>
> On Sun, 1 Feb 2004, Carrol Cox wrote:
>
> > And those theories increasingly remind me of what Stephen J.
> > Gould and others in the field of evolutionary biology have
> > labelled "Just So Stories." The beauty of Just So Stories is
> > that as long as they have literary coherence, they cannot be
> > challenged (except by another equally foolish Just-So Story)
> > nor can they usefully explain anything. This incapacity is
> > related to their internal coherence, which is achieved by
> > creating a world inside the poem <g> which is hermetically
> > sealed from contamination from the outer world. One can write
> > critiques of them as poetry, but there is no way to discuss
> > their propsitional adequacy.
>
> It's interesting to me that it takes an English prof to point this
> out. --What is it about sexuality that encourages such
> confidently epoused statements on the basis of such limited and
> anecdotal "data"? By the logic of this thread, Doug's next
> issue of LBO should leave out the messy data about the
> money supply and the Fed rate: he could tell stories about
> this guy who really wants to work (or this other guy who
> hates his job) and then engage in fanciful speculation about
> how that's related to the budget deficit or the war in Iraq!
You're losing me here. The money supply and the Fed rate are objects out there in our mutual world. A Dr. Kinsey can objectively measure vesicular engorgement with a pleuroplethysmograph but that tells you zero about the train of thoughts going on in the guy's head. Which is what y'all were, for some reason, discussing - "what it is that gets guys off when they groove on lez-pr0n" - it's wholly subjective. There being no mind reading machines, I can think of no other way to investigate that question than by examining anecdotal evidence.
Also I can easily imagine how you could falsify such hypotheses. For example Dave suggests:
> The salient aspect of conventional "lez" porn is that the women are
> captive in the frame. If the two of them drove off together into the
> sunset, out of camera range, it would be a violation of an implicit
> code.
OK, just present a lez-pr0n flick to your test subjects (think Alex de Grand in that chair with his eyes alligator-clipped wide open) with where the lovers do drive off into the sunset hand-in-hand, and ask the viewers if they liked it or not. That would be practical market research for the porno business.
Yours WDK - WKiernan at ij.net