↪Truth Seeker What's the alternative to determinism to you? Is it just some degree of randomness sprinkled in? Like some visions of quantum mechanics suggest? — flannel jesus

It seems to me that determinism and randomness presuppose each other. That’s why proponents of determinism, like Martha Nussbaum and Daniel Dennett support blame and punishment. Dteeminism has arbitrariness built into it, and arbitrariness justifies blameful
justice. We don’t punish evil souls, we reshape capricious, wayward behaviors.

Some people cannot help themselves but do what they do, regardless of whether hard determinism is true or not. But we should also not help ourselves against jailing those that pose a threat to us. It might just be that socially and psychologically stressing over a serial killer, ultimately over the question of "Why did you do that?", might be as pointless as asking the hurricane "Why did you destroy my house?" — Lionino

I think it’s the most important question there is. But we’re so overwhelmed by the effort to answer it that we throw up our hands and fall back on a concept of blame. We blame the free willing autonomous subject. Or we blame the social milieu. Or we blame genetics and biology. Or we blame determinism. What blame fails to do is come up with an explanation of behavior that avoids pinning it on arbitrary internal ( spiritual will, biological impulse, the id) or external (society, mother and father) demons, conditionings and influences. We fail to understand ‘blameful’ behavior in terms of motivations that not only are justified by the standards of the person who initiated it, but by our own standards of sense-making.

Ah, you mean as in Kierkegaard's Repetition, as opposed to the "recollection". But in the liberated "moment," we are still bound to that which is there to be liberated, and this is as cultural, bound, that is, in the sense that there is nothing else "there" in the possibilities. — Astrophel

Not for Heidegger. He defines primordial anxiety as dissociating oneself from one’s familiar world, rendering beings as a whole meaningless, irrelevant and insignificant, so as to simultaneously open up new possibilities of acting and being. The self continually comes to itself, and ex-ists, from out ahead of itself. It is not the human will that creates this transformation, but time itself.

Truth, as the clearing and concealing of what is, happens in being composed, as a poet composes a poem. All art, as the letting happen of the advent of the truth of what is, is, as such, essentially poetry. The nature of art, on which both the art work and the artist depend, is the setting-itself-into­-work of truth. It is due to art's poetic nature that, in the midst of what is, art breaks open an open place, in whose openness everything is other than usual. By virtue of the projected sketch set into the work of the unconcealedness of what is, which casts itself toward us, everything ordinary and hitherto existing becomes an unbeing. This unbeing has lost the capacity to give and keep being as measure.” (Origin of the Work of Art)

Interestingly, there are a preponderance of congenitally blind people with autism. Autism has been considered by some to involve symptoms that are the opposite of schizophrenia, and this has led to the thinking that to reduce schizophrenic cognition, make them more like autistics.This has led some researchers to speculate that congenital blindness predisposes toward styles of cognitive processing that encourages autism and suppresses schizophrenia.

Our existence is "fundamentally futural." But in "the moment" (what looks to me like Heidegger's version of nunc stans) one is still bound to finitude: "So neither must we take the fallenness of Dasein as a ‘fall’ from a purer and higher ‘primal status’. Not only do we lack any experience of this ontically, but ontologically we lack any possibilities or clues for Interpreting it. (p. 336 Stambough). There is nothing of a singular primordiality in this analytic. I read this to say that truly novel possibilities are simply bad metaphysics based on extravagant thinking about presence at hand (like Descartes of the Christian God — Astrophel

By finitude, Heidegger, like Derrida, Deleuze and Nietzsche, doesn’t mean we are hemmed in by cultural norms or our past. On the contrary, finitude is the eternal return of the different and the unique. It is not our past that produces our finitude, it is the utter individuality of our future. Fallneness is not a fall from some purer, higher status because the futural finitude of temporality functions implicitly even within fallnness.

Yes, all. Including organisms and plants. They all perceive and react to their environment. Because they all want to survive. And multiply. — Alkis Piskas

Enactivist approaches argue that perception and reaction are not sufficient for consciousness. What is required is a self-organizing and self-correcting anticipative purposiveness. Living systems are normatively oriented, defining their environment in relation to their ongoing functioning. Consciousness is intrinsically affective , and affectivity arises out of the organisms’s ability recognize what is better or worse for it in relation to how it is functioning. It’s purposes and aims cannot be reduced to simple ‘survival’ or ‘multiplication’ but the survival of a normative way of functioning.

Heidegger, later on, affirmed the value of gelassenheit, the yielding to the openness allowing the world to "speak," if you will. A very important move, I think, for even if one's thoughts are constructs of historical possibilities, there is in this openness things that are alien to this. And language may gather around this and discover a new "primordiality — Astrophel

He confirmed it early on, too, but he said that people misread Being and Time. For H. , both early and late, one’s thoughts project historical possibilities from ahead of oneself. History comes from the future, not the past.

All of the comments you direct towards me are respectful and on point. — Arne

:starstruck:

"Art is beauty. Beauty takes many forms beyond the stereotypical and expected ie. a flower or a warm summer's day. — Outlander

For a different view of art:

Art critic Sister Wendy Beckett once said that before Picasso, painters took it for granted that their job was to produce works of beauty. What else is art to do, after all? It was only after Picasso—specifically, after 1907's “Les Demoiselles d'Avignon,” with its squatting French prostitutes with faces like grotesque African masks—that painters realized they were not bound to beauty, that beauty was not a fate but, in a way, a limitation. Picasso showed that ugliness too could be the subject of great art, that artists could capture ugliness without rendering it beautiful, and this forever changed the course of culture. Like all truly deep assumptions, this one about beauty had hardly seemed like an assumption at all. It had seemed rather like an unquestionable, inescapable truth—until someone questioned it and thereby escaped it. What had seemed self-evident came to be seen as a self-imposed restriction. How much of the world, how much ugliness, how much mundanity had artists been ignoring? How much more could they now capture? This was perhaps the question of twentieth century art, with its depictions of hideous slaughter, its sliced-up cow carcasses, its snow shovels and urinals and soup cans, paint splotches and blank canvases.
(Lee Braver)

↪AmadeusD Thanks. Yes, some Nietzscheans can be gauche and insufferable. — Tom Storm

You’ll notice Amadeus was speaking not just of his followers, but of Nietzsche himself. Perhaps one can say of many of Nietzsche’s followers as well as of his more shrill detractors that they are gauche and insufferable in their inability to read him well.

Heidegger doesn't seem to say a lot about freedom and Being
— Corvus

No, he does not speak directly in terms of freedom. However, authentic Being-one's-Self is a choice. Please see Being and Time at 312-313 — Arne

In being-ahead-of-oneself as the being toward one's ownmost potentiality-of-being lies the existential and ontological condition of the possibility of being free for authentic existentiell possibilities.

With the factical existence of Da-sein, beings are also already encountered. That such beings are discovered in the There of its own existence is not under the control of
Da-sein. Only what, in which direction, to what extent, and how it actually discovers and discloses is a matter of freedom, although always within the limits of its thrownness. (Being and Time)

Simon Critchley wrote that philosophy was the great spreader of doubt and despair because nothing survives inquiry. But I disagree. Like the Hindu's jnana yoga, philosophy is a liberation from tthe presumption of knowing — Astrophel

Heidegger determined the span of history from Anaximander to Nietzsche as being beholden to the guiding question of philosophy, ‘Why is there something rather than nothing’? This guiding question was based on a thinking of being as objective presence, and truth as correctness. Heidegger wanted to replace the guiding question with the basic question, ‘how does be-ing essentially occur’? This thinking no longer opposes subject to object , existence to nothingness, truth to untruth.

And why do you think scientists are telling you what you think so frequently?
— flannel jesus
Because they want to have control over people.
It's a standard mode of operation for people anyway; scientists have just elevated it to a whole new level, much like religion/spirituality — baker

Are you talking about the influence of positivism on science? Not all approaches in science are positivistic. There are postmodern sciences, for instance.

I've been in several, disparate 'gay' and 'queer' communities. I fucking hate them. I detest everything I went through trying to be friends with those people. Any opinion that didn't align with the group was grounds for not just ostracization but attempts to belittle me in my work life, family life and other social endeavours. It was harrowing, and disgusting (in two specific examples, anyhow). One of my children was put through essentially a Struggle Session in an attempt to have them tell their school that i was an unfit parent. And this is a common experience. — AmadeusD

Was the group’s push for you to conform an example of ‘hive-mind’? Let’s start with the motivation behind trying to force or convince someone to conform to one’s own ways of thinking. I suggest this is the structure of anger and blame , which underlie most concepts of justice. If you meet someone and share with them your views of gender or gayness or whatever, and they are outraged and disappointed by your thinking, they have convinced themselves that you are willfully disregarding their needs or suffering. The anger they feel impels them to try and get you to ‘mend your ways’ , to ‘get with the program’, to think more ‘ethically’ or righteously. Because they believe that your beliefs are irrational, arbitrary, or selfish, they justify their judgmental attitude toward you. They basically have thought themselves into a corner. If they are unable to see the world through your eyes, you become a danger to them.

What’s true of an individual can be true of a whole community united around shared values. I dont believe in the concept of hive-mind, brain-washing or mindless conformity. People don’t blindly introject ideas from others. The interpretive nature of cognition makes this impossible. We can only assimilate ideas from others that make sense to us in relation to the way we construe the world, and everyone’s construction system is unique to them to some extent. If a group all seems to believe the same things and share the same values, it is not because they are being blindly led by the hive-mind, but because they have gravitated to that group based on the fact that they have, as individuals, already arrived at that way of thinking. I have never met any group that thinks in lock-step, regardless of how much the leadership tries to define and enforce a party line.

Once you dig beneath the surface , you’ll find all sorts of splits in ideology among members of the same group. My impression is that you have strong convictions and values yourself, and that there are issues where you blame others for their moral failings as seen from your perspective. You wouldn’t be a part of the legal profession unless you believed in a concept of justice that is able to determine guilt and innocence. So you yourself belong to a community with that shared value, and when you declare someone guilty of something, you are imposing those community values on that person. So what makes you different from that gay community who tried to impose their values on you?

You emphasize your individuality and your not fitting into any group. But all the views you have expressed on this forum fit into a familiar slot in terms of a philosophical and cultural background they draw from. So as much as you may want to think of yourself as an outsider and non-conformist, your ways of thinking express a cultural
worldview shared by many others, a worldview that finds ways to impose itself on others, or at least uses itself as a standard on the basis of which to judge others.

Groups of affinity aren't designed to foster difference (nor do they incidentally do so). This context is actually an apt one - trans individuals who do not tout the same concepts and ideas we're, perhaps wrongly, discussing, are ostracized as not the 'right kind of trans' (as it is with blacks, Jews, feminists etc....). Affinity groups seem to reinforce irrational self-image. — AmadeusD

Let’s say you want to excel at something and soar beyond all your competitors. How do you do this? Well, first you have to have to find people to compete against that are the closer to your level of performance as possible. You cant up the level of your tennis game against a backboard; you need a community of players to push you further. Isnt this true in any creative endeavor? Don’t we need to hone ours skills in a creative social environment consisting of those who can bring out the best in us? One of the things I loved most about the gay community I interacted with was that they were more colorful, free and creative than the bland hetero environment I was used to. They encouraged my individuality, not my conformity. Their ‘gayness’ was more of an open tent, a welcoming attitude toward all kinds of alternative ways of being, than a ghettoized clique.

The reason I love living in a big city is that the diversity stimulates my non-conformity more than if I lived in a cave in the middle of nowhere or a small town. How can it be that being surrounded by 3 million people fosters eccenticity and non-conformity better than living an isolated existence? My neighborhood has a sense of community that is built on celebration of diversity. Just because people gather in a group based on shared interests doesn’t mean that they are there to form a hive mind. The opposite may be the case. This is also true of romantic love. The relationship may be stifling and confining for one or both participants, or it could be a union that frees each person to be themselves more authentically than if they were alone.

IN a world where there are female and male brains, easily identifiable and uncontroversial - aberrations in development could feasibly lead to an otherwise fully male person attaining some behaviour due to their brain structure, only found in 'female brains' — AmadeusD

I was, and still am, a very, very odd person, from most people's perspective sexually, hobbies, mentation, habits etc.. and this from being very, very young and open about myself because I chose not to care what others did. My 'outsider status' never arose, because it didn't occur to me as helpful. I do not think your inability to overcome yours says much more than that you perhaps were naturally predisposed to reject things you didn't relate to. — AmadeusD

I don’t want to give the impression that my childhood was some sort of nightmare. It was pretty typical, and I know everyone in their own way feels like a freak in some respect when they’re growing up. It doesnt take much;. a weird name, a big nose, geeky clothes will do it. And the value of finding a community of people with common experiences or behaviors is much more than just therapeutic. It’s a crucial way to learn about yourself, to define who you are and who you want to be, not by conforming to the group but by comparing experiences so that you can define yourself uniquely. Can one thrive without benefitting from this engagement? Of course, but one has a big advantage if one has the opportunity to learn from the interaction with those like oneself in some respect. I’m a no -conventional person by nature, and have always gone my own idiosyncratic way. Plugging into groups on the basis of shared perspectives was a valuable part of the foundation for

Think about non neuro-typical communities. Imagine how connecting with such a group can help a non neuro-typical individual discover their strengths and build their confidence.

Do you have sources on Heidegger denying the label? I see that Camus and Sartre have. — flannel jesus

In Existentialism and Humanism Sartre writes,

The existentialists, amongst whom we must place Heidegger as well as the French existentialists and myself . . . what they have in common is simply the fact that they believe that existence comes before any essence—or, if you will, that we must begin from the subjective.”

Heidegger, in his critique of Sartre, writes:

Sartre's main point about the priority of existentia over essentia justifies the word `Existentialism' as a suitable name for this philosophy. But the main point of "Existentialism" has not the least bit in common
with the sentence from Being and Time cited earlier: "The `essence' of existence lies in its life."

https://cah.ucf.edu/fpr/article/why-heidegger-is-not-an-existentialist-interpreting-authenticity-and-historicity-in-being-and-time/

As for me personally? I don't think of myself in terms of gender. I'm the sex that I am. That's it. — Philosophim

I wasn’t talking about sex. I had in mind memories of growing up feeling different and alienated from most of my male classmates, as well as my father, brothers and cousins, on the basis of behaviors and comportments that I believe I was born with, that I didn’t fully understand or know how to articulate. And not overcoming this outsider status until I found a gay community within which I could see myself as normal. I saw many aspects of myself in members of this community. There was the joy of mutual recognition, the relief that behaviors and dispositions that I thought were utterly unique to me were shared by many others in that community. The experiences of those on the Asperger’s/Autism spectrum who found their way to a community of shared disposition remind me of my own experience.

It sounds like you have never had to think about yourself in terms of gender because your gender behavior never stood out from your peers. I notice you haven’t said anything about the studies associating gender with functional brain organization, like that mentioned earlier in this thread by @wonder1:

A recent paper suggests that it is deeper than culture:

Deep learning models reveal replicable, generalizable, and behaviorally relevant sex differences in human functional brain organization

Significance
Sex is an important biological factor that influences human behavior, impacting brain function and the manifestation of psychiatric and neurological disorders. However, previous research on how brain organization differs between males and females has been inconclusive. Leveraging recent advances in artificial intelligence and large multicohort fMRI (functional MRI) datasets, we identify highly replicable, generalizable, and behaviorally relevant sex differences in human functional brain organization localized to the default mode network, striatum, and limbic network. Our findings advance the understanding of sex-related differences in brain function and behavior. More generally, our approach provides AI–based tools for probing robust, generalizable, and interpretable neurobiological measures of sex differences in psychiatric and neurological disorders.

To me, the transgender/transexual community is finding its footing in its desire to be accepted by society, as well as accept itself. As such it is at an extremely immature stage of rational thinking, and is mostly in a reactive and nascent stage of thought. If it remains this way, it will fail. People do not tolerate such things for long. It needs rational discourse. It needs to refine its language and be more clear in its desires and intents. It needs better arguments. If not, I feel it will cause damage both inside and outside of its community and find itself in a worse position than it started with. — Philosophim

What do you imagine to be the ideal endpoint of rational self-definition within the trans community? In the best of all
possible worlds, how do you see people taking about and performing gender in 50 years? How do you prefer to think about your own gender?

Heidegger and a Buddhist monk. An interview? Of course, there is that famous Der Spiegel interview where he mentions Buddhism, briefly. Where would I find this? — Astrophel

I’ve been reading Heidegger’s Contributions to Philosophy, where he states

Da-sein is the grounding of the truth of beyng. The less that humans are beings, the less that they adhere obstinately to the beings they find themselves to be, all the nearer do they come to being [Sein]. (Not a Buddhism! Just the opposite).

But the basic point is, I take it, that basic arithmetical principles are true in all possible worlds, as the saying has it…If the truth of mathematical statements can be confirmed just by thinking about them, then why not ethical problems, or even religious questions? Why bother with empiricism at all?" — Wayfarer

Are we talking about truths, or a method that is self-confirming by its very nature as method? Don’t mathemarical statements have to be true in all possible worlds by virtue of the fact that the method of ‘same thing, different time’ stipulates the very concept of ‘true in all possible worlds’ as empty repetition of identity? Wittgenstein recognized the truth of mathematics as ‘hinge propositions’ that are true in virtue of being the unquestioned ground of assertions within a language game.

Rorty, of course, we leave behind....and keep. There is no such thing as non propositional knowledge, her says; yet what it is that is to be fit into a proposition is indeterminate. As I see it, the world can once more BE, what it once was, arguably, prior to the bloating of knowledge assumptions that fixate it with such vigor and authority. Standing in the openness of Being is not a philosophical exercise. It is something else. The world is something else, something "tout autre". — Astrophel

If you haven’t ready Lee Braver yet, I think you would really enjoy him. He reads Heidegger through Kierkegaard.

nature only becomes exact, only becomes number, when we turn our attention away from what we actually experience in order to count.
— Joshs

Sure. My contention about number is a simple one: they are real as constituents of reason but not materially existent, and I think that says something important. — Wayfarer

If the concept of number emerged at some point in cultural history , was this a necessary or contingent event. And if it was not necessary, that is, if we could conceive of a different trajectory of culture in which the concept of number did not emerge, can we still say that it is independent of thought?

Truth is made, not discovered.
— Astrophel

Can’t let that go by. I’ll refer back to that quote I mentioned the other day

Frege believed that number is real in the sense that it is quite independent of thought: 'thought content exists independently of thinking "in the same way", he says "that a pencil exists independently of grasping it.”
— Frege on Knowing the Third Realm,Tyler Burge

I see no reason to doubt it. The basic facts of arithmetic and logic are not made up but discerned — Wayfarer

Number is based on ‘same thing , different time’
We look ar may aspect of our word and we see ‘different thing, different time’. How do we get from that to repetition of identity? It’s it just that there is no pure repeated identity in nature, but even in our imaginings of nature. The answer is , from a historical view, we got to it when it became useful to construct the ideality of ‘same thing’, different time’, which didn’t occur all at once, or just in one region of the world. We had to create a rule telling us that when we observed or thought of a multiplicity of things, we should abstract away everything else about the things other than the fact of their being individually noticed by us. This is a very specific concept designed for a specific human purpose. With this rule we now had the concept of pure , empty unit. We arrived at this concept well before it occurred to us that we could impose it back on nature as the ideal of scientific exactitude, forcing nature into categories of unitized things. Thus, we convinced ourselves that nature itself is made of numeric relations, fixed calculable qualities in relations of numeric exactitude. But nature only becomes exact, only becomes number, when we turn our attention away from what we actually experience in order to count.

It is only when we empty the world of everything natural that we locate the context-free abstraction of ‘same thing, different time’. Number is the very essence of thought in its most stripped down functioning, as associative synthesis. Frege believes that number refers to a concept in the world , but Husserl argued the opposite:

…the number relates, not to the concept of the enumerated objects, but rather to their totality . Its relationship to the generic concept of the enumerated is simply the following: If we count a group of homogeneous objects, e.g., A, A and A, we at the outset abstract from the intrinsic nature of their contents, thus also from the fact that they are of the genus A. We form the totality form one, one and one, and subsequently note that "one" in this case is to have the signification "one A " Thus, it is only after the enumeration, which as such is totally indifferent to the circumstance that the objects are A's, that the generic concept links up with the number as a defining factor. It determines the unit, i.e., the representation of the "something" enumerated, which is at first void of content, as a something falling under the concept A. The relationship between number and the generic concept of the enumerated is thus in a certain manner the opposite of what Herbart and Frege maintained. The number does not say something about the concept of the enumerated, but rather the concept says something about the number.

Also, I really appreciate your thoughts and replies. I can see your viewpoint articulated well and I hope the discussion is enjoyable. :) — Philosophim

:up:

A recent paper suggests that it is deeper than culture:

Deep learning models reveal replicable, generalizable, and behaviorally relevant sex differences in human functional brain organization — wonderer1

I’m actually sympathetic to this argument, but very carefully qualified. Let me ask you , to the extent that you think they’re onto something, would you agree that , since anything biology is capable of , it will do in many ways, it is reasonable to assume that a whole range of intermediate differences in functional brain organization are regularly produced? This would give biological justification not only for binary differences in gender behavior , but also for gay and transgender identities. Of course, all this would be intertwined in complex ways with culture.

but is it any more relevant and useful than inserting skin color into the conversation of a mixed group?
— Joshs

Oh, yes, obviously. Men and women have on average very different experiences of hte world, even if you can conceptualise a socially equal 'treatment'. Though, we're definitely going to be differing on the extent to which we have moved toward that goal — AmadeusD

. I think it is not reasonable to think males/females or in typical parlance 'men and women' are the same, or that they would be the same in any circumstances. They are biologically different, on average, in significant ways and require different things from the world, and provide different things to the world. That this is the case seems inarguable to me, and so attempting to minize the aspects that make people what they are seems odd to me, and counter to reality. Knowing whether someone is female will alter the way i speak with them, in light of what I can assume their experience has been in a world where females, on average, experience certain positives and certain negatives and male, a differing (and, obviously - though again, we'll disagree in degree - disproportionate) set of those. — AmadeusD

I assume by biological differences between men and women you’re not referring to feminization of brain connections producing characteristic gender-related behaviors from birth. Rather, I take it the differences you have in mind are socially imposed due to women’s capacity for childbirth, their size and strength relative to the average man , etc.

So you think the use of he and she in everyday conversation, and the gendered grammar of many languages, arose due to their different social roles based on bodily differences? I think they arose just as much because of a belief shared by many cultures in history that women were mentally inferior to men, that they were biologically programmed to be too emotional, to have limited intelligence, to act in childlike ways , to not be responsible or capable enough to study religious texts, go to school, get a job or vote. I don’t think we perpetuate the ubiquitous use of he and she pronouns simply because of differences in life experiences between men and women

As noted earlier, this is pretty silly. You're describing the function of names. People are allowed to choose their own names — AmadeusD

What is it about ‘he’ and ‘she’ that make it important to use these terms in everyday conversation? If you are in a room with 5 white people and 5 black people, most likely none of the conversation will include terms that refer to skin color. Why not? Because skin color is not considered relevant or useful to what we need to be reminded about each other in the interchange. But such a conversation will be littered with he and she, his and her if it is a group of 5 men and 5 women. This is certainly a matter of habit, built into our language use, but is it any more relevant and useful than inserting skin color into the conversation of a mixed group? Can you see that the origin of the everyday use of he and she goes back to eras when there was a sharp difference in roles between men and women? Of you think it’s silly for individuals to invent their own roles, is it any less silly for an entire culture to impose binary roles?

Being transgendered by definition, is committing actions associated with the cultural expectations of the other sex, and not your sex. You do not own gender. Culture does. Gender is not genetic. You can be a girly boy or a manly man. Neither is gender. You can like painting your nails or not as a man. That is not gender. Gender is culture's expectation of how you should act based on your sex. — Philosophim

Do you think that the umbrella of transgender can include within it a notion of gender ( genderqueer) not tied to any knowledge of biological sex? For instance, those who believe that everyone has their own unique gender, just as everyone has their own personality dispositions, and that biological sex is not relevant to this fact.

1. You aren't disregarding the old words to make a new word, you are using the same word. We're still using 'him' and 'her'. This would be like me still continuing to use negro but saying, "Yeah, but it doesn't mean slave or black anymore, don't think that way."

2. The disregard for negro was to regard what was offensive or oppressive. There is nothing offensive or oppressive about the part that pronouns were used primarily to identify sex. — Philosophim

I haven’t mentioned the move to discard black in favor of African American. What was behind this initiative? The concern was that black, in referring to a biological feature common to certain people , associated that group with the concept of race. Race is no longer considered by geneticists to be a coherent scientific notion, and has been used mainly to discriminate against individuals. It wasthought that African, on the other hand, would direct one toward a cultural rather than biological identification, just as indigenous or native peoples accomplishes relative to ‘Indian’. African American has not replaced black the way that black replaced negro and colored, partly because an increasing percentage of blacks in America were not born there, and partly because the term black was redefined away from its racial connotation in favor of culture and ethnicity.

The term ‘person of color’ achieves something similar but in a more inclusive way. It’s important to note that built into the embrace of blackness as a term is that it includes within its meaning the sense of being a minority in danger of marginalization. In other words, it is considered important that a word which distinguishes one group from others on the basis of the particular surface indicator of skin color should be used not only as a banner of pride but of continuing struggle for acceptance.

This strategy to knowingly keep using a term that in part connotes marginalization is seen in the embrace of the word ‘queer’. It has built into its sense both the recognition that certain groups have been considered as freaks, perverts or pathological by the dominant culture, and that these groups are turning that meaning into a positive by celebrating their non-conformity. By contrast , the term homosexual has been rejected because it is considered to be hopelessly compromised by years of medicalized pathologizing of gays.

You have argued that black means the same thing as negro or colored; they all refer to skin color. But the fact is all these words mean different things in different contexts for different people. What is relevant here is that there were predominant meanings associated with some of them that were damaging to the group they weren’t being applied to. The terms colored and negro weren’t phased out slowly, but all at once. In 1967 in the U.S. one could find the word negro used in almost all publications. In 1968 they all but vanished in favor of the new term ‘black’. Did black mean ‘skin color’ in 1968? It certainly could be used this way, but its emergence was associated with bold messaging such as ‘black is beautiful’ and ‘black power’. Beauty and power are concepts that were not generally associated with negro and colored. Blackness was designed to be as much a cultural as a physical concept, reflecting the rapid and dramatic changes in attitude that took place in the 1960’s.

Can we equate ‘he’ and ‘she’ with the damaging cultural stereotyping associated with colored and negro? Many women would say yes. But what evidence do we have that cultural stereotypes are ingrained within the word ‘she’ that have affected women on a day to day basis? For starters, applying for a bank loan, mortgage, credit card or job was a very different experience for a woman than for a man. But one might ask, is there a way to change attitudes about femaleness without eliminating she? Can’t we ameliorate the imbalance by substituting ‘humankind’ for ‘mankind’, and using the word she as often as he in generic descriptions? Or perhaps put an asterisk or something after the word she to catalyze the kind of shift in cultural presuppositions that swapping negro for black aimed for? Of course, it would require more than this to bring our language up to date with our cultural attitudes. Why do we refer to certain inanimate objects, like a ship, as ‘she’? Is it because a boat looks like a vagina, or because we apply a certain cultural notion of femininity to things? And what do we do about languages that use grammatical gender? Do such languages not color the whole world in terms of anti-feminine bias?

So far I’ve been arguing that harmful cultural prejudices make their way so frequently into what we mean when we use a word like ‘negro’ or ‘she’ that the groups affected by these uses felt it necessary to call attention to such uses by playing with the language. Your concern has been that, however we decide to re-educate ourselves concerning the detrimental cultural aspects, we must protect those words that provide a clear meaning of physical and biological differences. “Blackness” allows us to have our cake and eat it , too, by changing attitudes without getting rid of the physical meaning. But eliminating words that refer to the biological sex binary would seem to block access to such clarity.

But how many of the occasions when we reflexivity use the word ‘she’ involve a need to know the biology of the person we are dealing with? When we describe someone as being a black person, it may be a description that helps us and others to identify them, just as clothing and hair color, height and weight. But in social interactions we don’t insert the world ‘black’ into every sentence because it isn’t relevant anymore. (not that long ago, pronouns such as ‘Massah’ were used to different blacks from whites in a room). And yet , he and she are built into all social interchanges. I suggest the reason for this is our tacit belief that our cultural assumptions concerning the roles and behaviors of maleness and femaleness of those we are interacting with is relevant.

And perhaps it is. That is, sharply defined , binary differences in role and behavior were the way that so many of us lived our lives for long that we really didnt have the concept of alternative genders. They didnt exist because we weren’t ready to think of ourselves in such multidimensional ways yet. For older and more conservative people , that is still the case in their social circles .They don’t have a need for language that expresses gender fluidity when there is very little of it in their own circles. But for a younger , more progressive population, the old, simple gender categories seem artificial and constraining, since they no longer think or act in terms of these roles. So ‘he’ and ‘she’ need not be used in social interchange. And when there is a need to refer to biological sex differences, which is relatively infrequent, there are plenty of ways to do it. Some may accept a biological binary, some may not. For those that do, they can simply refer to it directly, leaving out all gender implications.

In sum, it seems to me that , on the one hand , you’re advocating for a split between cultural gender concepts and words pertaining to biological sex. But on the other hand, you’re in favor of elevating what should be an infrequently used, technical vocabulary (sexed plumbing and genes) to the status of everyday usage in all social conversations (he and she). It seems to me you confuse the fact that our culture has traditionally communicated this way with the reason they have done so. If you really want to keep biological and cultural ethnic or gender terms separate, then there is no earthly reason to force ‘blackness’, ‘he’ and ‘she’ into conversations where they are largely irrelevant, and that means most social conversations.

Slavery. A difference of use that was so controversial an entire war was fought over it because negro was synomyous with 'inferior person'. But pronouns don't have an objective abuse like this. Further, the color change had the same underlying meaning it was trying to get to, "that they had black skin". The idea that pronouns change to gender defies the entire purpose of the underlying word, which is to describe sex. — Philosophim

And one could argue the purpose of the word negro was to describe color of skin. But it was likely never simply a neutral label, because it was shaped right from the start by the cultural context of its use, just as pronouns were never purely about biological sex. The modern scientific concept of sex didnt even exist until recently. Tracing the etymological history of male-female pronouns through different cultures would produce in every case meaning in which whatever ‘natural’ sense of the binary was hopelessly and inextricably entangled with cultural understanding of gender roles.

Society is not obligated to view you how you view yourself. This is what a child does. "I'm strong!" "No you're not" *Child gets mad and storms off* Part of maturing is realizing that you exist in society and other people see you differently than you see yourself. Part of existing in society is learning how to get others to see you the way you want, which requires effort on your part. No one is every obligated to see you as you see yourself simply because you tell them they should.

If I want others to see me as strong, I need to lift heavy weights. If I want others to see me as kind, I'ld better act kind. Even then, people will have their own opinions. "Nah, they're not that strong, that's just 120 pounds" "Kind? All they did was listen to another person's problems, that's basic." — Philosophim

You want to be careful here , because look how easily we could insert the word ‘negro’ into your account. In fact , conservatives like William F . Buckley used a justification not unlike your argument for not supporting the civil rights movement. Society was supposedly not ready for such changes. The burden was upon the negroes to convince the larger population of the need for the changes they advocated. I agree that whether one’s cause is worthy ultimately will be decided not simply by our own desires but by convincing others. And I would argue that this is precisely what we are now seeing across Western cultures. Advocates have put enormous effort and passion into changing minds, and as a result today’s culture, especially the young, are showing a desire to change their vocabulary.

To be clear, being transgender does not mean you've changed your sex. You have not become, "Something else". You are simply dressing, acting, or behaving in a way that a particular culture expects people of a particular sex to do. If I'm a male that likes putting on nail extenders and painting them hot pink, I'm still a male. The action I'm doing is transgender, as normative American culture expects that only women do this. — Philosophim

This isnt quite accurate. ‘Trans’ isn’t simply slot ratting within an already defined and culturally familiar binary. It can mean ‘transcend’ as well as ‘transition between’. It can just as well be true that a transgender perceives themselves to be acting in a way that defies all gender expectations of a culture. Not because they are acting like either a male or a female , or some combination thereof, but because their gender is idiosyncratic and outside of the familiar categories.

Since different cultures have different ideas of gender, it is not rational for pronouns to be used to match culture, to keep their clarity. — Philosophim

Why do you think it has become important for those advocating for changes in the way society thinks about gender to alter the traditional association of pronouns with plumbing? Isnt it because they believe that the use of these pronouns has evolved in most cultures to associate maleness with power and privilege not accorded to femaleness? You may believe that these pronouns only refer to plumbing, but centuries of self-justifying oppression against a group that is categorized on basis of plumbing shows that most have not understood the relation between plumbing and gender roles the way you do. So how do we define what it means for the meaning of a word to be used accurately?

The etymological history of language shows that the meaning of words continually shifts over time. Shouldn’t accuracy of words be defined on the basis of the dominant way they are actually understood by a culture, rather than by recourse to categorization based on a presumed authority ( such as biological plumbing) that the culture is not paying attention to? Why was the word negro changed to black? After all, one could argue that it is merely a translation of the French word for black into English. But those who advocated for a change knew that this is not how negro was understood by the dominant culture of the U.S. in the mid 20th century. The word black was chosen as a more accurate verbal representation of a being with equal social status to whites than the word negro symbolized.

Similarly, allowing individuals to chose their preferred pronouns over ‘he’ or ‘she’ is designed to offer a more accurate verbal representation of what they consider as their gender and/or how they want their social status to be perceived. To what extent they succeed in achieving this through their chosen pronoun will vary from person to person, and I’m sure some will try out different variations to see if they achieve the desired response. The ongoing reinvention of gender-related language is a an experiment still in progress. Like all etymological changes that have taken place in history, we will likely go through a number of permutations before society settles down for a time with a consensus on what ‘accurately’ reflects the emerging understanding of the relation between sex, gender, status and power. But I am assuming we will not be returning to ‘he’ and ‘she’ for the same reasons that ‘negro’ is not likely to be making a comeback any time soon.

↪Joshs I love how people are like "Ad hominem" So what, an attack is an attack, it's only fallacious when you're using it like "It rains outside when AmadeusD cries," "AmaduesD Cries a lot," "Therefore it rains a lot."

Not when making a basic observation. — Vaskane

Rationalists have a grab bag of ‘em for all occasions : ad hominem, false equivalence, category error. They whip them out like a crucifix to ward off the idea that the rational is a species of the irrational.

quote="AmadeusD;888011"]↪Joshs your ad hominem is duly noted[/quote]

But from one hominem to another, I have a point, no? Did you form your opinion by reading Foucault’s texts or listening to your prof? Btw, what do you think of Thomas Kuhn’s view of how science works?

[

Foucault was and remains risible — AmadeusD

He must remain risible for you in order for you to maintain your way of understanding the basis of scientific fact.

consider Wittgenstein's example re persuasion. IIRC, the king who has been told the world was created when he was born fifty years ago isn't described as being from some radically different culture or speaking a different language. His difference with Wittgenstein lies precisely in his having been told the world was created at his birth, making the problem individually situated.

But Wittgenstein doesn't describe a process whereby any such disconnects must be solved by some sort of purely affective maneuver. What the case highlights is the way justification hangs together, not that justification is some sort of unanalyzable primitive. Rather, PI basically sidesteps and ignores the issues of how practices arise. Yet presumably they do not spring from the ether uncaused, nor are their causes unknowable. Wittgenstein even provides a narrative of the reasons that the king holds this belief. — Count Timothy von Icarus

It’s not a private situation , but an intersubjective one. We are brought up into, or inherit, our practices, because they are language games, not solipsistic opinions. “ why should not a king be brought up in the belief that the world began with him?” As far as the role of justification and reason with respect to the king’s belief, Witt says

“… if Moore and this king were to meet and discuss, could Moore really prove his belief to be the right one? I do not say that Moore could not convert the king to his view, but it would be a conversion of a special kind; the king would be brought to look at the world in a different way…I did not get my picture of the world by satisfying myself of its correctness; nor do I have it because I am satisfied of its correctness. No: it is the inherited background against which I distinguish between true and false. The propositions describing this world-picture might be part of a kind of mythology. And their role is like that of rules of a game; and the game can be learned purely practically, without learning any explicit rules.”

So how do practices arise? The same way that Kuhn tells us paradigms arise. Via a gestalt shift. We turn the picture upside down, change its sense. This is a different notion of causation than that of empirical reason.

fact remains that the biological sciences are moving away from the male-female binary.
— Joshs

Hmm. I don't think it does. It never really was, either

Bringing in a single speculative quote does not overturn the sex binary.

And in any case, some subset of biologists 'calling into question' something doesnt' represent a trend. I would also posit that in science, trends come and go. So, I hear your point - I think its very weak, and doesn't serve the claim you're making.

In fact, the paper I quoted from disagrees with the non-binary view.
— Joshs

Seems to me, a rather odd conclusion given the claim quoted above. But, neither of us are biologists and I am open to your postion being hte case. I simply see no evidence for it. This type of stuff only turns up in pop sci — AmadeusD

Ok, is this still just ‘pop sci’?

Sex Redefined: The Idea of 2 Sexes Is Overly Simplistic.
Biologists now think there is a larger spectrum than just binary female and male

BEYOND THE BINARY

Biologists may have been building a more nuanced view of sex, but society has yet to catch up.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/sex-redefined-the-idea-of-2-sexes-is-overly-simplistic1/

Or this?

the term “biologic sex” is understood by many to be an outdated term, due to its longstanding history of being used to invalidate the authenticity of trans identities. Although sex is typically misconceptualized as a binary of male (XY) or female (XX), many other chromosomal arrangements, inherent variations in gene expression patterns, and hormone levels exist. Intersex categorizations include variations in chromosomes present, external genitalia, gonads (testes or ovaries), hormone production, hormone responsiveness, and internal reproductive organs. Medical classification of intersex individuals is not always done at birth, as many intersex traits do not become apparent until puberty or later in life. Currently, there are at least 40 known variations that fall into intersex classifications (Carpenter, 2018). Notably, complex biologic variations can occur in everyone, and sex may best be viewed as a spectrum comprised of many traits.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9355551/

The point is that for them to count as reasons, the interlocutor must already share a form of rationality or argu­ment language-game, which in turn cannot be imparted by reasoning on pain of infinite regress.

Sounds like a pretty serious problem for an interpretation of Wittgenstein to have.

Is this supposed to be a communitarian interpretation of Wittgenstein ala Kirpke? I — Count Timothy von Icarus

What you’re seeing here is a particular kind of theological interpretation of Wittgenstein. Braver, like contemporary religious thinkers such as Caputo and Critchley, read Wittgenstein through Kierkegaard and Levinas. They believe that in order to rescue god from idolatry, we must not allow empirical fact to become captured within presuppositions concerning the nature of ontology or reason.

Getting stuck inside the box of language is quite akin to getting stuck inside the box of "mental representations," and I don't know how advocates of our being stuck in either box justify the one over the other. It seems like the same mistake in either case, mistaking the means through which something is grasped for the thing that is grasped. E.g., "we cannot drive a car, we can only push pedals and turn steering wheels; we do not experience the world we can only experience ideas; we do not exercise reason, we can only participate in language-games." — Count Timothy von Icarus

The irony here is that Braver’s reading of Wittgenstein is meant to protect true novelty from being dissolved into subjective schemes of language. He is unhappy with my claim that we can never be truly surprised by anything.

“Lately, I've become interested in these moments of revolutionary experience, when our whole sense of what the world is like gets turned inside out and we are forced to form entirely new concepts to process what is happening. According to what I am calling Transgressive Realism these are the paradigmatic points of contact with a reality unformed by human concepts, when a true beyond touches us, sending shivers through our conceptual schemes, shaking us out of any complacent feeling-at-home.”

His aim would seem to be in accord with your desire to keep the real a radically surprising phenomenon. But he believes this aim is compromised by dictating the terms of what counts as real and true by sneaking into the real a series of assumptions, as Kant does, which claim to be universal and outside of history but are instead a contingent product of a particular historical era.