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Subject: RE: [huml-comment] PC-33 -Section 4.4.6-race
I agree with that in the socio-cultural experiential sense. It is an abusable term that has historically been abused. However, I sense in the reply, a cultural emotionalism. ANY term is subject to certain cultural contexts, so that is not enough to remove it. (I favor removing it but not for the reasons given so far.) First: I suggest that one of the means by which one detects the presence of cultural amplifiers are the emotions demonstrated in the presence of a term. Terms such as "nigger" are famous for this kind of reaction; it can be used by members of the ???? race in certain contexts, but if members of multiple ??? races are present, its use will provoke emotional responses. See the problem here? Are there communications for which the context of "race" will determine interpretation or usage for a reasonably large set of instances? Second: the problem some people have with the term is that it does not have a genetic truth, or better, nothing genetic is concretely denoted by the term 'race'. So the second test. Given the code list I provided earlier, would an observer be able to correctly identify (select into a coded membership) a representative set of candidates? Does it matter that geneticists and anthropologists do not find use in their theories for the term 'race' if a large population identifies with a label in the codelist and that identification is the source of contextual rules for its use? Careful here. We can quite quickly make our own emotionally laden prejudice the values by which we choose. Human communication is not exclusively about proven facts. That is a core challenge that HumanML has to meet. Even Peirce and Sowa admit to logical reasoning over probabilistic facts. http://www.jfsowa.com/peirce/ms514.htm It does not belong in the primary if we cannot state a rule by which a designer can determine if any member of a codelist of that type is a proper member of the enumerated set. That's the Knowledge Test. len -----Original Message----- From: cognite@zianet.com [mailto:cognite@zianet.com] At 01:00 PM 02-12-2002 -0600, you wrote: >From: Dennis E. Hamilton [mailto:dennis.hamilton@acm.org] > >>That's a big step from a measurable physical characteristic. Is this going >>to be added to the specification? > Len replied: >It would depend on the codelist. And that is application dependent. It's >a good point though; race is probably not a physical characteristic until >it is enumerated further or measurable. On the other hand, it can be a Even a " standard codelist one finds in many public safety applications " is local to certain cultural contexts. Preferable to in effect teaching application of divisive criteria, is the huml work toward a framework for using commonalities to bridge across contexts. Relegating the term to secondary, user-developed extensions rather than leaving it in the huml primary seems merited, on grounds of objectivity as discussed, and in view of the huml goal of ameliorating misunderstandings in increasingly global communication.
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