Detached Ideas

In April of 2005, shortly after Larry Summers’ public comments which resulted in his resignation as president of Harvard, there was a debate between Steven Pinker and Elizabeth Spelke, both from the Harvard psychology department, on “The Science of Gender and Science.” Streaming video, a transcript, and slides from this debate are available on Edge – here. There are also comments on the debate by Nora Newcomb, David Haig, Alison Gopnik and Diane Halpern, with a response by Pinker —  here.

The question under debate was whether innate differences between the sexes might help account for the dearth of women tenure track faculty in the physical sciences, mathematics, and engineering at elite universities. At the beginning of his remarks, Steven Pinker made what seems to me to be a vital distinction:

[I]t 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. They are not the same thing. Indeed, distinguishing them is essential to protecting the core of feminism. Anyone who takes an honest interest in science has to be prepared for the facts on a given issue to come out either way. And that makes it essential that we not hold the ideals of feminism hostage to the latest findings from the lab or field. . . . The truth can­not be sexist.

The debate proceeded mainly on empirical grounds, although there were also a few philo­so­phical moments. Elizabeth Spelke is the 2009 winner of the Jean Nicod Prize. Steven Pinker is author of The Blank Slate, among many other books, and is married to Rebecca Goldstein.

–Paul

Sherry Turkle is the Abby Rockefeller Mauze Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at MIT, and is the director of the MIT Initiative on Tech­nology and Self. She earned her doctorate in sociology and per­son­ality psychology from Harvard University, and is a licensed clinical psycho­logist. She writes about the “subjective side” of the relationship between people and technology.

I first read The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit nearly twenty years ago, and have used it in var­ious courses. Turkle describes how children often em­ploy computers as evocative objects — “things to think with” — which assist them in understanding their own capacities and limi­tations. The sense of self that emerges in children who have grown up with computers, for instance, can be quite different from that of children who have grown up, say, with animals and pets. Instead of the traditional Aristotelian notion of being a “rational animal”, the experience of such children can lead them to formulate a new genus and specific difference, to conceive of themselves as “feeling machines.” This sort of radical change in our understanding of who we are, it seems to me, could have pro­found consequences for our culture. It is important that we consider the pos­si­bility that technology might induce deep change.

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