Or it might be that someone was trying to, say, work out how to treat people in ways that are good for them and then you tried to stop them from using “women” to mean, the cluster of social practices around treating women as opposed to men. Which would perhaps be a fault of yours, or at least, I’d want to know why you were doing that
Because I think this motion of circularly defining a category in terms of things-that-are-good-to-be-in-this-category doesn’t actually get people what they want; I think it’s a comforting casuistry optimized to make it harder to notice that people do not, in fact, have what they want.
If we actually hadmagical perfect sex change technology, it would never occur to anyone to redefine gender in terms of “working out how to treat people in ways that are good for them.” People who wanted to change sex would do so, and everyone else would use the corresponding language because it was straightforwardly true, not because they were trying to be nice.
To be sure, there is such a thing as cluster of social practices around treating women as opposed to men: we call these gender roles, or sex roles. The stricter these roles are and the more they encompass all aspects of life, the more important it is to allocate short codewords for them. If your Society is structured such that the most salient things about “women” is that they’re the ones who work in the household and take care of children—then sure, in the context of that Society, males who work in the household and take care of children are women.
But … how many of the people in modern Society who say “Gender is a social category” actually want that? In practice, I think “Gender is a social category” is more often an excuse, selectively deployed because consensus-based definitions can’t be challenged by those who dispute the consensus, and not because people actually only care about the subspace of social practices, with everything else that covaries with sex truly being irrelevant.
motion of circularly defining a category in terms of things-that-are-good-to-be-in-this-category
Someone could say “I am a woman”, in context with the goal of communicating something like “please treat me like you treat women, not like you treat men”, and I called that “using ‘women’ to mean, the cluster....”. But that doesn’t imply they aren’t also referring to some underlying reality. Maybe a developmental quirk made their brain develop with a female regulatory mode. Maybe not, but as a child they ended up in a feminine psychic basin of attraction. Maybe they are harmed by their social position because of their gender and want out. In any case, they want to be treated as women. I don’t see what’s wrong with giving a name to the cluster of people who want to be treated the way women are treated.
That doesn’t mean anyone has to do anything; just because you think me treating you some way would be good for you, doesn’t mean I believe you, and doesn’t mean it would be good for me if I treated you that way.
would use the corresponding language because it was straightforwardly true, not because they were trying to be nice.
Those aren’t the only two options. You could use language because it’s unstraightforwardly true, and use appropriate precautions. I wonder if you’re pushing against calling such a person “woman” because that makes it seem like how you use words like “sky” or “hamster” or “seven” or “tasty” or “beautiful”, which is a native representation that you can use unreflectively in your internal planning, whereas really it’s a cluster of other peoples’ preferences, and if you use them unreflectively you’re “unsandboxing” other peoples’ preferences into your internal planning.
Maybe we could separate your objections into two parts: you object to calling this cluster “women”, and you object to reifying this cluster at all (?).
how many of the people in modern Society who say “Gender is a social category” actually want that?
If we unstrawman from “work in the household and take care of children” to the whole panoply of social attitudes, then maybe a lot of people actually want that? I don’t know, it would be interesting to know how much trans people care about treatment vs. some more transcendent type of being believed that they’re really women/men, or vs. other stuff; and if someone cares about other people thinking that they’re really a women, what exactly does that mean to them etc. and how would that reconcile with biological or psychological facts (noting that some psychological facts are objects of free will, e.g. one could decide to shape ones mind like a woman’s).
I don’t see what’s wrong with giving a name to the cluster of people who want to be treated the way women are treated.
I agree that it’s fine to have a name for that, and I agree that it’s fine to use the word “women” for that in contexts where it doesn’t cause any important confusions. (Well, I usually formulate transness in terms of mimickry—people who are trying to pass as a sex, rather than merely wanting to be treated as a sex without taking any steps to make that look plausible to others—but let that pass for the moment.)
Words can be used in many ways depending on context: we can sometimes say that ice is “water” (because it’s H₂O) and sometimes say that it’s not “water” (because it’s not liquid H₂O), and this mostly doesn’t cause confusion. At worst, if I ask for water and you bring me ice, I can say, “No, sorry, I meant ‘water’ in the sense of liquid H₂O, for which purposes this ice doesn’t count even if there’s also an ice-inclusive sense of the word ‘water’; I expected you to figure that out from context without me having to explicitly disambiguate, but I am explicitly disambiguating now.”
If I were to say that about ice, you would probably reply, “Oh, okay.” You wouldn’t pretend not to understand, or insist “But frozen water is water” or accuse me of causing harm or being philosophically naïve for using the word “water” in the ice-exclusive sense.
In the case of water and ice, people are generally pretty good at this without any explicit philosophy-of-language knowledge. If people in contemporary liberal Society routinely exhibited the same skills about gender—if it were possible to say, “No, sorry, I meant ‘women’ in the ‘adult human female’ sense, for which purposes this trans woman doesn’t count even if there’s also a trans-inclusive sense of the word ‘woman’; I expected you to figure that out from context without me having to explicitly disambiguate, but I am explicitly disambiguating now” and for people to reply, “Oh, okay”—then I wouldn’t bother doing so much philosophy-of-language blogging.
But then it turns out to be surprisingly hard to explain the correct lesson without someone reading me as saying something technically false that I didn’t spend the wordcount disclaiming that I don’t believe in every single post in the Sequence; the fact that I often take the wordcount to disclaim it (“Thus we can legitimately end up with a non-circular trans-inclusive sense [...]”) doesn’t help because I can’t count on the critic having read everything I’ve ever written.
When I say, “Look, the hidden Bayesian structure of reality says we should want short codewords to point to clusters of high density in thick subspaces of configuration space; when a codeword is already pointing to such a cluster, and someone proposes redefining the word in order for people to not be sad, that’s a problem, because presumably the sad people are sad about the cluster in the territory; if you edit the map instead of the territory, you’re just deceiving them, not solving the actual problem that’s making them sad”, then someone will reply, “Ah, but what if we want to point to the thin-subspace cluster defined by what the sad people want, and furthermore want to use the same word for that as the thick-subspace cluster that the sad people are sad about?”
And I’m like, sure, technically you could do that, as long as you’re scrupulously careful to disambiguate which cluster you’re using the codeword to point to in cases where the difference matters and the referent isn’t clear from context. But when you look at the history of why we’re discussing the philosophy of language in this much detail, can you blame me for being suspicious that most people just aren’t interested in being scrupulously careful to disambiguate when the referent isn’t clear?
Okay, maybe I’m getting where you’re coming from now...??
In the hypothetical scenario you quoted from me, it’s you who are trying to prevent someone from using a useful concept in a context where it’s clear what concept is meant by the word. You seemed to endorse doing so, writing “[TM:]I’d want to know why you were doing that [ZD:] Because I think [reasons]”. It seems like in this hypothetical, you’re the one making the mistake that you sometimes rightly accuse others of making: trying to stop other people from using a useful concept (using ambiguous but contextually clear language).
Now it sounds like basically you’re saying: “If that’s what they were doing, then I was making a mistake. I don’t believe that that’s what those people are doing, I think they’re not trying to use words for clusters and instead trying to use words to make people feel a certain way, and I think they’re going to make a bunch of destructive mistakes because they’re using words not for clusters.”
(Which you roughly said in your first response above, but it didn’t land for me, maybe because you packaged it with a strawman of the hypothetical position that *is* using “women” for a cluster meaning something about social treatment.)
Since that might be right about what’s happening, I’m curious why we’re down this rabbit hole, and will go back again and look upthread.
Looking back, it seems like you’re using bad examples to argue your point, if I’ve got you right. This conversation came from a post where you argue that concepts based on niche-adaptedness are less cohesive:
In contrast, “finned swimmy animals” is an intrinsically less cohesive subject matter: there are similarities between them due to convergent evolution to the aquatic habitat, and it probably makes sense to want a short word or phrase (perhaps, “sea creatures”) to describe those similarities in contexts where only those similarities are relevant.
But that category “falls apart” very quickly as you consider more and more aspects of the creatures: the finned-swimmy-animals-with-gills are systematically different from the finned-swimmy-animals-with-a-blowhole, in more ways than just the “respiratory organ” feature that I’m using in this sentence to point to the two groups.
It seems to me now that
(1) you’re mostly mistaken about such concepts being “less” anything (well, probably in some useful sense there are “more features” explained by phylogeny than by niche-adaptedness, but that doesn’t make the latter “less cohesive”),
(2) that example is a red-herring for your point, which is that “concepts” that aren’t attached to a cluster *at all* are fake and bad (such as “women” used to “mean” “whatever makes people not sad if I use the word this way”).
...Though it’s worth noting that it’s almost impossible to *avoid* some cluster-related-ness. If you use a word in whatever way makes people not sad, you are going to pick up on some cluster-structure. I think this *is* a good way of *finding one’s way* to *new* words; I think we agree that this is a very bad way of *continuously correcting towards territory-reflection*.
If your Society is structured such that the most salient things about “women” is that they’re the ones who work in the household and take care of children—then sure, in the context of that Society, males who work in the household and take care of children are women.
In Britain in the 1950s and 1960s (and long before, but I’m limiting this to what I observed in my own lifetime), that was the position of women. Men who took on that role were not “women”. They were thought very unusual, even unnatural, and the word “househusband” was coined.
In the comments on “Blood Is Thicker Than Water”, TekhneMakre writes:
Because I think this motion of circularly defining a category in terms of things-that-are-good-to-be-in-this-category doesn’t actually get people what they want; I think it’s a comforting casuistry optimized to make it harder to notice that people do not, in fact, have what they want.
If we actually had magical perfect sex change technology, it would never occur to anyone to redefine gender in terms of “working out how to treat people in ways that are good for them.” People who wanted to change sex would do so, and everyone else would use the corresponding language because it was straightforwardly true, not because they were trying to be nice.
To be sure, there is such a thing as cluster of social practices around treating women as opposed to men: we call these gender roles, or sex roles. The stricter these roles are and the more they encompass all aspects of life, the more important it is to allocate short codewords for them. If your Society is structured such that the most salient things about “women” is that they’re the ones who work in the household and take care of children—then sure, in the context of that Society, males who work in the household and take care of children are women.
But … how many of the people in modern Society who say “Gender is a social category” actually want that? In practice, I think “Gender is a social category” is more often an excuse, selectively deployed because consensus-based definitions can’t be challenged by those who dispute the consensus, and not because people actually only care about the subspace of social practices, with everything else that covaries with sex truly being irrelevant.
Someone could say “I am a woman”, in context with the goal of communicating something like “please treat me like you treat women, not like you treat men”, and I called that “using ‘women’ to mean, the cluster....”. But that doesn’t imply they aren’t also referring to some underlying reality. Maybe a developmental quirk made their brain develop with a female regulatory mode. Maybe not, but as a child they ended up in a feminine psychic basin of attraction. Maybe they are harmed by their social position because of their gender and want out. In any case, they want to be treated as women. I don’t see what’s wrong with giving a name to the cluster of people who want to be treated the way women are treated.
That doesn’t mean anyone has to do anything; just because you think me treating you some way would be good for you, doesn’t mean I believe you, and doesn’t mean it would be good for me if I treated you that way.
Those aren’t the only two options. You could use language because it’s unstraightforwardly true, and use appropriate precautions. I wonder if you’re pushing against calling such a person “woman” because that makes it seem like how you use words like “sky” or “hamster” or “seven” or “tasty” or “beautiful”, which is a native representation that you can use unreflectively in your internal planning, whereas really it’s a cluster of other peoples’ preferences, and if you use them unreflectively you’re “unsandboxing” other peoples’ preferences into your internal planning.
Maybe we could separate your objections into two parts: you object to calling this cluster “women”, and you object to reifying this cluster at all (?).
If we unstrawman from “work in the household and take care of children” to the whole panoply of social attitudes, then maybe a lot of people actually want that? I don’t know, it would be interesting to know how much trans people care about treatment vs. some more transcendent type of being believed that they’re really women/men, or vs. other stuff; and if someone cares about other people thinking that they’re really a women, what exactly does that mean to them etc. and how would that reconcile with biological or psychological facts (noting that some psychological facts are objects of free will, e.g. one could decide to shape ones mind like a woman’s).
I agree that it’s fine to have a name for that, and I agree that it’s fine to use the word “women” for that in contexts where it doesn’t cause any important confusions. (Well, I usually formulate transness in terms of mimickry—people who are trying to pass as a sex, rather than merely wanting to be treated as a sex without taking any steps to make that look plausible to others—but let that pass for the moment.)
Words can be used in many ways depending on context: we can sometimes say that ice is “water” (because it’s H₂O) and sometimes say that it’s not “water” (because it’s not liquid H₂O), and this mostly doesn’t cause confusion. At worst, if I ask for water and you bring me ice, I can say, “No, sorry, I meant ‘water’ in the sense of liquid H₂O, for which purposes this ice doesn’t count even if there’s also an ice-inclusive sense of the word ‘water’; I expected you to figure that out from context without me having to explicitly disambiguate, but I am explicitly disambiguating now.”
If I were to say that about ice, you would probably reply, “Oh, okay.” You wouldn’t pretend not to understand, or insist “But frozen water is water” or accuse me of causing harm or being philosophically naïve for using the word “water” in the ice-exclusive sense.
In the case of water and ice, people are generally pretty good at this without any explicit philosophy-of-language knowledge. If people in contemporary liberal Society routinely exhibited the same skills about gender—if it were possible to say, “No, sorry, I meant ‘women’ in the ‘adult human female’ sense, for which purposes this trans woman doesn’t count even if there’s also a trans-inclusive sense of the word ‘woman’; I expected you to figure that out from context without me having to explicitly disambiguate, but I am explicitly disambiguating now” and for people to reply, “Oh, okay”—then I wouldn’t bother doing so much philosophy-of-language blogging.
The problem is that a dominant faction in my Society really doesn’t want it to be socially permissible to disambiguate, and so people who want to align themselves with the dominant faction keep introducing distortions into their rationality lessons (like “I ought to accept an unexpected [X] or two deep inside the conceptual boundaries of what would normally be considered [Y] if it will save someone’s life”) to make it look like the dominant faction is in the right, prompting me to waste years of my life correcting the distortions in increasing amounts of technical detail.
But then it turns out to be surprisingly hard to explain the correct lesson without someone reading me as saying something technically false that I didn’t spend the wordcount disclaiming that I don’t believe in every single post in the Sequence; the fact that I often take the wordcount to disclaim it (“Thus we can legitimately end up with a non-circular trans-inclusive sense [...]”) doesn’t help because I can’t count on the critic having read everything I’ve ever written.
When I say, “Look, the hidden Bayesian structure of reality says we should want short codewords to point to clusters of high density in thick subspaces of configuration space; when a codeword is already pointing to such a cluster, and someone proposes redefining the word in order for people to not be sad, that’s a problem, because presumably the sad people are sad about the cluster in the territory; if you edit the map instead of the territory, you’re just deceiving them, not solving the actual problem that’s making them sad”, then someone will reply, “Ah, but what if we want to point to the thin-subspace cluster defined by what the sad people want, and furthermore want to use the same word for that as the thick-subspace cluster that the sad people are sad about?”
And I’m like, sure, technically you could do that, as long as you’re scrupulously careful to disambiguate which cluster you’re using the codeword to point to in cases where the difference matters and the referent isn’t clear from context. But when you look at the history of why we’re discussing the philosophy of language in this much detail, can you blame me for being suspicious that most people just aren’t interested in being scrupulously careful to disambiguate when the referent isn’t clear?
Okay, maybe I’m getting where you’re coming from now...??
In the hypothetical scenario you quoted from me, it’s you who are trying to prevent someone from using a useful concept in a context where it’s clear what concept is meant by the word. You seemed to endorse doing so, writing “[TM:]I’d want to know why you were doing that [ZD:] Because I think [reasons]”. It seems like in this hypothetical, you’re the one making the mistake that you sometimes rightly accuse others of making: trying to stop other people from using a useful concept (using ambiguous but contextually clear language).
Now it sounds like basically you’re saying: “If that’s what they were doing, then I was making a mistake. I don’t believe that that’s what those people are doing, I think they’re not trying to use words for clusters and instead trying to use words to make people feel a certain way, and I think they’re going to make a bunch of destructive mistakes because they’re using words not for clusters.”
(Which you roughly said in your first response above, but it didn’t land for me, maybe because you packaged it with a strawman of the hypothetical position that *is* using “women” for a cluster meaning something about social treatment.)
Since that might be right about what’s happening, I’m curious why we’re down this rabbit hole, and will go back again and look upthread.
Looking back, it seems like you’re using bad examples to argue your point, if I’ve got you right. This conversation came from a post where you argue that concepts based on niche-adaptedness are less cohesive:
It seems to me now that
(1) you’re mostly mistaken about such concepts being “less” anything (well, probably in some useful sense there are “more features” explained by phylogeny than by niche-adaptedness, but that doesn’t make the latter “less cohesive”),
(2) that example is a red-herring for your point, which is that “concepts” that aren’t attached to a cluster *at all* are fake and bad (such as “women” used to “mean” “whatever makes people not sad if I use the word this way”).
...Though it’s worth noting that it’s almost impossible to *avoid* some cluster-related-ness. If you use a word in whatever way makes people not sad, you are going to pick up on some cluster-structure. I think this *is* a good way of *finding one’s way* to *new* words; I think we agree that this is a very bad way of *continuously correcting towards territory-reflection*.
In Britain in the 1950s and 1960s (and long before, but I’m limiting this to what I observed in my own lifetime), that was the position of women. Men who took on that role were not “women”. They were thought very unusual, even unnatural, and the word “househusband” was coined.