Lies, Diagnoses, and Star Trek

At some point along my path towards an ADHD/autism diagnosis, I was asked if any of the adults that knew me as a child — parents, teachers — ever raised any concerns, to which I’ve always had to say “nope, not a one”: Because I was homeschooled, so my teachers and my parents were the same, and one of the best parts, for me, of being homeschooled was that I had no fixed schedule, I could do whatever lessons I wanted when I wanted, and my mom tailored my curriculum around my interests. So it’s unsurprising that I never displayed any of the classic symptoms in an academic context, because I spent 12 years in a context that absolutely catered to my needs.

But as I learn more about some of the lesser discussed aspects of being AuDHD — such as pathological demand avoidance and rejection sensitive dysphoria — the more I can look at certain parts of my childhood and see them in a new light. My rigid inflexibility in the face of being asked to do things whose value I didn’t understand. My regular utter incapacity to ever form routine habits — or to deviate from them if I ever did get them formed.

Every Saturday, I had weekend chores to do. One of these was to dust my bedroom — and being a serial collector of knickknacks, that was a lot of things to dust. I hate dusting. I would rather do pretty much any other chore than dust. And as a child, I just couldn’t see the point of it. Unlike washing dishes and doing laundry (dishes and clothes get dirty; they are nicer to use when they are clear), or emptying the wastebasket (if it gets full, it spills over onto the floor and makes it awkward to get from the door to the bed), or putting my books away (they are easier to find if they are organized properly), there was literally no point or purpose to dusting. The only thing that would change is that there’d be more dust to remove again the next week.

***

Every Saturday night that we’re both home, I make pizza, Joel picks out a couple of beers, and we sit on the couch and watch SciFi. We’re currently mid-way through season 5 of Star Trek: The Next Generation, which has been a real nostalgia trip for me because it is the only TV that I watched as a child — when my mom made pizza and we’d sit and watch together as a family. I maintain that the opening credits of that show are some of the best opening credits of any TV series ever; certainly they get me right in the heartstrings every time I hear them.

Last night, by complete happenstance, we watched an episode exactly 32 years after it had aired: “The First Duty”, season 5, episode 19.

Ever since we decided that ST:TNG was the next thing we’d watched, I’d wondered when we’d reach that episode.

***

One Saturday, 32 years ago — about a month before my birthday — my parents asked me if I’d dusted my knicknacks, and I lied. I lied knowing that it was a stupid lie; I lied knowing that all they’d have to do was come into my room, see the layer of dust, and know that I’d lied; I lied knowing that actually dusting would be easier than dealing with the consequences of the lie; I lied knowing all of these things and wondering why I was doing it; but I lied anyway.

My parents checked my shelves, it was obvious that I was lying, and they gave me the opportunity to come clean. I dug in my heels — why? I remember thinking at the time — why? because anything, anything was better than being wrong.

Eventually, things became serious enough that my parents gave me an ultimatum: if I didn’t tell the truth, my punishment would be that my birthday party would be cancelled.

I don’t know if it was that weekend or the weekend after that we watched “The First Duty.” In this episode, Wesley Crusher — my idol and crush — made a mistake. A serious mistake, and someone died, and he lied about it. Lied in front of his mom, his captain, an inquiry panel, the father of the person who died.

And then, he didn’t. He changed his mind, in the face of pressure from his friends and teammates, in the face of having already perjured himself, and he told the truth.

If he could do it, in far graver circumstances than me, I could do it.

I confessed to my parents that evening, and a couple weeks’ later, celebrated my 10th birthday.

***

Thank you, Star Trek.

Writing While ADHD

When it comes to writing, I love processes.

Or rather, I love hearing about other people’s processes: Far from the tepid “write every day!”, “show, don’t tell!” writing advice that you get all too often, I get to see what actually works for actual writers. I love hearing about what works for other people because it helps me work through what could possibly work for me. Sometimes, I read other people’s writing processes and go “hahahahahahahhah, hell no.” Sometimes, I go “oh, yes, I see how that could work — but not for me.” And sometimes I go “hmmm, maybe I should try that.”

So in that vein, I’m going to talk about my own processes — what has worked for me, writing both nonfiction and fiction, over the last 20+ years, as a person with ADHD. (Because, let’s face it, that has a huge impact on my ability to write). I’m going to frame this as “advice to you, a fellow person with ADHD, who wants advice on how to write,” but really, this is “what works for me, and may not work for anyone else, so take what works for you and scrap what doesn’t.”

Find out what motivates you, and lean into it

I am highly motivated by arbitrary constraints. As an undergrad, I wrote one essay which had exactly 26 sentences, with the first letter of each sentence spelling out the alphabet. In another essay, the first letters of each sentence spelled out A N N E B R A D S T R E E T (the topic of the essay) over and over. Neither of these are particularly generalizable, but I was lucky enough to discover, about ten years ago, an arbitrary constraint which did work for me, and got me out of a rut: writing exactly 400 words. They could be any damn words I wanted, but they had to be exactly 400, no more, no less. Every day. And if I missed a day, then the words rolled over, so that I had 800 to do the next day. This was both simultaneously super easy and way harder than I ever would have imagined, but it got me out of a decade-long fiction writing dry spell.

Set yourself plausible goals

But there were two useful lessons I learned from the “exactly 400 a day” task I set myself. First, when I first set up the arbitrary constraint, I picked 500 words. And struggled so badly the first day that I became utterly despondent. Then I remembered I’d set the arbitrary constraint myself, and I could change it. I changed it to 400 words, and suddenly it was doable. Second, it didn’t take too long before I realised that insisting I do this every day was, again, just going to lead to failure. When I started missing days, instead of rolling over the word count to the next day, I gave myself the option of rolling them over, rather than the requirement. (So if I wanted to write exactly 800 words, I could; but otherwise I could just do 400.)

I followed those constraints through until I reached 80,000 words and called that project to a halt. However, the single most useful thing that I have ever done for my writing process was discover the “(at least) 400 words a day, five days out of every seven” structure. When I can keep to this structure, I can be enormously productive. (And because I like to see just how productive, I track my wordcounts, divided into the categories fiction; nonfiction; blogs; admin, via WordKeeperAlpha). It’s also advice I give to 3rd years panicking about their dissertations: Count how many working days there are between now and when your dissertation is due (do not count weekends or Easter break). Divide the number of words you need to write for your dissertation by that number of days. Now you know what your target words-per-day is. Most students, by the time they start panicking, are around the “250 words a day” mark. That’s a small paragraph. Everyone can write one paragraph.

For me, what works about the 400-words-a-day/five-days-out-of-every-seven combination is that it is feasible, so I don’t get stuck in a failure spiral before I even get started; and the best part is, quite often, once you’ve written 400 words, you’ve probably actually written 500. Or 600. Or maybe even 1000. Writing I don’t generally find difficult; getting started writing is the hard part, and telling myself “it’s just 400 words” helps a lot in getting over the hurdle.

All writing is real writing

A lot of my mechanisms are based around ensuring I don’t get stuck in a failure spiral. One of the easiest ways to get into a failure spiral is when you convince yourself that only the writing you do for an article, dissertation, a summative, counts as “real writing,” and that if you get to the end of the day and you haven’t produced any words in any of those, then “you haven’t written,” and if you have a day where you “haven’t written,” then clearly you are a failed academic who will never amount to anything. I’ve seen this happen to many people (with and without ADHD).

So I am a very big proponent of: All writing is real writing. Writing breeds writing. The more you write, the more you will write. (Hello, yes, I am a logician, I like my tautologies). Writing a short story when you should be writing an essay? It’s still writing. Procrastinating on that committee report by working on a “pie in the sky” research article? Still writing. Avoiding that essay with a deadline by writing a blog post instead? STILL WRITING. (Why, yes, this post counts towards today’s “at least 400 words.”)

To try to divide your writing into “real” writing and writing that “doesn’t count” is to erect artificial barriers that don’t need to exist. Over my years as an academic, I have come to really enjoy the particular genre of writing which is the “700-800 word blog post”. I write this often when I’ve read an interesting article about which I have Thoughts (TM) but about which I don’t yet have any arguments (and hence I can’t just start writing a journal article). Sometimes, I just want to be able to go “here is this interesting thing I read, isn’t it interesting? It made me think these interesting thoughts,” without any pressure. And you know what has happened more often than not? Some years down the line, I reach a point where I do have an argument, and I’m ready to start writing that paper. When I reach that point, I grab the posts, cut and paste them into my file, and then I don’t have to deal with blank document syndrome. It’s magical.

Oooh, squirrel!

This sort of approach also means I don’t have to decide in advance whether something is worth pursuing. I can write the 700-800 word blog post and then…just let it be. Maybe I’ll come back to it someday. Maybe I won’t. Maybe it’s worthwhile to pursue in more detail. Maybe it’s not. I don’t have to know the answer to this now.

This isn’t necessarily a part of my “writing a specific piece” process, but it is part of my overall writing process, which is that I jot down every idea that comes into my head that makes me go “oh, interesting!” This used to happen in the form of random scribbles on pieces of paper, which I would then find years later and go “wow, I had no idea what I was thinking!” and now mostly occupies individual cards on Trello where I have the headline idea and then a few sentences about the thought behind the idea. I just keep collecting them whenever they come into my head, and review them occasionally — I’ve got over 100 such cards right now, and this is why I am never worried about running out of ideas for things to write about. (Though if I ever did, I’d just go back to my advice here on how to come up with research questions.)

I don’t really like the “ADHD superpowers” discourse (is my hyperfocus really a superpower, when it results me in missing meetings, being late to pick my kid up from school, forgetting to eat??) but the ability that ADHDers have to keep many disparate threads and thoughts in our heads at once, and to see connections between seemingly separate topics is one of our strengths, and lends itself beautifully to the academic life.

Don’t forget your dopamine

Whenever I’m struggling with a specific writing task, whether it’s because the task is tedious and boring and I don’t see it’s worth; or because I’m struggling with task-switching/executive dysfunction; or for another reason, I’ve learned to recognize that this is what is happening and tap into dopamine hits that will get me over the hurdle. Three things that reliably work for me:

• Power music. In particular, Gorlex’s Best of Epic Orchestra Music Compilations has, for the better part of a decade, never failed to get me in a position where I feel empowered to write.
• Food-based rewards. I’ve spent half an hour revising a draft? I deserve two M&Ms. Small rewards for small goals will get me through the most difficult task.
• External validation. This comes in two forms: (1) Shared pain is shared…gain? I.e., if I whinge about writing on social media, it’s often must easier to get on with the writing. (2) Out of sight, out of mind, or rather: I find it much easier to perform the job of “being a writing academic” if I feel like I have an audience, which is why on bad days I’ll leave my office and head to the pub. Knowing that someone is watching me (honestly, no one is watching me…) means I’m much less likely to get distracted by social media and am much more likely to keep pounding away at my keyboard.

Oh, look, I’ve just written 1500+ words and an hour has passed. Which is precisely why I waited until the evening to write this, when I could afford to get distracted!

Wot I Read, 2023 edition

Fiction

1. Andrews, N. J., The Thief of Red Mountain (finished May 22, 2023): It’s not often that a book that features, essentially, four characters can have such depth and complexity. The layers of Andrews’ story were subtle and manifold and it just kept being unwrapped in new and exciting ways. I enjoyed this very much.
2. Arseneault, Claudie, City of Exile (finished April 4, 2023): Last book in the series, which I was anxiously awaiting! This one wrapped things up nicely and was a satisfying end to things. My previous complaints about the characterization still hold: The vast majority of the characters seem to act in whatever way feeds the drama of the story, rather than having an internal consistency that drives them (exceptions being Diel and Jaeger, who are, unsurprisingly, two of my favorites), and most of them act, or are described as acting, as if they’re teens or young adults, when some of them are centuries-old elves — the fact that you cannot tell (roughly) how old they are from how they speak and act is something I find aggravating. (One exception being Efua, who is a child and whose conversation is deliberately childish in an artificial way.) And yet, despite these issues with characterization, I can’t help but love the series, and I’m so glad the final one is finally out.
3. Bennett, Claire-Louise, Checkout 19 (finished January 4, 2023): A Christmas present from Joel. Short but extremely interesting, although a tough read because it isn’t quite stream of consciousness but the paragraphs are long enough that if you’re super tired while reading it’s hard to pay the right kind of attention to not get lost. Parts of it were so relentlessly male and literary and pretentious. I felt, actually, quite a bit like it was the story of how my life would have gone if I hadn’t discovered Savage Love and queer SFF.
4. Cogman, Genevieve, The Untold Story (finished January 28, 2023): My increasing dislike of Cogman’s stories has been well documented in earlier instalments of this series. I only read this one because one of my friends described it as finally explaining why Irene acts the way she does sometimes. That was somewhat true, but it doesn’t make her any more realistic or sympathetic a character; in fact, increasingly I felt like she was playing a trope or a role, as much as any of the fae characters do. I was extremely peeved at the fact that the one character that felt fully formed and flawed and engaging (Bradamant) was killed during the course of the story. She deserved better.
5. Engdahl, Sylvia, Enchantress from the Stars (finished June 11, 2023): This is such an underrated book. I was introduced to it as an early teen by a penpal. I don’t remember her name, but I do remember she was a missionary in Africa and in her 50s at the time. When I first read it, I was totally taken aback by the way in which the three separate stories ended up all being the same story from different points of view. I’d reread it a few times since, and thought G would be at the right age to enjoy it as our next read-aloud book at bedtime. I was right. She picked up on the different-aspects-of-the-same-story motif far quicker than I did, but in turn she found the whole “maybe there are other sentient races out there in a universe” idea deeply, deeply disconcerting. We both enjoyed reading it very much, and I was surprised again that I basically never see this book recommended or discussed.
6. Jones, Heather Rose, Floodtide (finished March 15, 2023): I needed a comfort reread, and this one always does the trick. It is such a masterful example of how to build a story well.
7. Juster, Norton, The Phantom Tollbooth (finished January 20, 2023): Read aloud to G. Neither of us had read it before. She loved it, I find it irritating in the same way I find Alice in Wonderland irritating: A series of events one after another each of which has little long-term impact on the story. It’s story without plot.
8. Kuang, R.F., Babel (finished February 26): Enjoyed this so much, I recommended it to my students: “Despite being set in alternate-universe 1830s Oxford, the story is remarkably apt for what we have been talking about, and living through, in the last couple of weeks — questions of language and translation, questions of access and exclusion, questions of colonization and colonialism, issues of industrial action and the origin of the word ‘strike’. I never would have thought to find a fiction book that overlaps the content of our nonfiction class in this way, and so wanted to recommend it all to you!”
9. Lancaster, A. J., A Rake of His Own (finished June 2, 2023): I loved Lancaster’s Stariel books and was super pleased when I heard last year that Marius would be getting a spin-off book of his own. I then didn’t hear anything more about it until a tweet about the audio book came across my timeline and I realised it had come out. Immediately bought it, it arrived a few days later, and I finished it a few days after. It was every bit as good as I hoped it would be.
10. Mandel, Emily St. John, Station Eleven (finished January 15, 2023): Mandel’s books showed up on a lot of my friends’ 2022 reading lists, or in response to my posting my 2022 reading list. This was the first one I got from the library. I was not prepared to read a pre-pandemic pandemic book during what is still the pandemic. It was good! But just good.
11. Mandel, Emily St. John, The Glass Hotel (finished February 5, 2023): Of the Mandel books recommended by friends, this one excited me the most. The blurb talks about the beautiful bartender Vincent and the New York financier Jonathan Alkaitis and their life together, and I was looking forward to a queer relationship being the focal point of the novel. So I was extremely disappointed to find out that (a) Vincent is in fact a woman, not a man and (b) far from this being a queer story, it is so ragingly heteronormative and patriarchal, that she dies on the very first page. Why do people even write stories like this??
12. Mandel, Emily St. John, Sea of Tranquility (finished February 15, 2023): I liked this one the best of the three, though there’s no way I could’ve read it without the other two first. It did, however, feel quite autobiographical when it came to “what it’s like to live through a pandemic lockdown.” Even though Olive’s pandemic was 200 years into the future, it was generic enough to feel like Mandel was exorcising her own Covid-19 experiences. Or maybe I’m just projecting.
13. Meadows, Foz, A Strange and Stubborn Endurance (finished April 7, 2023): Oh, what a beautiful book this was! And even better because of how I obtained it — straight from the author’s hands when I visited them during a conference in CA, because their husband is a set theorist and was one of the local organizers…

    (finished July 6, 2023): I was in a weird headspace early July and needed a comfort reread, and this felt like the right choice.

14. Mowat, Farley, Owls in the Family (finished February 8, 2023): This was a bedtime story I read aloud to G. It was an absolute treat for both of us. I remember loving the book as a child, and she loved it too.
15. Mo Xiang Tong Xiu, Mo Dao Zu Shi vol. 1 (finished April 24, 2023); vol. 2 (finished April 28, 2023); vol. 3 (finished April 29, 2023); vol. 4 (finished April 30): I received a recommendation to watch “The Untamed,” inhaled it (50 episodes in less than two weeks), loved it, and then discovered that it was based on a book series of which the first four had been translated into English. I went out the next day and got all four for my birthday. I enjoyed the books very much because it allowed me to piece together a few bits I missed in the initial episodes, and also the different ordering of how the story was told made it not feel repetitive. They were also highly addictive, as you can see by the fact that I read them all in less than a week, and two of them each in one day.
16. Mo Xiang Ton Xiu, Mo Dao Zu Shi, vol. 5 (finished May 11, 2023): Having finished the first four volumes I was bereft at the fact that vol. 5 wasn’t out — only to discover that it was to be released only a few days later! I pre-ordered it, and was delighted when it arrived earlier than I expected. The final volume wraps up the story and also contains some short stories set in the same universe. I was surprised at how little of vol. 5 was the wrapping up of the story, in part because there’s a plot layer in the TV show (a very good/important one, which explains important backstory) that turned out not to be present in the books. The short stories were, overall, a lot of fun and a pleasant addition, except one which involves graphic depictions of non-consensual sex, and was definitely not something I wanted included.
17. Muir, Tamsyn, Gideon the Ninth (finished June 23, 2023): Friends had raved over this, so when I was at Portal Bookshop in York and saw a copy, I bought it. The “lesbian necromancers in space” description basically doesn’t appeal to me at all, and I had a hard time getting into things. I did start really enjoying it when the various characters began to be developed — so I was pretty disappointed when they all started dying. I’d like to read the sequel, but I’m not sure I want to pay for it. Unfortunately, my county library system only has book one, not the later ones.
18. Oseman, Alice, Loveless (finished July 22, 203): This was an airport book for my trip to South America, but it was one I’d been planning to buy for awhile because (a) I ❤ Hearstopper and (b) Alice is from Durham. OMG, was this book — centering around a student at Durham — hilarious to read as a member of academic staff at Durham. There were so many little bits and pieces about student life that made me laugh (“College Matriculation — a bizarre pseudo-religious ceremony”; “There was nothing interesting to do in Durham apart from eat out, drink, and go to the cinema. Unlessyou particularly like looking at old buildings”; “our third date was at a pancake cafe. It was situated up a hill about a ten-minute walk out of Durham’s town centre” — that cafe is a block from my house, and I can get from my office, up that hill to my house, crossing Durham’s town centre on the way, in 10 minutes!) — or finally helped me make sense of things that have happened in some of my classes! (Such as the logic discussion seminar where two guys got down on one knee in front of a girl, and proposed to her…) I also really valued reading a book that is so explicit about asexuality, and found it a useful exercise comparing the MC’s experiences to my own, especially seeing where they diverge.
19. Pamuk, Orhan, My Name is Red (finished January 1, 2023): This book was like three pages too long to be a 2022 book. It was an airport book from my trip to Mexico, and it was a long read, with a few other books interspersed. But it was a very good read. I found the discussions of the different approaches to art between the West, the Middle East, and the East, absolutely engaging and absorbing. I was recommending it to friends before I’d even finished it.
20. Perrenoud, Zoe, Timebender (finished March 24, 2023): This book suffered from none of the “second book of a trilogy”-itis that second books often have. It was almost entirely self-contained, and could easily be read separately from book 1, yet it also filled in gaps that the first book had (deliberately) left. I’m super curious about how the trilogy is going to finish up, because there are so many different directions things could take. I found the romantic love-triangle arc a little juvenile, but this made sense because Sophie is only a teenager, and she should respond to these things in a juvenile fashion. And I’m glad that this book wasn’t quite as straight/het as the previous one.
21. Peterson, Andrew, On the Edge of the Dark Sea of Darkness (finished October 9, 2023): This is the first book of a quartet which G had received from her cousins for Christmas a year or two ago, but we hadn’t had time to read yet; but when she was visiting them over summer, the girls read the books out loud to each other and G was so enamoured of it that she insisted on reading it to me when she got back. It’s cute and fun and a cut above some middle grade fantasy (I adore all the footnotes), but it is problematic ableist in some ways made even more unfortunate by the fact that you can see the author is deliberately trying to have physically and mentally diverse characters. Still, anything that gets G fired up to read, either to herself or out loud, is a win in my book.
22. Pulley, Natasha, The Watchmaker of Filigree Street (finished February 8, 2023): This very nearly scratched the itch left behind by Pulley’s The Kingdoms. It was very, very good.
23. Pulley, Natasha, The Lost Future of Pepperharrow (finished February 10, 2023): I liked this one even more than WoFS, because of its Japanese setting, and its happy ending.
24. Spillard, C. L., The Evening Lands (finished April 21, 2023): This book went onto my tbr list a few years ago when the author was posting about it on twitter, and I finally acquired a copy. Wow, what a strange, weird, bizarre, unreliable book this is! So much going on, and so many pieces to put together. Definitely one of the better self-published books that I’ve read, it was utterly unlike anything else I’ve ever read and I really enjoyed it.
25. Suri, Tasha, The Oleander Sword (finished July 21, 2023): I really loved Suri’s Empire of Sand books, but the book that TOS is a sequel to, The Jasmine Throne was less to my taste. Still, it was good enough to buy this sequel, and I enjoyed the sequel, although I still struggle with believing the central romantic arc, and the one romantic arc that was believable ended up unhappily. So it was not a terribly satisfying reading.
26. Telgemeier, Raina, Drama (finished June 25, 2023): This was the book that turned my reluctant reader into a reader. I got it for G for her 9th birthday, during the pandemic, and she LOVED it. She has read it so many times she has a lot of it memorized, and she wanted to share it with me so we read together for bedtime stories, dividing up the characters. It was such an enjoyable experience, because she has not only become a good reader, she has become an extremely expressive and characterful reader out loud.
27. Telgemeier, Raina, Sisters (finished July 5, 2023): G requested this one after we finished Drama, so we did it in the same way, dividing up the characters. This one was not as gripping as a story, but still good fun to read out loud with someone.
28. Zhao, Xiran Jay, The Iron Widow (finished August 6, 2023): This was an airport book, picked up for my trip to South America. I very nearly read it in one sitting on the bus from Buenos Aires to Paraná. It took a chapter or two for me to get into it, and then it became gripping, even if it felt like fanfiction at times (lots of queer/happy love triangles!). I liked the setting a lot, and was able to appreciate much of it a lot more than I might have otherwise if I hadn’t watched “The Untamed” (and then read the books — or, more importantly, the explanatory notes at the end of them) in the preceding few months!)

Nonfiction

1. Wilkinson, Alec, A Divine Language: Learning Algebra, Geometry, and Calculus at the Edge of Old Age (finished March 5, 2023): This was another Christmas present from Joel. It’s a book about a man who did very poorly with algebra, et al., as a teenager, and decided in his 60s to try to learn them again. If you don’t know much about math; you won’t learn much about it from this book. If you don’t know much about philosophy of math, you’ll learn a bit, but often from a heavily simplified point of view. But what was in the book that I found the most fascinating was what he has to say about learning how to learn. A sentiment that students sometimes express to me is that learning logic is hard, in the sense that it’s something that takes effort, rewards time and investment, and really does benefit from multiple goes at it. And what Wilkinson has to say about learning how learning itself can be a process involving effort I thought was super interesting, because while he was applying it to learning how to learn math, I think much of it also applies to learning how to learn logic. I recommended it to my students, as a result.

And then I…stopped reading in September 2023. I don’t really know why, and figuring it out involves a blog post of its own. But it wasn’t for lack of trying.

Plot as Argument, Writing as Inference

I’ve known I was going to be a writer since I first started writing stories age 4. But I spent a lot of my childhood being unclear on how to actually be a writer, because the advice I kept reading (“show, don’t tell!”) was always a bit mysterious, and I had no idea how to actually construct a plot.

I’ve written before (part 1, part 2, part 3) about how the decade I took off from writing fiction taught me much about the latter, and how viewing plot as a form of argument has shaped how I approach my fiction writing projects as an adult. But nearly 40 years into this writing business, I still struggle with the “show, don’t tell” advice (for reasons expressed in my “writing while autistic” posts here), in my own writing.

This is partly because most books that are trad published do it so well, you don’t even notice it, so it’s hard to see what it is about them that works, in order to be able to develop and incorporate the techniques into your own work. This is where I’ve found reading and review short stories for SFFReviews plus reading self-published SFF so valuable — because this expose me to work in a much wider variety of styles and voices, and, frankly, quality. Another very helpful exercise has been reading manuscript submissions that I receive as the editor in chief of Ellipsis Imprints: when I read with an editorial eye, I can “see” the differences between what I receive and what is out there, published. (Alas, so far this eye only works when I’m reading other people’s work, not my own!)

Which brings me to the second half of today’s post’s title: Writing as inference. What does this mean in the context of showing, not telling? It’s simple: when editing someone else’s work, if there is an explicit statement of an event or action (or feeling or thought) that could be inferred from something else that is already explicit, I delete the conclusion of the inference and see if the story reads just as well.

For instance, consider a scene which describes one character exiting a room; then another crosses the room, catches up with them, and exits the room as well. This is a step by step temporal narrative with all the steps spelled out; but if, for instance, the author only mentions the second character catching up with the first, and not the room crossing, then the reader has to make the inference themselves, from the fact that the two characters left together to the fact that the latter must have crossed the room to meet the former. As authors, we need to be brave enough to trust our readers to fill in these gaps, to make these inferences.

Another place where trust in the reader can strengthen the “showing” rather than “telling” is trust in the process of reading. Stories follow a temporal path (not necessarily linear, not necessarily always in the same direction, but events in stories are necessarily temporally ordered), but so too does reading a story — and when those paths overlap and align, there is less need to be explicit about the temporal ordering of events. It is tempting to put in explicit temporal order marks, such as “then,” or “while,” or “now”. But the reader’s own temporal experience can often fill in these gaps; the author doesn’t need to say “x happened and then y happened”; “x happened and y happened” will have a temporal order in the narrative in virtue of the temporal order imposed by the reader’s experience, which makes it natural to infer that the same temporal order happened in the story.

So if the large structure of a piece of fiction, its plot, can be expressed and informed by thinking about argument, then what I’ve been learning, and have tried to express in this post, is that the small structure can be expressed and informed by making the reader perform the inferences, to fill in the enthymemes. It’s all about logic, for this logician-author!

Writing While Autistic: Social Scripts

One thing I am very bad at is empathy. One thing I would like to be good at is empathy, but there is not a natural empathetic bone in my body, so the best I can do is learn how to imitate empathy.

For me, this is via the use of social scripts — identifying the appropriate things to say in complex situations, and then running through those situations in my head to play-test them, both general things like “I’m really sorry that happened to you,” and “Are you okay?”, and “what can I do to support you?”, plus a bunch of more specific sentences for particular use-cases. For instance, “do you just want me to know what happened or do you want me to do something about it?” is useful when parenting, but that becomes “if you need support making a formal complaint, I am here to help you,” when talking to a student.

I practice these, in various scenarios, in my head quite a bit (and sometimes out loud when walking around town, complete with trying out appropriate facial expressions and hand gestures…), with the net result that when they’re needed, I can recognize that they’re needed and know which ones to use.

What does this have to do with writing while autistic? Well, what else is writing other than working through various social situations and trying out scripts on them? Which ones work, which ones don’t, and when, and why? What situations need social scripts and which don’t? How does one figure out the appropriate non-verbal responses, and how does one convey this — whether in physical manifestation or in prose?

The way it generally works, is I think of some class of scenarios, and establish a goal for the successful navigation of that class. For instance, if it’s parenting, my goal might be “I want my child to not feel like I am dismissing her experiences.” If I am supporting a friend or colleague or student, it might be “I don’t want to gaslight them about the severity of their experiences.” If it’s a writing scenario, it might be, “I don’t want drama to result purely because of systematic miscommunication.” With a goal in mind for each of these cases, I can then try out different potential responses, either mentally or through characters on a page, to see which ones are most likely to result in my desired outcome.

One of the most freeing realisations that social scripts gave me was the realisation that I don’t need to pretend that this comes naturally or is effortless or is easy. I don’t need my social scripts to be neurotypical, it’s perfectly fine for them to be neurodivergent. If what I want the other person to know is “it’s unacceptable that this happened to you,” then I can simply say that, even if this is far too blunt or polite for typical (or British) communication.

What I’m now working on doing is taking this realisation and translating it into my writing: I don’t need my prose to follow neurotypical norms, either. If there’s something I want to say, I can just say the damn thing, I don’t need to finesse it into something that fits neurotypical norms and standards of story-telling. I’ve touched on this a bit in my previous Writing While Autistic posts, and have a longer piece currently brewing, about my stumbling towards developing an autistic authorial voice, and what this even means.

But for now: Social scripts. They’re great. And I can practice them in advance either mentally and through my writing.

What We Do When We Do Philosophy

Today I had the great pleasure to be hosted by the Núcleo de Epistemologica e Lógica at Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina in Florianopolis to give a masterclass on What We Do When We Do Philosophy: Issues in Methodology* (*with special attention to logic, history of logic, and philosophy of fiction).

Here are the notes that I wrote up yesterday which formed the basis of the conversations that we had over 4 hours across the morning and the afternoon. They are in part influenced by this post on How do we (teach students to) ask questions and this post on How to write academic papers for fun and profit:

Methodology of Philosophy, or What are we doing??

The basis of this masterclass is the belief that we don’t talk enough about what we are doing, and how, and why, and that there is a lot to be learned from hearing about other people’s processes – steal what works for you, junk what does. All of these topics fall under the broad heading of “methodology” or “what we do”.

Ask a philosopher what they do, they’ll jokingly answer “I read things and think about them and then write about them.” Surely there’s more to it than that!

Q1: What is your methodology for “doing philosophy”?

Bonus Q: Does this differ from your methodology for “writing philosophy papers”?

I asked a bunch of my philoso-friends this question, and got answers much like the joking answer above:

“doing philosophy involves reading groups, participating in workshops, commenting on work much more than writing”

“Reading then thinking then writing.”

“A problem in the world, an interesting paper or person to read or push against, long walks with those, and fingers crossed/prayers for an idea.”

“reading then thinking then writing. I’m either addressing questions that I identify through engagement with primary source texts or secondary literature, or I find a problem in the world, often through experience, that I look at textual resources to try to address then add to if I find I have something to say that goes beyond what’s already published.”

“Discussion is a massive part of my ‘methodology’. Q&As at talks, post talk pub chat, organising reading groups, going for coffee with colleagues, teaching upper level courses in my area and chatting with students. This obviously fits into a wider picture of reading-thinking-writing, but a big part of ‘thinking’ for me is social.”

“I had to start properly writing a paper and was happy to find a full overview of the sections, based on things I thought about for talks I had to give. So there’s my methodology.”

“On the Nietzsche front it’s partly what I ended up getting assigned to do, and partly when I truly do not understand how something works and can’t find an explanation already written.”

“my methodology seems to be ‘see a social problem and ask why that problem isn’t getting resolved’, then go from there… ”

So if you poke a bit deeper at these answers, it’s a little bit more than “read, think, write.” (For instance, there’s also “talk”.) More importantly, all of these answers are variations on “how to get ideas and do something with them.”

When I was an early graduate student, I remember being baffled by grad students further along, who seemed to have an endless amount of ideas. Where did these ideas come from? I certainly didn’t get any guidance on this from the seminars I was taking, which all focused on relatively traditional questions in traditional philosophy and expected us to do the same. So, for the most part, I found the questions boring, though the methods used to answer them interesting. But to come up with new ideas on my own?

Over the years, I’ve come up with four reliable methods for generating ideas/questions, which have served me well (I’m still in academia!). These are not the only methods, but they are the methods that worked for me.

1. Edge cases: Take a traditional theory or a traditional question, and instead of working in the center of it, work on the edges. Work on the borderlines.
2. Intersection: Here’s a thing that interests me in philosophy. Here’s a thing that interests me outside of philosophy. What’s in the intersection? (This is the method I give to undergraduate students needing to develop a thesis topic. It invariably works, and the dissertations they end up writing are amazing and usually get very good grades.)
3. What’s in there?: Here’s a historical text. What does it say? How does it compare to what other people at the same time were saying? How does it compare to what we say today?
4. Tool combination: I have this modal logic. I have this temporal logic. I have agents. I have self-reference. What happens if I put them all together?

Edge cases in philosophy of fiction

My main interests in fiction are on the language and logic side of things: How can we say true things about fictions and reason about them? (In fact, I’d worked in philosophy of fiction for about a decade before I learned that most people consider it a subfield of aesthetics, an area about which I know almost nothing.) So I like to take standard accounts of the language/logic/(sometimes metaphysics) of fiction and ask how they:

1. deal with fanfiction (e.g., constitutive vs. stipulative accounts)
2. deal with fictional languages
3. deal with modal statements about fictions or within fictions

Another guiding principle: Take the phenomena seriously. We interact with fictional languages as if they are meaningful. We compose texts in them. We translate into and out of them. We write grammar books and dictionaries of them. We also engage in meta-level activities: We criticize people’s translations, we praise their compositions. So, all of our activity makes it look like it’s meaningful. If your theory of meaning says that fictional languages are not meaningful, e.g., because they do not have robust truth-conditions, then instead of taking that as an answer, I will just shift the question: What accounts for this behavior, whether or not we call it meaning?

Same with any theory of character identity that cannot account for claims of fanfics being OOC or in character. Or cannot account for character identity across media (from book to TV) or ties it to embodiment (e.g., no actor changes). We do all these things: identify characters across media, across actors, as being OOC or IC; I want a theory that makes sense of these things.

Intersection: A general method

There’s not much more to say about the method other than what I said above, except that it’s a really good exercise if you’re struggling for ideas. Take something in philosophy and something outside of philosophy (preferably something near and dear to your heart), and ask yourself “what kinds of philosophical questions can I ask about these subjects?”
This method is how I got into historical logic/history of logic in the first place. I’d been studying logic for a number of years, and loving it; I had also been a member of a medieval re-enactment group for some more years. I took a history of logic class as a graduate student, and five weeks in we hit the Middle Ages, and I was like “Wait, they did logic in medieval times?! Whelp, I guess that’s what I’m writing my dissertation on!”

What’s in there? In the history of logic/philosophy

The vast majority of my work in historical logic follows a predictable pattern: I pick a text, preferably one that not many other people have worked on, and ask “What’s in here?” That, combined with a bit of biographical/historical info about the author and the text, some motivation for why I picked the particular text that I did, what the text says, how we can understand it (sometimes with modern logical tools, cf. methodology 4), and whether there’s any connections or implications to modern discussions.
A subgenre of this methodology is the “What did they say?” method. Sometimes I will take a modern topic – such as temporal operators – and ask “what do medieval authors have to say about this topic?” My go-to sources are the “Big Four” – four introduction to logic textbooks written ~1250-1270, all translated into English and hence accessible for non-specialists.
The advantage of picking texts that most people haven’t looked at before is that you are pretty much guaranteed to say something new. Low-hanging fruit: Pick it!

You might think you need to be a historian to use this method. To some extent, that’s true. Depending on the time period, you might need to be able to read specialist languages. You might need to have familiarity with the broader culture (e.g., the religious and political culture of the time); you might need to know not just what’s in the book/text you’re reading, but what is in other books/texts of the time. But not all historical work needs specialist language skills, and not all historical works have to be read historically: You can still do interesting work that is ahistorical (e.g., a lot of my work on historical logic is – weirdly enough – ahistorical).
But it’s also not true: You can gain the relevant historical knowledge and skills by doing this sort of work. (Here the “plug things into googlebooks” methodology becomes very useful!)

Tool combination in logic

1. What happens if I take all these bits and put them together, what can I do with them?
2. What bits do I need to combine in order to be able to say something about What’s in there?

You might be thinking:

• I didn’t know I could talk about X in philosophy!
• How do I know if the questions these methods generate are philosophical enough?

All of this is about finding and asking questions. The next step is: How do you distinguish the good questions from the bad (or at least, not so good) questions, and how do you answer them? Let’s go back to Intersection, and flesh out how to generate questions from ideas or topics. Once I have a topic in Intersection, I tend to work through (or have students work through) these questions:

• What do you want to know?
• What would count as an answer to this question? How are you going to discriminate between things that answer the question and things that don’t?
• What would count as a good answer to this question? How are you going to discriminate between competing answers? What are your foundational principles, the things that you cannot give up? What is the purpose of this answer (are you looking for something functional, moral, epistemological, etc.)? State these at the beginning of what you are writing, as part of your motivation.
• Then, once you’ve answered the question…who cares? Why does it matter? What has changed as a result of having this answer? What must change as a result of having this answer? Does having this answer affect our behavior? Does it affect what philosophical position we must adopt to remain consistent? Does it change the philosophical landscape by either removing or adding possible positions? What difference does it make?

Think about some typical abstract philosophical question, such as “What is The Good” or “Why is there something rather than nothing” or “What is a fact”. I tend to think a lot of these questions are silly/stupid/useless questions to ask unless you have some idea of what could possibly count as an answer, and some idea of what could possibly count as a good answer. These are the interesting questions:

• What would count as an answer to the question “What is a fact?”
• What would count as a good answer to the question “What is fact?”

Let’s go back to the question of doing philosophy vs. writing philosophy papers

For me, these are exactly the same thing: My way of doing philosophy just is via writing papers, it’s how I work out my ideas. (Note that “presenting these ideas at workshops and conferences” is a part of the paper writing process, for me.)

So let’s talk about the methodology of writing papers: What goes into a successful term paper, seminar paper, journal article? (Of course there will be differences because of the different purposes and audiences, but these general features generally hold).

The first thing you need is what question you’re trying to answer, and what your answer is: Everything else gets built around that. I often recommend to my students to work backwards: What do you want your reader to come away with at the end? Set up your entire paper to drive that point home:

• Motivate the question — why is this a question worth answering? Why this question rather than another question? Your intro should include what your problem/puzzle/issue is; what motivated your choice; and what tools you’ll use to solve it.
• Contextualise the question — what has already been said to answer this question? Why are these previous answers inadequate? How will your answer differ? You should say what other people have done that’s relevant, and why it’s inadequate (if it isn’t inadequate, then you don’t have a puzzle/problem to solve).
• Motivate the answer — what will count as a good answer? How will you discriminate good answers from bad answers? (This will, of course, be connected to the previous, in that you want answers that do things that previous answers haven’t done).
• You should define all your technical apparatus. This can be done in two ways:
  1. Either you introduce the technical apparatus and the motivating examples/material concurrently, in an interleaved fashion.
  2. Or you present all the technical apparatus, and then apply it to your motivating examples/material.

  It’s REALLY HARD to know which route is best. I often end up starting with one method, finding it wholly inadequate, switching to the other, hating it, and then switching back.

• Answer the question. Explain how your answer answers the question and why it is a good answer.
• After you’ve applied your technical apparatus, say something about the consequences. What have you gained from doing this? What have you learned? What are the problems? What still needs to be done?
• And all of that will segue into your conclusion/recap/future work section. Remind your reader what the question and answer were, and conclude with pointers to what you wanted to do but were unable to do; what you want to do in the future; and what other people might want to do.

Logic as Liberation. Part 3.

[Read Part 2 here.]

3.1

I asked my students to tell me, if they felt comfortable sharing this in a full lecture hall, how many of them had ever been told “don’t be so emotional” or “be more rational.” I was not surprised how many people raised their hands; women, at least, have been told this all our lives.

I was surprised, and saddened, by how many men did.

This is logic being used as a weapon, as a tool of silencing. It is one person telling another: “I will only interact with you on my terms, not yours.” It is a way of denying other people a voice, a way of saying that they are not full participants in human discourse.

How can we keep logic from being weaponized?

3.2

The weaponization of logic to exclude certain voices from the discussion isn’t merely a modern conceit, but one with philosophical roots as far back as ancient Greece. Val Plumwood in her paper “The Politics of Reason: Towards a Feminist Logic” points to Plato and Aristotle’s views of who gets to be within the sphere of reason, and also notes:

For Kant, it is not only women who are excluded from reason by their possession of a gallantly presented but clearly inferiorised ‘beautiful understanding’, but also workers, and blacks [p. 436]

This is but one footnote in the history of the exclusion of people from and by logic. What Plumwood points out is that there is an interesting tension between a view of logic which takes it to be neutral, and the way in which it nevertheless takes non-neutral positions on the inclusion and exclusion of different groups of people. She says:

Although logic is usually assumed to be a paradigm of neutrality, the work of feminist philosophers has suggested that even logic has been shaped by these relations of domination, a claim I will help to support here [p. 437].

If logic is a tool of domination, what can we do to reject its use as this type of tool? (Can we even do so?) Nye, one of Plumwood’s major opponents in her paper, clearly things that there is no rehabilitating logic. Plumwood, on the other hand, asks:

Why does it make a case for abandoning logic, as opposed to critically reconstructing it and making much more limited claims for it? [p. 438]

(“it” here being “the historical context of oppressive social relations which has also affected reason”). Plumwood charges Nye with an overgeneralized and overabstract account of logic, created from the very logical structures that Nye wishes to reject. Instead, if we take a more nuanced approach to what logic is — and what it can be — we can “really insist that all uses of language be grounded in personal experience, the testimony of the witness, and ‘the normality of human interchange that logic refuses'” [p. 439].

So let us accept, then, that logic should be properly grounded in careful attention to personal experience, testimony, human interchange, etc. Does it follow from this that logic must be a tool of domination? Plumwood argues not: “If there is not one Logic, but in fact many different logics, if logics can be constructed which can tolerate even contradiction itself, logic itself can have no silencing role and no unitary authority over language” [p. 440]. Instead of being used as a means of silencing, properly deployed it can be a means of giving a voice to the voiceless.

Plumwood locates the problem with logic not in logic itself but in the way in which the core of contemporary logic, and the dominant tradition throughout western history, namely classical logic, buys into a system of dualisms; it is these dualisms that make logic apt for oppression. The specific dualism that Plumwood identifies as the core problem is the dualism of negation: Classical negation which divides everything into “X” and “not-X”. True and not-true, man and not-man, human and not-human, rational and not-rational. This way of thinking supports “the structure of a general way of thinking about the other which expresses the perspective of a dominator or master identity, and thus might be called a logic of domination” [p. 442]. Such a dualistic approach to negation, and othering, is not an intrinsic part of logic; it is a choice that logicians make:

The ‘naturalness’ of classical logic is the ‘naturalness’ of domination, of concepts of otherness framed in terms of the perspective of the master [p. 454]

Why is the dualistic approach so problematic? It is because when carving the world up into X’s and not-X’s, it is one thing to be an X, but it is many things to be a non-X. It is one thing to be a man; but to be a non-man is to be a woman, or an enby, or any of many other things. The X/non-X binary erases all the differences in the non-X category, defining its members in terms of what they are not rather than in what they are.

There are other accounts of negation which do not carve up the world in this dualistic way, and these logics are less suited to be tools of oppression and domination. When logic takes into account not the dualistic division of the world into X’s and non-X’s, but rather the differences that make up the non-X’s, then we are in a position to develop, as Plumwood says, a “liberatory logic” [p. 458] — the logic that will set us free, rather than bind us.

Logic as Liberation. Part 2.

[Read Part 1 here.]

2.1

Back in 2016, I had the pleasure of going to Australia for a string of back to back conferences — the Australasian Association for Logic (where I was an invited speaker); the Australasian Association for Philosophy; and the International Association for Women Philosophers.

Ever since I left my initial PhD programme, in philosophy, because I wanted to do logic but the department decided that logic was “not philosophical enough,” I have had an uneasy relationship with being labelled a philosopher. This series of conferences really drove that home. I’ve written extensively about my experiences there here, shortly after it all happened and when the unsettling discomfort of the final conference was still foregrounded. Even now, almost 7 years later, it’s hard to reread that post because doing so brings back all my feelings of ostracization and unwantedness, and it’s hard to know what to pick from that post to include in this one. So I will leave it with a link that you can go and read. I will, however, quote one thing I said then that still perfectly encapsulates my overwhelming conclusion:

I came away from this roundtable with a profound feeling that if this is what ‘Women and Philosophy’ is, then the only logical conclusion is that either I am not a woman (or the right kind of woman) or what I do is not philosophy (or not the right kind of philosophy).

It’s been made very clear to me throughout my academic career that many of my colleagues think the latter; but it is hard to escape the feeling that at least some people in my field think the answer is the former.

2.2

One of the first feministic critiques of logic is Andrea Nye’s Words of Power: A Feminist Reading of the History of Logic. Her position on the femininity of logic is clear from the introduction:

but logic, she is learning, is not a feminine subject…logic is, after all, a masculine subject (p. 2)

It is her position to exclude in advance any possibility of being both a feminist and a logician. This is because logic “is the creation of defensive male subjects who have lost touch with their lived experience” (p. 4) and “an invention of men, that is something men do and say” (p. 5). The exclusion is affirmed again at the end of the book, when she talks about “if a feminist reader is to remain reader and not turn logician at the last moment” (p. 175, emphasis added) — never pausing to wonder if one could be both reader and logician at the same time.

It is hard to read such a critique, as a logician, because I want to also be able to be a feminist. If Nye is right, no woman can be both a feminist and a logician because the two are antithetical to each other. If she is right, then if I wish to be both, then — because I am a logician and can do modus tollens — I must conclude that I cannot be a woman.

One thing that has always drawn me to logic is that it is a rule-following discipline. The rigidity of the rules is part of its attraction: You either have a proof, or you don’t. Something is either true, or it is false. (Or both, or neither, but whichever combo it is, it is clearly and definitively). Sometimes your answer is wrong; sometimes it is right. And when something is wrong, or false, or not a proof, there is something that you can say which explains why. This is part of what also makes logic such a joy to teach, because there is always a reason why students have gotten something wrong, and if I can help them see that reason, then there’s nothing to prevent them from fixing it and never making that mistake again.

It’s only been in recent years that I’ve realised how connected my joy in logic is to my joy in the slavish adherence to arbitrary rules, and how much that is an indicator of autism. The deep-seated need to be a rule-follower (combined with a rampant desire to question everything, including the rules I want to follow!) along with an inability to deviate from the rules or to understand how other people can just blow those rules off, is one of the most central aspects of my character, and one of the strongest signs that I have that I am autistic.

The curious flip side of this is how being autistic impinges on my gender. Gender, for the most part, is simply incidental to me, a non-thing. I like to joke that I am cis be default, because being anything else would simply be too much work. I can see why the idea of being agender would be attractive; but it also seems like a big hassle, when things have gone along fine enough so far. I, in one of my favorite English phrases, cannot be arsed. So I am cis, I am a woman. Maybe I am “the wrong kind of woman”, but if so, it is precisely because my view of my gender is mediated through my autism, which itself is intimately linked to my love of logic.

According to Nye, “logic articulates oppressive thought—structures that channel human behavior into restrictive gender roles” (p. 5). My experience has been entirely the opposite: It was the welcoming embrace where I first felt freed from restrictive gender roles, where I could escape the woman = emotion/woman = body/woman = irrationality equations that had pervaded my life, implicitly and explicitly. Logic was where I first felt at home, a place within philosophy where my gender didn’t matter. Logicians have never judged my desire to be a logician on the basis of my gender, only philosophers have.

If you ask me “are you a man or a woman?” I will answer “I am a logician”.

[Read Part 3 here].

Writing While Autistic: Who Gets to Speak?

Ever since writing my previous Writing While Autistic post, I’ve been thinking about other ways in which my writing is affected by my neurodivergent status.

I’ve always struggled with dialogue, in the sense that I often end up with characters who would rather hang on the fringes of things, who don’t know how to express themselves fluently, whose anxiety ties their tongues and prevents them from engaging in the way that characters need to engage with each other in order for the story to be driven forward. This is a clear instance of “write what you know”: When I write characters that are close to my own heart/experiences, and are characters that I understand, this is what I end up with. I do not understand people who can fluently express themselves in any given situation, who can dominate and direct a conversation, who are not constantly afraid of how they will be viewed or whether they will transgress the ordinary turn-taking norms of conversation. When I am too deeply inside a character’s head, I then experience their world in the way I experience my world, entirely “mediated through how that scene/situation impacts on the character and how they make sense of it”.

On the other hand, what the recent weeks’ reflections have shown is that there is a style of writing in which I have no trouble at all writing characters who can speak to each other easily, in fully formed, well-developed, and distinct voices. What is this style? It is when I have an external narrator, telling about events that they are not a part of. It isn’t an omniscient narrator perspective, but a storyteller narrator perspective; these are the sorts of stories which, at least in their initial drafts, start off with a “here we all are around the campfire, let me tell you a story” setting, stories that start off “They say…” or “It has been told,” or even “Once upon a time.” The story is told through a person, not a god or an “above” sort of view, but it is always told by someone who is in some sense external, or removed, or remote from the events they are narrating. In a sense, this is also a way of experiencing events mediated through the way in which they impact on people, it’s just that the people they’re impacting on are not the person telling the story.

So, who gets to talk, in my stories? The ones who are able to talk easily are the ones who are not a part of things: They can stand on the fringes, observe, interpret, understand, communicate. But the ones who are in the middle, acting and being acted upon, trying to interpret, failing to understand — they are the ones who cannot communicate.

Art imitates life, life is expressed in art.

Logic as Liberation. Part 1.

[Read Part 0 here.]

1.1

I went into my first logic class convinced I was going to fail.

I was 16 years old, still in high school, and had signed up to do some credits at the local community college. Why logic? Because I’d lived all my life knowing, fundamentally, to my core, that I was not a logical person — and that my dad was. I wanted to know more about how thought, how he worked, and this was the perfect opportunity to do so, because the grades I got wouldn’t count towards anything, and so it wouldn’t matter when I failed.

And then, I didn’t. We were about a third of the way through the semester when I realized that I was the only one who understood any of what was going on; and by the end of the semester, I had tutored all but one of the other students. Not only was I not fundamentally illogical, I was actually rather good at it! After I finished the final exam, I looked at the course catalogue for the university I hoped to attend the next year, and marked out all the logic classes. These were the classes for me.

By the time I left UW-Madison, I had taken all of the logic classes offered in both the philosophy and the mathematics departments (and one of them I took twice!). Logic was everything that English lit (my first major) and philosophy (my second major) was not: There were rules. Things were right or wrong. Either you had a proof or you didn’t. Questions could actually be answered; and the task of figuring out the right new questions to ask was enormously challenging and satisfying.

Logic gave me the tools I needed to structure my world into something I understood, to navigate social settings, to court my husband (also a logician). It has given me the tools I need to be a parent, to make decisions about my future in the face of uncertainty, and it has given me the opportunity to share the sheer joy of it with others.

1.2

In 1913, American author, historian, and Unitarian minister Edward E. Hale published an article in The North American Review entitled “Women and Logic”. It opens:

That women are not logical is one of the recognized conventions of social life (p. 206)

Hale is interested in two things: (1) Where this convention comes from and (2) What, exactly, is meant by the convention.

To the first point, Hale says he only knows of one explicit discussion of the convention, in Otto Weininger’s Sex and Character, which he attempts to summarise. In brief: A necessary part of the logical faculty is memory — in order to be able to carry out logical operations, one must remember what you have started with, and what steps one has done along the way, so that the $A$ that you start with is the $A$ that you end up with. Memory is also required in order for any sort of generalisation across time to be made: One has to be able to remember the instances yesterday in order to recognize that they are the same as instances today, and thus that these instances might be instances of some more general law. “Only so can we understand the fundamental proposition of Logic, $A=A$”, he says (p. 206). But, according to Weininger, “the absolute woman has no memory” (p. 206). So she lacks one of the necessary components of the logic faculty. Hale notes that Weininger’s position can be objected to by either rejecting the claim that memory is necessary for logic, or the claim that women do not partake in memory; he prefers to avoid both of these questions and instead “examine the general proposition directly; make a frontal attack, as one might say” (p. 207).

Which brings us to the second point, what is meant when it is said that women are illogical. Hale says:

When we say that women are illogical we often mean that when they try to prove anything they come out at an illogical result or that they get at their result by illogical methods, that they do not argue by making inferences or deductions, but determine their result by intuition, or by some other method known to themselves, or if not consciously known, at least customary (p. 211).

He’s inclined to be generous to women at this point.

If we mean by logic a sort of consistency or coherency, a full development or a natural outcome or something of the sort, then we shall often find that these intuitions of women are often logical enough (p. 211).

What Hale wants us to realise is that if we accept there are many different types of logic — “the logic of the schools, the logic of argument, the logic of consistency” (p. 212), namely, the “consistency between theory and practice” (p. 213) — then we can “consider women and see whether they have any logic, and, if so, what kind of logic it is” (p. 212).

All this work, for Hale to eventually, grudgingly, concede that maybe women do have some little bit of logic, perhaps, if we construe logic in the right way — namely, as a sort of “consistency between theory and practice” (p. 213) or a “consistency […] with whatever plan, good or bad, happens to be under discussion” (pp. 216-217). A munificent conclusion! Maybe 16yo me would’ve been reassured, in advance of taking my first logic class, that when I questioned whether I could be logical, I could reassure myself that as a woman, I did have some “logic”!

But the real question is not “whether women can be logical” but how this is even a question at all.

[Read Part 2 here.]