Hofstadter quote

[tahnan]

Does anyone out there have a copy of Metamagical Themas, and can therefore spare me a trip down to the library this week? I recall Hofstadter quoting (probably in chapter 7) an oldish anthropology textbook which used a "gender-neutral" masculine pronoun when talking about sexual development in children, thus leading to some anatomically absurd assertions. I'd love it if a friend in possession of the book were able to supply me with the quote.

Comments

[dougo.livejournal.com]

The closest I could find was this (chapter 7, page 145): "It is unknown in what way Man used to make love, when he was a primitive savage millions of years ago." (No citation, just "a book on sexuality".) There are also these hypothetical quotes (same page):

[David Moser] observed that in books you will find many sentences in this vein: "Man has traditionally been a hunter, and he has kept his females close to the hearth, where they could tend his children." But you will never see such sentences as "Man is the only mammal who does not always suckle his young." Rather, you will see "Man is the only mammal in which the females do not always suckle their young."

Hope that's close enough for your purposes.

[tahnan.livejournal.com]

Not quite close enough, alas. I was looking for a quote specifically using pronouns badly, and not just using "man" generically. I had thought, as I said, that there was a passage about a young child exploring his ; perhaps I read that elsewhere, or simply imagined it. But knowing that it's not in the Hofstadter means I don't have to hunt it down, at least.

[drastic.livejournal.com]

Are you possibly conflating some of the for shock-value passages in his accompanying "Person Paper" bit? Memory being a tricky beast prone to cross-circuting, he said projectingly.

I've got a copy as well, somewhere amidst my clutter--if I can excavate it, I'll give it a powerskim and see if another pair of eyes might stumble over the right bit.

[bibliogirl.livejournal.com]

What's your deadline on this? I will be back within reach of my copy of the book in about 24 hours...

[drastic.livejournal.com]

My nomination for closest possibility:

"I began to look for such anomalies, and soon ran across the following gem in a book on sexuality: 'It is unknown in what way Man used to make love, when he was a primitive savage millions of years ago.'" (pg. 145 in my printing.) Sex yes, childhood development related nope.

Other than that...not so much.

[tayefeth.livejournal.com]

On page 150, Hofstadter quotes "a famous psychologist" saying "What the plain man would like, as he comes into an undergraduate psychology course, as a man or a woman, is that he would find out something about emotions." Not as vivid as the imagined sentence about sexual development, but that's the closest to pronoun-mangling I can find in Chapter 7 or 8 in Themas, and Hofstadter says explicitly that he didn't touch pronoun-gendering in GEB, so I think you're safe in ignoring Hofstadter in your search for that passage.

[tahnan.livejournal.com]

No, it definitely wasn't in the "person paper"; I remember that one pretty distinctly, and the quote I'm (mis)remembering was definitely not in there.