Comments Elsewhere

• Jerry: “If she is wrong and mischaracterizes the causes, what does that say about her conclusions regarding the effects?”

Nothing at all. If Brownmiller advances a false theory of the form “X causes R” (N.B.: I’m not conceding that her theory about the causes of rape IS false; nor am I insisting that it’s true; my position is that it’s not salient to this discussion whether it’s false or true), and then advances another theory of the form “R causes P,” based on an independent argument that doesn’t refer back to the first theory, the falsity of the first theory tells you nothing at all about whether the second theory is true or false, and nothing at all about whether the theory well-grounded or ill-grounded. What will tell you something about the merits of the second theory is a consideration of the independent arguments that are given for it.

• “F => F is True. F => T is True.”

If you mean the arrow here to express a material implication, that’s an accurate description of the truth-values of material implications with false antecedents. But what has any of this got to do with the comments you’re trying to respond to?

There is no argument that I made, or which Susan Brownmiller made, in which her theory about the causes of rape is the antecedent in a conditional of which her theory about the effects of rape is a consequent. The theory in which rape is the explanans is not part of the evidence given for the theory in which rape is the explanandum, so disputing the first doesn’t undermine any of the reasons given for believing the second.

Again, speaking generally, you seem to be awfully muddled about causal claims, implication, and the proper places in which to attack an argument. This discussion is about causal claims, and causal claims are not claims about material implication. (A causal claim of the form “P’s being true causes Q to be true” is not truth-functional at all, because causal claims, among other things, have to support counterfactuals.) Maybe you are running into problems here because you believe that if someone advances a theory of the form “X causes R,” and another theory of the form “R causes P,” the direction of causation and the common middle term somehow suggests that the first theory is somehow logically prior to, a premise for, the second theory, and so that the evidential basis for the second theory somehow must depend on the evidential basis for the first theory. If you do believe that, I don’t know what to say except that it’s a hopeless muddle of really distinct causal, logical, and epistemological relationships, and you need to try to more carefully distinguish claims about complex causal chains between events from claims about complex logical and evidentiary relationships between statements asserting the existence of simple causal chains between events.

If that’s not what you’re confused about, then you’ll have to state more clearly why exactly you think a discussion of Brownmiller’s theory about the causes of rape has any evidential bearing on her theory about the effects of rape, and also just what precisely the antecedent is supposed to be and what the consequent is supposed to be in the material conditionals you keep trying to use.

• Jerry: “your post contains quotes from women that basically blame men for most violence in the world (MacKinnon’s quote especially)”

MacKinnon’s quote does not say anything at all about either what absolute quantity or what proportion of the violence in the world is committed by men rather than women. What she actually says is that men commit some violence against other men (she doesn’t say how much), and men commit some violence against women (she doesn’t say how much), and then she contrasts the different ways in which the one kind of violence and the other are committed. I’m sure she has views on that, and so do I, but those views aren’t expressed in the quote and they aren’t material to this discussion. Any claim about how far men are to blame for how much violence is a claim that you have projected into the quote, not something that was there to be found.

• Jerry: “Your claim that you are not saying men are bad and that it is just the science that makes them that way . . .”

I literally have no idea what this means. I have not advanced any theory at all about what either the causes of rape are, or what the moral status of men, either individually or collectively, may be. I also have no idea what you mean by “the science [making] them that way.” What science? What claim are you even referring to?

• Jerry: “You and Brownmiller have done none of that accounting.”

I already told you that I’m not attempting to provide a comprehensive defense of Brownmiller’s claims against all possible objections; if you want that, you should read Brownmiller’s book. My aims for a mid-length blog post are quite different. As for Brownmiller, unless you have read her book (I mean the whole thing, not just the handful of quotations that I or somebody else has pulled for brief consideration), then you have literally no idea at all what she does or does not account for.

• Jerry: “Ad hominem covers the kind of insult you used, which dismisses the argument by demeaning the target of the insult as someone that unfairly shouts and worse, shouts irrelevancies.“

Jerry, characterizing your argument as irrelevant is, I repeat, not an argumentum ad hominem. It is not an argumentum of any kind, because it has no internal inferential structure. It’s an assertion about your argument, which happens to be the conclusion of an argument drawn from a distinct set of premises. You might find the characterization, or the wording in which it is expressed, insulting. But “statements which you find insulting” and “examples of argumentum ad hominem” are two distinct classes, and their members have different logical properties.

As for that argument from distinct premises, I provided several reasons in my comments for saying that your reply was largely irrelevant to the point you were supposedly replying to. Those reasons may be good reasons, and they may be bad reasons, but they are reasons which had specifically to do with the structure and direction of the argument itself, not with any of your personal characteristics or circumstances as the person advancing the argument. You cannot simply point at the conclusion of an argument, declare “I find that conclusion insulting!” and then write off the entire argument as an exercise in argumentum ad hominem. (Or rather, you can’t do that without proving that you don’t understand what the term “ad hominem” means.) Argumentum ad hominem hasn’t anything to do with your reaction to the conclusion; it has to do with the kind of premises that the argument appeals to.

• Jerry: “‘Since kharris disagrees with you, and DRR tells you to stop, I must consider I have won the argument!!! ZOMG!'”

I didn’t say that I won an argument. I said that you were devoting a lot of energy to topics that weren’t on-topic for the discussion, weren’t responsive to the specific claims advanced in my post, and which a number of people have repeatedly said they’re not much interested in discussing at length with you.

• Jerry: “Here is a transcript of a speech from Wendy McElroy. . . .”

I’m not interested in your views on male victims of domestic violence, or the ERA, or on the debate between liberal and radical feminists, or your beef with contemporary feminism broadly. These issues have nothing to do with the proper interpretation of Susan Brownmiller’s theory about the systemic effects of stranger-rape.

• Jerry: “P.S. Ad hominem attack: ‘You’ll have to engage with that if you want to actually join the conversation, rather than just shouting irrelevancies at it,’ — I think it’s clear I have not been shouting irrelevancies, regardless of how you would like to characterize my argument or me.”

That’s not an argumentum ad hominem. It is not even an argument at all; it’s a piece of advice which neither draws from premises nor moves towards a conclusion. It contains an implied characterization, which you may find personally insulting; but insults may be either called-for or uncalled-for, depending on the breaks, and are not the same thing as argumentum ad hominem, which is always a logical fallacy.

• Jerry: [after a quotation from Brownmiller and a quotation from MacKinnon] “This is what RadGeek buttresses her argument with.”

No, it’s not. You seem to be having consistent problems with understanding the direction of inference in arguments. (For example, you also have repeatedly spoken as if the part of Brownmiller’s theory that was under discussion in the post was attempting to explain or make predictions about the causes of stranger rape. It’s not; it’s about the effects.) Here, you have failed to grasp that my post was intended to EXPLAIN THE CONTENT of the claims in those quotations using terms which a certain part of my audience would be likely to understand and find interesting.

The post was not intended to establish some further conclusion BY MEANS OF those quotations. The quotations are not introduced as evidence for a conclusion. They are introduced as texts to be interpreted; the evidence for the interpretation I favor is provided elsewhere in the post.

• Jerry: “RadGeek’s point of departure is dubious and weak. Her conclusion seems to be . . .”

My conclusion is that Susan Brownmiller is advancing a theory on which patriarchy is substantially reinforced by a spontaneous order arising from the effects of pervasive, random acts of sexual violence against women.

Any other suggestion as to what my conclusion “seems to be” is sure to be overreaching on your part.

As for your beefs with a random assortment of popular feminist bloggers, other claims that Susan Brownmiller happened to make about a different topic (e.g. false report rates), Women’s Studies programs in Universities, feminist analyses of domestic violence, social constructionism, zero tolerance policies, or the price of tea in China, I honestly don’t care. Judging from the response that your comments has gotten, I doubt much of anyone else here does, either. I’m sure that these issues are all very important to you, but they are not actually material to my post, or to the part of Brownmiller’s theory that’s under discussion, or to the discussion that basically anyone other than you has been pursuing. I would call them red herrings, but even an accusation of misdirection would require a degree of coherent direction that your posts have, so far, not demonstrated.

• kharris: “By the way, RadGeek admits to Women’s Studies, but so far, not to being female that I can tell.”

For what it’s worth, I’ve only ever taken one course in my life that would qualify as a “Women’s Studies” course, and it was a fairly straightforward Psychology of Sexuality course, which wasn’t especially feminist in content. (It was cross-listed as Women’s Studies but taught by regular Psych department faculty.) Not that I think there’s anything wrong with taking Women’s Studies courses; that’s just not the way my academic career panned out.

However, I will happily concede just about any empty polemical label that jerry wants to throw at me, without argument, because I don’t give much of a damn what he calls me, and I’d just as soon get it out of the way in order to discuss something that matters.