Sexual Desire:
A Pragmatic Reconstruction
of Scientific Explanation
Sharyn Clough
Phronesis Lab
Oregon State University
in collaboration with
Mark Tschaepe
Prairie View A&M University
AIDS Foundation Houston
Based on a presentation given at ISSHPSSB
July 5-10 2015
University of Quebec at Montreal
Science and sexual desire
Philosophers of science have not said much
about the sciences of sexual desire.
Perhaps because there is not much to be
said about “sexual desire” as a discrete
phenomenon out in the world that is
ready-made for scientists to examine.
Science and sexual desire
But many scientists certainly proceed as if they have
something to say about it.
Perhaps even A Billion Wicked things.©
Leading to “the true differences between male and
female desires” (Ogas and Gaddam 2011).
Or the Science of Desire [as] The Search For the Gay
Gene (Hamer 1993).
Or the potential for flibanserin, the new drug for women
diagnosed with low sexual desire
(aka “women” “diagnosed” with “low” “sexual” “desire”).
Coming soon to a pharmacy near you.
Science and sexual desire
To be sure, philosophers of science have occasionally
responded critically to these kinds of studies.
On these occasions, research has usually focused on a
host of frustratingly ubiquitous methodological
problems.
Such as misunderstandings/misapplications of the
notion of heritability.
Or problems with the methodological assumptions
underwriting twin studies.
Or the use of non-human animals as model organisms.
Science and sexual desire
But typically our critical methodological focus has
been on the sciences of human behavior more
generally
With concerns about the sciences of sexuality and
desire used only as examples.
And of these examples, most of our critical
commentary has addressed sexuality solely in
terms of “homosexuality”
And is usually restricted to a focus on males.
Science and sexual desire
There are three sustained criticisms of the sciences of
(male) (homo) sexual desire in the philosophy of science
literature:
● 1981 special issue of the Journal of Homosexuality,
edited by Noretta Koertge, published as the book The
Nature and Causes of Homosexuality: A Philosophic and
Scientific Inquiry (1982) and reprinted as Philosophy and
Homosexuality (1985);
● The Mismeasure of Desire: The Science, Theory, and
Ethics of Sexual Orientation, Edward Stein (2001);
● Most recently Helen Longino’s Studying Human
Behavior: How Scientists Investigate Aggression and
Sexuality (2013).
Science and sexual desire
Elisabeth Lloyd’s The Case of the Female
Orgasm (2006) is a notable exception, of
whom more shortly.
In general though, we can and should do
more, and better.
Science and sexual desire
As we critically examine different scientific studies
purporting to explain “sexual desire”
We should (more often) back up a step or two to
consider some of the pragmatic, contextual issues
Such as those revealed by recent feminist studies
of ignorance, testimony, and trust.
Science and sexual desire
A good example of the consideration of pragmatic and
contextual issues is Nancy Tuana’s essay, “Coming to
Understand: Orgasm and the Epistemology of
Ignorance” (2004), published in Hypatia.
As Tuana argues, ignorance, in this case ignorance of
women’s sexual pleasure, is not “a simple lack” of
knowledge. Rather “it is often constructed, maintained,
and disseminated and is linked to issues of cognitive
authority, doubt, trust, silencing, and uncertainty.”
Unfortunately her essay has received little uptake by the
larger philosophy of science community.
Science and sexual desire
In line with Tuana, the sorts of questions we should be
asking include:
What features of the various phenomena that we have
come to associate with human sexual desire catch the
attention of scientists?
What kinds of interventions are imagined?
What seems problematic and to whom?
Who gets to diagnose the problem?
What circumstances reliably produce problems of this
kind?
What and who makes a sexual phenomenon into a
sexual problem?
Why is some inquiry permitted, while other inquiry is ignored
or forbidden?
Science and sexual desire
The pragmatic reflection we’re endorsing is NOT
meant to suggest that there are facets of human
sexuality that are, by definition, inappropriate
targets of scientific research.
Indeed we need to confront and examine the
popular resistance to the idea that features of
our human sexual desires can only be
addressed from one perspective or cannot be
addressed at all.
Science and sexual desire
Lloyd’s The Case of the Female Orgasm (2005)
confronts exactly this kind of resistance.
She doesn’t argue against the possibility of
scientific research on women’s sexual desire.
In fact she presents what she takes to be a wellconceived scientific study of adaptationist
accounts of sexual desire
Namely, women’s heterosexual desire for men
with particular immunity profiles.
Science and sexual desire
But when Lloyd argued that there was no good
evidence that orgasm in women was a product of
natural selection
She received some ambivalent reviews, even from
women, some from self-identified feminists
Who expressed concern that evolutionary accounts
were needed to legitimize female pleasure, or that
arguments against evolutionary accounts might lead
to a devaluing of orgasm in women.
Science and sexual desire
This kind of ambivalence can be explained only if
we inquire into a number of pragmatic
considerations by asking questions like:
Why are evolutionary accounts rather than, say,
folk psychological accounts appealing to the
importance of pleasure and desire, seen as more
valuable?
And to whom?
Science and sexual desire
One way forward is for us more consistently to
highlight what we all know very well:
Scientific explanations are tools for solving
particular problems.
As philosophers of science, we need to make the
particularities of the problems more explicit.
We need more often to investigate which
contingencies have led some sexual phenomena to
be considered problematic while others are not so
considered.
Science and sexual desire
When (an element of) human sexual desire is taken
up by scientists as an appropriate object of
investigation
The phenomenon as investigated has already been
separated out as some thing.
There is something about the phenomenon that has
caught the attention of researchers in a particular
context.
Science and sexual desire
We philosophers can help make clear scientific
investigation of sexual desire is a practice of
historically-situated embodied persons with beliefs
and (sexual) desires.
This is part of accounting for the pragmatic
considerations of scientific inquiry and explanation.
Pragmatic considerations are, generally speaking,
those specific factors within an explanatory situation
that determine what elements are taken to be
problematic and what elements are normalized.
Science and sexual desire
Acknowledging pragmatic considerations entails
recognizing that such considerations contribute to
explanations that function as tools for describing,
solving, or preventing problems that inspired inquiry.
Science and sexual desire
For instance, Lloyd showed us that the realm
of sexual desire is a field laden with scientific
elements to be considered, examined and reexamined.
For better, as in the case of selection for
heterogenous immune profiles,
Or worse, as in the case of the selection of
orgasm in women.
Science and sexual desire
But we should also emphasize that the very
objects of scientific inquiry are laden with
the historical, political, moral, and socialpsychological…
… all the way down.
Accounting for pragmatic considerations
acknowledges this.
Science and sexual desire
Some of the work on pragmatic considerations that
we are referencing here is spelled out more
carefully in Mark’s 2009 essay “Pragmatics &
Pragmatic Considerations in Explanation,”
Contemporary Pragmatism.
Science and sexual desire
As a point of contrast with this pragmatist approach
Let’s return to Longino’s latest book Studying Human
Behavior.
Longino surveys a variety of explanatory approaches
to the study of human desire
Which quickly, and with little explanation, gets
reduced to a discussion of male homosexuality.
Science and sexual desire
She argues that we philosophers of science have no
reason to prefer some explanations for behaviors to
others explanations.
She calls for pluralism across all approaches because
we cannot know which approach is epistemically
stronger.
The explanatory strength of each approach can only
be assessed against an assumption that the effects
appealed to by any and all other approaches can be
held constant (p. 204)
Which, of course, they cannot.
Science and sexual desire
Now, if the explanatory strength of each approach
can only be assessed against an assumption of
constancy, then it is true that they are in some
sense on a par.
But surely there are other ways to judge the
effectiveness of competing explanatory
approaches.
Science and sexual desire
Indeed in earlier sections of her book she discusses
the (many) methodological weaknesses of heritability
claims about male homosexuality based on twin
studies (e.g. pp. 30-35).
Including the unsupported assumption in heritability
studies that “environment” and “genetics” can be
meaningfully separated.
She also acknowledges the “contested” nature of
how (homo) sexuality is operationalized in these
kinds of studies (p. 206).
Science and sexual desire
But her calls for pluralism seem in tension with
the very weaknesses she iterates.
And she also leaves unexamined the pragmatic,
contextual issues on which we want to place
more emphasis.
Science and sexual desire
Increasingly, specific types of explanations, such as
the biological, receive more financial, institutional, and
rhetorical support than do others, such as the sociopolitical.
Additionally, the biological realm seems to some
scientists, lay people, and the NSF, to be (somehow)
simpler and more tractable, than the socio-political
realm.
Explanations that do not easily admit of quantification,
such as those that appeal to social/political factors, are
often described as less “real” than those that appeal to
biological metrics of various kinds.
Science and sexual desire
This means that there is greater inductive risk
associated with errors in biological explanations.
Because there is more at stake, financially,
rhetorically, indeed, politically.
This is a point that Longino does not critically assess
when she compares different explanatory approaches
to sexual behavior.
Advocating a pluralism across explanatory
frameworks in the face of these kinds of differences
seems unwise.
Science and sexual desire
Of course quantified and measurable
explanatory accounts can be helpful for
explaining sexual desire in some contexts.
But we need to encourage the relevant publics
and players to reconfigure sufficiently what is
meant by objects and processes demarcated as
sexual
In ways that account for the pragmatic
considerations by which certain features appear
salient to those who study them.
Science and sexual desire
Salience is a political, historically-situated
predicate.
As philosophers, we can serve to remind
each other and the scientists with whom we
work that the features of sexual desire we’ve
chosen to isolate are contingent upon the
very processes of inquiry that isolate those
features.
There is no natural or value-free state of
sexual desire to which investigators arrive as
separate entities.
Science and sexual desire
We also need to work to break down the
reification that sometimes accompanies
the identification of a successful scientific
tool.
Just because scientists have developed
new shiny hammers doesn’t mean every
sex problem is a nail.
Science and sexual desire
Scientific explanations are tools for solving
particular problems.
As philosophers of science, we need to make the
particularities of the problems more explicit.
We need more often to investigate contingencies
that lead to some sexual phenomena being
problematized while others are not.
There is a lot of work to do.
Science and sexual desire
Forthcoming from the
Tschaepe/Clough
“Pragmatic Reconstruction
And the Science of Sexual Desire” Project
Neuroscientific Explanations of Monogamy
Presumptions in Public Health: Concerning “The
Homosexual Lifestyle” and Risk
Personhood, Personal Responsibility, and
Pedophilia
Science and the Problem of Pornography
Acknowledgments
Jesse Prinz, CUNY Grad Center
Christian Matheis, Virginia Tech
Sari van Anders, University of Michigan
And the members of Phronesis Lab at OSU
● Stephanie Jenkins
● Jonathan Kaplan
● Bradley Boovy
sharyn.clough@oregonstate.edu
mdtschaepe@pvamu.edu