Just found another unbelievable "correction"... one that can be described without thereby revealing too much. Here goes.
Like philosophers often do, I employ an example that recurs throughout the book. The example involves two hypothetical people, to whom I give the names "Ann" and "Brian." "A" and "B," and the former is female and the latter is male. Get it?
Sometimes a paragraph will begin with something like, "Recall our example of Ann and Brian...." then I'll go into some refresher about the example, and introduce the next consideration. But the whole point of using proper names of different genders is to make it easy to use "she" and "he" ("her" and "him," etc.) in developing the examples.
My copyeditor decided to alternate between "he" and "she" apparently without any regard for the way the example is supposed to work. If one sentence about Ann uses "her," the next sentence uses "him," even if it's another sentence clearly about Ann.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
8 comments:
perceived sexism > clarity
Someone I know once had all the pronouns in a ms changed to female without regard to any other considerations, leading to phrases like "Quine's eliminativism reflects her commitment to . . ."
Off with her heads!
In the preface to "Truth and the Absence of Fact," Hartry Field complains of an earlier copy-editor who indiscriminately replaced occurrences of 'he' with 'he or she', noting that "I drew the line when she tried to change a 'he' that referred to Paul Horwich in this way."
He goes on to note the dangers of indiscriminately replacing male with female pronouns: "One would not be striking a blow for gender equality if one rewrote Marx by saying, 'From each according to her abilities, to each according to his needs'."
David Velleman has an extensive footnote on this issue in his book Practical Reflection. See footnote 1 of his original introduction. She uses 'he' in the book rather than switching. He believes that in doing so there will exist an abstract pronoun to refer to an arbitrary person, but if we opt to switch back and forth or in some cases use she over he, she thinks we will lose that kind of abstract pronoun.
Thanks to Anon 12.57 for reminding us that prominent philosophers like Velleman can be as dumb as any copyeditor. Other people have data, but Velleman has intuitions.
Wait, what is going on in 12:57's comment? Is this supposed to somehow reinforce the confusion of switching between 'he' and 'she' when referring to an actual person? Or is this supposed to show how silly switching is? Or is... I just don't get it...
I thought philosophers didn't need data.
Post a Comment