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December 04, 2005
Is the pursuit of truth ever reprehensible?
Adam suggested the following case: our reading group was looking at Gila Sher's "Ways of Branching Quantifiers" and it occurred to him to wonder whether Sher was male or female - something that can be easily checked using google. But Adam suspected that it might be wrong to check. And so he suspected that this might be a case in which is wrong to pursue the truth.
I feel the force of the case, but I was wondering what might be behind the intuition that it is wrong to check. When challenged it's natural to appeal to the fact that Sher's gender is irrelevant to the quality of Sher's article, which makes one suspect that the worry is that one might judge the article less or more sympathetically given knowledge of the author's gender. This is the same kind of worry that one might have when one wonders whether a job candidate is male or female. Or black or not. Or from a decent graduate programme or not. Or also works on Foucault or not. Or wrote that paper on decision theory that you half remember. Or has a blog. (There seems to be some kind of slippery slope here - when is to ok to start pursuing truth?) But one might worry about one's assessment of the article being skewed by knowledge of the author's gender for two reasons. One might be worried about doing an injustice to the author. But one might also be worried about corrupting one's own epistemic processes - that is, placing obstacles in the way of one's own pursuit of truth. And in that case, the worry that investigating the truth might be wrong is motivated precisely by one's pursuit of truth.
Anyway, Adam guessed that Sher was female, and I said "I bet you anything they aren't", which no doubt made me guilty of all kinds of grammatical sin as well as of the sin of despair. To which I might have to add the sin of pursuit of truth - I checked.
Posted by logican at December 4, 2005 10:21 PM
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Comments
I was going to wonder whether one of your sins was the sin of betting on something you knew, although there are only certain circumstances in which that's a sin. I wonder what they are? If we are watching a movie that unbeknownst to you I have already seen, and I bet you about the ending, I think I have cheated. But I think it would not be wrong for me to bet you about who won the NL East in 1990, even though I do know the answer to that. (Tobias Wolff's story "The Poor Are Always With Us" deals with some similar issues, though on another look it is more complicated than I thought in memory.)
I was going to wonder this, because I wasn't sure whether you checked before or after you made the bet, until I checked myself.
(One reason one wants to know these things is so one can use pronouns, but it should be OK to refer to Sher by name throughout--in fact, Sher adapts nicely to what has been called the Weiner reflexive for those of unknown gender: Sherself. [Warning: links are to typically ridiculous Unfogged comment threads.])
Posted by: Matt Weiner ![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.logicandlanguage.net/nav-commenters.gif)
at December 6, 2005 09:43 PM
(In fact, if you scroll up on the second link, it is somewhat bawdy; due notice.)
Posted by: Matt Weiner at December 6, 2005 10:08 PM
Bawdy?! Honestly, Professor Weiner, you're worse than the spammers.
Posted by: Gillian Russell at December 12, 2005 09:36 PM
I take it you did scroll up, then?
Posted by: Matt Weiner at December 14, 2005 06:33 PM