A philosophical argument about flirting gained her international attention – now Carrie Jenkins wants to reshape the way we think about arithmetic.

Carrie Jenkins has long been fascinated with the getting of knowledge, especially mathematical knowledge. A lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Nottingham, the young philosopher currently holds a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in the Epistemic Warrant project, part of the Philosophy program at ANU. She also has a thing about flirting.

It all started with a conversation between Jenkins and her philosopher partner Daniel Nolan over a dinner in Lisbon. This led to a debate that has brought Jenkins and Nolan to the attention of the world outside philosophy, introducing a wide audience to some general philosophical principles in the process.

Rather than getting on with the act of flirting, Jenkins and Nolan spent the evening talking about it instead, teasing out issues of intent, social context and behaviour. Perhaps this was some kind of philosopher flirting? “We might have managed to flirt by talking about flirting – a sort of meta-flirting,” Jenkins says. “We had a great time anyway.”

They had such a great time, in fact, that they decided to write a joint paper exploring the philosophy of flirting. But as they dug deeper into the concepts, their views diverged, leading to two related papers. Jenkins’s piece was published in The Philosophers Magazine. Their debate attracted the attention of mainstream media as far afield as Poland and sparked interest in other fields.

Jenkins argues that flirtation is all to do with intention. “If you had the intention to flirt, you have done it. Even if you do it really badly, you’ve still done it.”

She also draws a line between flirting and flirtatious behaviour. “Flirtatious behaviour is not really to do with intention at all; it’s all to do with social contexts. Certain things within a social group are regarded as flirtatious acts, and if you do some of those things, whatever your intentions are, you will have exhibited some flirtatious behaviour, but not necessarily flirted.”
“Daniel’s reply to my paper says no – it’s not all about the intentions. You can flirt by accident. You can have absolutely no intention of flirting but because you did some of the things that I think are flirtatious, and you should have known they were flirtatious, then you flirted.”

Jenkins says the seemingly light-hearted debate has a real purpose. She says that flirting is a topic that catches people’s attention, in the process drawing them into the kinds of language and analyses used by philosophers every day.

“You think about conceptual analysis in the ether without its context and you wonder, ‘What’s the point of that?’ Who cares what we really mean by ‘mathematics’ or ‘knowledge’? Who cares what knowledge really is? Whereas if you take a concept like flirting, you see immediately what the implications are.”

“My [flirting] theory is that it all depends on your intentions. If I’m right about that, you can see what the implications would be. So if someone managed to prove they didn’t have any intention, they’d manage to prove they weren’t flirting.

“Part of this is to show in an easy case what the point of conceptual analysis is in general. We’re always doing it, because we think there are these kinds of implications for how to understand the world and how to interact with the world.”

Jenkins says that one of the most interesting things to come out of the flirting debate has been the feedback she has received from other philosophers and people working in other fields who have a completely different take on the topic.

“Its been really, really interesting, actually. We’ve had philosophers getting out their conceptual tool kits to come and engage with it. I’ve also had various people email me – scientists and social scientists – saying this is really interesting, and engaging in different bits of it and saying how it connects up with the things they do. It’s obviously the kind of thing where there are loads of connections, such as in the biological sciences or social sciences. I think it has the potential to draw in a lot of disciplinary interests.”

Beyond flirting, Jenkins is pursing a much more complex topic in her postdoctoral work, focusing on completing her book Grounding Concepts. According to her blog, Long Words Bother Me (http://longwordsbotherme.blogspot.com), she hopes to develop in the book the idea of concept grounding as the basis of a new kind of epistemology for arithmetic.

It’s an extension of the big ideas that first attracted Jenkins to philosophy as a high school student. “How do we have our basic knowledge of the world? What kind of knowledge can we have? What’s the world like fundamentally? What kinds of things exist? How much of what we think of as ‘our world’ do we create? How much is out there waiting for us to find it?”

The book continues the work she began in her PhD, wondering how we gain mathematical knowledge. “I picked arithmetic, and mathematical knowledge in general, because it’s a really hard case. It’s really hard to explain exactly how we’re getting that knowledge,” Jenkins says.
“It’s not like what we think of as knowledge in the empirical sciences, where we go to the lab, we do some tests and we formulate a hypothesis. Then we look at the world and see if it conforms to our hypothesis. If we get the right result then we think we know the hypothesis is true. That kind of knowledge all seems easy to understand.

“There are everyday versions of that [type of knowledge] where we might have a hypothesis about where our car is, and then we go and look to see if the world is as we think it is. If it is, we find our car.

“Mathematics and a few other things don’t seem to be like that. We seem to be able to know them just by sitting down and thinking really hard about it. If you want to work out what seven plus five is, you don’t have to go and look or check. It’s not like looking where your car is, or checking in the lab, you just have to sit down and figure it out – think about it.

“It’s a really serious question: how are we getting that knowledge? It’s not through experience of the world, and it’s kind of weird to think we have other faculties that somehow enable us to get knowledge of the world.”

This question of how we develop mathematical knowledge has long divided philosophers into three broad groups. Jenkins explains, “Some argue that it’s not really knowledge of the world, it’s just knowledge of something we’ve just created ourselves – a human construct.
“Some say, ‘No, we do actually have another faculty besides experience for learning about the world. They tend to call it things like ‘rational intuition.’

“Others say that we don’t get that knowledge just by sitting down and thinking about it, but we do actually get it by going out and doing tests, even though it doesn’t seem like it to us. This group thinks experience is our only way of finding out about the world.”

Jenkins has a different take on this question, arguing that none of the existing three groups have quite got it right.

“What you should say is yes, we can get this knowledge by sitting down and thinking about it, but that doesn’t mean it’s entirely divorced from experience.”

She explains that when we think about mathematics, we are examining our concepts, concepts that have developed because of how we experience the world. Those concepts have information packed into them that we can discover by examining them.

“A bit of thinking about it and some experience will get you the knowledge,” says Jenkins.
“I’m trying to carve out a new area of the logical space. Pretty much every philosopher would agree that each of the existing three theories has something wrong with them. So my aim is to say there is another way.”

Jenkins is hoping her theory will spark debate when the book is published later this year. She’s already stirring the pot, in the way that modern philosophers do, via her blog. “The basic idea is getting some attention already because I chat about it a lot on my blog, and people seem very interested. Reaction seems to be evenly divided between those who think it’s great and those that say ‘Oh, no that’s not right’.”

She’s says it’s not clear where her theories will take the philosophical debate, but is sanguine about the possibilities. “One is that people will see this new view as having just as many or more problems than the other ones did. Or people may think I didn’t create a new view at all, that it’s not really different to the others. Or, people may see it as a new view without really obvious problems and they may help develop it.”

Which brings Jenkins back to why she is so attracted to philosophy as a discipline over other disciplines. “There is difference in scale of ideas. Philosophers definitely have very general, very fundamental ideas. In terms of whether they are creating or discovering, when they are doing it well they are discovering.”


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ANU Reporter 
Autumn 2007