On the intellectual capacity of women by James Panero

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Aug 04, 2003 05:15 PM

On the intellectual capacity of women

by James Panero

Regarding Stefan’s posts below, let’s not forget Roger Kimball’s eyebrow-raising soupï¿½on from The Women’s Quarterly, reprinted in that publication’s Spring 2003 issue.

Austen, Aristotle, and Bagehot were realists. So was David Stove (1927-1994), a brilliant but little known Australian philosopher. Almost anything by Stove could be read with immense profit. His most important work concerned irrationalism in the philosophy of science, that benighted swamp of confusion popularized by covert irrationalists like Karl Popper and Thomas "Mr. Paradigm Change" Kuhn. But Stove was also an occasional essayist of scintillating power and insight. And my fourth suggestion is his long essay "The Intellectual Capacity of Women" (available in my anthology of Stove’s writings, Against the Idols of the Age).
I have noted with some amusement that even the title of Stove’s essay on women tends to elicit a frisson of anxiety. "He is not going to...wouldn’t dare... You don’t mean to say that he actually argues. . . ." Well, yes. "I believe," Stove writes in his first sentence, "that the intellectual capacity of women is on the whole inferior to that of men." He offers as his main reason for this belief the uncomfortable observation that "the intellectual performance of women is inferior to men." In other words, he explains, it is the same sort of reasoning as that which convinces us that "Fords are on the whole inferior to Mercedes; or as that which convinces dog-fanciers that Irish setters are not as smart as labradors; or as that which convinces everyone that the intellectual capacity of seven-year-old children is on the whole inferior to that of nine-year-olds. They do not do as well, and we infer from this that they cannot do as well." Of course, this is not, Stove readily acknowledges, proof: "performance is no infallible guide to capacity." Still, "it is, in the end, the only guide we have or can have."

Is Stove right? I really don’t know. Would it matter if he were? Probably not. But at a moment when young women are surrounded by a chorus of feminist claptrap, how refreshing it would be to entertain, if but momentarily, a contrary opinion that, even if mistaken, is carefully argued, wittily expressed, and genuinely provocative. Jane Austen would doubtless have raised an eyebrow if confronted with David Stove’s essay. But I suspect she would also have been amused. She might have penned a compelling reply. One thing we can be sure of is that she would not have started whining about misogyny and the depredations of patriarchy.

Here is David Stove’s essay in its entirety (with thanks to Armavirumque reader Mathew Lu for the link). Also, a link to Roger Kimball’s Stove anthology, Against the Idols of the Age (a very rewarding read), along with Scott Campbell’s review from the old PR.

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