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Re: [ontolog-forum] electric sheep

To: "[ontolog-forum] " <ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
From: "Gary Berg-Cross" <gary.berg-cross@xxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 6 Nov 2007 09:34:34 -0500
Message-id: <330E3C69AFABAE45BD91B28F80BE32C9019BDDF8@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>


Included in the review of a book that John cited about Aristotle's comments on 
women (or females of any species):  
http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/bmcr/2004/2004-09-19.html   Bryn Mawr Classical 
Review 2004.09.19    (01)

was this:    (02)

  "Drawing on an article by Charles Kahn, M.            formulates a two-fold 
"test for ideological     rationalization" to evaluate not just if the claim    
  a thinker makes is mistaken but if that error   can be  attributed to his or 
her ideological    blinders.3      To justify that an assertion is         an 
ideological rationalization, M. claims that it       must be proven that first, 
the assertion        justifies the interest of one group at the      expense of 
another (in the case of M.'s topic,  that Aristotle's account of the female 
justifies        the interests of men at the expense of  women), and second, 
that either the claim        rests on arbitrary assumptions and unusually   bad 
reasoning or the claim contradicts other    fundamental principles held by 
Aristotle (M. 7- 11)."    (03)

It struck me that these times could use well thought out tests of cliams that 
might be based on                 " ideological rationalization".  The 2 cites 
in the section certainly are a useful start, although firming up 
criteria/evidence for "at the expense of others" and "arbitray assumptions" 
leads into higher order debates.    (04)


Gary Berg-Cross, Ph.D.
Spatial Ontology Community of Practice (SOCoP)
http://www.visualknowledge.com/wiki/socop
Executive Secretariat
Semantic Technology
EM&I 
Suite 350  455 Spring park Place
Herndon VA  20170
703-742-0585    (05)

Reference 3.  is  C. Kahn, "Comments on Schofield," in G. Patzig, ed., 
Aristoteles Politik: Acten des XI. Symposium Aristotelicum (Göttingen: 
Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht), pp. 28-31. Mayhew's also acknowledges his debt to 
Schofield's "Ideology and Philosophy in Aristotle's Theory of Slavery" (in 
Aristoteles Politik, pp. 1-28), in which Schofield pursued an analogous 
examination of Aristotle's theory of slavery to see if it was liable to the 
charges of ideological motivation (see M. 2).    (06)

-----Original Message-----
From: ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx 
[mailto:ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of John F. Sowa
Sent: Tuesday, November 06, 2007 12:29 AM
To: [ontolog-forum]
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] electric sheep    (07)

Wacek,    (08)

 > Some progress has been made, though.  Aristotle claimed
 > -- according to Russell, as far as I know -- that women
 > have fewer teeth than men.    (09)

Following is a review of a book about Aristotle's comments
on women (or females of any species):    (010)

    http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/bmcr/2004/2004-09-19.html
    Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2004.09.19    (011)

I would guess that he actually did the test, but the man he
examined happened to have fully developed wisdom teeth, but
the woman didn't.    (012)

You can find lots of very good examples as well as those
"howlers" in Aristotle's writings.  Among the better ones
is his conclusion that sponges are animals, not plants.    (013)

An excellent example of experimental method is his study of
embryos -- by starting with 30 chicken eggs, breaking open
one each day, and describing how the embryo develops.    (014)

In any case, the primary role of philosophy is not to
accumulate facts and theories, as in science, but to develop
methods of conceptual analysis.  For that purpose, it's hard
to find more instructive examples than the writings of Plato
and Aristotle.    (015)

But the distinction between philosophy and the empirical sciences
wasn't clearly distinguished until the 19th century.  Even Kant had
lectured on Newtonian mechanics, and one of Kant's contributions
was the hypothesis that the planets developed from a cloud of dust
around the sun.    (016)

John    (017)


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