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Susan Khin Zaw, "Is Reason Gendered? - Ideology And Deliberation", Res Publica IV/2 (1998), 167-197: A practically-based model of reason is proposed via a re-analysis of an ideological argument between "liberal" and "radical" feminists over reason and gender, as described by Alison Jaggar (Feminist Politics and Human Nature, 1983). Jaggar's account of ideological disagreement in terms of differences in sustaining paradigms and associated criteria of rationality is criticised as incomplete and incapable of resolving ideological disagreements calling for argument about ends. An alternative account is proposed of relations between reason and knowledge as historically-conditioned praxis reflecting interests, explaining convergence of different paradigms on rational criteria. The argument between Jaggar's "liberals" and "radicals" over reason as a gender attribute and biological essentialism is re-analysed, using familiar and minimally controversial rational categories, and shown to have a practically rational structure capable of objective assessment, and more appropriate to paradigm-based argument. The re-analysis concludes by drawing on recent developments in connectionist modelling and cognitive science to illuminate the proposed model of reason, and on the history of ideas to illuminate the issue of gender and reason. It is suggested that supposedly a-rational cognitive processes such as female intuition are the result of unconscious processing similar to that inseparable from practical rationality; and 18th-century gender associations are contrasted with ancient Greek ones.

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