Feminist look at philosophy of mind

[GirlSailor]

Apologies if this isn't an area of interest, but thought it might be too dense for chat.

Specifically looking at mind/body dualism but happy to widen discussion if there's an appetite. About 10 years ago I remember the idea of mind/body dualism being quite old fashioned, and while modern updates exist, monist or functional alternatives had gained a lot of ground. Would you say that a concept of innate gender identity requires mind/body dualism? And is there any other position compatible with innate gender identity, or does it not work?

There are no areas not of interest (except, perhaps, cricket - no, I even find that interesting, curse my wandering brain!). Anyone who thinks about feminism should be interested in the human brain / mind in all its aspects.

This is my interpretation: the brain is a a set of mechanisms which enable human thought and experience to occur. These experiences are 'emergent properties' (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence) Also, some of these mechanisms are 'plastic' - that is, they adapt throughout life to the environment. Now, for any particular individual mechanism, the environment consists of the outside world AND the other mechanisms in the brain. The fact that different brain mechanisms have a degree of independence is what allows us to make decisions. If there was no conflict between different parts of our brain, we would be literally single-minded all the time!

So, gender identity - well, certainly what I feel regarding my sex and my sexuality need not be the same. A human can, so it seems, feel male but be sexually attracted exclusively to males - this implies there must be two different mechanisms at the very least for gender identity. The part(s) of the brain that help us adapt to our specific social environment are also very heavily influenced by gender stereotypes, so that adds another mechanism. Our inner sense of our own capabilities will sometimes conflict with gender stereotypes, which again changes how we feel about our gender identity. That's four potentially conflicting mechanisms right there!

Now, as for the innateness of gender identity - well, that's a question of whether or not any of these mechanisms are irrefutably set in stone during early development. Lots of current research suggests much, if not most, of our gender identity is hard-wired into the brain. However, critics of this position have made some very strong refutations of this idea and my feeling is that the critics are right. Most aspects of our gender identity arises from our need to conform to the social model of our gender. What I wonder is whether or not the need to be defined as man or woman is hard-wired, or if it also a product of socialization. Is it the case that I feel like a man because society tells me that I am a man, or is it the case that the particular type of man I feel like is determined by society, but that the fact that I feel like a man at all is laid down in the womb?

That is basically also my understanding of brain mechanisms. How far the brain = the mind is more complex obviously, and I've always found Searle's micro/macro level explanations sit pretty well with me.

Coming at the question from a feminist point of view, I have always seen gender as a societal construct and have always thought found the idea of a female/male mind or brain to be hard to relate to. Philosophically, I would gravitate towards biological naturalism, and think dualism is being disproved more and more, but still dominates our vocabulary, in the same why that evolution by natural selection as the accepted mainstream theory hasn't stopped us thinking in terms of design.

I would assume that anyone who believes in a female or male mind/brain would have to be a dualist, or we couldn't explain the notion of a male brain in a female body or vice versa, but this could be flawed thinking on my part.

I find a lot of debates in philosophy of mind really weird and unhelpful - but maybe that's because the school of thought that really interests me is that associated with everyday life, starting with people like Wittgenstein and Heidegger. The two of them mounted devastating attacks on mind/body dualism nearly 100 years ago now - and I feel like all those moderns like Dainton and so on who are concerned with microarguments about perdurance of the self have just totally ignored them! If we assume that the world not only predates the self but constitutes it, we throw gender identity right back out into the public/social realm and get rid of the need to bridge some kind of chasm between mind (note, not brain) and body.

Wow, fascinating research area buffy!

Ooops, posted too soon - one of the things I'm working on right now is a genealogy of selfhood and space, thinking about the way conceptualisations of selfhood have influenced the way we think about the spatial (and the societal). Most of my focus is on the C17-early C20, but obviously discussions like this are relevant and of great interest.

I'm also doing another book on care, from a philosophical angle, and a paper on Latour. . Sometimes I feel like I'm spread too thin!

BAH to positivism!! (It is remarkably powerful still, though, isn't it? Even in fields that self-describe as post-positivist).

See, that is exactly where I think Heidegger is brilliant - by reversing the priority of epistemology and ontology to put the focus on the latter as something always already 'thrown' into a world, he does away with the whole chain of assumptions about the need to explain how the 'inner mind' might relate to the 'outer world' (and also, though less explicitly, the priority of science as an investigative tool that is somehow supposed to stand outside of assumptions). While I am entirely at odds with all the other stuff he tacks onto that (authenticity etc), I really think there's something powerful and profound there and it frustrates me when it's just straight ignored. To my mind, I don't think Searle goes nearly as far - his 'background' is still too divided from 'mind', his brute facts still too far from social facts, and the whole thing still too Cartesian for my liking.

Testicles of objectivity! I LOVE IT!

What surprises me is how hostile the reaction to skepticism about positivism remains - and how gendered it is. Like if you mention uncertainty or (more radically) the idea that any question has already been framed in a context of assumptions, you are immediately assumed to be some kind of terrible anti-scientific climate change denier, and 'irrational' in a way that is often gendered feminine. I seem to have spent large parts of the last five years explaining to people that I like science a lot and absolutely think it has its place, but that it's only one of a multiplicity of ways of viewing the world, only one among a number of practices, that its methods aren't always very good at capturing significant aspects of experience that are qualitative, and that its intellectually imperialist tendency to assume that it can speak for the social, political, spiritual, aesthetic domains is questionable. I have a friend who is a male scientist (and a bit of a mansplainer at times) who honestly is convinced that you can solve ideological divisions with data. I find this absolutely weird.

Ortega y Gasset is someone I haven't read at all - but I need to! Terrible confession - I have never read Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed either.

Know what you mean about large tomes. I reckon my "essential, cannot finish the book without reading these" list is about five years' worth. I guess I will have to get it done without all of it!

Oh yes - I was actually thinking of Irigaray when posting about how much I hated Homeland in the TV thread. (I feel it very much perpetuates that binary). I guess this is relevant in a way, because the definition of (hu)manity as a rationally-minded being has been so philosophically important and a perceived inability to reason and inability to escape the body was used for so long actively to exclude women from things like the vote. I.e. Mind/body dualism was, for a very long time, a gendered division.

Intersting question but I am not sure that popular understanding of the mind/body debate clear from the getgo. As a post grad someone in our cohort (CG) wrote a thesis that outlined what she believed to be a misunderstanding of Descartes famous analaogy:

The popular claim being that the stuff that makes up the mind is fundamentally different from the stuff that makes up the body; therefore the two cannot be reconciled.

The excellent claim made by CG was that this image of dualism was false because it neglected the important role of the imagination.

In a nutshell (and doing her arguement a disservice i am sure) CG points out that for D the imagination involves an interplay between the mind and body and therefore we cannot rely on our popular description of Cartesian dualism.

As to your question, well Im not sure. It seems as though Descartes ideas did little to otherthrow the patriarchial view of the world (even though it proffered objectivity).