Threatening Women

This chapter discusses the killings by Elliot Rodger, in Isla Vista, California, in May 2014, and the widespread denials that his actions were symptoms of a culture of misogyny—or even involved misogyny whatsoever. This was despite Rodger’s primary, explicit, long-held intention of punishing the “hot blonde sluts” who refused to give him sex, love, and attention. Such denials owe to a “naïve conception” of misogyny, according to which misogyny is primarily a property of hate-filled individuals, who are hostile to any and every woman, or admitting only limited exceptions. The naïve conception is criticized for making misogyny a psychologically puzzling and predictably rare phenomenon in what ought to be its native habitat: social environments with patriarchal norms and expectations. For, when women know their place, what’s to hate, exactly? Why would even the least enlightened of men insist on biting the hand that soothes and serves him?

Sets, Aggregates, and Numbers

Frege's definition of the natural number n in terms of the set of n-membered sets has been treated rudely by history. It has suffered not one but two crippling blows. The discovery of Russell's Paradox revealed a fatal flaw in the ‘naive’ conception of set. In spite of its intuitive appeal, Frege's Basic Law V (in the context of the rest of his theory) turned out to be impermissible, leaving us only with the etiolated concept of set that survives in the axiomatic treatments initiated by Zermelo. The independence results, however, of Godel and Cohen, concerning Cantor's Continuum Hypothesis, have left us adrift in choosing between Cantorian and non-Cantorian set theories, which has induced in some logicians a skepticism in regard to the very idea of set-theoretic platonism.

On the Decline and Possible Fall of PPBS

The apparent failure of the Planning-Programming-Budgeting System (PPBS) to fulfill hopes for it in the federal government is examined in this article from the perspective of arguments surrounding its inception. It is argued that PPBS proponents had a naive conception of the political process, and that PPBS as an overall system has failed for precisely the reasons predicted by early critics. The productive aspects of the system do not require the overall framework to be useful, and, to the extent that improved budgeting is possible, it can be achieved in other ways more consistent with the actual structure of political decision-making in a world characterized by great complexity and disagreement about values.