Mmm. I sympathize, but I don’t think this is likely to be very helpful; as this blog post by Yvain mentions, the Courtier’s Reply is a lot less obviously fallacious than it might naively seem. That is, it’s generally unlikely to convince anyone that’s not unusually vulnerable to an argument from authority, but there are situations where it’s appropriate too.
I’m not sure what Yvain’s proposed solution might indicate in this context, though. It seems likely to me that estimations of who’s being “smart and rational” here are so closely bound to political tribalism that reading works on gender by people you already admire would tend to reinforce existing beliefs more than it’d lead them to converge; there aren’t many well-respected writers on gender, on any side of the issue, who’re greatly accomplished in other fields. With the possible exception of evolutionary psychology, and as others have mentioned there are good reasons to doubt its prescriptions here.
Mmm. I sympathize, but I don’t think this is likely to be very helpful; as this blog post by Yvain mentions, the Courtier’s Reply is a lot less obviously fallacious than it might naively seem. That is, it’s generally unlikely to convince anyone that’s not unusually vulnerable to an argument from authority, but there are situations where it’s appropriate too.
I’m not sure what Yvain’s proposed solution might indicate in this context, though. It seems likely to me that estimations of who’s being “smart and rational” here are so closely bound to political tribalism that reading works on gender by people you already admire would tend to reinforce existing beliefs more than it’d lead them to converge; there aren’t many well-respected writers on gender, on any side of the issue, who’re greatly accomplished in other fields. With the possible exception of evolutionary psychology, and as others have mentioned there are good reasons to doubt its prescriptions here.