Based on a - PowerPoint Presentation

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Based on a presentation given at ISSHPSSBJuly 5-10 2015 University of Quebec at Montreal

Sharyn CloughPhronesis LabOregon State Universityin collaboration with Mark TschaepePrairie View A&M UniversityAIDS Foundation Houston

Sexual Desire:

A

Pragmatic Reconstruction

of

Scientific ExplanationSlide2

Philosophers of science have not said much about the sciences of sexual desire. Perhaps because there is not much to be said about “sexual desire” as a discrete phenomenon out in the world that is ready-made for scientists to examine.

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But many scientists certainly proceed as if they have something to say about it. Perhaps even A Billion Wicked things.© Leading to “the true differences

between male and female desires” (Ogas and Gaddam 2011). Or the Science of Desire [as] The Search For the Gay Gene (Hamer 1993).

Or the potential for

flibanserin

, the new drug for women diagnosed with low sexual desire

(aka “women” “diagnosed” with “low” “sexual” “desire”).Coming soon to a pharmacy near you.

Science and sexual desireSlide4

To be sure, philosophers of science have occasionally responded critically to these kinds of studies. On these occasions, research has usually focused on a host of frustratingly ubiquitous methodological problems.Such as misunderstandings/misapplications of the notion of heritability.Or problems with the methodological assumptions underwriting twin studies.

Or the use of non-human animals as model organisms.

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But typically our critical methodological focus has been on the sciences of human behavior more generally With concerns about the sciences of sexuality and desire used only as examples. And of these examples, most of our critical commentary has addressed sexuality solely in terms of “homosexuality”

And is usually restricted to a focus on males.

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There are three sustained criticisms of the sciences of (male) (homo) sexual desire in the philosophy of science literature: 1981 special issue of the Journal of Homosexuality, edited by Noretta Koertge

, published as the book The Nature and Causes of Homosexuality: A Philosophic and Scientific Inquiry (1982) and reprinted as Philosophy and Homosexuality (1985); The Mismeasure of Desire: The Science, Theory, and Ethics of Sexual Orientation, Edward Stein (2001);

Most

recently Helen Longino’s

Studying Human Behavior: How Scientists Investigate Aggression and Sexuality

(2013).

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Elisabeth Lloyd’s The Case of the Female Orgasm (2006) is a notable exception, of whom more shortly.In general though, we can and should do more, and better.

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As we critically examine different scientific studies purporting to explain “sexual desire” We should (more often) back up a step or two to consider some of the pragmatic, contextual issues Such as those revealed by recent feminist studies of ignorance, testimony, and trust.

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A good example of the consideration of pragmatic and contextual issues is Nancy Tuana’s essay, “Coming to Understand: Orgasm and the Epistemology of Ignorance” (2004), published in Hypatia

. As Tuana argues, ignorance, in this case ignorance of women’s sexual pleasure, is not “a simple lack” of knowledge. Rather “it is often constructed, maintained, and disseminated and is linked to issues of cognitive authority, doubt, trust, silencing, and uncertainty.”

Unfortunately her essay has

received little

uptake

by the larger philosophy of science community.

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In line with Tuana, the sorts of questions we should be asking include:What features of the various phenomena that we have come to associate with human sexual desire catch the attention of scientists? What kinds of interventions are imagined?

What seems problematic and to whom? Who gets to diagnose the problem? What circumstances reliably produce problems of this kind?What and who makes a sexual phenomenon into a sexual problem?Why is some inquiry permitted, while other inquiry is ignored or forbidden?

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The pragmatic reflection we’re endorsing is NOT meant to suggest that there are facets of human sexuality that are, by definition, inappropriate targets of scientific research. Indeed we need to confront and examine the popular resistance to the idea that features of our human sexual desires can only be addressed from one perspective or cannot be addressed at all.

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Lloyd’s The Case of the Female Orgasm (2005) confronts exactly this kind of resistance.She doesn’t argue against the possibility of scientific research on women’s sexual desire.

In fact she presents what she takes to be a well-conceived scientific study of adaptationist accounts of sexual desireNamely, women’s heterosexual desire for men with particular immunity profiles.

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But when Lloyd argued that there was no good evidence that orgasm in women was a product of natural selectionShe received some ambivalent reviews, even from women,

some from self-identified feministsWho expressed concern that evolutionary accounts were needed to legitimize female pleasure, or that arguments against evolutionary accounts might lead to a devaluing of orgasm in women.

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This kind of ambivalence can be explained only if we inquire into a number of pragmatic considerations by asking questions like:Why are evolutionary accounts rather than, say, folk psychological accounts appealing to the importance of pleasure and desire, seen as more

valuable?And to whom?

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One way forward is for us more consistently to highlight what we all know very well: Scientific explanations are tools for solvingparticular problems.

As philosophers of science, we need to make the particularities of the problems more explicit. We need more often to investigate which contingencies have led some sexual phenomena to be considered problematic while others are not so considered.

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When (an element of) human sexual desire is taken up by scientists as an appropriate object of investigationThe phenomenon as investigated has already been separated out as some thing.There is something about the phenomenon that has caught the attention of researchers in a particular context.

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We philosophers can help make clear scientific investigation of sexual desire is a practice of historically-situated embodied persons with beliefs and (sexual) desires.This is part of accounting for the pragmatic considerations of scientific inquiry and explanation.Pragmatic considerations

are, generally speaking, those specific factors within an explanatory situation that determine what elements are taken to be problematic and what elements are normalized.

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Acknowledging pragmatic considerations entails recognizing that such considerations contribute to explanations that function as tools for describing, solving, or preventing problems that inspired inquiry.

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For instance, Lloyd showed us that the realm of sexual desire is a field laden with scientific elements to be considered, examined and re-examined. For better, as in the case of selection for

heterogenous immune profiles, Or worse, as in the case of the selection of orgasm in women.

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But we should also emphasize that the very objects of scientific inquiry are laden with the historical, political, moral, and social-psychological…… all the way down.Accounting for pragmatic considerations acknowledges this.

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Some of the work on pragmatic considerations that we are referencing here is spelled out more carefully in Mark’s 2009 essay “Pragmatics & Pragmatic Considerations in Explanation,” Contemporary Pragmatism.

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As a point of contrast with this pragmatist approach Let’s return to Longino’s latest book Studying Human Behavior.

Longino surveys a variety of explanatory approaches to the study of human desireWhich quickly, and with little explanation, gets reduced to a discussion of male homosexuality.

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She argues that we philosophers of science have no reason to prefer some explanations for behaviors to others explanations.She calls for pluralism across all approaches because we cannot know which approach is epistemically stronger.The explanatory strength of each approach can only be assessed against an assumption that the effects appealed to by any and all other approaches can be held constant (p. 204)

Which, of course, they cannot.

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Now, if the explanatory strength of each approach can only be assessed against an assumption of constancy, then it is true that they are in some sense on a par. But surely there are other ways to judge the effectiveness of competing explanatory approaches.

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Indeed in earlier sections of her book she discusses the (many) methodological weaknesses of heritability claims about male homosexuality based on twin studies (e.g. pp. 30-35).Including the unsupported assumption in heritability studies that “environment” and “genetics” can be meaningfully separated.

She also acknowledges the “contested” nature of how (homo) sexuality is operationalized in these kinds of studies (p. 206).

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But her calls for pluralism seem in tension with the very weaknesses she iterates.

And she also leaves unexamined the pragmatic, contextual issues on which we want to place more emphasis.

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Increasingly, specific types of explanations, such as the biological, receive more financial, institutional, and rhetorical support than do others, such as the socio-political.Additionally, the biological realm seems to some scientists, lay people, and the NSF, to be (somehow) simpler and more tractable, than the socio-political realm.

Explanations that do not easily admit of quantification, such as those that appeal to social/political factors, are often described as less “real” than those that appeal to biological metrics of various kinds.

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This means that there is greater inductive risk associated with errors in biological explanations.Because there is more at stake, financially, rhetorically, indeed, politically.

This is a point that Longino does not critically assess when she compares different explanatory approaches to sexual behavior. Advocating a pluralism across explanatory frameworks in the face of these kinds of differences seems unwise.

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Of course quantified and measurable explanatory accounts can be helpful for explaining sexual desire in some contexts. But we need to encourage the relevant publics and players to reconfigure sufficiently what is meant by objects and processes demarcated as sexual

In ways that account for the pragmatic considerations by which certain features appear salient to those who study them.

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Salience is a political, historically-situated predicate.As philosophers, we can serve to remind each other and the scientists with whom we work that the features of sexual desire we’ve chosen to isolate are contingent upon the very processes of inquiry that isolate those features.

There is no natural or value-free state of sexual desire to which investigators arrive as separate entities.

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We also need to work to break down the reification that sometimes accompanies the identification of a successful scientific tool.Just because scientists have developed new shiny hammers doesn’t mean every sex problem is a nail.

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Scientific explanations are tools for solving particular problems. As philosophers of science, we need to make the particularities of the problems more explicit. We need more often to investigate contingencies that lead to

some sexual phenomena being problematized while others are not. There is a lot of work to do.

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Forthcoming from theTschaepe/Clough “Pragmatic Reconstruction And the Science of Sexual Desire” ProjectNeuroscientific Explanations of Monogamy

Presumptions in Public Health: Concerning “The Homosexual Lifestyle” and RiskPersonhood, Personal Responsibility, and Pedophilia

Science and the Problem of Pornography

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Jesse Prinz, CUNY Grad CenterChristian Matheis, Virginia TechSari van Anders, University of MichiganAnd the members of Phronesis Lab at OSU

Stephanie Jenkins Jonathan Kaplan Bradley Boovy

s

haryn.clough@oregonstate.edumdtschaepe@pvamu.edu

A

cknowledgments