(b) you apparently insisting that people can't be that different than you are — Terrapin Station

It's not about difference from me though is it? Again, this is an empirical matter. I'm not claiming "I behave this way, therefore everyone else should", I'm claiming that the psychological evidence we have indicates that people behave this way.

I don't buy that there are unconscious mental phenomena period. — Terrapin Station

Really? How do you explain Weiskrantz's 'blindsight' experiments, Tulving's procedural memory experiments, Bargh & Chartrand's work on automatic processing, Brook's work on subliminal image recognition...?

I think if we're talking about what's acceptable in philosophy then one thing I'd rule out is making wildly controversial claims without any evidence simply by saying "I don't buy..."

If you wanted to try to forward an empirical claim that all moral stances of a certain type MUST be based on earlier or intuitive moral stances of another type, whether those other/earlier stances are conscious or not, that would be a near-impossible task . . . and not the least difficulty would arise in trying to plausibly define the types of moral stances to even begin. — Terrapin Station

It's not that complicated at all. We have a pretty clear idea, for example, that the pre-frontal cortex is involved in rational thought (people with damage to certain parts of it find rational thought hard), we know it's not much involved in instinctive responses. So if people engage that part of the brain when making moral decisions, they're thinking about some aspect of it rationally. Much oftthis work has already been done.

Decades of research across multiple disciplines, including behavioral economics, developmental psychology, and social neuroscience, indicate that moral reasoning arises from complex social decision-making and involves both unconscious and deliberate processes which rely on several partially distinct dimensions, including intention understanding, harm aversion, reward and value coding, executive functioning, and rule learning

-The neuroscience of morality and social decision-making, Keith J. Yoder and Jean Decety

M can be any conceivable ethical stance. — Terrapin Station

S can simply feel that either yes, it would be morally acceptable to sue the team in question, or no, it wouldn't be morally acceptable, where S's decision is simply S's intuitive or "gut" feeling, without S's decision resting on some other moral stance that S holds. — Terrapin Station

I disagree with those statements. As I've said, the human brain is a machine, it has limits and a relatively narrow range of normal function. FMri scans done by Eric Corchesne on six month old babies showed activity being processed through the pre-frontal cortex in response to having a toy taken away before they cried. Even a six month old child processes things through the rationalising part of their brain before responding. I've mentioned before the prevailing theory of childhood learning being one of theory testing and rejection.

The majority of the psychological evidence is that if your S is deciding whether to sue without thinking, it is based on previously wired responses from repeatedly following similar patterns, the first examples of which would have been worked out rationally. Its not an honest acceptance of inherent subjectivity, its just lazily relying on rational work done earlier in life without bothering to check it's still valid.

You say that genitalia is ‘hugely important’ for nothing rooms - why? There’s nothing, literally nothing, about language that makes this so. — StreetlightX

It's not the language that makes it so, it's the people using it. Someone using the word 'women' on a toilet door is doing so with the intention that the word use will do something (in this case cause people with non-female genitalia to exclude themselves from the room). He can only reasonably expect the word use to have the desired effect if others respond to it predictably, if they too know what effect it was intended to have.

But the something that people want the word to do varies with context. In the 'women's' section of the clothes shop they don't want it to do the same job as with the toilet door. But years ago they did, that's the progress I'm referring to. Years ago one would be expected to exclude oneself from the 'women's' section of the clothes store on the same grounds as the toilets. Now we have a more nuanced and varied criteria in different circumstances.

What concerns me when I hear, for example, about trans people wanting to change the wording on their birth certificate, wanting to enter the toilet room of their chosen gender etc is that we're losing this variety. 'Woman' no longer means different things in different contexts, it means "the gender role I identify with" in every single context. That's a step backwards in the progress to gender nihilism.

If you or anyone else is so threatened by gender unintelligibility that others must pay the price for your intellectual confusion speaks not to the problems of others, but to problems that are yours and yours alone. — StreetlightX

Are you suggesting that no one but me takes issue with the trans agenda with regards to gender terms? If so, I can refer you to some feminist authors who have similar concerns. If not, then they're not mine and mine alone, are they? So those who must "pay the price" are not a clearly distinguished group. The whole concern here is over who will pay the price and what that price will be.

Ought to add for etiquette, I just wanted to get his response down, and you may or may not care, but I'm only intermittently able to respond further for a while, so if you do have any response, I'm unlikely to respond to it for a few days.

Thanks for the article, it was a very good read. I'm not sure I see in it any significant opposition to what I've been talking about her. I think the author is making a similar point to the one FDrake's made about immigrants lacking representation the moment we are nihilistic about borders. I'm not talking here about representation. Yes the category 'woman' already exists but it has several, not one single function in our society. I get that simply refusing to acknowledge it is not going to undermine those functions which are oppressive. I agree that to do so we must look to the mechanisms and causes.

But there are ways and means to do that which do not involve further re-enforcement of those structures. As I said earlier, the word 'Woman', even just when used as a means of categorisation, a label, already does large number of jobs. there's no need for anyone entering the 'Women's' section of a clothes shop to imagine they have to have female genetalia, the label is categorising a clothing style. Not so for someone entering a 'Women's' changing room. Here clothing style is irrelevant, but genetalia is hugely important. As language users, we don't have any trouble at all with recognising different uses in different contexts. So it is a doomed political strategy to try and unify contexts under one use. A 'man' did not give birth, a 'woman' did. In the context of "giving birth" the relevant distinction is an ovary/womb. That same person might shop in the 'Women's' section of a clothes shop (if that's what they prefer). They might even be accepted into a 'Women's only' safe-space, if the people there are mostly concerned about avoiding testosterone-fuelled behaviour. Appearance, body-shape, behaviour... all different ways of understanding what counts as being a 'woman' in different contexts.

We're seeing people wanting their birth certificates corrected, wanting access to changing rooms, wanting to be referred to by the same gender word at all times. Basically there is a move to base all categorisation contexts on the same nebulous distinguishing criteria and that is to the poverty of language, and a very poor political strategy if undermining oppressive forms of categorisation is the aim. We already have in our lexicon the means by which we can use categorisation terms differently depending on context. That's a good start, that means we can have 'women-only' safe spaces and 'women-only' jobs (women's prison warden, for example) refer to two different means of categorising gender. The moment we accept the discourse that only one means exists (the feelings of the person concerned) and that such a method must be applied in all cases, we lose those markers of progress.

Sure, it's possible to be wrong about them, although basically we have to argue counterfactuals and counterfactual truth values are close to impossible. — Terrapin Station

Indeed, but it's a task that is necessary nonetheless because we can only have one policy as a community. We need to work out, to the best of our ability, which policy that should be. Arguments about the likelihood of counterfactuals is really the only way to inject any consensus building into the process (otherwise it's just might/majority power).

In the cases at hand, it's not an issue of disagreeing over what the consequences would be, but feeling differently about the consequences regarding whether they're acceptable/desirable or not. — Terrapin Station

No, I disagree, and this is the point I'm trying to make. The question of whether you find the consequences acceptable/desirable is itself amenable to further analysis of this kind. why do you find those consequences acceptable/desirable? At some point in time during this questioning process you will come to "I just do", but that reality does not, in itself, constitute an argument that any given question (about acceptability/desirability) is at the point.

With free speech, simply taking as our base for the sake of ease (given a 70+ page thread) the consequences @Benkei has recently listed.

What about defamation?

What about spreading lies about a competitor causing him to lose money?

What about copyright infringement?

What about psychological abuse?

What about leaking military plans causing a lot of deaths?

What about leaking company secrets to competitors causing loss of income?

You do not merely find these consequences acceptable/desirable as a matter of foundational feeling, they are too specific for you to have a gut feeling about, you would be thinking about consequences still. Psychological abuse you've already mentioned, you just happen, foundationally, to think that's fine. You think that exposure would make people tougher, less liable to believe lies. But the feeling that people would be better tougher and less liable to believe lies doesn't just pop into your head either, you're still thinking about the consequences, how much better a society would be if people were tougher and less liable to believe lies.

Ultimately, it always comes down to some vision of utopia (your frequent reference to "if I were king"), but society is like a machine, you cannot simply imagine a car that flies (without any modifications) and claim you're just as right as any other in aiming for it. The laws of physics will constrain your options. Likewise with society, the limitations on what a human can do with their brain constrain the options for your utopia in a very real and empirical sense. They also constrain the options for how to get from here to there.

We may not have all the data on what those constraints are, but it doesn't allow for just any old nonsense to get treated as reasonably as mainstream views.

-- just to add, I'm only very intermittently available for a few days, so I might not get around to responding further for the duration.

In this case, sure, the consequences matter to me. I wouldn't have preferences for things like this where I'm not thinking about practical upshots of them. — Terrapin Station

Right. This is as good a definition as any of what I'm talking about. The consequences matter to you. The consequences of some policy are an empirical question. It is possible to be wrong about them. That is what ethical arguments are about.

Yes, there are complications, probably more than I know (I have only a passing interest in gender issues related to some work I did years back), but it's still my gut feeling until overwhelmingly condradicted. I will have a read of the article, and respond to it properly when I have more time.

Ah, so you're a gender abolitionist then? — StreetlightX

Pretty much, yes. I'd certainly prefer that a woman can act and ask to be treated in any way conceivable without that implying that she belongs to some group which also happens to be the one anyone with a penis is presumed to belong.

I think you're completely over-estimating the role that "I am a woman" or whatever plays in the social process of identifying as any gender. No one would sincerely say "I am a woman" as a statement of their identity solely because of 'private feelings', they would feel a certain way about social relations and social roles which leads them to reject (or embody) the social branding and expectations. — fdrake

The second part of your sentence seems to contradict the first. It reads to me as - they would not do so because of feeling, they would do so because of some way they feel. Which is the same thing.

I'm looking for some publicly available criteria, something people could use to learn how to use the word correctly.

Really, the error in imagining you're having is that you're thinking of these things as 'feelings alone' or 'private feelings'. As if they're not also reactions to public phenomena. — fdrake

Again, a reaction is a feeling is it not? Unless you're talking about the request (number 2 in my options) which I agree is the real reason such a claim is made. But that runs into the problems of an 'appropriate' treatment for women.

I think you've both got the wrong impression of what I'm arguing. I'm not saying that the trans position is to make some kind of private language. I'm saying that the position it claims in response to accusations of gender stereotyping would do if it were true. I'm claiming that the trans agenda is very much at risk of gender stereotyping and its claims to the contrary are incoherent.

And exactly what the fuck do you think those asking to be called women are asking? — StreetlightX

Personally I share the concerns of the feminist argument. I think a significant portion of what they're asking is to be treated like a woman. Which reinforces the idea that there is a treatment appropriate to women, an idea that feminists have spent years trying to break down.

The reason I think this is because the alternative (using the term to correctly identify a private feeling) is so incoherent.

It is no more a label based on a private feeling than the word 'pain' is a label based on a private feeling. And just as we learn to use the word 'pain', we learn to use the word 'woman' or 'man'. — StreetlightX

No. We learn to use the word pain by observing the actions and reactions of people using the word. If we say "I'm in pain" every time we laugh, smile carelessly and skip about with joy, we are using the word incorrectly. Pain has to have external, publicly available signs for us to use it, otherwise it would be impossible to learn. It cannot be a private feeling alone.

Words are not labels — StreetlightX

Of course they are, they're just not only labels. What have I just put on my jar with the word "jam" if not a label? The word "jam" is serving as a label.

Do you have a view that's something like "Either you're born thinking x, or x is necessarily built on foundational moral principles?" — Terrapin Station

"Either 'Based on nothing' or 'principle-based approach'" is a false dichotomy. — Terrapin Station

So what's the alternative? It's like getting blood out of a stone talking to you about this. I'm obviously asking about how you form and change moral views and you're just giving me a list of things it isn't (namely, everything I happen to suggest). So what actually is it, in your view? You're not just born with an opinion on prison sentences, one does not just pop into your head spontaneously, yet you claim that no other principle or objective connects your view on the matter (such that you could be wrong about the logic of that connection). I'm struggling to see any other way in which these very specific policy choices you have come about. They're all very libertarian, for example. But you'd have me believe that libertarian values are not in any way foundational. That the strong libertarian bent to all of your policy preferences is what...coincidence?

Yes, I did say that I don't imagine a single purpose behind "I am a man", what I'm asking is why, in some contexts, the correct response could not be "no you're not". Maybe you're thinking that would be OK, in which case we don't disagree, but my personal experience of talking about trans issues is that such a response is never OK, meaning context is removed, gender becomes one thing and one thing only and that is the expression of the private feeling of an individual. I don't take that to be coherent, for the same reasons Wittgenstein gives (in spite of StreetlightX's whiney protestations to the contrary).

The 'community of language users' could all die in a fire and so long as a use is able to be learned in principle — StreetlightX

So, with a use where 'woman' is a label based on a private feeling, how is anyone able to learn it's use in principle?

What I'm guessing you mean is that the information about each person which is used to label them with a gender is done 'publicly', so it's something which has a social-behavioural-biological component which everyone has access to. — fdrake

Yes, that is pretty much what I think.

So when someone says they feel like a different gender, I imagine you imagine that they're taking their feeling 'I'm not this gender, I'm that one', and they're trying to put this feeling through the sorting machine above, and voila they're now whatever gender they desired as a result of their feelings. IE, their feelings suffice for the correct application of the identity label. — fdrake

I personally doubt there's a single thing a person would be expecting the labelling act to achieve. The point is, I can't see anyone committing a speech act without the intention to achieve something. Like with the toilet attendant, the women's group, the shop... They're all using the term 'woman' to do some job and if it fails to do that job we might reasonably say they've used the word incorrectly. It does its job by the response of others who know what the intended response is.

I say "duck!", you duck. I say "I'm a woman/man", you... what? The options seem to be

1) do nothing whatsoever - the word seems no more than a name, certainly not the intent behind "man gives birth".

2) treat me like a woman - the concern of the feminists, that there is a consistent thing that is 'like a woman'.

3) treat me only like a woman so far as the context seems to specify - genetalia for toilets, perhaps looks for the women's group, clothing preferences for the shop... With none of these being right or wrong, only contextual.

So unless you can think of a fourth response, I think 3 is the better. Which means "man gives birth" (and other attempts to solidify identity choices) is a stupid headline because the only reason it would be newsworthy is in the biological context which is the one context in which its incorrect to label the person concerned a 'man'

That's all understood, but it's just lazy writing on my part, not anything which undermines the position I'm taking. Something being a private language and therefore being meaningless is not materially different in implication here in this context from something that would be a private language if it were as it is claimed to be, and therefore cannot be so.

I'm happy to take a slapped wrist for sloppy writing, but I don't agree that it "badly misrepresents" the private language argument. The point is the much same. Wittgenstein was not claiming it was somehow physically impossible to attempt to use a word by what one imagines to be a private rule. In fact he gives an example of exactly that. The point is that it wouldn't function, not that one couldn't try.

If people are using a word, they must expect that it has a public meaning, otherwise the use is incoherent. That's the point I'm making. If someone uses a word to define themselves by criteria to which only they are privy, it is no different from Wittgenstein's example of sensation recording.

I'd also appreciate it if you would consider commenting me in when criticising my posts, I appreciate the opportunity to respond.

"We could do or allow x versus not doing/not allowing x. Which option do I prefer? Which do I think is okay/not okay to do to other people?" — Terrapin Station

OK, so what I'm asking, with reference to the above, is whether it's your view that these preferences and limits (what is/isn't OK) just pop into your head without any consideration. Were you born thinking that way, have you ever changed your mind about them (if so what was the experience like of suddenly finding yourself feeling differently about what it is OK to do to others without having given the matter any thought).

Are no ethical stances based on anything, or just some/most of them? Your views on the ethics of taxation, for example. Do they just pop into your head without any prior consideration, or are matters with complicated consequences an exception?

You realise that this approach would be extremely exceptional. Most people give some thought to their ethical positions with reference to broader duties or objectives.

Can you describe how this works to me? Like, give me an example — fdrake

So, if someone puts a sign on a toilet door which says 'women only' they're intending that it has a certain effect on the world. Probably, in this case, that it eliminates anyone with male genetalia. If I create a 'women only' safe space, the effect I'm looking for might be slightly different, but ultimately, it is still to eliminate some sub-group with a good degree of predictability. When a shop has a section labelled 'women's clothing' it's aiming to help those people looking for a certain style of clothing to find what they're after.

All of these different uses rely absolutely on public meanings of the word.

If the toilet attendant intended to eliminate people with female genetalia we would say he'd used the wrong word, if the clothes shop intended to direct people to the trousers and three-piece suits, we'd say they'd used the wrong word.

We'd say this because the word would not carry out the function they intended for it. It would fail to carry out that function because it was being used contrary to the expectations of the other language users.

it's a simple fact that if we were to try to control everything that every single person doesn't care for--control it to try to get rid of the things they don't care for--it would be impossible — Terrapin Station

Yes, but you're using this fact to justify a position about harms. The original position about harms was not all harms, so it is a logical error to raise, in support of it, the impossibility of some act to eliminate all harms. The fact that it would be impossible to eliminate all harms as no bearing on whether people should suffer some harms.

I'm just explaining that it's why I don't use something so broad as "caring about the welfare of others" as a basis for any moral stance. — Terrapin Station

But it does not explain it if its not a moral stance. Saying we should not do X because X is impossible is not a moral stance, I'm asking you about your moral stances. Could you give me an example of something you think of as a moral stance you hold, so that I might explain what I mean with reference to it.

That's based on the fact that anyone could find anything conceivable not to their liking, and it would be impossible to control/put sanctions on everything everyone had a problem with — Terrapin Station

Right. Which is an empirical claim and so subject to counter-argument. Have you conducted or read a survey of "everything people don't like" to see how many different things there would actually turn out to be? It also contains a logical claim (a known fallacy in fact) that a direction on a scale includes all points of that scale (slippery slope fallacy). There's no logical link between legislating against some perceived harms and legislating against all perceived harms.

Plus, why would that be a moral normative at all? If your argument genuinely is that we should make/allow people to suffer a bit simply because it would be impossible to not, then where's the normative? It's just impossible. It's not a moral normative to say we shouldnt fly, we just can't.

What form of life underpins the uses of the word 'woman', 'man', 'gender' etc? Come on, words are never just words alone. We have the benefit of a social background to look at here. — fdrake

As I've already said, I'm focusing on the use of those words to assign to categories, to label. Of course those same words could be used in other contexts to do any number of other jobs, but I'm not talking about those. So the form of life would be that of assigning people in our community to sub-groups. The purpose of such assignation varies wildly and I couldn't possibly list them all here.

I'm not sure how this links to the issue of private language?

For example, I think that people should often enough be potentially subject to, and should often enough subject themselves to, things that they do not like, things that they would rather were different, etc. — Terrapin Station

So your claim is what? You were just born that way? This feeling just popped into your head one day? Because I think the same as you, but I quite clearly think it because toughness is a virtue which I have good reason to believe will lead to a society of people better off than otherwise. Ie we still get down to the vague notion of a 'better' society.

Are you really claiming that this idea of being subjected to small hardships being a good thing is not itself based on the idea that doing so might achieve some other objective, it just appeared in your mind unbidden and without further consideration?

It's kind of patronizing to think that someone has the view they have due to probably not thinking about the consequences of it. Rather, they probably would disagree with you whether the consequences are acceptable or even desirable. — Terrapin Station

I don't think it's patronising at all. Maybe if the consequences were really simple, but they rarely are. People think differently, with different focuses, it's not unreasonable to make use of that mileau, to check one's own thoughts.

Was your position in this part of the discussion based on whether you think there was a contradiction? — Terrapin Station

Yes. Put (very) simply I believe that you cannot rationally hold an absolutist position about free speech, and also a concern for the welfare of those around you without contradiction. I merely presumed you had the latter, without asking, and so holding the former would be a contradiction.

The reasoning behind thinking that those two positions are rationally contradictory is not immediately obvious, so it seemed reasonable that it might well be something I had stumbled across which you may not have done.

We agree that there is no such thing as correct when it comes to purely ethical statements. "One should do A", and "one should strive for B" are two such statements. But "one should do A because it causes B, which one should strive for" is an ethical statement but one which does admit of 'right/wrong' judgements because it contains within it a hidden empirical claim (A causes B). Likewise the opposite would be true (with the empirical claim being that A does not cause B).

I think that the vast majority of ethical normative statements, including the ones you've forwarded here, are of the above form (including logical, as well as empirical claims), and thus open to rational counter-argument.

Do let's continue this as my favorite sidebar though: discussing how to discuss things, with an emphasis on criticism of how I discuss things, as if that's going to lead to me discussing things any differently than I do. — Terrapin Station

On the contrary, I enjoy the way you discuss things and would have no interest in causing you to discuss them any differently. What we're discussing here is the way you discuss the way you discuss things. You missed a meta-level out. We were merely discussing the discussion, pages back. That's old hat. We're now well into discussing the discussion about the discussion.

Although, my current post is obviously the first in discussing the discussion about discussing the discussion.

So perhaps we should stop there?

I guess what grinds my gears here is that trans people have commonalities of experience, as do men and women, so do non-binaries. You can do sociology, anthropology, psychology and medicine on this topic. If discourse on gender and the self reports/gender identifying processes of people were so lacking fixity, like the arbitrariness you suggest in:

I'm saying that it makes no sense for them to have a private view as to what referent the gender words are used to pick out.


I'd think the world would look a lot different. If gender identification actually worked like what W criticises in the private language argument; there could be no articulable commonalities. And there are. — fdrake

That's exactly the problem. The moment there are commonalities attached to the term 'woman' there are expectations created as criteria for the use of that word. There has to be otherwise using the word becomes meaningless as per the private language argument. so if there are 'commonalities' between all the trans people who were born male but feel like a 'woman', if those commonalities are what make their use of the term 'woman' correct among their community of language users, then what is to be made of someone born with female genitalia, who themselves does not chare those commonalities? They are no longer correct in defining themselves as a 'woman' because the term is 'correctly' used to define the commonalities you describe (though I'm at a loss to know what they might be).

Again, you're arguing against something of a straw man and I'm having to repeat myself a quite unreasonable number of times here such that I starting to feel there's some disingenuousness to your responses. I am not talking about whether trans people really exist, I'm not talking about whether they have an experience worthy of some term to describe it. I'm talking about the means by which society holds the rule for the correct use of the terms 'woman' and 'man'.

Let me try this for simplicity. In your view, how does a two/three year old begin to learn they way in which to use the term 'woman'? Under what circumstances would a member of their language community say they had used the word wrongly, to describe themselves?

People are labouring under the expectation gender means something other than gender. Gender isn't recognised as itself amongst many people. They think a membership granted by having some other fact. — TheWillowOfDarkness

To start with, 'Gender' is a word. It defines what the language users use it to define. There isn't a thing it is which the whole community must consult before using the term. There's no God-given dictionary we all learnt as children. There is only the thing it is used for. So you're mistaken to suggest there's a thing that 'gender' is that we must find out before using the term. There are just things, we name some of them 'gender'. The things come first, names after. The 'correct' application of the term 'gender' is whatever the community of language users find it useful to use the word for.

So what can the trans person mean in this context? The usual accounts of gender membership don't work. Their identity is opposite or other to other gender asserted in these accounts. Something else has to be found. — TheWillowOfDarkness

Again, you're presuming I'm talking about the trans experience. I'm not denying the trans experience. I'm not denying that people don't feel they fit into the gender roles society assigns them. I'm not denying people feel, they want to belong to a gender other than that which they've been assigned (or perhaps one outside of all the options currently available). None of this is in contention because it is self-evidently the case.

What I'm talking about is language use and language use alone.

I'm talking solely about the meaning of the term 'woman' and the meaning of the term 'man'. To apply terms, there must be some rule as to their 'correct' application. That rule cannot be private, it must be one which is held by society, otherwise the word is meaningless as an assignation in an act of communication. If the meaning of the term 'woman' is held by society to mean anything other than biological appearance, then it creates an imposition to meet those criteria on anyone wanting to claim that term. Hence the feminist issue with trans identity arguments.

one is trans because they have a gender which is other to what is expected under some notion of gender — TheWillowOfDarkness

Absolutely. A fine definition of the word 'trans'. A shame this isn't about the definition of the word 'trans'. It's about the definition of the word 'woman'/'man'.

No idea why you'd think I'd even have a "position" in a discussion, much less one based on whether I think there's a contradiction. — Terrapin Station

Well, the evidence of my own experience, for a start. Ar you telling me you don't have a 'position' in this discussion. That if I did a quick poll now asking "what is Terrapin's position on free speech?" the majority of people reading this thread would answer "we haven't a clue, Terrapin doesn't really seem to have a 'position' on this one"?

If I ran a second poll asking people whether they thought you'd expressed any 'position' on the opposite view regarding whether it was consistent, rational etc, you think I'd get a similar answer - "no, terrapin's not really expressed a view on that one, he seems to be just impartially interested in what they have to say"?

I think it's obvious to anyone that you have a 'position' in this, and any other discussion, and that that 'position' extends to, quite bombastically, pointing out what you think are flaws in the opposing arguments. You're kidding yourself if you think you've not let that come through.

The second part you quoted wasn't an automatic assumption. It was a comment made after interacting with you many times.

That you're the sort of person who routinely can't manage things like discerning the difference between an "automatic assumption" and a comment made after interacting with you many times is part of what motivated the second comment. — Terrapin Station

Ah... so there's a number of times after which one is permitted to start judging another person rather than maintain a dispassionate interest in what they have to say? So, going back to my purposes I listed earlier, spotting flaws being one of them in other people's arguments (presumably necessary to judge them moronic, disingenuous etc), after how many posts does that become acceptable, in your view. 72 pages enough?

One of the things that suggests a rule is in play is that mis-identification can happen. It does. Most of the time gender non-conforming teens stop gender non-conforming and do not feel the need to transition. — fdrake

That would still be self-misidentification. The whole point of the private language argument is that correcting oneself (alone) makes the rule meaningless. The community of rule-users has to be able to say that the rule is being incorrectly applied.

'identifying with a gender' isn't a speech act on par with writing down a symbol for a mental sensation, it's a whole social role which is performed; a correlated series of speech acts with bodies and gestures, choices, thinking styles, norms... The image that you have of 'identification' with a gender is very shallow if you think that it resembles writing down a symbol to convey the presence of a sensation in all relevant respects. — fdrake

Indeed, it would be, if that was what I thought, but it isn't. I'm talking solely about the use of gender terms in language, nothing else.

A headline I read in the paper recently was "man gives birth". They had used the term 'man' on the sole basis of the person concerned claiming to feel like one (their private rule) and they were clearly using to term to function as a means of categorisation (otherwise the headline would not even be newsworthy).

I'm not in any sense saying that people do not have a private view as to what gender role they act out. I'm saying that it makes no sense for them to have a private view as to what referent the gender words are used to pick out.

But it completely baffles me how you think gender identity is just what an individual feels, rather than a composition of how someone feels and society's norms... how they identify with them? — fdrake

I don't necessarily. There is a feature of a person which could be something like which social group they "feel" like they belong to. Someone might say, "I feel like I belong, or identify myself as, the societal group labelled 'woman'". They might feasibly say this despite having male genitalia, mixed genitalia, or no genitalia at all. But none of this tells us what the label 'woman' actually refers to. The community of 'woman'-users is the only thing that can tell us that.

Once we accept that, it must follow that someone might say "I feel like I belong to the category 'woman', but the community of language users say back" well, you don't".

Another, simpler aspect of the private language argument is that the rule for applying the word has to be checkable with a community of users, it has to be possible to be wrong about the rule, otherwise it is a private rule.

In what way can the definition of 'woman' being advanced here, be non-privately wrong. Someone must be able to use the word 'woman' (even of themselves) and the language community be able to say "no, you've mis-applied the rule", otherwise it is a private rule. Yet what's being advocated here is that it is impossible for an individual to mis-apply the rule when talking of themselves (yet it is possible to mis-apply the rule when talking of others, which is a whole other problem).

Can you really not talk about how it feels to take a place in a social role? Society? Culture? — fdrake

Talking about it is not the same as using it as a rule to correctly use terms.

UN definitions of gender expression/identity and transgender and sex put you in mind that it's a private language? — fdrake

But 'gender expression', 'transgender' and 'sex' are not the terms I'm suggesting suffer from the private language problem. The categories within them are. It's like everyone agreeing what 'colour' refers to but claiming a private set of criteria for what is 'blue'.

If you can find me a UN definition of 'woman' that satisfies both feminists and trans-women/trans-men, I'll grant there may not be a private language problem. But the moment the word 'woman' is used to describe how a single individual feels, with no external reference at all (associated behaviours such as with 'pain', 'happiness' etc), then I can't see how we escape the private language problems.

I see. The starting point for me was

undocumented immigrants pay taxes — Maw

No emotion, just a bare statement of fact. Hence my confusion about your comment.

So the immigrant's employers would be the ones committing the crime. American citizens. So why deport immigrants for the crimes of their employers?

Thread title versus discussion — frank

Are you just going to reply in clause-less aphorisms all the time?

I think the lesson here is that it only takes one emotion-injector to deflect logic. Emotion always wins. — frank

How is that the lesson? What 'logic' has been defeated here by emotion, I can't work out from your comment how it relates to the post it's in reply to.

In other words, they may be paying some, but not all/not paying the full amount that other's are paying.

In keeping with the theme of using logic, that's why I asked for the statistics, if available. — 3017amen

Exactly. A situation which large corporations and the very wealthy are in too. Anyone who can afford a tax advisor will pay less tax than the equivalent person who cannot. Now you're moving from "not paying any taxes" to "not paying enough taxes", which is an entirely different argument, and one which I very much doubt immigrants will come out on the losing side of.

Surely you're not saying that everyone should pay a fixed amount of tax no matter what they earn? So income tax being related to pay is essential. So those who get paid less, pay less. What happens at zero pay? Zero tax. It's not cheating, its the exact same system by which you pay less tax than Donald Trump.

And a community of transgenders or non-binary people who report conflicts between the cultural norms they're in, their gender expression, the expectations of their bodies, and the words they need to use to describe them... This doesn't count as a linguistic community? — fdrake

Of course it does, just as 'sick' means good among the youth (so I'm reliably informed). But that doesn't make it mean good for every user of the word.

There are commonalities of experience here, shared cultural norms, shared words - just a different embedding in them. — fdrake

No, it's not about experience, we could each 'experience' our own beetle and still be none the wiser about the contents of anyone else's box. For a word to mean something there has to be some use it is put to, the rule for which can be corrected by some community of language users. It's not sufficient to simply have a community of language users all using a word. They could all regularly say "piff", but if each means a different thing by it and each has their own private rule as to where it applies, then they each fall foul of the private language argument, simply being a community isn't enough, the word must have some rule which is held communally too, which means (for words used as classification) the measures must be publicly accessible, they cannot be entirely private.

Sure but many don't. You have the numbers by chance? — 3017amen

I'm only glancing through this conversation, and I suspect what I have to say is what @Maw had in mind anyway, but I'm going to say it because this sort of attitude really pisses me off. We have VAT here in the UK, you have Sales Tax in America. We both have various other levies and duties on goods and services, but apparently if someone doesn't pay any income tax on their salary, they suddenly "don't pay any taxes". Its just a convenient myth to beat the lower classes with, but it gets trotted out too often, so I like to refute it wherever I see it

Unless your immigrants are buying absolutely nothing but tax-free food items or the like, then they definitely do pay taxes, all of them.

Where do you think this dichotomy comes from? Between 'taught and imposed by culture' and 'determined freely by individuals'? — fdrake

Not sure if you're asking how I think it came to be, or what I think it is about those factors which give rise to a dichotomy. Presuming the second, it's about the knowledge drawn on to make the classification.

Ultimately, man, woman, are just words, right? Words can be used correctly or incorrectly and the arbiter of 'correctness' has to be the function of the word (unless you can think of anywhere else 'correctness' could be kept). So, with the aspects of 'man' and 'woman' which refer to gender (there are obviously other uses the same words are put to), they are categorising words, they assign people to groups. So the question of whether they've performed this function 'correctly' has to be one which the language-user community can answer. Otherwise you end up with a private language, which is a nonsense.

I don't assume that something that seems like a contradiction to me both (a) would seem like a contradiction to the person who said it, and (b) is something that the person would think they should avoid (just in case it would seem like a contradiction to them). — Terrapin Station

Granted. But your position in any discussion must surely be based on whether you think there's a contradiction, and whether you think it should be avoided. So your charitable understanding of another's beliefs is noble, but not really relevant. Otherwise, we're back to just saying "oh really" in response to everything.

I don't automatically assume that people are morons who are posting something they just came up with two minutes ago. — Terrapin Station

Seriously, you're either extremely dishonest, extremely moronic, or there's something seriously wrong with you re a mental illness. — Terrapin Station

Glad I manged to make an exception to your general rule...

Your whole position here has not been "really, you think hate speech should be banned, how interesting, tell me more... ", it has from the start been "if you can't show me the exact evidence I count as acceptable, using the rule-making methodology I approve of, you're a moron". I don't mind that approach, I prefer people who have some passion behind their philosophy, but it's disingenuous to paint this 'curious curator of ideas' picture just to support your position here. You're just as passionate about telling everyone what's 'right' as the rest of us.

And here...

If the person can't or won't respond to questions in good faith, then I might change my tune — Terrapin Station

...is where the inevitable judgement comes in. All you've done is renamed it. You don't judge people as being contradictory, you judge them instead, of arguing in 'bad faith', which means what exactly, if not some form of contradiction between things they're saying?