The apology is here: http://www.vince-inc.com/vincent/?p=1175, plus posted on the feminist philosophers and Leiter blogs.

Cheers,
Cate

In the case of skepticism, however, I believe I might generally be more friendly than you are. I think a skeptical point of view is very salutary in kick-starting nearly any line of inquiry. In fact, I’m of a mind to think that a case for any position isn’t really complete if one cannot rule out the nearest-to-hand skeptical possibilities. I’m not talking about brains-in-vats here, but in cases like this one for example, the possibility that Hendricks was putting forward some kind of meta-commentary. Of course his apology rules that out, so in this case the skeptical burden is met with no problem: there really is nothing more to the images than their sexist content.

It’s maybe a methodological point that could be debated in another sphere, but I often find it incredibly helpful to wonder what it would be like for the other side to be 100% right, for my perceptions to be wildly inaccurate, my data to be biased, etc.. I don’t know that it would have been possible for me to claim the sympathy I have with feminism at all today were not for this intellectual attitude. It was skepticism that put me on the path to the inquiries that led me to a sense of what feminism is and why it’s a good thing.

But the crux of the exercise is that you do it all the time. Skepticism for friends as well as for enemies; double skepticism for yourself. It may be a little homespun (from a philosophical point of view), but I cannot think of any better remedy for the creep of biases and dogmatic thinking. That’s why I’d defend it as an important part of critical thinking in any context.

Perhaps my flippancy was misleading. Rather than jumping to conclusions, critics of this image including myself spent most of yesterday fretting over what Hendricks could possibly have been thinking. Critics are deeply upset to see a high-ranking philosopher exploit young women’s bodies, and outraged that he would do so for the purposes of publicizing education.

There is a great deal of speculation on the feminist philosophers blog about what the motivation might be (including me in comment 76): http://feministphilosophers.wordpress.com/2012/02/22/um/. Many comments there suggest the possibility of artistic merit, but fail to cite any. If Hendricks was trying to be satirical, he failed; and failing to recognize the difficulties of being ironic about objectification is sexist, even if nothing else is.

I wonder what sources and contexts you find deserve such extensive scepticism, even as an exercise in critical thinking? However, Hendricks has now retracted the images and posted an apology. The apology reflects his complete ignorance about gender subordination (see final comments on feminist philosophers blog). Hendricks is no artist, however good a logician he may be.

How do we know these images are not satirical in intent–perhaps a comment on the crass commericalization of higher education? Has no one else but me noticed that Hendricks, as a black man, might not be invoking racial stereotypes here too? (If you find yourself chuffing at this then I bid you look at the ads for colleges and universities in your area–you will find them nicely segregated by similarly insensitive demographic stereotypes.) Could it not be that we’re missing the point because we’re not paying enough attention to the juxtaposition of person-less, abstract formal logic and the cognitive flaws of the people that practice it–the most ready-to-hand example of such flaws being things like racial and gender biases? (And isn’t non-montonic logic a discipline that is founded on a straightforward recognition that idealized monotonic logics, though interesting, are inadequate to the task of describing realistic patterns of inference?)

If we rush to condemnation of any communicative act without stopping to consider that our interpretation of it might be wildly out of sync with what the communicator intends, and (especially) if we do so on the basis of the race, gender, religion, etc. of the communicator, no matter what it is, then aren’t we guilty of the same kind of prejudicial thinking we oppose?

If we find ourselves saying: “Yes, of course it’s likely that these images are intended as satire, or humor, or some other sort of meta-commentary but it’s not likely because Hendricks is male/the product of patriarchal Danish society/etc.” then, given that we do not have any concrete evidence about what the intent of the images really was, aren’t we guilty of some degree of confirmation bias ourselves?

The point here is not to defend Hendricks or exploitative, “cheescake”-type pics of anyone. I don’t know his motives (or those of the models in these pictures) any more than anyone else does. As someone with a little background in art, however, I do know that it usually pays not to underestimate the intent behind deliberately provocative images like this. Hendricks may well be an egomaniac, but it’s wildly implausible to me that he would have had no idea of the negative reaction these kinds of images were going to draw. In fact, he may be baiting feminists in order to drum up some controversy and get his name in the papers. In that case, overheated responses to this would put the joke squarely on us.

And again, he may in fact just be a sexist egomaniac who thinks ripping off memes from 1980s rock videos is kewl. (In this case he’s both boring and offensive.) The point is not to defend him or the images at all. The point is that we don’t know, and that because we know images like this have the power to provoke us to betray the kind of principles of critical thinking that are often the focus here on RAIL, we ought to be careful in assessing them when they come from sources and contexts like this one. That way, not only will we avoid being played by a facile trick, but we will also uphold the standards of critical thinking for which we so often advocate.