I’ve got plenty of objections to the radical feminist view of society, but this isn’t one of them; at least, not exactly. It does make some falsifiable predictions: it predicts for example that increasing local awareness and resistance of the patriarchal structure should lead (perhaps after a period of pushback) to improved outcomes for women along quantifiable dimensions, relative wages being one obvious example. Self-measured happiness and/or satisfaction with gender relations seems like it should be another, but there are confounding factors: we can expect increasing awareness of widespread oppression to lead to stress among those affected until it’s eliminated (which by hypothesis it hasn’t been), and as we know that’s correlated with all sorts of bad shit.
The trouble as I see it is more that there are several social theories making the same or closely related predictions, and distinguishing between them is much harder than evaluating the predictions of one relative to the status quo; given a set of social deltas pointing in the general direction of a more feminist society, I imagine it’d be very hard indeed to figure out whether they favor radical feminism, equity feminism, or any of the hundred other shards of feminist ideology (along with a number that aren’t feminisms at all). There are a few issues on which feminisms make radically different predictions (the effects of changing prevalence of pornography, for example), which should in theory allow us to make distinctions, but there are so many variables changing at once in any dynamic society that any half-decent apologist should usually be able to come up with a convincing-sounding argument for why any particular case turned out the way it did. And of course the prescriptions of most of these ideologies aren’t static either, making things harder still.
We do have some heuristics to fall back on, though. Occam’s Razor is a powerful one but its prescriptions are likely to be disputed. Similarly, given the priors for success on widespread multimodal social upheavals, we may prefer incremental change to sudden.
It does make some falsifiable predictions: it predicts for example that increasing local awareness and resistance of the patriarchal structure should lead to improved outcomes for women along quantifiable dimensions, relative wages being one obvious example. … The trouble as I see it is more that there are several social theories making the same or closely related predictions, and distinguishing between them is much harder than evaluating the predictions of one relative to the status quo...
Agreed. As far as I understand, eridu does in fact oppose these other flavors of feminism, believing them to be unwitting tools of the patriarchy; thus, his/her hypothesis is impossible to falsify merely by using improved quality of life for women as evidence.
In fact, I think it is likely that eridu would see any short-term improvement in the women’s quality of life as irrelevant (at best). According to radical feminism, we need to shatter the women’s cages, not re-upholster them with shinier wallpaper.
In addition, eridu explicitly denied that we should “prefer incremental change to sudden”. One key goal of radical feminists is the total elimination of the concept of gender; this can’t be done via incremental improvements, since such improvements must within the existing social order, while radical feminists would prefer to destroy the existing social order altogether.
Quite. I’m not sure to what degree I should take eridu’s statements as representative of radical feminism, but insofar as they are accurate I think we might best fact-check them by isolating domains where radical feminism predicts no improvement from non-radical feminist prescriptions, finding places where social change has occurred in those domains, and comparing results. Such domains should exist if radical feminism has coherent goals, though I’ve no idea what they are. For reasons outlined in the grandparent I don’t expect this to be a knockout for or against the ideology even if we manage to do it, but it’d be a good start.
The heuristics I mentioned were intended to be useful from an outside view; radical feminism rejects them more or less by hypothesis.
Such domains should exist if radical feminism has coherent goals, though I’ve no idea what they are.
Other than the elimination of gender, you mean ? I think that is a perfectly clear and even measurable goal, though IMO it borders on unachievable, for a variety of reasons.
That said, your proposed methodology is valid, but I think we might have to wait for eridu (*) to provide some additional goals before we can apply it.
(*) Or any other radical feminist, I don’t want to single eridu out unfairly.
Well, I’m assuming here that radical feminism isn’t proposing the elimination of structures associated with gender for shits and giggles, but rather believes that eliminating those structures will improve people’s lives in ways that feminisms wishing to maintain them can’t.
I’ve got plenty of objections to the radical feminist view of society, but this isn’t one of them; at least, not exactly. It does make some falsifiable predictions: it predicts for example that increasing local awareness and resistance of the patriarchal structure should lead (perhaps after a period of pushback) to improved outcomes for women along quantifiable dimensions, relative wages being one obvious example. Self-measured happiness and/or satisfaction with gender relations seems like it should be another, but there are confounding factors: we can expect increasing awareness of widespread oppression to lead to stress among those affected until it’s eliminated (which by hypothesis it hasn’t been), and as we know that’s correlated with all sorts of bad shit.
The trouble as I see it is more that there are several social theories making the same or closely related predictions, and distinguishing between them is much harder than evaluating the predictions of one relative to the status quo; given a set of social deltas pointing in the general direction of a more feminist society, I imagine it’d be very hard indeed to figure out whether they favor radical feminism, equity feminism, or any of the hundred other shards of feminist ideology (along with a number that aren’t feminisms at all). There are a few issues on which feminisms make radically different predictions (the effects of changing prevalence of pornography, for example), which should in theory allow us to make distinctions, but there are so many variables changing at once in any dynamic society that any half-decent apologist should usually be able to come up with a convincing-sounding argument for why any particular case turned out the way it did. And of course the prescriptions of most of these ideologies aren’t static either, making things harder still.
We do have some heuristics to fall back on, though. Occam’s Razor is a powerful one but its prescriptions are likely to be disputed. Similarly, given the priors for success on widespread multimodal social upheavals, we may prefer incremental change to sudden.
Agreed. As far as I understand, eridu does in fact oppose these other flavors of feminism, believing them to be unwitting tools of the patriarchy; thus, his/her hypothesis is impossible to falsify merely by using improved quality of life for women as evidence.
In fact, I think it is likely that eridu would see any short-term improvement in the women’s quality of life as irrelevant (at best). According to radical feminism, we need to shatter the women’s cages, not re-upholster them with shinier wallpaper.
In addition, eridu explicitly denied that we should “prefer incremental change to sudden”. One key goal of radical feminists is the total elimination of the concept of gender; this can’t be done via incremental improvements, since such improvements must within the existing social order, while radical feminists would prefer to destroy the existing social order altogether.
Quite. I’m not sure to what degree I should take eridu’s statements as representative of radical feminism, but insofar as they are accurate I think we might best fact-check them by isolating domains where radical feminism predicts no improvement from non-radical feminist prescriptions, finding places where social change has occurred in those domains, and comparing results. Such domains should exist if radical feminism has coherent goals, though I’ve no idea what they are. For reasons outlined in the grandparent I don’t expect this to be a knockout for or against the ideology even if we manage to do it, but it’d be a good start.
The heuristics I mentioned were intended to be useful from an outside view; radical feminism rejects them more or less by hypothesis.
Other than the elimination of gender, you mean ? I think that is a perfectly clear and even measurable goal, though IMO it borders on unachievable, for a variety of reasons.
That said, your proposed methodology is valid, but I think we might have to wait for eridu (*) to provide some additional goals before we can apply it.
(*) Or any other radical feminist, I don’t want to single eridu out unfairly.
Well, I’m assuming here that radical feminism isn’t proposing the elimination of structures associated with gender for shits and giggles, but rather believes that eliminating those structures will improve people’s lives in ways that feminisms wishing to maintain them can’t.