Category Errors

A "category error" is a serious philosophical error in which, because something is assigned to the wrong category, a whole set of mistakes is sure to follow. A fairly common one among conservatives is Ross Perot's dictum that 'government should be run like a business.' No, it shouldn't; those aren't the same kind of things at all. This is also an example of the fallacy of composition, in which it is assumed that something which holds at one level of organization holds at all levels of organization: this is not true either. Oxygen and hydrogen at room temperature are gasses that lack the property of 'wetness,' but combined into a new form of organization -- water -- they are liquid and wet. 

I was thinking about this while reading of a classroom experiment this morning.

One lecture in Industrial Psychology, in particular, I will never forget. 

The professor spoke about how an effective job description focused on concretely measurable tasks, not vague instructions, or characteristics. 

For example, "maintain an 85% or greater average on customer feedback surveys", instead of "be cheerful and upbeat", or even "interact positively with customers".

This means that goals are clear, and performance is measurable.... 

Once some of the students had wrapped their minds around this concept, the professor decided to do a class exercise. 

He asked the female students to come up with a job description for "husband".  At first, this went fine. The girls noodled around a bit with things they wanted their husbands to be (tall, etc), but he was able to gradually steer them towards describing what they wanted in terms of actions. 

But then he asked the male students to define a wife in the same way. 

And all the girls became upset. Some of them had full-on meltdowns. 

Every single thing that a male student wanted, or expected, from his hypothetical future wife was sexist, oppressive, old-fashioned, misogynistic, patriarchal, etc. 

They were literally screaming. Some of them in tears. 

And I realized something pretty quickly. It wasn't the actual, concrete responsibilities of the female role that they objected to. 

It was the idea of there being a female role at all, with any attached responsibilities. 

The obvious category error here is assigning an industrial concept to the family. Just as government is not and should not be run as if it were a business, the family is not a business and definitely should not be run as if it were. The point of a business is to generate profits. The point of a family is to provide an intimate space for humanity to achieve its natural ends. These can include happiness, children and their successful rearing, delight, meaning, and a whole host of other things that are important though they may not be profitable.  

As a result, it is probably important that we don't assign concrete, measurable standards of performance to each other inside of our families even if we it is important that we do when running a business. In the family there needs to be room for growth, for comfort in bad times, for expansion and change as interests or capacities develop, and so on and so forth. It's not the point of the thing that we hit targets, but that we experience love and support and give others the same things in return. 

To take an example from the field, cooking. Traditionally women cook meals while men work outside the home, but that's not very important. Even in the old days, some men decided to become cooks as a profession. 

Apple pie.

It happens that I like to cook, and my wife doesn't like to cook, and as a consequence I'm better at it than she is -- no offense to the lady -- because you practice doing what you enjoy doing and it is practice that makes perfect. We're Gen X, not the younger people being complained about, but it works for us and it's nobody else's business. It's our marriage. We don't report to anyone else about how we run the thing. 

The problem the young ladies in the original long quote have is thus not that they object to being tied down to an industrial performance standard in their prospective roles as wives; it's that they assume it is reasonable to tie the prospective husbands down to such standards as husbands. Each couple has to figure this out for themselves, and like us, they don't report to anybody about how they do it. The only thing that really matters is that they are loyal to each other while doing whatever it is they work out to do. The only thing you can't break is the bond of honor. What that bond entails is up to the two of them.