A famous man has been arrested on charges of rape and here come the brigade of male friends to argue that "he's not like that." Today it is Bernard-Henri Levy on behalf of Dominique Strauss-Kahn. His essay has been called sexist, etc., but my beef is that it is illogical.
In making this argument, a man is making the case that he is able to form an opinion about behavior which specifically occurs only when he is not present. This is something like the case of Shrodinger's cat, who is both alive and dead until you look and see that she is either alive or dead. That is a quandry for the philosophers and physicists to deal with seriously. In the apparently more intellectually trivial matter of rape, the male making the truth statement cannot look, yet he makes the truth statement anyway.
Since knowledge of rapist or not rapist is not possible for this man, one has to ask what other criteria he is using to make the statement? Also, if this criteria is viable it requires that he has been able to use the same criteria to identify rapists. I would like to see some journalist ask him if this has occurred. It would seem this criteria would be useful to women and juries. Of course, no such criteria is admissible to a jury because in fact no such criteria exists (I have not been able to interview the non-witness, but it seems logically viable to reach this conclusion). And so these men are speaking nonsense and in doing so literally make fools of themselves.
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