I thought there was an interesting posting concerning Mother and child bondings. (Nick) Fri June 19,98 "that isn't just because the mother is spending more time with the baby as a result of social constructs - that baby wants the person with whom it is most connected. and the mother - does she not feel a bit more connected to a child than a father? does shared pain not create the deepest bonds? ... but we won't be very credible without acknowledging the existence and power of some of these biological realities."
(Doyle) So Nick is trying to make a case for biological inheritence. I've occasionally heard this sort of thing about felt bonds (which usually sends me into paroxisms of rage). Though there may be some "instincts" involved in human beings, and that is what Nick is alluding to, no one has measured (to give this some hint of "science) what Nick writes about; 'deepest bonds are shared pain'. This assertion is a very shaky thing to base any sort of claim about human instinct upon. If anything what you perceive as "biological reality" is most likely "social construct". You miss in Wojtek's comments Wojtek's own allusion to cognitive inheritence:
(Wojtek) "Solving those contradictions require some sort of 'cognitive lenses' or a set of values that can rank-order, that is, perceive certain interests as more salient or important than other interests. Therefore, sexism might be an ideology that dove-tails with the interests as a male breadwinner; that is, defines the role of a male as a family provider, and defines the family wage as the most salient material interest..."
(Doyle) Here I am lifting a fragment of Wojtek's thought to illustrate how biological reality can be a part of human thought. Value's as Wojtek points out help us quickly decide what satisfies our interests for example; the opposite of Wojtek's values, the moral underpinning of a sexist man don't respond to "rational" argument. Often times those moral arguments are self contradictory, that is don't hold a logical order. For instance anti-abortionists don't care what happens to poor children, or poor Mothers, when they are "pro-family".
(Doyle) The point is that we could with the current evidence about the mind in cognitive "psychology" think that such metaphorical categories that a sexist uses are biological artifacts of the human mind. They don't respond to "logic", they remain intact even though material evidence points in other directions, and many people have different views. In fact the clash between Nick and "X" is a case in point. The remark from X refers to Nick's allusion to Mother/Child bonding.
(X) "This post shows the viciousness of grounding arguments in the pseudo-science of "psychology." Back to Bruno B on autism."
(Doyle) X is taking a moral stance (a value based upon X's history etc, the social construction of X) to label Nick's comments as viciousness. The dictionary defines vicious as: 1. given to or characterized by vice, or evil; wicked depraved; immoral; as a vicious person.
(Doyle) X's point is to use Nick's faulty (unscientific) assertion about biological reality to make a moral argument about Nick. This sort of reasoning often doesn't yield to "rational" logic. That "moral" barrier to communication is probably there in the mind as some sort of physical determinant (biological reality) of communication between us.
(Doyle) Wojtek's comments then are shaped by some kind of biological reality. My assertion doesn't really enlighten us how much social construction is shaped by biological reality, because we seem to move beyond moral constructions easily enough. If we didn't, the middle ages of the Catholic Church's moral strictures would still rule us, but instead the Capitalist rule. Capitalist are dynamical, amoral if you will. Moral systems can be very unreliable as a guide to reality, but we use them because they serve a purpose to short circuit and stabilize much of the more "rational" and "logical" processes which are very changeable and unstable.
(Doyle) It seems to me that we could allow Nick to think "biological reality" determines something without seeing that as plainly vicious, because we as Marxist don't allow moral systems to block scientific understanding of our world. In other words we want to explore what happens when moral systems clash in the working class, and how to unite people who are enmeshed in something which often doesn't respond directly to rational argument. That means to get a sense of where people can hear things, and why in order to unite in our common struggle. Doyle Saylor