Pronouns and Triviality

Just to dial down on the digressions for a moment, I notice there don't seem to be any sex-specific pronouns in those sources...

Here's a place I agree with Set. I was a psych major for a bit, before I settled down to bacteriology/microbiology. While I was still interested, I left because of the mushiness.. in contrast to my hard science classes. I thought it was all twiddly.

Years later, I still am interested and still think it is all twiddly, including some of my favorite books.

Like the way they just decided one day that homosexuality is no longer a disorder. There was no research that made them change their minds, it was just a realization that times were changing. The did manage to come up with some research later to support their decision.

Mind you, I think they made the right decision when they did this. You just don't see this kind of thing happening in real science.

Of all the things under God's heaven to worry about.

How wonderful our lives must be when we can spend 9 pages in an internet forum discussing the sexist nature of masculine pronouns.

I have a long time friend, then lover, who sought a psychiatrist for his rage. The doc told him to tell me the truth, and he tried to. He wasn't clear enough and I was dumb as doornails.

There was a decade long lapse but we later talked and still do, not often, catching up, and all this time later I thank that psychiatrist.

That was around the time you are talking about.

Really, I don't give a **** about pronouns.

I have no problem with psychology as a profession. It just isn't a science.

I'm not that worried, more interested. And this thread has been an education (to me) in many ways, about how arguments work, languages, and the definitions of things. I appreciate the amount of debate that a point I previously regarded as simple and obvious has provoked.

And Setanta's science 101 materials were of course most educational of all...

Fallacy alert: argument from lack of imagination.

Here is another conclusion: Arbitrary conventions are arbitrary. As a rule, they don't mean anything, or else they wouldn't be arbitrary. This particular arbitrary convention is no exception. Still can't see how I can reach any conclusion other than yours? Watch me!

There's a clue in there. One can allege that the use of the pronoun is sexist (although i would not agree), but not that the pronoun itself is sexist. This is germane because one of the links Soz provided states that pronouns and nouns are sexist. If i gave Thomas a cold drink, and a friend asked where it came from, for Thomas to reply "He gave it to me," or "From him," or "It's his," is descriptive, not oppressive. So the pronouns themselves are not sexist, only their use in context. As Thomas points out here, it's a convention. Sure it's arbitrary--so what? Using the Imperial system of measure, or U. S. Standard or metric is arbitrary. Arbitrary usages are a part of life.

Reality alert: that wasn't an argument.


What do you mean by "mean?"

He's calling up the Blue Meanies, beware.



I'll add, as I said a few times, I don't care that much about the use of accepted universal pronouns, though I understand the sturm and drang a bit. I was in a premed program where there were max 5 women in a large university, and few women at all were admitted to accredited med schools in the US, and I think also in Canada. The data was extraordinary (not sure of the year, '61, '62 or '63). By far the majority of schools admitted no women at all.

I think it was similar but probably less dire with law school admissions. The arguments I tended to hear and read were that women would just leave medicine - after having been given a place in med school, ingrates or hormone driven, to marry and bear children. Sure, some women probably agreed with that at the time, but I was steered away from such interests by the nuns and then later by university types. In high school, I took it that my catholic vocation was to be a Single Woman in the World, since I couldn't do both.
A friend at my high school didn't have her transcripts sent, they told her it was because she wanted to be an engineer. This all changed with civil rights advances.

Similarly, I've seen a lot of bias against homosexuals, me being so old and all. I had some of that bias myself way back when.

I see that it is possible that a universal pronoun will confuse the young about whether girls get to do stuff in life. But given the progress I've seen, lived through, it doesn't agitate me unduly.

I think Sozobe's second paper answers this question correctly: The meaning of any language construct is the image it evokes in the average reader's mind. To be sure, I have several problems with the study's execution. For example, the tested readers differed from the average reader in ways that systematically propelled the authors' hypothesis. But the study's basic idea is sound. In particular, it captures what I mean by "mean".

Correction: I meant Sozobe's third paper.

I'm confused. You said that the use of "he" as a neutral pronoun didn't mean anything, but now you cite an article that suggests it means something. Which is it?

As I said: I cite the article because I agree with its basic premise --- the meaning of a construct is the image it invokes in the reader's mind. The article ends up with what I consider the wrong finding because it implements the premise in what I consider the wrong way. Frankly I'm surprised that's confusing to you. Ideas can be valid on their face and invalid as applied. Surely you're familiar with the distinction: it's just the same with the constitutionality of statutes.

I still have no clue what you're talking about. You started by talking about "meaning" and now you've switched to "validity." But don't bother trying to explain any further -- I've lost interest.

the interesting bit of that research (for me) was that he/she invoked male images for men. He wasn't gender neutral to men, neither was he/she. Only they was.

I definitely want to do some more reading in this area.

Which would mean that I'm screwed when writing German. Although "they" has no gender in German, the nouns it attaches to, do. Hence the English way of discreetly sidestepping into the plural is unavailable to Germans. ("Liebe Buergerinnen und Buerger" = "Dear citizenesses and citizens")

why would the results of research into English language noun-gender effects apply to how you are currently writing in German?

Because debates about allegedly-sexist language are so similar in Germany. The arguments exchanged are practically analogous. The same is true in France --- or in other words, in all countries of which I speak the language.

And why not? If gender-neutrality in a language affects gender emancipation in the societies that speak it, that would likely have root causes in logic and cognitive psychology. Both of these, in turn, are practically universal across humans. They are not artifacts of any particular language. So if solid studies in any one of these languages find effects of this kind, I'd be fairly confident that solid studies in other languages will find comparable effects. And of course, I would expect the same vice versa if solid studies in one language fail to find such effects.