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Well...
Mathematicians are pretty honest about the fact that problem selection, and ultimately basic choices of definitions, are driven at least partially by cultural and aesthetic concerns. But the actual content of mathematics is extremely difficult to politicize, given how abstract it is.
It is much harder to introduce bias into fundamental physics than it is to introduce bias into psychology or even biology. I kinda gotta hand it to Irigaray for having the chutzpah to suggest that we haven't fully characterized the solutions of the Navier-Stokes equations because of men's fear of menstruation and "feminine" fluids, but... yeah that's actually not a reasonable thing to believe...
You left out that mechanics of hard, rigid, phallic objects have been solved, also because men run the world..
As an aside, Irigaray is someone I have mentioned to progressives in private discussion, and asked them to answer for her. The response I get is universally that that her fluid mechanics quote is crazy, and it doesn't really represent the feminist or progressive movements. I mean, at least the people I deal with are sane enough to recognize that level of insanity and disavow it in private. However the wider progressive movement has not disavowed her assertion, and in fact seems to promote ideas that are just short of said assertion. While it is important to consider the strongest ideas of a movement, so as not to be knocking down straw or weak men, the insistence on that when it matters in private coupled with the lack of public disavowal on their end makes for an insidious motte and bailey.
Doubly so because Science™ claims to be the process by which we find "strongest ideas" generally. It's both a direct and a meta-level failure.
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I went and read the "The 'Mechanics' of Fluids" chapter in Irigaray's This Sex Which Is Not One to make sure I wasn't misrepresenting her. I believe that it can be steelmanned (or at least, one thread of thought within it can be steelmanned).
The critical passage seems to be this:
It is philosophically contentious whether anything like a "solid object" even exists at all. Arguably, our fundamental ontological presuppositions are not given to us, but are instead the result of choices we make (or, perhaps, choices made for us by society and the structure of language). Science, by its own admission, makes use of idealized theoretical models that are one step removed from actual "reality" (spherical cows in a vacuum and such). We can imagine an alternative isomorphic description of the same physical model that keeps all the math exactly intact, but uses different linguistic imagery. Why a "spherical" cow "rolling" down an incline? Why not a "viscous" cow "flowing" down an incline?
Because the metaphorical imagery employed by science is fundamentally arbitrary, Irigaray's contention is that the fundamental choice of which parts of physics to label as "solid" mechanics and "fluid" mechanics in the first place reveals something sociologically and psychologically about the people doing the labeling (obviously, she would say that it reveals a fundamental aversion to or discomfort with fluid imagery and feminine imagery in general).
Well, good on you for reading that and trying to steelman it. No matter what, I always believe that all ideas should be considered at their own merit.
However, I'm not sure I fully agree with your analysis. I'm not the best at understanding those sorts of jargon-upon-jargony passages in this type of philosophy. I'm inclined to, at a certain point, simply write it off as something that's so detached from reality as to be worthless. I can understand a little better if I go really slow, but even so, I'm not really seeing how what you said relates to the passage you quoted. It seems to me that her point has something to do with (arbitrarily) claiming that metaphor is more like a solid, and metonymy is more like a fluid, presumably because fluids in real life have the capability of changing shape. But this to me already is an overstep into the ridiculous, because she is simply using her own personal associations to claim two unrelated abstract concepts are related, not justifying it, and then going on to use that towards her own end.
I don't really know where you're then getting this notion that we can draw any conclusion from what she says to how theoretical objects are thought up for use in scientific scenarios.
And in reply to the point that you think she's trying to make, I'd say, if people are choosing spherical cows for their thought experiments (not something I've personally heard of myself, but I'd believe that it's a thing if you say so), it's likely because it is a simpler concept to do math with, than fluid cows. And it's not un-justified, since our bodies behave more like solids than fluids under such conditions; we generally take up a certain volume, give or take a very small amount for our ability to deform our skin by pushing into it. Certainly the outside of our bodies generally stays together under normal conditions, and holds inner fluids inside, such that they have little effect on how we'd interact with an incline.
It was the idea that occurred to me while reading the text, so I just went with it!
I fully admit I'm engaged in a "motivated" reading. I'm more concerned with trying to extract a coherent philosophical idea from the text rather than with reconstructing Irigaray's exact mental state. But I don't think my interpretation is baseless either.
Backing up to give more context:
Roughly: Science can't just give a direct description of every single microdetail of reality. It has to "symbolize" things -- create simplified and idealized theoretical models. These models are inevitably attached to linguistic imagery.
Honestly not entirely sure what this part means. I assume that she's saying that solid imagery is more metaphorical, and fluid imagery is more metonymic, and her questioning here is impugning the privilege that the current imagery of physics grants to solids over fluids.
They key part is really the line at the end, "the subjection, still in force, of that subject to a symbolization that grants precedence to solids". The current "symbolization" of physics grants precedence to solids. But she's implying that that could change. We could imagine an alternative symbolization that grants precedence to fluids instead (without changing the content of the underlying physics).
Again the suggestion is that the imagery could change without changing the math.
Solid objects are already a lot more "fluid" than they might initially appear. See for example The Problem of the Many. It's not too hard to imagine an alternative conceptual landscape where we view the world of macro objects as being fundamentally populated by fluids, with "solids" being an exotic deviation from the fluid norm, if they even exist at all.
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Whether it's true that the scientific metaphorical imagery is fundamentally arbitrary and/or the degree to which it is/isn't is an interesting question. It's somewhat analogous to phonemes / morphemes. In most (maybe all?) structuralist linguistic models, phonemes are defined as lacking information individually. They're the sub-components of higher level objects that do convey information but they're interchangeable building blocks. Studying natural languages as used, though, seems to show that phonemes can have information: round sounds are associated with words involving the concept of roundness or fullness, sharp sounds are associated with spiky objects or violent concepts.
The associations seem somewhat universal and somewhat arbitrary and are not absolutes, every language has counter-examples. They also aren't necessary for a language's expressiveness so they are optional and to some degree interchangeable.
If the metaphors that tend to be used in scientific imagery are / are not potentially tied to some lower level structure in how humans form concepts, we could maybe learn more about the process of cognition. The degree to which they're socially mediated would still be interesting.
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Perhaps the rationalist habit of steelmanning should be put to rest.
You can find something valid in pretty much any rant. But if the rant is bad enough, you're going to do it by ignoring the author's intentions, and by ignoring the other 80% of the rant that can't be made valid by any standard.
We've had Holocaust deniers here. Occasionally they come up with something I can steelman (like lampshades made of human skin probably not being real). But the effect of steelmanning this is to ignore and gloss over 1) what they're saying, and 2) what they're trying to do by saying it.
I am not a “Rationalist” and my habits are very much my own.
I approach every text with the level of respect it deserves. Nothing more, nothing less.
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