Definitions aren’t generally arbitrary in communication for reasons similar to why they aren’t arbitrary in cognition; if I define “woman” to mean “adult female human” (for some possibly-contentious definition of female” I will communicate more effectively than if I define it to mean “adult female human who is not called Jane, OR 4x2 lego brick” (same definition of “female”), even if everyone knows what definitions I am using. I think the distinction that’s doing the actual work isn’t between communication and cognition, but between proper nouns (where the question is how you assign names to specific single things) and common nouns (where there are also boundary-drawing questions). Anyway, no matter; as I said, the point of what I said about proper nouns was merely to establish that language is not used only for prediction-optimizing.
Of course people take “he” and “she” to convey sex-category information! But (because different people draw boundaries in different places) that doesn’t mean that what e.g. “he” conveys is anything as specific as “part of the cluster in thingspace that contains typical men, with Zack’s preferred metric on thingspace”, which is what it would have to be for your use of terms like “lie” to be right.
My apologies for missing the link to TCWMFM! I retract my claim that eukaryote didn’t mention it. For what it’s worth, my guess is that without TCWMFM eukaryote would in fact have said much the same things as they did with TCWMFM; the idea that category boundaries are “a little bit arbitrary” did not originate there. Philosophers have been saying “well, it all depends on what you mean by …” for ages. And, despite your many thousands of words on the subject, I remain entirely unpersuaded that it’s “bonkers”, and it still looks to me as if your assertions that it’s “bonkers” are based on entirely unrealistic ideas about how language ought to be used.
Sure, it would be nice if the language I use to talk were perfectly optimized for thinking. But it isn’t, and it never will be, and any possible conflict between tact and prediction-optimality in gender-words is far down the list of reasons why. Because the primary requirement for the language I use to talk to my friends is that I should be able to use it to talk to my friends, and it happens that the language my friends mostly talk is English, which like every other natural language is a pile of kludges and path-dependent arbitrary choices. And also because different people define things in slightly different ways, so no matter how carefully optimized my notion of (say) “woman” might be, when I’m talking with other people that doesn’t matter because they are not going to mean the exact same thing by it as I do. Even if nothing we are saying has anything to do with trans people at all.
To be more precise: no, I don’t “want” the language I speak with my friends to be the same as the language I use to organize my own thoughts. The way I organize my own thoughts is necessarily idiosyncratic; it has to work for my brain, thinking the kinds of thoughts that I happen to need to think, given the things that I happen to know; fortunately my friends are not my clones, and their brains and thoughts and knowledge are different; so there is no possible way for the language we speak to be optimal for all of our thoughts.
What’s wrong with “adult human female” is that it just pushes whatever difficulties there might have been in “woman” over to “female”. I’m perfectly happy agreeing that women are adult female humans (or adult human females, but that’s an ugly locution) and I think everyone would be if that set of words hadn’t been adopted by some people specifically as a way of objecting to some things trans people want to say and think. But some people would want “female” to mean “person with no Y chromosome” and some would want it to mean “person nearer to the cluster in Zack-concept-space that contains typical women” and some would want it to mean “person who considers herself female”. Again, the circularity is perfectly benign; take any definition of “woman” that is anywhere near any definition any sane human being uses, apply the cluster definition, and iterate a few times, and it will converge very rapidly.
I’ve no idea why you say at that point “I get it, we want to be trans-inclusive”; I was referring to your preferred understanding of the word “woman” (in so far as I understand it right, which quite possibly I don’t) and so far as I can tell you don’t particularly want that to be trans-inclusive, to whatever extent being trans-inclusive conflicts with prediction-optimality. But, for what it’s worth, I don’t think that the clean way to be trans-inclusive is what you say; maybe that’s one clean-ish way to be kinda-trans-inclusive but it seems to me it doesn’t do either of those things terribly well and that term “sufficiently successful” has an awful lot of stuff swept under it.
Indeed sex is functionally binary (though I remark that most of the individual consequences of sex that actually matter for most human interactions are very much not binary, although if you take them collectively you can pretty much recover the binary classification them them), and indeed it is unlike (say) size in that respect. But I don’t think that’s relevant to the point I was making, which is simply that “woman” and “town” both have boundaries that different people draw in different places, and therefore the only circumstances in which you are going to get anything like the optimal communication you want are those where we say very explicitly where we draw the boundaries, and once we do that we are communicating far more precisely than the norm however much you dislike the specific boundaries I draw.
The rest of that paragraph only has any chance of being right if we make the assumption, which I explicitly reject, that the only valid way to delineate the meanings of words is by picking something like minimum-volume clusters in concept-space. No! It isn’t! The only valid way to delineate the meanings of words, outside technical discussions where you make explicit and precise definitions, is to try to match your usage of each word to how the other people you’re trying to communicate with use it. And, like it or not, the way language actually works does not give you anything like a guarantee that common usage will do a very good job of optimizing compactness in concept-space. If your goal is to communicate with other people, it doesn’t matter whether your preferred usage corresponds to something you consider a natural cluster in concept-space unless everyone else is also choosing their definitions that way. Which they aren’t.
(And I am very unconvinced by the assumptions you are making about the proper metrics in concept-space, for reasons I already explained about as well as I think I can explain them. If all I know about you is what gender you, or someone else, says you are, then it is most likely that the appropriate metric on concept-space for the purposes of whatever interactions we are going to have while that remains the case is one that cares mostly about things like what words you prefer me to use when talking to you. And once we start having interactions for which more subtle gender-related differences matter, what I’ve been told about your gender probably no longer has much impact on my predictions because I know a bunch of other things that mostly screen that off.)
“Treating someone as male or female” means, in practice, treating them in ways that they interpret as indicating that I regard them as male or female. This is not a thing with a precise definition and it probably couldn’t be. But as long as we have (e.g.) different pronouns for male and female, different public toilets for men and women, different social expectations for men and women (maybe we shouldn’t have those! but they are there none the less), it will be hard to avoid some degree of pigeonholing and many people will care which pigeonhole you seem to be putting them into.
Okay. I give up. I really liked your 11 May comment, and it made me optimistic that this conversation would lead somewhere new and interesting, but I’m not feeling optimistic about that anymore. (You probably aren’t, either.) This was fun, though: thanks! You’re very good at what you do!
OK. I’m not sure to what extent I’m supposed to take the last comment as an insult (“you’re very good at emitting sophistical bullshit” or whatever), but no matter :-).
I don’t know that I was feeling optimistic, but I had had some hopes that you might be persuaded to engage with what seem like key criticisms rather than just dismissing them. But you certainly should feel obliged to engage with someone you aren’t finding it worthwhile arguing with. [EDITED to add:] Er, oops, of course I mean you shouldn’t feel obliged.
By the way, I see that at least one earlier comment of yours in this thread has been downvoted; it wasn’t by me.
Definitions aren’t generally arbitrary in communication for reasons similar to why they aren’t arbitrary in cognition; if I define “woman” to mean “adult female human” (for some possibly-contentious definition of female” I will communicate more effectively than if I define it to mean “adult female human who is not called Jane, OR 4x2 lego brick” (same definition of “female”), even if everyone knows what definitions I am using. I think the distinction that’s doing the actual work isn’t between communication and cognition, but between proper nouns (where the question is how you assign names to specific single things) and common nouns (where there are also boundary-drawing questions). Anyway, no matter; as I said, the point of what I said about proper nouns was merely to establish that language is not used only for prediction-optimizing.
Of course people take “he” and “she” to convey sex-category information! But (because different people draw boundaries in different places) that doesn’t mean that what e.g. “he” conveys is anything as specific as “part of the cluster in thingspace that contains typical men, with Zack’s preferred metric on thingspace”, which is what it would have to be for your use of terms like “lie” to be right.
My apologies for missing the link to TCWMFM! I retract my claim that eukaryote didn’t mention it. For what it’s worth, my guess is that without TCWMFM eukaryote would in fact have said much the same things as they did with TCWMFM; the idea that category boundaries are “a little bit arbitrary” did not originate there. Philosophers have been saying “well, it all depends on what you mean by …” for ages. And, despite your many thousands of words on the subject, I remain entirely unpersuaded that it’s “bonkers”, and it still looks to me as if your assertions that it’s “bonkers” are based on entirely unrealistic ideas about how language ought to be used.
Sure, it would be nice if the language I use to talk were perfectly optimized for thinking. But it isn’t, and it never will be, and any possible conflict between tact and prediction-optimality in gender-words is far down the list of reasons why. Because the primary requirement for the language I use to talk to my friends is that I should be able to use it to talk to my friends, and it happens that the language my friends mostly talk is English, which like every other natural language is a pile of kludges and path-dependent arbitrary choices. And also because different people define things in slightly different ways, so no matter how carefully optimized my notion of (say) “woman” might be, when I’m talking with other people that doesn’t matter because they are not going to mean the exact same thing by it as I do. Even if nothing we are saying has anything to do with trans people at all.
To be more precise: no, I don’t “want” the language I speak with my friends to be the same as the language I use to organize my own thoughts. The way I organize my own thoughts is necessarily idiosyncratic; it has to work for my brain, thinking the kinds of thoughts that I happen to need to think, given the things that I happen to know; fortunately my friends are not my clones, and their brains and thoughts and knowledge are different; so there is no possible way for the language we speak to be optimal for all of our thoughts.
What’s wrong with “adult human female” is that it just pushes whatever difficulties there might have been in “woman” over to “female”. I’m perfectly happy agreeing that women are adult female humans (or adult human females, but that’s an ugly locution) and I think everyone would be if that set of words hadn’t been adopted by some people specifically as a way of objecting to some things trans people want to say and think. But some people would want “female” to mean “person with no Y chromosome” and some would want it to mean “person nearer to the cluster in Zack-concept-space that contains typical women” and some would want it to mean “person who considers herself female”. Again, the circularity is perfectly benign; take any definition of “woman” that is anywhere near any definition any sane human being uses, apply the cluster definition, and iterate a few times, and it will converge very rapidly.
I’ve no idea why you say at that point “I get it, we want to be trans-inclusive”; I was referring to your preferred understanding of the word “woman” (in so far as I understand it right, which quite possibly I don’t) and so far as I can tell you don’t particularly want that to be trans-inclusive, to whatever extent being trans-inclusive conflicts with prediction-optimality. But, for what it’s worth, I don’t think that the clean way to be trans-inclusive is what you say; maybe that’s one clean-ish way to be kinda-trans-inclusive but it seems to me it doesn’t do either of those things terribly well and that term “sufficiently successful” has an awful lot of stuff swept under it.
Indeed sex is functionally binary (though I remark that most of the individual consequences of sex that actually matter for most human interactions are very much not binary, although if you take them collectively you can pretty much recover the binary classification them them), and indeed it is unlike (say) size in that respect. But I don’t think that’s relevant to the point I was making, which is simply that “woman” and “town” both have boundaries that different people draw in different places, and therefore the only circumstances in which you are going to get anything like the optimal communication you want are those where we say very explicitly where we draw the boundaries, and once we do that we are communicating far more precisely than the norm however much you dislike the specific boundaries I draw.
The rest of that paragraph only has any chance of being right if we make the assumption, which I explicitly reject, that the only valid way to delineate the meanings of words is by picking something like minimum-volume clusters in concept-space. No! It isn’t! The only valid way to delineate the meanings of words, outside technical discussions where you make explicit and precise definitions, is to try to match your usage of each word to how the other people you’re trying to communicate with use it. And, like it or not, the way language actually works does not give you anything like a guarantee that common usage will do a very good job of optimizing compactness in concept-space. If your goal is to communicate with other people, it doesn’t matter whether your preferred usage corresponds to something you consider a natural cluster in concept-space unless everyone else is also choosing their definitions that way. Which they aren’t.
(And I am very unconvinced by the assumptions you are making about the proper metrics in concept-space, for reasons I already explained about as well as I think I can explain them. If all I know about you is what gender you, or someone else, says you are, then it is most likely that the appropriate metric on concept-space for the purposes of whatever interactions we are going to have while that remains the case is one that cares mostly about things like what words you prefer me to use when talking to you. And once we start having interactions for which more subtle gender-related differences matter, what I’ve been told about your gender probably no longer has much impact on my predictions because I know a bunch of other things that mostly screen that off.)
“Treating someone as male or female” means, in practice, treating them in ways that they interpret as indicating that I regard them as male or female. This is not a thing with a precise definition and it probably couldn’t be. But as long as we have (e.g.) different pronouns for male and female, different public toilets for men and women, different social expectations for men and women (maybe we shouldn’t have those! but they are there none the less), it will be hard to avoid some degree of pigeonholing and many people will care which pigeonhole you seem to be putting them into.
Okay. I give up. I really liked your 11 May comment, and it made me optimistic that this conversation would lead somewhere new and interesting, but I’m not feeling optimistic about that anymore. (You probably aren’t, either.) This was fun, though: thanks! You’re very good at what you do!
OK. I’m not sure to what extent I’m supposed to take the last comment as an insult (“you’re very good at emitting sophistical bullshit” or whatever), but no matter :-).
I don’t know that I was feeling optimistic, but I had had some hopes that you might be persuaded to engage with what seem like key criticisms rather than just dismissing them. But you certainly should feel obliged to engage with someone you aren’t finding it worthwhile arguing with. [EDITED to add:] Er, oops, of course I mean you shouldn’t feel obliged.
By the way, I see that at least one earlier comment of yours in this thread has been downvoted; it wasn’t by me.