entire book - Chris Hables Gray

[ 80 ] The Present
its meaning from u to be able." Judgment, on the other hand, has its roots in
"showing" and "demonstrating." Reason and rationality are directly from
"calculating" and "to count." Science is from the Latin scire, "to know,"
probably originally "to cut through," maybe from Sanskrit chyati, "he cuts"
and Farsi, scion, "a knife." Knowledge derives from a whole set of Anglo and
Germanic words for "can," and "to be able." Judgment is from the Old Latin
deicere and the Greek deiknumai, "to show" and the Sanskrit disati, "he points
out or shows." Reason and rationality are directly from Latin's ratus, "to count
or calculate" (Partridge, 1966). These all can be seen as different epistemok>
gies. Today, the meanings overlap a great deal, but perhaps something could
be gained by drawing some distinctions between them. Humans have many
different criteria for thinking, for proof as well. Certain styles of thought have
always been with us. Consider how the belief that numbers alone hold the
key to understanding goes back, from the twentieth century (Porter, 1995)
to the ancient Greek Philolaus, who proclaimed:
For the nature of Number is the cause of recognition, able to give guidance
and teaching to every man in what is puzzling and unknown. For none of
existing things would be clear to anyone, either in themselves or in their
relationship to one another, unless there existed Number and its essence,
(quoted in Heims, 1980, p. 60)
As modern science developed out of the philosophical debates and
social realities of the Enlightenment, it was shaped in many cases by historical
chance as much as design. Distilling the idea of experimentation from
alchemy, the new scientists went to great pains to reject alchemy s metaphysics,
so strongly keyed to female-positive images (e.g., Sophia, goddess of
wisdom; the respectful partnership with nature that was gendered female; the
symbolism of hermaphrodites and androgyny). The new philosophy, now
known as science, would be a masculine project in two senses. First, adapting
logic and emotionless calculation from the scholastics and marrying them to
objective clinical experimentation. Second, in its rhetorical equation that
woman is nature and science is torture and domination, as Bacon says so
clearly, which makes of the scientist an inquisitor.
This gendering of nature—and the metaphor of domination explicit in
the way science uses it—is an important part of the power/knowledge of military
AI. Central aspects of military discourse are also gendered in the key of
domination, as is war itself. So the affinity between science and war that has
become so obvious in the twentieth century should not be a surprise. They
share similar metarules about gender, rationality, instrumentality, nature, and
domination. They also have extreme differences. And it is important to stress
that within both discourses there are other views besides the dominant ones.
But still, the many similarities between war and science are striking.