informed and philosophically acute critique of logic would not only explain this, but also, by deconstructing the ambitions of traditional philosophy at its very centre, offer a way forward. Internal critiques, after all, are generally the most effective. But such a suggested response, of course, has been part of the problem. For as Alcoff and Potter say in their introduction to Feminist Epistemologies, 'Feminism made its first incursions into philosophy in a movement from the margins to the center' (1993: p. 2), and it is only recently, with postmodernist assaults on objectivity, deconstructive 'readings' of classical texts, and the hidden assumptions of science in all its forms coming under increasing scrutiny, that feminism has been in a position to marshall the forces to attack philosophy in its citadel, its metaphysical keep secured on the rocks of logic.

Of course, there have long been gender-conscious sociological and psychological studies of what can be called informal logic - or perhaps better, the pragmatics and rhetoric of argument. A very recent example of this is Elizabeth Mapstone's War of Words, subtitled 'Women and Men Arguing'. Based on interviews, diaries, questionnaires and experimentally staged arguments, all the traditional stereotypes are found to be as alive and kicking in Britain today as they ever were. Men locked in adversarial combat, or engaged in 'report' talk, and women keyed into conciliatory dialogue, or engaged in 'rapport' talk, are still seen as the accepted models of discursive exchange. However, in not probing deeper into the nature and historical development of argumentative practices, all that such studies yield is, at best, advice of the agony uncle kind, and, at worst, the perpetuation of those prejudices that were presumably to be exposed. Descriptions, of how things actually are, can always prompt certain kinds of prescriptions, as to how things ought to be, but prescriptions are rarely effective unless the sources of their normativity are appreciated.

As far as work in the history of logic is concerned, there has been little attempt at recanonization. To take just one glaring example, there are some 90 volumes of papers by Christine Ladd-Franklin still left on the shelf in the library of Columbia University. Next to George Boole and Gottlob Frege, Charles Sanders Peirce was probably the most important logician in the modern period; and Christine Ladd-Franklin, who studied logic with Peirce at Johns Hopkins and soon contributed to a number of his projects, had a significant influence on Peirce. It seems remarkable that no one, even in the more politically correct parts of the States, has properly taken this up, but perhaps this itself is a symptom of what is often perceived as the underlying problem - the inherent unattractiveness of logic to women. For any such project would seem to require the motivations of the politically committed feminist, the technical wizardry of the first-class logician and the text-fondling obsessions of the dedicated historian.

However, there has been one notable attempt in the last few years, combining both historical and philosophical perspectives, to contextualize the work of certain male logicians, clearly aimed at debunking the pretensions of logic. In her Words of Power (published in 1990), Andrea Nye offers, as the subtitle puts it, 'a feminist reading of the history of logic' - from Parmenides, Plato, Aristotle and the Stoics, through Abelard and Ockham, to the founder of modern logic, Gottlob Frege. In Parmenides' conception of there being literally nothing outside 'what is' (providing no cognitive purchase, in other words, on 'what is not'), Plato's method of division mistakenly thought to always issue in dichotomies both exclusive and exhaustive, Aristotle's forging of the chains of syllogisms that were to shackle logicians for most of the next two millennia, and the Stoics' positing of a 'third realm' of meanings that in mediating between language and the world opened up the possibility of abstracting from both the distortions of ordinary language and the contingencies of the empirical world, Andrea Nye finds processes of closure operating, restricting thought by channelling it into given forms and inventing justifications of the idea that these forms represent how things 'really' are. What I have termed semainomenalism - the view, deriving from the Stoic conception of semainomena, that there is a realm of 'pure meanings' more fundamental than any phenomenal realm - is developed further by Abelard, who in finding a third way between realism and nominalism in the medieval debates over the status of universals, grounded his (almost presciently Wittgensteinian) appeal to the use of words, conceived as human 'institutions', in special acts of 'intellection' that gives us access to the semainomenal world, and by Ockham, who made explicit the distinction between 'real science', concerned with 'mental contents that stand for things', and 'logic' (or as we might say, 'meta-science'), concerned with 'mental contents that stand for mental contents'. When we come to Frege, the founder of modern logic and one of the main architects of contemporary analytic philosophy, the process of closure, according to Nye, is itself purportedly completed, logic finally becoming 'unreadable' and reducing any 'would-be reader' to mere exegesis (p. 127). From his earliest work, Frege's avowed aim was indeed to develop a Leibnizian characteristica universalis, or universal logical language, capable of proving all arithmetical truths from a privileged kernel of logical axioms and thereby providing the conceptual basis for all science. In doing so, Frege realized the importance of distinguishing the 'conceptual content' of a proposition from all those other features - which he called 'tone'
('Beleuchtung') or 'colouring' ('Färbung') - that may also be involved on any actual occasion of use, a distinction that has now been crystallized into that fundamental distinction of modern philosophy of language and linguistic theory, the semantics/pragmatics distinction. In Frege's work, these 'conceptual contents' became refined into the 'senses' that were notoriously then housed in a 'third realm' ('drittes Reich') of 'thoughts' - a semainomenal world indeed. Nye rightly questions the deflowering of language and the banishing of the resulting entities that occurs here; and concludes that such abuse of power can only be countered by 'readings' that are far more attentive to the context in which something is said.

The story that has been sketched here is plausible and instructive. But in Nye's narration, it is soiled by spurious elements presumably injected to assure us of its feminist credentials. 'Man', we are told, is Aristotle's favourite example in his logical and metaphysical discussions (p. 56); and the development of propositional logic by the Stoics, it turns out, was somehow designed to justify Hellenic imperialism (p. 75). Abelard, we all know, seduced Heloise and then forced her into a nunnery; what we may not have realized is that he also had the gall to use logic to justify his evil ways (pp. 98-100). Ockham, that celebrated eradicator of unnecessary beings, may have influenced Protestantism by directing us to the meanings that lie behind texts, accessible by attentive reading, but the role that was accorded in this process to the individual will, Nye tells us, led to the witch-hunts of the 15th and 16th centuries (p. 119). The anti-Semitic remarks that Frege made in his late diaries are seen as a sign of the connection that there is between the purging of certain aspects of meaning in developing a logical language and the extermination of Jews in Nazi concentration camps.

However, even a 'logician' can 'read' the subtext of these claims: logicians are Fascists. But tarring all logicians with this brush indicates a mentality that is not so very different from that of the Fascist. Nye sees a straight contrast between logic, which ignores context, and 'reading', which appreciates context (cf. p. 183). But from someone who is elsewhere critical of binary oppositions, this is extraordinary. For any 'reading' emphasizes certain features of the total context at the expense of other features, and this is just what 'logic' does. So the worst charge that can be brought (familiar in postmodernist attacks) is that 'logic' is only one kind of 'reading', albeit one that is unduly privileged. However, even this should be resisted, for 'logical readings' should indeed be privileged, providing as they do the basis for further 'readings'. (We cannot do linguistic theory, or indeed think or communicate at all, without drawing some kind of distinction - however negotiable it may be in specific contexts - between semantics and pragmatics.) It is not true that any 'reading' goes, and what provides constraints on the 'readings' that can be offered, and which makes them all 'readings' of the same 'text', is 'logic'.

In her conclusion, Nye writes: 'It must be clear by now that I am no logician, that I see no "logic" in the history of logic. Each story, each history has been different: different times, different concerns, different tones of voice, different ways of speaking, different men whose logics are no more commensurable than their lives.' (p. 173.) But not only does such relativist talk conflict with the coherent narrative that can indeed be extracted from the history of logic (visible even in Nye's own narrative, as I hope I indicated above), but it also undermines Nye's whole argument. For if men's 'logics' are incommensurable with one another, then a fortiori they are incommensurable with any 'feminist reading' that might be offered today, which leaves any such 'reading' free-floating in a justificatory vacuum.

At least at the level of what she tells us she is doing, Nye's work sends out precisely the opposite message that ought to be heard. For the effect is simply to reinforce the myth of what Wittgenstein called 'the hardness of the logical must' and the popular misconception of logic as restrictive and useless. What is needed is not a further hardening from outside, but a softening from inside. Recognizing 'the hardness of the logical must' is simply to understand from within the linguistic practice the relevant conceptual demands. Logical compulsion is not physical or even mental oppression but conceptual understanding. This is clear if we go back to the origins of logic in the work of Aristotle. For it was not Aristotle's aim to shackle thought by restricting it to given forms (however much this may have been the effect), but to provide an intellectual framework within which to understand and organize conceptual connections and to facilitate the movements of scientific thought. 'Analysis' may now have the reputation of being dry, boring, and the sort of thing that only deeply repressed men do; but historical studies of the development of conceptions of analysis and detailed understanding of actual examples of analysis show that lying at the very heart of such processes is a fundamentally creative element. Finding the right framework within which to explain something fruitfully requires precisely that sensitivity to the wider context that Nye commends, and precisely that mental faculty that Aristotle called 'nous' and later

(anti-Enlightenment) Romantics called 'intuition'. The appropriate feminist response is surely to draw our attention to this creativity at the core of the logical process. 'Fascist logic' versus 'feminist reading' is the opposition, above all, that needs to be deconstructed. Nye, it turns out, is no less a prisoner of polarity than her supposed 'logician'. There is clearly a great deal to say about the creative processes underlying the complex developments in the history of logic, and Nye has provided useful material for pursuing this project; but the conceptual framework needed to understand these developments needs to be far richer than the counterproductive hand-waving appeal to 'feminist readings'.

References

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