Re: Frequent false reports: where's the evidence? (was: Re: Rape Education Story #60

Waldo Weaver <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message:
news:[EMAIL PROTECTED]: 

> Daran <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message
> news:<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>... 
> 
>> No it wasn't.  It was to produce a feminist who said "Women never lie
>> about rape".  The two sentences are not equivalent.  The former makes
>> a universal claim.  The latter makes a general claim and is far more
>> nuanced. 
> 
> That's debatable. My claim is that the two sentences:
>  "Women never lie about rape." AND
>  "Women don't lie about rape." say exactly and precisely the same
> thing.
> 
> You're trying to sneak in a weasely point about usage, and there's no
> final authority on usage.
> 
> If I say to my friend: "Care for  a cigarette?"
> And he says, "No, I don't smoke."
> I don't take that to be a general, nuanced claim.
> I don't say: "Oh, you *do* smoke sometimes, then."
> I assume that he means exactly what he says, and that it's his
> responsibility to qualify it if he doesn't want me to misunderstand.
> 
> So sometimes people use it in a nuanced way, and sometimes they don't.
>  It's a weasely dual-purpose slogan, with built-in deniability. If you
> want to take it to mean "Women don't lie" like "I don't smoke", by all
> means do so. But if you're going to tag us on it, well, then we'll do
> the switcheroo.
> 
> At the very least, I would say that the slogan does not make a good
> faith effort to convey its real meaning. You're saying that it means
> something more than it actually, on the face of  it, says.
> 
> But you seem intent on defending it . Would you endorse the
> unqualified statement "Women don't lie about rape" as an accurate
> characterization of your personal beliefs. Would you use it as a sig?
> After all, isn't your claim that the qualification is clear and
> already built in?

i don't think it is "built-in" - i think that some of us (i, at least) 
have been conned by the subsequent qualification "only 2% of accusations 
are false".

If i were to say that i don't drink anymore, that would be generally 
true, despite the fact that a few sips of Southern Comfort passed my lips 
the other night.

But, consider this statement:

Men don't commit murder.  Less than 0.01% of men in England are convicted 
of murder each year.

The reality is that saying that <group> doesn't do something, and then 
giving data for how (in)frequently <group> does that thing, is 
contradictory, and it creates the illusion of a general statement while 
at the same time making what appears to be an absolute statement.

Otoh, there is another context here.  In each case where the "women don't 
lie about rape" line is quoted, it's in response to the hypothetical 
statements "there are lots of phoney rape reports/women invent rape 
accusations to get back at their boyfriends".  It could be argued that 
this response is to debunk the general statement as a myth:  it is not 
women in general who make false accusations, but a tiny minority of them 
who are false accusers.  Likewise, if you say to me 'men commit date-rape 
because they think they can get away with it', i could counter with the 
fact that it's not 'men' in general that do it, just a tiny minority of 
them.

This is bugging me now.

-- 
Neil