Gender debate, Pinker vs Spelke.

[Dylab]

I thought some of you might find this interesting. At the popular science/reality website "The Edge" there is a debate hosted by Harvard Universty between the scientists Steven Pinker and Elizabeth Spelke. Pinker takes the side that innate statistical differences in cognitive thinking and goals in women and men are a major factor in the discrepencies while Spelke argues that social factors are mainly the cause. Here is the site.

I felt that Steven Pinker made the stronger argument especially at the end with the concluding discussion although I thought Spelke's argument and discussion of studies on biased perceptions was interesting. I'm not sure how reflective her argument was over the entire issue and there were a few spots where I thought both of the presenters could have further elaborated.

This whole issue of Psycometrics is very complicated and confusing. Please tell me what to think.

 

[Dymanic]

I found this statement by Pinker to be the salient point:

"But it is crucial to distinguish the moral proposition that people should not be discriminated against on account of their sex -- which I take to be the core of feminism -- and the empirical claim that males and females are biologically indistinguishable."

And I love what he said here:

"It is said that there is a technical term for people who believe that little boys and little girls are born indistinguishable and are molded into their natures by parental socialization. The term is "childless."

I also think Spelke was right on the money with this:

"When people are presented with a complex task that can be solved through multiple different strategies, males and females sometimes differ in the strategy that they prefer."

In other words, if different approaches to the same task are employed by persons of different gender, with functionally equivalent results, then simply testing performance may not reveal that.

This is the sort of thing going on in this area:

"The question of whether there exist sex differences in the functional organization of the brain for language represents an area of considerable debate. A long held, but unconfirmed hypothesis posits that in general, language functions are more likely to be highly lateralized in males but represented in both cerebral hemispheres in females. Here we use echo-planar functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to study 38 right-handed subjects (19 males and 19 females) during orthographic (letter recognition), phonological (rhyme) and semantic (semantic category) tasks. We find significant sex differences in activation patterns during phonological tasks: in males, brain activation is localized to left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) regions; in females the pattern of activation is very different, engaging more diffuse neural systems involving both left and right IFG regions. These data provide the first clear evidence of sex differences in the functional organization of the brain for language and indicate that these differences exist at the level of phonological processing."
(From: Sex Differences in the Functional Organization of the Brain for Language - 1995 Nature, 373, 607-609)

Here's another link related to this.

there were a few spots where I thought both of the presenters could have further. elaborated.

You would probably find Pinker's book: The Blank Slate well worth the read.

 

[Earthborn]

And I love what he said here:

"It is said that there is a technical term for people who believe that little boys and little girls are born indistinguishable and are molded into their natures by parental socialization. The term is "childless."

Funny, yes. But it is not much of an argument. In fact, it is a fallacy: just because someone happens to be a parent does not make that person an expert on child psychology. Also, it is not necessarily true that all who believe that are childless.

Spelke's argumentation largely consists of showing that parental socialization into a gender role happens from a very early age, and often without the parents being consciously aware of it. Pinker offered very little that can counter that.

 

[Bodhi Dharma Zen]

Gender feminists? Wooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

(Sorry for not being as elegant as Pinker)

 

[Dymanic]

Originally posted by Earthborn
just because someone happens to be a parent does not make that person an expert on child psychology.

Perhaps not, but an ounce of practical experience is often worth a pound of academic knowledge. I'm not sure any such creatures as 'experts on child psychology' actually exist, but if so, and if academic knowledge is the criterion, Pinker must surely be among their number. Ironically, Pinker's own insights are not of the hands-on variety, unless things have changed (which I am unable to determine) during the eight years since he wrote this in How The Mind Works:

"Well into my procreating years I am, so far, voluntarily childless, having squandered my biological resources reading and writing, doing research, helping out friends and students, and jogging in circles, ignoring the solemn imperative to spread my genes."

Spelke's argumentation largely consists of showing that parental socialization into a gender role happens from a very early age, and often without the parents being consciously aware of it. Pinker offered very little that can counter that.

I don't see Pinker as being interested in countering that, except where it is taken to the extreme of being presented as a complete explanation for cognitive or behavioral differences between genders.