In message <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Darcy James Argue writes: >> Data which supports the essence of her statement exists and has been >> analysed statistically. > >First, that's not what Paglia is actually arguing,
Perhaps you should tell us what she is arguing then. The bald statement is obviously imprecise, but the essence of it seemed to me to have some value and related to a more precise observation. >[...] > >Next, correlation doesn't equal causation, and the historical precedent >of there being "no female X" is a poor predictor of the future. Plus, >it's completely ridiculous to claim that there's some kind of >meaningful and important link between the reasons why there have been, >historically, few prominent female composers, and the reasons why there >have been few female serial killers. That's an assertion that ought to be justified by a scientific argument. As I understand it, some aspects of the present model of heredity predicted that statistics on some data would have certain characteristics. The data were collected, the statistics were calculated, and the predicted characteristics were observed. This is called the scientific method. It is the best way I know of predicting how things work and has had a certain amount of success with people too. A corollary of these observations would be the prediction that outstanding compositional ability and criminal activity would both occur in a higher proportion of men than of women. >Note that there *have* been "female Jack the Rippers" -- Aileen >Wuornos, for one. More info here: If you try to turn numeric assertions into categorical ones (as Paglia did) you may gain cogency but you lose accuracy. -- Ken Moore [EMAIL PROTECTED] Web site: http://www.mooremusic.org.uk/ I reject emails > 100k automatically: warn me beforehand if you want to send one _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
