As always, really good stuff. A couple comments that might just beg the question:
With regard to your view on word meanings, I think the least plausible consequence isn't that it destroys the possibility of communication but rather that it destroys the possibility of word misuse. To take a case from Burge which I think is useful here, if Alf thinks he has arthritis in his left thigh, and reports to his doctor "I have arthritis in my left thigh" he has a mistaken belief about what arthritis means because arthritis is a rheumatoid ailment of the joints, so it's not possible to have arthritis in the thigh. When the doctor corrects him: "Thats not possible, you can't have arthritis in your thigh because it only occurs in joints" the reason Alf will modify his usage of arthritis is because his prior usage didn't align with the words meaning. Like I said above, this worry might just constitute question begging though, in that I'm essentially just asserting the opposite of your view while stomping my foot.
For your last point about concepts, one motivation that the biological essentialist could offer for why the concept of woman is 'special' is that it hooks onto a natural kind. When we find out someone is a MAN or WOMAN, we can project a range of interesting features about them. If we think those terms are natural kind terms, we want some deeper theory or account of their microstructure in the same way we do for other natural kinds like chemical kinds. The analogue to microstructure here would then be the "adult human female" definition.
Aside from that natural kinds point, it seems obvious to me that it's still worth trying to analyze a concept even if its fuzzy. I see no reason to think man and woman is any less fuzzy than things like knowledge or belief, yet I think both of those terms are still worth analyzing. I'm obviously sympathetic to my own (https://thetowerofbabble.substack.com/p/non-circular-definitions-of-gender?r=1gx1a0) analysis on the matter, but I'd of course accept it probably doesn't capture everyones usages. But I think these sorts of analysis provide a correct account of *some* usages and certain analysis can account for more usages than others.
To your first worry, I think that might just be "concept misuse," assuming we are externalists about content. The content of Alf's concept ATHRITIS is determined in part by what experts think it is. Thus given that he means ATHRITIS when he says "athritis," he would be mistaken. If we say that he just has a concept ATHRITIS that's internal, or otherwise isn't fixed to be about joints, then I would say that he isn't making a factual mistake. But he would still be communicating very badly by using the word to mean something quite idiosyncratic, and so once he figures out that he has been using it in a way different to most others, he should adjust his usage in order to communicate clearly. I'm not sure I think it's very implausible to say he isn't making a factual mistake here.
On the second point, yeah that might be a way to get some special significance to WOMAN in the biological sense. I'm generally also very skeptical of natural kinds, so I wouldn't be inclined to go that route (though that's not an argument, just a report of my dispositions). But even if you think there are natural kinds, I'm still not sure what you get out of it. Sure there is this objective biological category of female, but why should we pay homage to it in our everyday thinking and categorization of people, even to the detriment of other normative concerns? We could also classify chairs and tables by the elements they're made out of, rather than their function as furniture, but why do that outside of the chemistry lab? I guess I'm just not getting the basic intuition that we should care very much about whether there is some concept that includes adult human females and excludes trans women--even if it is somehow joint carving.
On the conceptual analysis point, I also don't think knowledge and belief are worth analyzing, lol. My worry isn't just that the concepts are fuzzy, but that it's impossible to ever successfully analyze them, since the way we formed the concepts should give us no hope that some precise analysis will be without intuitive counterexamples (unless perhaps you just make a long list of all the cases where the concept applies--and even then people have differing intuitions).
Instead I think we should be conceptual engineers, and deliberately design concepts to capture and highlight the things about the world we care about. In many cases this will look similar to analysis, as there are often good reasons why we have decided to use the concepts we do--but it avoids the pointless Sisyphean effort of trying to figure out what our everyday concepts of knowledge and freedom *really* are, when there probably isn't a fact of the matter.
So in the alf case, lets call the concepts ARTHRITIS and THARTHRITIS where THARTHRITIS is the concept that includes pain in the thigh. It seems like Alf minimally thinks that his concept is that of ARHTRITIS, because he would presumably report that what he thinks is in his thigh is the same thing scientists call 'arhtritis.' I think he might, in fact, have in mind the concept of THARTHRITIS but the concept he is *trying* to capture is ARTHRITIS, and thats roughly where I think his factual error comes in because he's using the word he thinks is associated with ARTHRITIS as a consequence of his mistaken belief that ARHTRITIS is THARTHRITIS.
On the second point, yea this was just a sketch of an idea I don't have much to say that could push someone to care. I guess the idea would be to say that, much like other natural kinds, biological notions of man and woman have interesting projectable properties and in the way we care about other natural kinds in virtue of their interesting projectable properties, we should also care about man and woman.
For conceptual analysis, yea we probably just have a conflict of intuitions here then lol. Fair enough. I'll give the conceptual analysis piece a look when I have the chance.
Wrt the arthritis, I think I would just take that to be a point in favor of internalism. He thinks that his concept THARTHRITIS is the same concept that scientists have in mind, but it's actually not. His mistake is in using the word to pick out an idiosyncratic concept, but I don't see how that's a problem for my account of words (though maybe I'm missing the point you're trying to make?).
I actually think my view can capture the reasons you mention for caring about natural kinds. If they have these projectable properties then we will just have good reasons for using the concepts that capture them in certain circumstances. But that doesn't generalize to every circumstance--and specifically it doesn't generalize to the circumstances where you'll hurt people's feelings or whatever by caring about natural kinds.
My thinking with the THARTHRITIS/ARTHRITIS, is that the word 'arthritis' picks out a particular concept, ARTHRITIS, and the reason we should think that is because we should think Alf would be mistaken to use 'arthritis' to refer to THARTHRITIS, and when you push him Alf would report that he had thought THARTRITIS *was* ARTHRITIS, thus why he used 'arthritis' to denote it (he thought they were one and the same concept) so when he alters his usage its because he recognizes that the concept didn't actually track what the word meant. So alf is making a factual mistake, because he thinks ARTHRITIS is THARTHRITIS is referred too by 'arthritis' but he actually just misunderstands what the ARTHRITIS concept is.
Yea to be honest I don't have an answer here that doesn't just sound terrible for the essentialist lol. Like you could say something like it's valuable for predicting behavior in our every day contexts but then it starts to sound like weird profiling based on sex, and I also don't think those inferences are going to be particularly strong anyhow. To be honest I'm not even sure why the 'adult human female' definition is supposed to be useful in typical social contexts, and like you mention it seems to look bad on the normative front, so even if the correct way to cache out the natural kind was to pick out only 'adult human females' I think you're right we should just ditch the concept in day-to-day activities.
Ah ok. Then I guess I'm just not seeing why we need to say that he's making a mistake--or at least that he's making a mistake about what the words mean. He *does* have a false belief, but the false belief is that he thinks "arthritis" is used by his fellows to pick out THARTHRITIS, when they in fact use it to pick out ARTHRITIS. So by using the word to pick out THARTHRITIS he's not communicating effectively, and by interpreting others as picking out that concept, he has a false belief about what others mean by it. But I still don't see why we also need to say that he is also making a factual mistake in using "arthritis" to pick out THARTHRITIS--I feel like the story I just told captures everything that's going wrong in the situation.
Okay Substack is being super weird and making it annoying for me to reply to this so hopefully this reply actually posts lol.
It seems to me like the thing that the story leaves out is that he’s mistaken about the meaning of the word! But that’s sort of why I said it might just be a question begging objection, because I’m just trying to pump the intuition that’s he’s misassociating the concept with the word and that’s just what it is to misunderstand the meaning of the word. But if you find the account you outlined satisfying I don’t know if I’ve said anything that should actually push you out of that.
I think this is a great post with a lot that I agree on, but there are two important perspectives I think you're missing here:
1) You're right that it doesn't really matter what word we use to describe something, and you're right that it's not about the concept of "woman" either. But there's also a third view here, which is that we're talking not about the meaning of a particular word or the content of a particular concept but rather the empirical boundaries of a particular sociocultural group. To me, the question is something like: "There's a certain socially constructed caste out there that everyone is referring to when they talk about women - what determines whether you exist in that socially constructed category?" It doesn't matter what word you use to reference that category, or how you understand that category conceptually. What matters is whether they're "in the club," so to speak. But also, I don't think this view settles things one way or another, because you can make somewhat plausible arguments either way! Depending on your broader analysis of gender and how it functions socially, you might think it's restricted to those born female or you might think it's open to anyone who is perceived a certain way. There also might be no guarantee that there's an objectively determined answer in every case.
2) I agree with you too that the real issue here is a normative one either way. But I'm surprised more people aren't at least somewhat open to the opposing normative case, which is that defining womanhood by one's comfort with or adherence to particular socially constructed roles can be harmful. I see at least two potential issues:
The most obvious one, imo, is that it essentializes many social practices that should be generally opposed. People differ on their analysis here, but as someone who is drawn to many traditional radical feminist critiques of beauty practices, gendered divisions of labor, etc it does really bother me to see things like having long hair or being uniquely nurturing held up as a meaningful grounding for womanhood when the feminist message has instead traditionally been that those were regressive sex stereotypes externally imposed on female people. I know a lot of "gender critical" people can be way, way, way too quick to jump to "WHAT IF IT WAS ABOUT RACE INSTEAD" rhetoric, but here I do think that's useful. Wouldn't we all find it offensive or problematic in some way if we defined a Hispanic person as anyone who is comfortable with the social role of day laborer, mariachi singer, or masked bandit? Obviously, that's an exaggeration - but I will say I see claims about the "female gender role" made by queer theorists fairly regularly that are almost as reductive. Ultimately it's going to depend on your background views about gender roles and stereotypes and the debate over nature versus nurture, but anyone who takes a hard social constructivist position here has reason to be concerned about any framework that naturalizes those practices and treats them as a meaningful expression of someone's innate "inner self."
On a related note, it's hard for me to understand how a definition like that would make room for women who are gender non-conforming or who challenge the restraints of patriarchal society in any meaningful way. If being a woman is just feeling comfortable with that particular social role, what do we say about people who are obviously not comfortable with that role but still want to identify as women? You can look at many important feminists throughout history and see that they were diametrically opposed to the social role they were placed into, but it seems not only inaccurate but offensive to say they weren't women. Conversely, it almost seems like an odd sort of victim-blaming to say that anyone who is a woman must necessarily accept their social role - again, not to sound like your average ranting GC, but it seems obviously true to me that women in Afghanistan do not generally enjoy the social role they inhabit but are nonetheless women. I think it's straightforwardly bad to foster a cultural understanding of gender that grounds *everyone's* gender in their own personal relationship to any particular social structure, rather than acknowledging that the vast majority of people are men and women because that's where society placed them at birth. Even just myself personally, I would not say I "feel most comfortable" in a masculine social role at all, and I don't really like the implication that I necessarily have to.
I think the best way to avoid those pitfalls while still acknowledging the existence of trans people is just to say that gender is an externally imposed social categorization system that people can and do relocate themselves in through various means. It's possible to say that someone who exists socially as a woman is a woman, full stop, while also accepting that what makes them a woman isn't just adherence to or enjoyment of various stereotypes. Anyway, that's a lot lol - no need to respond but just thought I'd give my somewhat uncommon take!
Thank you a lot! Sorry for taking so long to respond, I hadn't forgotten about you!
1) Given our exchange on moral realism, you can probably anticipate that I'd want to say that no such club "really" exists beyond just being a way we speak and think about the world. If that's right then we should just think about a group that includes trans women, not one that excludes them.
But that's probably idiosyncratic for me, so let's suppose that one such social group really does exist in a privileged sense. Even so, I don't see why we should care more about it than any not-as-real group we come up with. Like, even if it's true that there is this social group which we could call "women" where trans women aren't included, why should we not just try to think about a slightly gerrymandered group called "women+" which also includes trans women? I mean, I just don't see why we should care about where the joints of reality are, so to speak, (at least outside of the philosophy- or science-room) instead of deliberately choosing to talk about categories that cut between the joints, but which are more useful.
2) Yeah, I probably glossed over the normative stuff a little too quickly (I was mostly interested in the phil language things for this post anyways). I think all the points you raise about invoking social roles being problematic due to essentializing gender roles etc. are all very good! I might go a bit of a different route than you in response to them, going more in the direction of a self-ID type of view.
I'm not sure how exactly I would want to define "woman," but I can tell you the success criteria: It should include adult human females who are comfortable being women, and adult human males who have gender dysphoria and wish to be women (maybe it should include more than this). At worst that might just be a definition, though it would be circular (actually it might not be circular, as the "women" which occurs in the definition might be thought of as a perceived social group, while the word "woman" being defined is a category different from this, but with a lot of overlap. I doubt this definition can be made precise though. Idk.)
I don't know what exactly it is that people with gender dysphoria are "missing." For some it seems to be certain anatomy, but I'm not sure what else it is that they feel they're missing to be women. But whatever it is, I would want to say that that is at least part of what makes one a woman. Maybe it is certain social roles, in which case it might be problematic to allow trans women for the reasons you suggest, but it seems to me to be more of a sort of "gender vibe" that doesn't necessarily overlap with social roles.
Just anecdotally, the trans people I know generally seem to be much more non-conforming about gender roles than people in general--even the roles of the gender they transitioned to. So it at least doesn't seem to me from experience that acknowledging trans women as women essentialises gender roles, but it might do so in certain contexts.
I'm not sure how coherent this is, just my thoughts.
The problem with any attempt to justify what a word should mean, is that the justification is itself made of words, and their meanings matter to whether the justification is valid. So if you tried to *figure out* the optimal meaning for words in general, youd be stuck in a loop. What people actually do when they say theyre being pragmatic about meaning, is that they have a first language to do their real thinking in, which they use to manage a second language in which they speak. People feel that thats dishonest: Just talk to me in the first language.
Propably youll try to wriggle your way out of this with concepts, but I think your concept of concepts is a mistake. Philosophers often use "concepts" like a kind of mental language, which has all the properties we want out of language but dodges the physicalist limitations that apply to spoken language. I think thats wrong. Just like you can point to words and ask "wheres the meaning", I can point to neural activations ad say "wheres the concept". Outside of some low-level details about the link to perception, mental language cant do more than physical, including on this problem. Its generally more sensible to think of concepts as equivalence classes of words.
>If I had a friend that constantly used the words “cat” and “dog” in the reverse way of what people usually do
You can switch them, but that doesnt mean they can mean anything. As an analogy in mathematics, we have indescribable real numbers. Its a group of numbers we know exists (intuitively, "truely random" digit sequences), but its impossible to name any individual one, because it would require an infinite amount of information to do so. I dont think thats relevant to your version directly, since you accept the stereotype-based definition of gender, but I think it goes against the general picture. There is similarly the part where you can reorder a set of natural numbers any way you want, and from some perspectives you cant tell which order is the correct one, but neither can you deny there is one.
>I mean, the concept we actually have when we think of women is not even of the same kind as these precise concepts
Why do you think reasoning works, like at all? If you can use your human concepts to make better-than-chance conclusions following some relatively low-dimensional rules, then there is some relatively low-dimensional structure in those concepts that makes that work. You can then just remove the other stuff and focus on that structure.
The first point is obviously correct. The second point is not correct, and you don't give any real arguments for it. It's just obviously not true that you should never say anything that might hurt someone's feelings, even if you assume that that thing is not objectively true.
Incidentally, none of this is particularly original, either. Scott Alexander made the same argument a decade ago.
I don't know why you think I claimed that you should *never* say anything to hurt someone's feelings--there are obviously countless examples where you should. But there's a presumption against doing so, and in most cases there isn't any good reason to do it.
I'm glad that I'm in good company, and I didn't claim that it was original. But it's also not the standard view from what I gather.
As always, really good stuff. A couple comments that might just beg the question:
With regard to your view on word meanings, I think the least plausible consequence isn't that it destroys the possibility of communication but rather that it destroys the possibility of word misuse. To take a case from Burge which I think is useful here, if Alf thinks he has arthritis in his left thigh, and reports to his doctor "I have arthritis in my left thigh" he has a mistaken belief about what arthritis means because arthritis is a rheumatoid ailment of the joints, so it's not possible to have arthritis in the thigh. When the doctor corrects him: "Thats not possible, you can't have arthritis in your thigh because it only occurs in joints" the reason Alf will modify his usage of arthritis is because his prior usage didn't align with the words meaning. Like I said above, this worry might just constitute question begging though, in that I'm essentially just asserting the opposite of your view while stomping my foot.
For your last point about concepts, one motivation that the biological essentialist could offer for why the concept of woman is 'special' is that it hooks onto a natural kind. When we find out someone is a MAN or WOMAN, we can project a range of interesting features about them. If we think those terms are natural kind terms, we want some deeper theory or account of their microstructure in the same way we do for other natural kinds like chemical kinds. The analogue to microstructure here would then be the "adult human female" definition.
Aside from that natural kinds point, it seems obvious to me that it's still worth trying to analyze a concept even if its fuzzy. I see no reason to think man and woman is any less fuzzy than things like knowledge or belief, yet I think both of those terms are still worth analyzing. I'm obviously sympathetic to my own (https://thetowerofbabble.substack.com/p/non-circular-definitions-of-gender?r=1gx1a0) analysis on the matter, but I'd of course accept it probably doesn't capture everyones usages. But I think these sorts of analysis provide a correct account of *some* usages and certain analysis can account for more usages than others.
Thank you, I appreciate it!
To your first worry, I think that might just be "concept misuse," assuming we are externalists about content. The content of Alf's concept ATHRITIS is determined in part by what experts think it is. Thus given that he means ATHRITIS when he says "athritis," he would be mistaken. If we say that he just has a concept ATHRITIS that's internal, or otherwise isn't fixed to be about joints, then I would say that he isn't making a factual mistake. But he would still be communicating very badly by using the word to mean something quite idiosyncratic, and so once he figures out that he has been using it in a way different to most others, he should adjust his usage in order to communicate clearly. I'm not sure I think it's very implausible to say he isn't making a factual mistake here.
On the second point, yeah that might be a way to get some special significance to WOMAN in the biological sense. I'm generally also very skeptical of natural kinds, so I wouldn't be inclined to go that route (though that's not an argument, just a report of my dispositions). But even if you think there are natural kinds, I'm still not sure what you get out of it. Sure there is this objective biological category of female, but why should we pay homage to it in our everyday thinking and categorization of people, even to the detriment of other normative concerns? We could also classify chairs and tables by the elements they're made out of, rather than their function as furniture, but why do that outside of the chemistry lab? I guess I'm just not getting the basic intuition that we should care very much about whether there is some concept that includes adult human females and excludes trans women--even if it is somehow joint carving.
On the conceptual analysis point, I also don't think knowledge and belief are worth analyzing, lol. My worry isn't just that the concepts are fuzzy, but that it's impossible to ever successfully analyze them, since the way we formed the concepts should give us no hope that some precise analysis will be without intuitive counterexamples (unless perhaps you just make a long list of all the cases where the concept applies--and even then people have differing intuitions).
Instead I think we should be conceptual engineers, and deliberately design concepts to capture and highlight the things about the world we care about. In many cases this will look similar to analysis, as there are often good reasons why we have decided to use the concepts we do--but it avoids the pointless Sisyphean effort of trying to figure out what our everyday concepts of knowledge and freedom *really* are, when there probably isn't a fact of the matter.
I have an old post on conceptual analysis, if you're interested (though it's pretty old now, so not sure how well it holds up): https://wonderandaporia.substack.com/p/conceptual-analysis-is-dead-long
Also interested to read your account of gender!
So in the alf case, lets call the concepts ARTHRITIS and THARTHRITIS where THARTHRITIS is the concept that includes pain in the thigh. It seems like Alf minimally thinks that his concept is that of ARHTRITIS, because he would presumably report that what he thinks is in his thigh is the same thing scientists call 'arhtritis.' I think he might, in fact, have in mind the concept of THARTHRITIS but the concept he is *trying* to capture is ARTHRITIS, and thats roughly where I think his factual error comes in because he's using the word he thinks is associated with ARTHRITIS as a consequence of his mistaken belief that ARHTRITIS is THARTHRITIS.
On the second point, yea this was just a sketch of an idea I don't have much to say that could push someone to care. I guess the idea would be to say that, much like other natural kinds, biological notions of man and woman have interesting projectable properties and in the way we care about other natural kinds in virtue of their interesting projectable properties, we should also care about man and woman.
For conceptual analysis, yea we probably just have a conflict of intuitions here then lol. Fair enough. I'll give the conceptual analysis piece a look when I have the chance.
Wrt the arthritis, I think I would just take that to be a point in favor of internalism. He thinks that his concept THARTHRITIS is the same concept that scientists have in mind, but it's actually not. His mistake is in using the word to pick out an idiosyncratic concept, but I don't see how that's a problem for my account of words (though maybe I'm missing the point you're trying to make?).
I actually think my view can capture the reasons you mention for caring about natural kinds. If they have these projectable properties then we will just have good reasons for using the concepts that capture them in certain circumstances. But that doesn't generalize to every circumstance--and specifically it doesn't generalize to the circumstances where you'll hurt people's feelings or whatever by caring about natural kinds.
My thinking with the THARTHRITIS/ARTHRITIS, is that the word 'arthritis' picks out a particular concept, ARTHRITIS, and the reason we should think that is because we should think Alf would be mistaken to use 'arthritis' to refer to THARTHRITIS, and when you push him Alf would report that he had thought THARTRITIS *was* ARTHRITIS, thus why he used 'arthritis' to denote it (he thought they were one and the same concept) so when he alters his usage its because he recognizes that the concept didn't actually track what the word meant. So alf is making a factual mistake, because he thinks ARTHRITIS is THARTHRITIS is referred too by 'arthritis' but he actually just misunderstands what the ARTHRITIS concept is.
Yea to be honest I don't have an answer here that doesn't just sound terrible for the essentialist lol. Like you could say something like it's valuable for predicting behavior in our every day contexts but then it starts to sound like weird profiling based on sex, and I also don't think those inferences are going to be particularly strong anyhow. To be honest I'm not even sure why the 'adult human female' definition is supposed to be useful in typical social contexts, and like you mention it seems to look bad on the normative front, so even if the correct way to cache out the natural kind was to pick out only 'adult human females' I think you're right we should just ditch the concept in day-to-day activities.
Ah ok. Then I guess I'm just not seeing why we need to say that he's making a mistake--or at least that he's making a mistake about what the words mean. He *does* have a false belief, but the false belief is that he thinks "arthritis" is used by his fellows to pick out THARTHRITIS, when they in fact use it to pick out ARTHRITIS. So by using the word to pick out THARTHRITIS he's not communicating effectively, and by interpreting others as picking out that concept, he has a false belief about what others mean by it. But I still don't see why we also need to say that he is also making a factual mistake in using "arthritis" to pick out THARTHRITIS--I feel like the story I just told captures everything that's going wrong in the situation.
Okay Substack is being super weird and making it annoying for me to reply to this so hopefully this reply actually posts lol.
It seems to me like the thing that the story leaves out is that he’s mistaken about the meaning of the word! But that’s sort of why I said it might just be a question begging objection, because I’m just trying to pump the intuition that’s he’s misassociating the concept with the word and that’s just what it is to misunderstand the meaning of the word. But if you find the account you outlined satisfying I don’t know if I’ve said anything that should actually push you out of that.
Your real face is more handsome than your profile picture.
I'm not sure that's possible, but I appreciate the sentiment!
it is possible, you must believe
I think this is a great post with a lot that I agree on, but there are two important perspectives I think you're missing here:
1) You're right that it doesn't really matter what word we use to describe something, and you're right that it's not about the concept of "woman" either. But there's also a third view here, which is that we're talking not about the meaning of a particular word or the content of a particular concept but rather the empirical boundaries of a particular sociocultural group. To me, the question is something like: "There's a certain socially constructed caste out there that everyone is referring to when they talk about women - what determines whether you exist in that socially constructed category?" It doesn't matter what word you use to reference that category, or how you understand that category conceptually. What matters is whether they're "in the club," so to speak. But also, I don't think this view settles things one way or another, because you can make somewhat plausible arguments either way! Depending on your broader analysis of gender and how it functions socially, you might think it's restricted to those born female or you might think it's open to anyone who is perceived a certain way. There also might be no guarantee that there's an objectively determined answer in every case.
2) I agree with you too that the real issue here is a normative one either way. But I'm surprised more people aren't at least somewhat open to the opposing normative case, which is that defining womanhood by one's comfort with or adherence to particular socially constructed roles can be harmful. I see at least two potential issues:
The most obvious one, imo, is that it essentializes many social practices that should be generally opposed. People differ on their analysis here, but as someone who is drawn to many traditional radical feminist critiques of beauty practices, gendered divisions of labor, etc it does really bother me to see things like having long hair or being uniquely nurturing held up as a meaningful grounding for womanhood when the feminist message has instead traditionally been that those were regressive sex stereotypes externally imposed on female people. I know a lot of "gender critical" people can be way, way, way too quick to jump to "WHAT IF IT WAS ABOUT RACE INSTEAD" rhetoric, but here I do think that's useful. Wouldn't we all find it offensive or problematic in some way if we defined a Hispanic person as anyone who is comfortable with the social role of day laborer, mariachi singer, or masked bandit? Obviously, that's an exaggeration - but I will say I see claims about the "female gender role" made by queer theorists fairly regularly that are almost as reductive. Ultimately it's going to depend on your background views about gender roles and stereotypes and the debate over nature versus nurture, but anyone who takes a hard social constructivist position here has reason to be concerned about any framework that naturalizes those practices and treats them as a meaningful expression of someone's innate "inner self."
On a related note, it's hard for me to understand how a definition like that would make room for women who are gender non-conforming or who challenge the restraints of patriarchal society in any meaningful way. If being a woman is just feeling comfortable with that particular social role, what do we say about people who are obviously not comfortable with that role but still want to identify as women? You can look at many important feminists throughout history and see that they were diametrically opposed to the social role they were placed into, but it seems not only inaccurate but offensive to say they weren't women. Conversely, it almost seems like an odd sort of victim-blaming to say that anyone who is a woman must necessarily accept their social role - again, not to sound like your average ranting GC, but it seems obviously true to me that women in Afghanistan do not generally enjoy the social role they inhabit but are nonetheless women. I think it's straightforwardly bad to foster a cultural understanding of gender that grounds *everyone's* gender in their own personal relationship to any particular social structure, rather than acknowledging that the vast majority of people are men and women because that's where society placed them at birth. Even just myself personally, I would not say I "feel most comfortable" in a masculine social role at all, and I don't really like the implication that I necessarily have to.
I think the best way to avoid those pitfalls while still acknowledging the existence of trans people is just to say that gender is an externally imposed social categorization system that people can and do relocate themselves in through various means. It's possible to say that someone who exists socially as a woman is a woman, full stop, while also accepting that what makes them a woman isn't just adherence to or enjoyment of various stereotypes. Anyway, that's a lot lol - no need to respond but just thought I'd give my somewhat uncommon take!
Thank you a lot! Sorry for taking so long to respond, I hadn't forgotten about you!
1) Given our exchange on moral realism, you can probably anticipate that I'd want to say that no such club "really" exists beyond just being a way we speak and think about the world. If that's right then we should just think about a group that includes trans women, not one that excludes them.
But that's probably idiosyncratic for me, so let's suppose that one such social group really does exist in a privileged sense. Even so, I don't see why we should care more about it than any not-as-real group we come up with. Like, even if it's true that there is this social group which we could call "women" where trans women aren't included, why should we not just try to think about a slightly gerrymandered group called "women+" which also includes trans women? I mean, I just don't see why we should care about where the joints of reality are, so to speak, (at least outside of the philosophy- or science-room) instead of deliberately choosing to talk about categories that cut between the joints, but which are more useful.
2) Yeah, I probably glossed over the normative stuff a little too quickly (I was mostly interested in the phil language things for this post anyways). I think all the points you raise about invoking social roles being problematic due to essentializing gender roles etc. are all very good! I might go a bit of a different route than you in response to them, going more in the direction of a self-ID type of view.
I'm not sure how exactly I would want to define "woman," but I can tell you the success criteria: It should include adult human females who are comfortable being women, and adult human males who have gender dysphoria and wish to be women (maybe it should include more than this). At worst that might just be a definition, though it would be circular (actually it might not be circular, as the "women" which occurs in the definition might be thought of as a perceived social group, while the word "woman" being defined is a category different from this, but with a lot of overlap. I doubt this definition can be made precise though. Idk.)
I don't know what exactly it is that people with gender dysphoria are "missing." For some it seems to be certain anatomy, but I'm not sure what else it is that they feel they're missing to be women. But whatever it is, I would want to say that that is at least part of what makes one a woman. Maybe it is certain social roles, in which case it might be problematic to allow trans women for the reasons you suggest, but it seems to me to be more of a sort of "gender vibe" that doesn't necessarily overlap with social roles.
Just anecdotally, the trans people I know generally seem to be much more non-conforming about gender roles than people in general--even the roles of the gender they transitioned to. So it at least doesn't seem to me from experience that acknowledging trans women as women essentialises gender roles, but it might do so in certain contexts.
I'm not sure how coherent this is, just my thoughts.
The problem with any attempt to justify what a word should mean, is that the justification is itself made of words, and their meanings matter to whether the justification is valid. So if you tried to *figure out* the optimal meaning for words in general, youd be stuck in a loop. What people actually do when they say theyre being pragmatic about meaning, is that they have a first language to do their real thinking in, which they use to manage a second language in which they speak. People feel that thats dishonest: Just talk to me in the first language.
Propably youll try to wriggle your way out of this with concepts, but I think your concept of concepts is a mistake. Philosophers often use "concepts" like a kind of mental language, which has all the properties we want out of language but dodges the physicalist limitations that apply to spoken language. I think thats wrong. Just like you can point to words and ask "wheres the meaning", I can point to neural activations ad say "wheres the concept". Outside of some low-level details about the link to perception, mental language cant do more than physical, including on this problem. Its generally more sensible to think of concepts as equivalence classes of words.
>If I had a friend that constantly used the words “cat” and “dog” in the reverse way of what people usually do
You can switch them, but that doesnt mean they can mean anything. As an analogy in mathematics, we have indescribable real numbers. Its a group of numbers we know exists (intuitively, "truely random" digit sequences), but its impossible to name any individual one, because it would require an infinite amount of information to do so. I dont think thats relevant to your version directly, since you accept the stereotype-based definition of gender, but I think it goes against the general picture. There is similarly the part where you can reorder a set of natural numbers any way you want, and from some perspectives you cant tell which order is the correct one, but neither can you deny there is one.
>I mean, the concept we actually have when we think of women is not even of the same kind as these precise concepts
Why do you think reasoning works, like at all? If you can use your human concepts to make better-than-chance conclusions following some relatively low-dimensional rules, then there is some relatively low-dimensional structure in those concepts that makes that work. You can then just remove the other stuff and focus on that structure.
The first point is obviously correct. The second point is not correct, and you don't give any real arguments for it. It's just obviously not true that you should never say anything that might hurt someone's feelings, even if you assume that that thing is not objectively true.
Incidentally, none of this is particularly original, either. Scott Alexander made the same argument a decade ago.
I don't know why you think I claimed that you should *never* say anything to hurt someone's feelings--there are obviously countless examples where you should. But there's a presumption against doing so, and in most cases there isn't any good reason to do it.
I'm glad that I'm in good company, and I didn't claim that it was original. But it's also not the standard view from what I gather.