Feminist Philosophers - 15 January 2014

Source: mass emailing

Feminist Philosophers

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• Gender-neutral language debated in the House of Lords
• Men discuss imprecise probabilities
• Saving humans and two posts on gender justice
• Welcome but Not Really
• Men propose to classify enactivist theories of cognition

Gender-neutral language debated in the House of Lords Posted: 15 Jan 2014 04:32 AM PST There was an interesting and well-informed debate in the House of Lords in December 2013 on gender-neutral language in legislation.  One illustrative highlight: In my view, it was perfectly reasonable for Jack Straw in 2007 to call for an end to any such male stereotyping in our use of English, specifically rejecting the Interpretation Act 1978 and its reiteration of the convention that masculine pronouns are deemed to include feminine reference. If it ever worked, that convention no longer does, and there have been convincing psycholinguistic experiments showing that sentences such as "Anyone parking his car here will be prosecuted" predominantly call up images of a man doing the illicit parking. To return to the policing Bill, we find that most amendments are thoroughly sensitive in this respect, with anaphoric reference employing "he or she" or repetition—"a person … that person". But among the minority using the traditional "he", there are striking cases, especially in Amendments 93 to 95, where the singular masculine pronoun is used no fewer than 18 times. In all of them, the antecedent of "he" is surely a tell-tale phrase: "the judge". Since we do indeed have a judiciary that is largely manned by men, it is hard to believe that the use of "he" in these amendments really means "he or she" rather than endorsing one particular male stereotype as a fact of life. (The speaker here is Lord Quirk, who founded the Survey of English Usage in 1959. I really don't like the fact that we have an unelected upper house in the UK, but the fact we get contributions like this gives me pause.)

Men discuss imprecise probabilities Posted: 14 Jan 2014 12:49 PM PST IMPRECISE PROBABILITIES IN STATISTICS AND PHILOSOPHY LMU Munich 27-28 June 2014 http://www.ipsp2014.philosophie.lmu.de ********************************************* Imprecise probabilities offer a model of uncertainty that is more general, less idealised than the standard precise probability framework. Imprecise probabilities are receiving increasing attention in statistics (as well as in artificial intelligence and in economics). Recently, there has been a resurgence of philosophical interest in these generalised models of uncertainty. The aim of this workshop is to bring together philosophers and statisticians to see what we can learn from each other. We are sure that such interdisciplinary collaboration will be valuable both to philosophers and to statisticians. Topics on which we might expect fruitful discussions include: - updating imprecise probabilities and dilation; - foundations of imprecise probabilities; - procedures for eliciting imprecise probabilities; - decision making with imprecise probabilities. We invite submissions of extended abstracts of 1500 words for contributed talks by 1st March 2013. Decisions will be made by 15th March 2014. KEYNOTE SPEAKERS: Fabio Cozman (São Paulo), James M. Joyce (Michigan), and Teddy Seidenfeld (CMU) If you're not sure why we're posting this, go here.

Saving humans and two posts on gender justice Posted: 14 Jan 2014 12:18 PM PST "Welcome back to the Saving Humans blog – the first of 2014, and to the beginning of the new year. This week's blog posts will be on the broad topic of gender justice, a topic which spans all three themes of Saving Humans." Gender justice 1: Are women human yet? Gender justice 2: Female suicide bombers Keep your eye open for other posts in the series.

Welcome but Not Really Posted: 14 Jan 2014 12:08 PM PST Awful story of being invited to speak at a conference, but only because there aren't enough women, and then being disinvited because they didn't like what you had to say. You should go read the whole story. Women in Science: Welcome But Not Welcome.

Men propose to classify enactivist theories of cognition Posted: 14 Jan 2014 10:52 AM PST NOTE: I had a fight with Safari, which kept on insisting on "inactivist" for the title of the post. That may be the best comment here. *** Varieties of Enactivism: A Conceptual Geography A one-day symposium at AISB-50, 1st to 4th April 2014, London, UK Keynote speakers Xabier Barandiaran (University of the Basque Country) Daniel Hutto (University of Wollongong / University of Hertfordshire) J. Kevin O'Regan and Jan Degenaar (Université Paris Descartes) Michael Wheeler (University of Stirling) *** Since two of the speakers were involved with the publication of my very recent Keeping the World in Mind, which presents a very distinctive form of enactivism, I wrote to the conference organizers about being included in the conference, and opening it up. I also explained the concern about all male lineups, and sent references to APA papers. No response. This post is part of the Gendered Conference Campaign