RE: [huml-comment] PC-33 -Section 4.4.6-race

["Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <clbullar@ingr.com>]

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.