I prefer to assume that all hypothetical people are of a particular
gender. I don't care which. It just makes the grammar easier to deal
with. If there are multiple hypothetical people I'd like to give them names and
refer to them by name, which I could do in CS (there being a precedent
in the zany antics of Alice and Bob) but not in philosophy. Fortunately,
in philosophy, the hypothetical people generally hail from different
camps of philosophy so I can refer to them by the position they
are advocating.
Wed Jun 14 2000 11:13:
I just realized something interesting. When I write text for my CS classes (not a common occurance), I
assign hypothetical people the ambiguous gender of "him or her".
When I write text for philosophy classes (a common occurance), I
assume that all hypothetical people are female. I think that this reflects the practices of my CS professors vs. my philosophy professors.
Wed Jun 14 2000 13:04:
The CS130 final says I have to either hand-write it or use my favorite word processor. I wrote it in Emacs, but is it cheating to put it into Word format to print it out?
