Hey! I've only posted one thing since you were praising my contribution! Caprice! — Isaac

Aye! I can appreciate what you wrote without agreeing with it. < 3

"I'm not here because I'm awaiting a sentence, I'm here because (something to the effect that I'm minimising some neurological loss function defined over my body states)" - and it would be true. — fdrake

Right, right. I used to have this argument with @Isaac, the space of reasons vs the space of causes, that sort of thing. Driving a car isn't just moving your arms and legs in a certain way. Been there done that.

I do tend to stop at some level above surprise minimization, although I think it's fair to keep that in mind. Damasio gets a lot of mileage out of homeostasis. You can use that lowest level as a constraint: if your theory requires something where the cost would outweigh the biological value, it's a non-starter. (Okay, at species level. Individuals get up to all kinds of shit.)

I suppose I assume that to get anything that will look like an explanation to me -- of identity, for instance -- you have to move at least in the direction of biology, so down to the level of mental mechanisms that would produce intuitions about identity, say. But it also makes sense to move up, to take essentially a functionalist stance -- what social purpose could this behavior serve?

Best to do both, right? I worry that there's a little more room for bullshit moving up rather than down. But either way you almost immediately run into these unresolvable differences -- "You're only saying that because you're a lackey of Capital," "But you're only saying that because it makes you feel special and in-the-know." The first is probably an abuse of "because" and what it really means is that by saying that you *become* a lackey of Capital. The latter is too general and would account for any heterodox view I might hold, and so doesn't account for my Marxism.

I think there is a consistent pattern here. Cultural explanations tend to overdetermine individuals, biological to underdetermine them. It's another way to put the point you were making: the farther down you go, the greater the range of behavior accounted for, which is fine, unless you wanted an explanation of *this* behavior. If apo is right, I stop at this specific store, for milk, after work, in order to accelerate the heat death of the universe. That is not an answer to any of the everyday questions I might be asked. (Why *this* store? Why milk? Why after work?) But it is an answer to some question.

I need to work and think some more about the kind of explanations I want, but am I in the neighborhood of your concern here?

I think we're thinking along the same lines except you remembered to mention filtering and I forgot again. — Srap Tasmaner

Ah well. I forget to mention embodiment. I think yours was the lesser oversight.

@fdrake

One thing on my mind is that both the hypothetical explanatory accusations I was considering are functionalist: one points to sociological function, one to psychological.

Functionalist explanations of speech behavior are going to be inherently unsatisfying to some people because they appear to ignore the content, or at the very least to ignore the truth-value of the content. (We had that discussion a long time ago too.)

The other thing is that functionalist explanations are most convincing when there's no competition (why on earth do they do that?) or when existing explanations have a serious flaw. (My example for the latter is Mercier and Sperber's explanation for why reason appears to have defects, the answer being that it doesn't if you recognize what it's actually for.)

And I think some of us see a prima facie case against the currently offered explanations for why someone with the anatomy of one sex would claim to be of the other sex. Some might see no need of an explanation at all, but it needn't be a political issue just, you know, the spirit of inquiry. The explanations on offer seem to depend on (a) ideas about identity or (b) ideas about language. Your objections to (a) and (b) are what provide the opening for a functionalist explanation. But not everyone accepts those objections, so to them you're just offering a competing theory, but on ground functionalism does not find congenial. Your functionalism is just unwelcome.

I need to work and think some more about the kind of explanations I want, but am I in the neighborhood of your concern here? — Srap Tasmaner

Yeah absolutely.

I suppose I assume that to get anything that will look like an explanation to me -- of identity, for instance -- you have to move at least in the direction of biology, so down to the level of mental mechanisms that would produce intuitions about identity, say. But it also makes sense to move up, to take essentially a functionalist stance -- what social purpose could this behavior serve? — Srap Tasmaner

Best to do both, right? — Srap Tasmaner

My intuition is that doing both styles of thought about this should be possible, but that they should constrain each other as you said. If we went so "top down" we started thinking in terms of free will = volitional control = identification, we'd be distorting the space of concepts we're reasoning with to the extent that social learning and psychogenesis as concepts are undermined - free will as undetermined, social mediation as a determination. If we go the other way and climb from "bottom up", all of the social categories we were trying to "climb toward" would dissolve since they're not derivable from, or identical with, their neural-dynamical conditions of actuation. Or as you wrote, there's a tightrope between over and under determination - which in this case is also a tightrope of both spaces of concepts interfacing at all. We'd like to have reasoning about the neural/bodily impinge upon reasoning about the social, and vice versa, just to see what's really going on. The fact that social phenomena are parseable as ex post facto categories of bodily comportments tells us that the two images, of neural bodies and socially organised bodies tells us nothing about either, or their relation.

What I'm arguing, is that because we could, it is not a given. We are not compelled to accept 'identities' as an empirical reality, any more than we are compelled to accept laws as a descriptor of criminality. — Isaac

You may be compelled to accept something like "institution" if you're studying a business, or "law" if you're studying legal codes. If what we're doing is more like studying legal codes, the fact that we can parse the law as ex post facto categorisations of bodily comportments tells us nothing about its content.

If instead the fact that social categories are ex post facto categorisations of bodily comportments lets us discriminate between identities, tells us how their content comes to be, then it'd be useful. Just to gesture to an intersection point, one might be the interface between social mediation of emotion categorisation ("Conceptual Act Theory of Emotion") and the phenomenology of trans embodiment.

Ultimately I'm throwing a "yes, and" at you, Isaac, rather than a pure criticism.

Your functionalism is just unwelcome. — Srap Tasmaner

Yeah! My intervention in your discussion with @Isaac makes no sense unless you're both quibbling on some interface between functionalist theories, I think.

Functionalist explanations of speech behavior are going to be inherently unsatisfying to some people because they appear to ignore the content, or at the very least to ignore the truth-value of the content. (We had that discussion a long time ago too.) — Srap Tasmaner

Aye. I remember. Hopefully we can keep the discussion away from those enormous rabbit holes.

One thing on my mind is that both the hypothetical explanatory accusations I was considering are functionalist: one points to sociological function, one to psychological. — Srap Tasmaner

I do think there's a uniquely fecund opportunity for functionalism here though. If what counts as a mental state of type X is determined solely by an array of behaviour, and there's social mediation of the behaviour, that's already very similar to gender is a performance. Since one comes to count as a gender by a type of functioning - performing a suitable class of behaviour with a given adequacy.

But as you say, if we end up with that "subjective" theory of meaning from before, it gets hard. Though it's certainly less hard when someone lives, works, speaks, looks as the gender they count as - regardless of their natal sex. Since then they function as their identified gender in a broad class of circumstances, and then they really do seem to count as that gender (like catcalling).

If we go the other way and climb from "bottom up", all of the social categories we were trying to "climb toward" would dissolve since they're not derivable from, or identical with, their neural-dynamical conditions of actuation. — fdrake

I get that. It's like Fodor's argument for the ineliminability of the 'special sciences'. (You can't just absorb meteorology into physics.)

On the other hand, my first commitment for 'what we're climbing toward' is "saving the appearances," so I want the bottom-up theory to explain why we hold the usual view, but I don't know that we need to preserve its categories and explanations. It's crucial to Fodor's argument that meteorology is an actual science. That it can't be reduced to physics is not at all the same as saying that pre-scientific ideas about weather and climate would need to be reconstructed for physics to be a threat to them. If those categories are inadequate, we can pass right by.

I'm okay saying that because my interest is almost entirely 'scientific' rather than political, so that's a limitation to my approach.

Your functionalism is just unwelcome.
— Srap Tasmaner

Yeah! — fdrake

Was it clear that the "you" there is @Isaac? (And also that I was again speaking in another voice.) Just checking.

gender is a performance — fdrake

I do still think we end up there, and maybe I like the word "performance" here because once we're this far along even I will have given up disentangling the cultural and the biological.

On the other hand, I'm pretty strongly committed to what I came up with after this, which is that identity, and so gender identity, seems obviously about intuitions. It has all the earmarks. You just know the answer when asked, even if you have trouble explaining it, you might not think about it much otherwise, sometimes the words for expressing it strike you as inadequate, there's confusion about whether you should even have to defend it with reasons, on and on. It's textbook. Your sense of your gender, or your identity more broadly, comes to you as an intuition. Seems obvious to me.

But that doesn't tell you much about where that intuition comes from. Your intuitions about how language works might be innate, but your intuitions about your native language are learned through socialization. We can have socially formed intuitions, and those will be realized in biology, but that doesn't make them biological meaning "innate". So the source and purpose of identity intuitions -- open question for me. @Moliere tells me the self is entirely social (I think), and for the record that strikes me as nuts. As nuts as thinking our ideas about sexuality are entirely cultural. But I don't have a theory to offer about our identity intuitions, and if I did have one it wouldn't be worth much. That's a research program, far as I'm concerned.

Sorry I must have missed your reply earlier, didn't mean to ignore it. — Isaac

No worries.

Yeah... I think that's guilt-based too, though. No one genuinely buys that shit... do they? — Isaac

Yes, and not just yes, but absolutely yes. The reason politicians can get away with saying what looks like obvious bullshit is they know what people like to hear, and that's what wins elections. The reason good union members with a strong foundation in solidarity vote for Republicans is because they can speak to the issues a union member believes are important -- like abortion, gun rights, and God. I always summed up Republican politics in the red states as revolving around God, guns, and babies -- you need God in your life to get you right, you need guns in your life to defeat the bad guys, and if you're going to have sex then you should take care of that baby no matter what.

I wouldn't be surprised if some of it is guilt based. Guilt is an emotion which builds institutions -- it makes people predictable enough that you'll have the numbers you need. Catholicism got by with that for over a millenia, so clearly guilt is an important motivator in building long-lasting institutions.

I just don't think it's going to be a guilt based in Marxism. The starving kids in China, as Mom would say to guilt trip us into eating vegetables, don't seem to have much to do with an individual's life, which is circumscribed by nationalist politics. Especially in the USA, I think people view themselves as having won the lottery by being born here. And if they just work hard enough they can be rich like Elon Musk, and they don't want to pay taxes because they know how to manage their own money on the stock market better, and all the other individualistic nonsense people really do believe.

There might be an underlying guilt for those with the conscience -- but that there's a carrot at the other end where you're in charge of your own destiny, I think, is what distracts from the reality of an industrial society. Plus there are all these reasons to reject Marxism, such as the violence of its political movement which is very real. (and capital's violence is intentionally designed to be easy to overlook, I think)

That's a more charitable way of looking at it that maybe I could adopt. I'm not sure I'm ready to excuse the lack of perspective relative to the major victims (the destitute), but I'm willing to go as far as to see genuine victimhood. — Isaac

That's pretty much where I'm at. If there's somehow, miraculously, a reasonable chance to actually change international conditions I'd sign up. In the meantime there are victims nearby who certainly aren't the destitute, but aren't doing too good either.

We do. So many threads to pull on here, not sure which to follow and which to save for later... — Isaac

Honestly I'm pretty happy with where we've ended up -- if I can complete the reduction to philosophical disagreements then there are future discussions to be had, and I think we agree there at least.

Well, then I'd be wrong! Again, supporting an active inference model of language is probably another thread we could pull on, but it's been combed through on other threads. — Isaac

Heh OK makes sense.

The thing I'm most vexed about is the victim culture, the way that not adhering to this (or any other) scheme is treated as an act of oppression. That I think is dangerous because it undermines attempts to address actual oppression. Most of what I'm doing here is showing that it's not oppressive. It might be old-fashioned, clumsy, but not an act of abuse. — Isaac

I think that makes sense.

For what it's worth, I believe you. I don't think it wise to jump at people for every possible slight. I said earlier on I believe there are some egos that need deflating. I can go that far ,because I don't like self-righteousness when it comes to politicking. It's far too gray to really go full-on into one's own self-righteousness unless one hasn't reflected enough.

But, hey, I was young enough once to have that feeling, too.

Then it what sense is it a 'social' creation, if others play no role in it and are overruled by the individual? That doesn't, on the face of it, sound very social. It sounds entirely private. — Isaac

This is going to get into the conceptual territory I've already admitted I'm uncertain about. But I'll take a stab anyways.

One of the things I like to remind people about Marx who are starting is that his scope is something a new reading is unlikely to be familiar with -- political economy. It's a jump even from standard sociology which tries to find some scientific explanation for phenomena -- it's an attempted scientific explanation for all social phenomena including the genesis of the state. It's a scope wider than countries, because it deals with the economies of countries and their transition from feudalism to capitalism.

The socially constituted subject is at a scope of explanation that doesn't impinge upon conversations except to say something about higher level rules that might explain why we're talking about this or that, but once we get down to the level of identity the scope is different.

But how to differentiate the scopes? Well, that's exactly where I'm stuck. The old question for me is finding the difference between social and psychological entities. I haven't answered it yet.

Was it clear that the "you" there is Isaac? (And also that I was again speaking in another voice.) Just checking. — Srap Tasmaner

I thought you were addressing an arbitrary functionalist, rather than specifically @Isaac.

I get that. It's like Fodor's argument for the ineliminability of the 'special sciences'. (You can't just absorb meteorology into physics.) — Srap Tasmaner

I'm okay saying that because my interest is almost entirely 'scientific' rather than political, so that's a limitation to my approach. — Srap Tasmaner

I'm also okay with saying that. If it turns out that the social categories can be made sense of entirely in terms of the bodily/neural ones, great. If there's a productive point of interface - like I conjectured may exist - great. My only concern is throwing the baby (the social categories) out with the bath water (the neural categories). Which is easy to do when the baby is made largely of water and often behaves accordingly.

I see it as a question of distilling constraints on the social categories from the physical ones - as produced explanada from generative explanans. And that means finding points of interstice to get the constraints out. If we end up saying the social categories don't mean anything, what question are we asking again? Does it make sense to consider any of the distinctions which lead to this line of inquiry, even the law? Mental states? Etc.

I'm not trying to say those things "really" exist either. For the purposes of this comment, I don't care if there really are mental states or identity really is a psychic act of affiliation, just that as a methodological point, saying "there's nothing to be explained" selectively within what is to be explained makes no sense.

A reductive analogy.
Alice: "Do you want ice cream?"
Bob: "I want Pizza"
Alice: "Ice cream is better though"
Bob: "Ice cream can't be better because people don't taste"
Alice: "Oh"
Bob: "Yeah! Pizza time! It's delicious"

The discussion should either melt entirely into uselessness or cling to an interstice of the domains. My reference point here is the manifest and scientific image concept in Sellars. Social stuff is firmly rooted in the manifest image; how the world appears to us, rather than the fundamental entities which are "really" there and generative of this world. The interstice would be how the neural categories lead to the generation of the entities within, or constrain the explanatory styles regarding, the appearance. The mere fact that there's a mismatch of entities and explanatory styles tells us nothing about either image. Even when one of them, the scientific/neurological-bodily one is thought ontologically primary.

It's textbook. Your sense of your gender, or your identity more broadly, comes to you as an intuition. Seems obvious to me. — Srap Tasmaner

I think as a "manifest imagey" conception this makes a lot of sense. The behavioural components of that identity could even be self reports, like asserting "I am a man", speaking as one, and so on. If the mind of the public is changed and asserting honestly that "I am a man" counts you as a man, that would be all the behaviour required. It would even be a public criterion. Since one says "I am a man" honestly.

I also doubt this falls pray to the private language argument, since we could all agree that the sole criterion for being a man, in this sense, is an honest report that one is. Which would even be a correctness condition in terms of behaviour.

It strikes me that my post is a re-rendering of 's here, only transplanted to method rather than ontology. What's the difference between psychological, physical and social explanatory styles? When you use an entity in one, how does it constrain the types of explanations appropriate for a phenomenon it constrains in another?

I've felt in reading along we've been in concert in our thinking, just from different angles. It's been great to read along.

Woke lefties of the internet, unite.

We have nothing to lose but our blockchains.

I thought you were addressing an arbitrary functionalist, rather than specifically Isaac. — fdrake

You might be right. (I wanted to make sure you didn't think it was you, and that it was clear I wasn't saying it but mentioning it.)

My reference point here is the manifest and scientific image concept in Sellars. — fdrake

Yeah I noticed you'd been in that recently.

If we end up saying the social categories don't mean anything, what question are we asking again? — fdrake

There's still behavior to be accounted for, including verbal behavior. One of the key linguistic markers for what region of the US you grew up in is whether you say "stream" or "creek" or "crick" (possibly also "kill" though I think that's preserved more in names than speech). There might be others I'm forgetting. Point being, there's no distinction at all among these, each is a Nash equilibrium, but they do indicate something about your personal history (statistically). On one level, they're equivalent; on another, a key distinction. Denying that they denote distinct types of small river doesn't change the differences in usage patterns.

I'll try to give another answer to this later.

Your sense of your gender, or your identity more broadly, comes to you as an intuition. Seems obvious to me.
— Srap Tasmaner

I think as a "manifest imagey" conception this makes a lot of sense. — fdrake

Dang. It was meant to be scientific.

we could all agree that the sole criterion for being a man, in this sense, is an honest report that one is — fdrake

Ah, now that's a whole different thing. I'm not sure the sort of intuitions I'm talking about could bear that kind of weight, and I wasn't anywhere near proposing that they should.

What's the difference between psychological, physical and social explanatory styles? — fdrake

Hmmm. You left out philosophical. Maybe I'm just excessively interested in psychology at the moment but I don't really want to make this kind of distinction. I think talking about behavior, human or otherwise, requires moving relatively freely up and down these levels. Maybe it's just that I've also recently sworn off boundary policing. Maybe it's that I think finding the right explanation means finding the right level at which to give an explanation.

Maybe it's just that I've also recently sworn off boundary policing. — Srap Tasmaner

I agree in principle. I do think we've got ontological level difficulties here though, so the boundaries seem part of the problem. If explanatory styles get to be superimposed and blurred, great. The rough edges between them can cause issues too.

Maybe it's that I think finding the right explanation means finding the right level at which to give and explanation.

There could be multiple too, I guess.

Dang. It was meant to be scientific. — Srap Tasmaner

Ah. I think in this context intuitions are manifest image.

The scientific image of man-in-the-world is, of course, as much an idealization as the manifest image --even more so, as it is still in the process of coming to be. It will be remembered that the contrast I have in mind is not that between an unscientific conception of man-in-the-world and a scientific one, but between that conception which limits itself to what correlational techniques can tell us about perceptible and introspectible events and that which postulates imperceptible objects and events for the purpose of explaining correlations among perceptibles. It was granted, of course, that in point of historical fact many of the latter correlations were suggested by theories introduced to explain previously established correlations, so that there has been a dialectical interplay between correlational and postulational procedures. (Thus we might not have noticed that litmus paper turns red in acid, until this hypothesis had been suggested by a complex theory relating the absorption and emission of electromagnetic radiation by objects to their chemical composition; yet in principle this familiar correlation could have been, and, indeed, was, discovered before any such theory was developed.) Our contrast then, is between two ideal constructs: (a) the correlational and categorial refinement of the 'original image', which refinement I am calling the manifest image; (b) the image derived from the fruits of postulational theory construction which I am calling the scientific image. — Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man, Sellars

Since the scope of a theory concerning intuitions would concern styles of thinking about "introspectible events".

There are as many scientific images of man as there are sciences which have something to say about man. Thus, there is man as he appears to the theoretical physicist -- a swirl of physical particles, forces, and fields. There is man as he appears to the biochemist, to the physiologist, to the behaviourist, to the social scientist; and all of these images are to be contrasted with man as he appears to himself in sophisticated common sense, the manifest image which even today contains most of what he knows about himself at the properly human level. Thus the conception of the scientific or postulational image is an idealization in the sense that it is a conception of an integration of a manifold of images, each of which is the application to man of a framework of concepts which have a certain autonomy. For each scientific theory is, from the standpoint of methodology, a structure which is built at a different 'place' and by different procedures within the intersubjectively accessible world of perceptible things. Thus 'the' scientific image is a construct from a number of images, each of which is supported by the manifest world. — Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man, Sellars

Though if you were positing an intuition as an explanatory entity - like having intuition X induces entity Y - it might count as part of a scientific image. What type of intuitions are you talking about @Srap Tasmaner?

There's still behavior to be accounted for, including verbal behavior. One of the key linguistic markers for what region of the US you grew up in is whether you say "stream" or "creek" or "crick" (possibly also "kill" though I think that's preserved more in names than speech). There might be others I'm forgetting. Point being, there's no distinction at all among these, each is a Nash equilibrium, but they do indicate something about your personal history (statistically). On one level, they're equivalent; on another, a key distinction. Denying that they denote distinct types of small river doesn't change the differences in usage patterns. — Srap Tasmaner

That's a great example, thanks. If gender were something like a body of water, it would make sense that there could be a structural equivalence in denoting behaviour whose names were occasioned by different events. Though I think we've got a good reason to muddy the water with gender, since the named territory is also statistical-historical. The act of treating something as manly, womanly etc informs what it means to be a man or a woman. The class of denoting events, for creek crick etc, don't do anything to change what counts as a small stream. Or at least, they don't change the size of the stream.

More generally, the classification mechanism of small streams into "creek" or "crick" doesn't modify the behaviour of what is classified over time. Cultural change couldn't stop Tinky Winky from being purple, but they could turn Tinky Qinky into a queer symbol.

What type of intuitions are you talking about Srap Tasmaner? — fdrake

Let's say, the conscious output of unconscious processes of inference (often performed by mental modules that are domain specific). Meant really as a replacement for "belief" which has all the wrong connotations.

And you can test for them. You can do research. The part I'm iffiest on is whether they must be conscious, because I don't see why, but that's just the problem of consciousness, and it seems like they often are. Maybe that's just because in doing research you elicit self reports.

That's a great example, thanks — fdrake

Thank goodness. I wasn't sure at first why that occurred to me.

The act of treating something as manly, womanly etc informs what it means to be a man or a woman. — fdrake

Does it? I mean, you say this, and it fits the usual way we talk about socially constructed whatever, but it's exactly what people are fighting over. The claim is exactly that your treating me as a woman or as a man doesn't make me one, anymore than treating slaves inhumanly made them inhuman. (How's that for a pointed comparison?)

This is exactly the sort of thing that made me wary of picking a level or a style and then crafting an explanation for that framework. You will always be able to do that, but the evidence that doesn't fit might be on another level. I think.

Cultural change couldn't stop Tinky Winky from being purple, but they could turn Tinky Qinky into a queer symbol. — fdrake

I don't actually get the point here. Tinky Winky wearing a frilly tutu can arbitrarily be a queer symbol, or can be one by aligning with our hyper-local conditions, but there's no reason to think this symbolism has any essential connection to queerness beyond that, is there? So in time pointing to Tinky Winky as a queer symbol will seem distinctly peculiar. You'll have to explain when and where and why they were taken as such.

Are you making a comparison between this sort of opportunistic symbolism and a person's gender identity? I don't want to guess.

The explanations on offer seem to depend on (a) ideas about identity or (b) ideas about language. Your objections to (a) and (b) are what provide the opening for a functionalist explanation. But not everyone accepts those objections, so to them you're just offering a competing theory, but on ground functionalism does not find congenial. Your functionalism is just unwelcome. — Srap Tasmaner

That's a fair assessment, but people (here) are still mistaking my intervention here for a prescriptive one where it is intended to be only an allowance.

That my functionalist explanations are unwelcome is clear (to say the least), but that's not the issue. The issue is solely that those other explanations' dependencies, which you highlight above lack the concreteness required to find acts of disagreement with them to be acts of oppression.

I know it was a long time back (in thread-years), but this whole debate stated with ideas about oppression and what oppression looked like. The point at which I intervened.

My argument is not "We are compelled to look at this from a functionalist perspective". My argument is "We are not compelled to agree to such a thing as identity, and therefore denying it is not an act of oppression, it's an act of philosophical disagreement"

Even with something like Marxism, I'm not going to say it taps into some kind of concrete reality the denial of which constitutes an act of abuse. I just think it's broadly right about economics. Where others disagree, it is a disagreement about economics, not an act of oppression.

It's at this ethical level that my objection sits.

You may be compelled to accept something like "institution" if you're studying a business, or "law" if you're studying legal codes. If what we're doing is more like studying legal codes, the fact that we can parse the law as ex post facto categorisations of bodily comportments tells us nothing about its content. — fdrake

I don't actually think so. A perfectly good functionalist account of legal practice could still be given. We could say that when people carry out such-and-such an act, there is a tendency for another group to place some kind of curtailment on their freedom. In fact this explanation works better because it gives a closer account of why some criminals get away with their acts and why sometimes the police do not pursue a prosecution even though a criminal act has been committed. We are not compelled to discuss legal codes, we don't need them as principles and starting from that actually requires a whole load of caveats and addendums to make it fit the reality we experience, we could reduce them to mere mechanisms.

As above, to sustain an accusation of oppression where the concept of truthful identity is denied, it needs to be much more concrete than that.

I'm not trying to say those things "really" exist either. For the purposes of this comment, I don't care if there really are mental states or identity really is a psychic act of affiliation, just that as a methodological point, saying "there's nothing to be explained" selectively within what is to be explained makes no sense. — fdrake

This makes the exact mistake I've outlined above. The aim is not to dissolve social entities by reducing them to their causal parts, it is to show how their concreteness can be called into question - not their assumed reality. I'm quite happy with a conversation which assume the social role 'man' is a reality. what I object to is twofold;

1. That this reality is concrete - it has a truth value the denial of which constitutes an act of oppression - we hear about "denying who the person really is". It is not concrete and disagreements are philosophical, not abuse.

2. Even if we accept these realities, that does not constitute an acceptance of any given theory about their nature. Particularly, in this instance the question of who owns those realities, who has the final word on correctness conditions. accepting that these realities are constructed doesn't deny them, but it does give us cause to question any assumed answers here.

we could all agree that the sole criterion for being a man, in this sense, is an honest report that one is. Which would even be a correctness condition in terms of behaviour. — fdrake

Again - we could. The ethical argument requires that we must. Otherwise there's no act of denial (and so no act of abuse) in mere disagreement about those correctness conditions.

The starving kids in China, as Mom would say to guilt trip us into eating vegetables, don't seem to have much to do with an individual's life, which is circumscribed by nationalist politics. — Moliere

True, but this is a rationalisation isn't it? Why did 'Mom' try the 'starving kids' routine? Was she not expecting the response "well, that has nothing to do with my eating policies, but is the result of far more systemic issues"? Emotionally, the expected result is guilt. All I'm saying is that emotionally that needs a salve. Maybe for some that salve is the insistence that it is a systemic problem divorced from day-to-day decisions, but for others that salve is going to be to say "hey, but I'm a victim too!". The actual felicity of any of those stories isn't the point, it's their function - to ease that uncomfortable feeling you get when you walk past one of the nation's homeless, or you see a painfully thin baby with flies around its eyes on the television. Those images produce guilt (or axon potentials in the anterior middle cingulate cortex with accompanying increase in cortisol and adrenaline and changes in heart rate accompanied by digestive discomfort, depending of your preferred frame!), we need to understand that and do something to make that nasty feeling go away. Physiologically, those feelings are 'designed' specifically to force us to come up with a plan to alleviate them.

That's pretty much where I'm at. If there's somehow, miraculously, a reasonable chance to actually change international conditions I'd sign up. In the meantime there are victims nearby who certainly aren't the destitute, but aren't doing too good either. — Moliere

I'd agree with this but with one huge caveat. There's only one front page and there are things we can do to make it more likely that those with the power to change international conditions are inclined to do so. Those things need some of the oxygen of political discourse, all of which is sucked out at the moment by the minutiae of identity politics.

That, and the fact that solidarity is literally our only weapon and we ought be more precious of it that to descend into tribalism at the slightest hint of dissent in the ranks.

I think that makes sense.

For what it's worth, I believe you. I don't think it wise to jump at people for every possible slight. I said earlier on I believe there are some egos that need deflating. I can go that far ,because I don't like self-righteousness when it comes to politicking. It's far too gray to really go full-on into one's own self-righteousness unless one hasn't reflected enough. — Moliere

Then I think we agree. As I've said in my post above, I'm not here making the argument that we must look at matters like identity from a social constructionist, or functionalist, or even behaviourist perspective, I'm only making the argument that because we can do so, our disagreements are philosophical, not ethical. No one is abusing anyone (not here anyway) and people are not oppressed by the fact the others do not agree with their preferred notion of how identity works.

The old question for me is finding the difference between social and psychological entities. I haven't answered it yet. — Moliere

Nor me.

but there's no reason to think this symbolism has any essential connection to queerness beyond that, is there? So in time pointing to Tinky Winky as a queer symbol will seem distinctly peculiar. You'll have to explain when and where and why they were taken as such.

Are you making a comparison between this sort of opportunistic symbolism and a person's gender identity? I don't want to guess. — Srap Tasmaner

Ah right, sorry. The idea I had was that what counts as a queer icon changed over time because people started classifying Tinky Winky as one, he's now an instance of the class "queer icon" partially because that way of referring to him was popularised.

Analogy - if you took Tinky Winky back in time, Tinky Winky wouldn't be able to be classified as a queer icon because the norms and symbols wouldn't exist, at that point. But if you took the small stream back in time, it's still a present type of entity which could be classified. A stream wouldn't stop being countable as small based on the practices of people, Tinky Winky would stop being countable as queer icon based on that.

Another analogy - like the French flag, it wouldn't stand for France if you took it back 10,000 years. Right now it's one of the ways of denoting France in some contexts.

So in context - I'd responded to the "creek" vs "crick" for small stream as a functional difference analogy you made, and made the point that what's countable as a small stream doesn't change in time. The kind of properties that would make something count as a small stream, at a time, don't go out of existence when people stop collectively behaving in a given way.

Something like a flag, or Tinky Winky being classified as a queer icon, doesn't have this property (I claim), because the existence of the type of thing they count as depends upon the practices of people.

Those practices being classification behaviours - like for France, the flag couldn't stand for France until a rough national boundary was drawn and that area counted as France.

Those images produce guilt (or axon potentials in the anterior middle cingulate cortex with accompanying increase in cortisol and adrenaline and changes in heart rate accompanied by digestive discomfort, depending of your preferred frame!), we need to understand that and do something to make that nasty feeling go away. Physiologically, those feelings are 'designed' specifically to force us to come up with a plan to alleviate them. — Isaac

I think that when we've become inundated in propaganda the guilt starts to fade away. It's just another emotion floating along with the others.

Earlier I posited that a man who is mature is content with his discontentment. I have no desire to let go of my emotions, but I also know when I'm being manipulated. A mature man accepts his emotions, feels them even if they are uncomfortable, even if they are from a source of manipulation. But it's not like I'm going to defer much to a source which basically gut punches the heart, usually to follow up with an ask for a donation to the cause. I know why I feel what I feel, but that doesn't mean the source of the guilt trip is something worth listening to.

And in a society where manipulation is the norm people will develop these defenses to their emotions, which in turn will cause people to make enemies as they begin to lose the desire to offer charity. It's learned callousness so you can get on with life, which is what the grind does is teach you to be selfish and stop caring about the world. It's enough to care for your family, and after that -- for most it's too much to care about. Especially given the uncertainty of it all: it's not like caring about politics is going to lead to good or bad outcomes. Most people feel like they have no power over these things, and so it's back to the hand-to-mouth, paycheck to paycheck. Let the people rich enough to care duke it out, and if you really feel something then go vote.

I'd responded to the "creek" vs "crick" for small stream as a functional difference analogy you made — fdrake

Right, "stream" and "creek" are different words that denote the same things, meaning -- at least in this case, maybe not in all cases -- they also have the same function within people's regional dialects. That function relates regularities in the physical environment to regularities in speech behavior. It's not that functionalism ends up having no role here, because it's functionalism that identifies the equivalence of "stream" and "creek," so functionalism can answer the question "Why do say 'creek'?" but it can't answer the question "Why do you say 'creek' instead of 'stream'?"

Your first point was that gender might not be an observable regularity like a creek, so an object like 'man' might be in part determined by whether people say 'man' of it, and so on, practices, comportment towards, blah blah blah. This would speak to @Isaac's constructivist tendencies, 'man' as off the shelf narrative for making sense of things.

I have deep reservations about that account because there are extremely salient observable differences between people because humans reproduce sexually and always have, just like our ancestors who lacked speech and culture. I think it likely we make almost exactly the same sort of intuitive inferences about the sex of members of our species as other mammals do. The question would be whether those intuitive inferences play a major role in our speech and culture or have they long since been swamped by other factors. Unclear to me, but even infants seem to distinguish male and female early, so I'd count that as evidence the machinery I'd expect to be there is there.

But we're not nearly done with functionalism, because one key question is whether everyone saying "I'm a boy" is even doing the same kind of thing. Such a claim could be overwhelmingly down to the sex-determining mechanism evolution bequeathed you, or it could serve a psychological or a social role. Or all of the above. But even before trying to figure that out -- which looks daunting -- we have to think carefully about where the functional account takes hold and where it doesn't. That is -- and now we're coming back to creeks and streams -- there might be a nice functional account of why you say "I'm a boy" but not of why you say "I'm a boy" instead of "I'm a girl," because that might be just a matter of personal history, like saying "girl" instead of "femme" or "Fraulein", or like saying "creek" instead of "stream".

Sorry that's a lot of words that don't advance any particular claim or the discussion. Just really clarifying for myself as much as anything where I think the discussion stands.

Moliere tells me the self is entirely social (I think), and for the record that strikes me as nuts. As nuts as thinking our ideas about sexuality are entirely cultural. But I don't have a theory to offer about our identity intuitions, and if I did have one it wouldn't be worth much. That's a research program, far as I'm concerned. — Srap Tasmaner

Earlier in the conversation I said to @180 Proof that we should at least be able to, through philosophy, get to the point of saying "needs further research" or at least make clear that the issue is not clear.

So I'm happy with the conclusion that these questions are snowballing into, to be appropriately addressed, what would require a research program.

And you understand me in my thinking that the self is entirely social -- though I hope to make it explicit that this is a philosophical stance. Basically these are the concepts I'd start with in a research program, the conceptual machinery around the question, that sort of thing.

There are some reasons for starting with culture that I'd put forward: feral children and enculturation, and the multiplicity of sexual expressions across cultures suggest that our cultural environment at least influences our performances. Also the cultural lens doesn't make a strong distinction between bodies and who we are, in a way skipping over the mind-body problem (whereas if we wanted a psychological explanation of identity we'd pretty much have to at least address the mind-body problem, which seems to lead us, with our present knowledge, to reject that there even is a self)

Further by starting from culture it opens the conceptual door to theatrical theories -- which I think are very ripe for talking about identity. It's kind of the actor's craft to be able to recreate identities, wear them, perform them convincingly, and step out of them. And if identity just is performance, then what they have to say on this performance might prove fruitful. (also, interesting!)

But -- I'm also happy with the conclusion "needs further research" -- though I'll keep picking at the question, as I do.

Cool.

I'd agree with this but with one huge caveat. There's only one front page and there are things we can do to make it more likely that those with the power to change international conditions are inclined to do so. Those things need some of the oxygen of political discourse, all of which is sucked out at the moment by the minutiae of identity politics.

That, and the fact that solidarity is literally our only weapon and we ought be more precious of it that to descend into tribalism at the slightest hint of dissent in the ranks. — Isaac

My previous post was meant to point out what level of apathy we're really dealing with. And I'd say it's even a rational apathy -- it's only the people who are in positions of power that care if they get enough votes or people out because that's their job. That's how they make money. For the rest? That's an extra effort. (which is a way of saying the professional organizer, contra Lenin, can never be a genuine organizer: payment changes the relationship enough to matter)

My own approach doesn't focus on the front-page, because I know that the front-page is propaganda. The people in charge, at least in the United States, are motivated by things other than the vote -- you can buy votes through propaganda. Election season is just an inconvenient time when you have to lie and say things that people want to hear so you can get back to the real business of governing.

Solidarity is our only weapon, I agree. But we're a bit defenseless at the moment. Thems who own are good areat breaking us apart -- and really I think that given how trans issues have been a historical reality for much longer than in the past few years when they came to prominence, my thought is that the propaganda machine selected for the most controversial issue on the basis of engagement -- and it just happened to be the one.

Then I think we agree. As I've said in my post above, I'm not here making the argument that we must look at matters like identity from a social constructionist, or functionalist, or even behaviourist perspective, I'm only making the argument that because we can do so, our disagreements are philosophical, not ethical. No one is abusing anyone (not here anyway) and people are not oppressed by the fact the others do not agree with their preferred notion of how identity works. — Isaac

I think we're close enough for meaningful discussion :)

I think there's more to the public discussions than the philosophic or scientific basis of inference, though. But philosophically I think our prime disagreement is on whether or not standpoints are worthwhile, and if so when they are.

my thought is that the propaganda machine selected for the most controversial issue on the basis of engagement -- and it just happened to be the one. — Moliere

I agree, but where we perhaps get our different assessments from is in the extent to which the movements (and their accompanying agendas, and small 'p' philosophies) pre-existed that propaganda.

I generally, as will have become very clear by now, look at most behaviour through the lens of social dynamics, and that tends to mean that the propaganda-created tribes are already part of the social narrative that those involved then have to work with (the now infamous 'public shelf').

So I suppose where you might see a relatively integral and authentic movement with a sort of media circus mis-portraying it for cynical gain, I see a movement manipulated and altered by the social impact of that media circus such that there's never very much left of the original by the time it's finished with it.

So I suppose where you might see a relatively integral and authentic movement with a sort of media circus mis-portraying it for cynical gain, I see a movement manipulated and altered by the social impact of that media circus such that there's never very much left of the original by the time it's finished with it. — Isaac

Yeah, that sounds like a correct description of our respective views.

Hot damn did we manage to understand one another?

Hot damn did we manage to understand one another? — Moliere

We so did!

There should be some kind of prize, no?

Masculinity, like anything else, stands out against a backdrop of its negation. You'll pick up on your own masculinity when faced with an opposition to it: your wife, mother, daughter, female divinity, female archetype, etc.

Is it a piece of genitalia or genetics that makes the masculine? Yes and no. Imagine that every human has a penis. We reproduce with machines that produce new creatures with penises. Will a penis mean "male?". No, it will just be part of "human "

But in a world with humans who don't have penises, having one means something. It means something. See what I mean?

Exactly. Treating a relative label, like masculinity, as an absolute descriptor, is a fundamental error.