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PHILOSOPHER_ACTIVIST

                                             April 30, 2018


                                     Alt titles: "honesty_vs_activism"
                                                 "the_silencers"

There is an interview with Amia Srinivasan where
she argues for a feminist philosophy; meaning a
philosophy that starts with a view of how the world        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wSMNf6y80d4
should be and then come up with conceptual
interpretations to try to enable that. She uses the
example of the concept of rape, pointing out it
used to exclude marital rape, and yet now it                BEYOND_THE_BLUE
doesn't: so if you can get people to use words
*your way*, changing the conceptual underpinnings
out from under them, then you can actually bring
about change.

But this actually seems like a rather sneaky
trick: instead of say, arguing that there are
things that should be prohibited in much the
same way (and for the same reasons) that rape
is prohibited, you constantly try to expand the
definition of rape-- or, as is common these
days, "harassment".

   Someone accused of harassment may be
   stuck with a cloud of associations
   that have nothing to do with what was
   actually done, and because there's        Interestingly, you can be
   philosophic chicanery afoot underneath    accused of harassment even
   this definitional drift (rather than      if the actual things done
   say, a deliberate legislative change)     weren't really regarded as
   someone so attacked can be in a pretty    harassment back when they
   awkward position.                         were done-- I'm thinking of
                                             the case of Al Franken here.



"The concept of 'silencing', what it might
mean to silence someone, stop them from
speaking freely, has been radically               (The least interesting
changed by feminists to include things like       thing about Srinivasan
pornography.  Pornography is something that       that she takes ideas
we at least think might in some cases might       like this seriously--
'silence' women, whereas before, that would       doesn't all the
just sound nonsensical.  How can visual           incessant hedging
representations of sex silence you?"              indicate the real truth
                                                  about this kind of idea?)


        The idea that porn "silences" is news to me,
        and I can only guess what that might even mean.
        If something is popular that you're not into,
        then you may feel reluctant to talk about how
        much you dislike it.  Is that it?  Then it
        seems peculiar to single porn out-- what
        really silences you is the hegemony of the
        normal, and the people who don't acknowledge
        the validity of being different.

          Taking it from the other side:
          certainly puritanical anti-sex
          attitudes have silenced people.

          And isn't it clear that "feminism" is
          something that can silence people?

          They sometimes actually *try* to
          silence people, wearing them down
          with organized internet brigades,
          like clouds of wasp stings.


Being the kind of person she is, Amia Srinivasan
acknowledges problems with this approach:
A philosopher-activist is someone who is
"trying to get people to use concepts in a new way",
and so "There's a worry about deception."

She remarks further:

    "We're truth tellers as philsophers, we're
    supposed to be candid."

    "This kind of conceptual warfare I'm proposing,
    there's something not totally honest about it."

    "You still act like you're a philosopher,
    you give people arguments, but really what's
    going on is you're trying to get them to
    change--"

    "You're trying to change the truth as
    opposed to uncovering the truth."

    "I feel a certain amount of discomfort with this"



           I'm tempted to go with a line like:

           Amia Srinivasan will always carefully
           consider all aspects of an issue before
           coming down on the wrong side.


           But really Srinivasan is talking about
           different aspects of an issue I've danced
           around a number of times:

                                    INTO_THE_BRAINPAN
                                    DANGEROUS_IDEAS

                  It really does matter how the ideas
                  play in real people's heads--

                  You can't just pretend it's all
                  abstractions disconnected from
                  human behavior.



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