Or you could say trying to pin down an essence will hide the fact that the term is half of a whole that can't stand independent if its opposite
I don't disagree, though in my experience while masculinity is "opposed" by femininity, it is more useful to view them as opposite poles on a broad spectrum, rather than two sides of a dualist paradigm. — LuckyR
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. — Isaac
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. — Isaac
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. — Isaac
An effect holding up a functionalist description alongside a non-functionalist one, of the same subject matter, has is that the application of the functionalist description style deconcretises entities in the non-functionalist one. That makes it difficult to predicate or apply judgements to the entities construed in the non-functionalist account because the means by which they were individuated from a background context has been challenged. As an example, one could only consider a law just if that law can be sensibly posited as an entity in the context it would be judged. If a functionalist vocabulary of description applied to that context construes positing such that law as a contestable act, then it is no longer necessary to consider the law as just, or unjust, in the manner it may previously have been as the law was inappropriately reified in that discourse. — fdrake, summarising an imaginary Isaac
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? — frank
I'd suggest that the bodily attachment is just one way to relate to our masculinity, and that we're not just our penis. In fact we can be a man without it entirely. — Moliere
In a culture which covers up the penis, then the penis isn't as important to gender-identity as many other things that we actually do get to see on the regular. — Moliere
Or the penis may become more important because it is always covered up. — BC
Too much masculinity is invested in the penis--a mistake. Masculinity is found in the whole body and in the brain. The penis doesn't hang alone as the sole signal of masculinity, and the penis doesn't 'produce' masculinity. Men with big dicks are not more masculine than men with small dicks. — BC
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'?" — Srap Tasmaner
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.
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.
Functionalist approaches here work like an acid, annihilating salient distinctions as well as irrelevant ones — fdrake
I've really been going hard on the Sellars huh. — fdrake
the semantic resources of folk vocabularies — fdrake
words
Sellars's inferential semantics — Srap Tasmaner
YMMV — Srap Tasmaner
Thou hast zinged me. — fdrake
arbitrariness — fdrake
The other way to say that is "random variation". — Srap Tasmaner
Whereas I read Isaac as highlighting that the fact that the "underlying substrate" of language use can't be reached, thus everything is arbitrary up to how it's used. I don't think Sellars would agree with the arbitrariness. — fdrake
You want to make the point, I think, that because "man" and friends are only statistical regularities, that -- something, I'm not clear. Freedom. Isaac counters that the moves that come next are also just statistical regularities ("responses"), and therefore -- I don't know, power, capital, big pharma. — Srap Tasmaner
what the underlying concept and/or construct under analysis is - what are the operative rules, what are the acts of conceptualising tokens relevant to gender aggregating and filtering into tropes of those tokens — fdrake
"empirical regularities in the tokens" — fdrake
I think there are chunks of your post left unaddressed here, which I hope is fine, we're not really debating so much as exchanging ideas at this point. — Srap Tasmaner
There are a couple different ways we can approach the concept of concept here: there are empirical questions about when and how members of a given population acquire a concept we're familiar with; there are questions about the content of that concept, empirical questions about how members of a population actually use it, and methodological questions about how we categorize data. There's some trouble here, because we might want to say that two people have different versions of a concept, and this comes out in the differing ways they use it, but why say that instead of saying that they just have different concepts, even if they denote those concepts by the same word? I don't think there's a simple answer to that. — Srap Tasmaner
There's some trouble here, because we might want to say that two people have different versions of a concept, and this comes out in the differing ways they use it, but why say that instead of saying that they just have different concepts, even if they denote those concepts by the same word? I don't think there's a simple answer to that. — Srap Tasmaner
Sad that a good chunk of this turns out to be a long-winded way of saying "context-sensitive and purpose-relative" which I have tried, unsuccessfully it seems, to swear off. — Srap Tasmaner
I think part of the problem is imagining a concept as an unchanging mental tool. It's not just that individuals might use a concept differently, but the same individual might use it differently over time or in differing contexts -- 'context' here being quite broad, since the difference might be mental rather than environmental. — Srap Tasmaner
And here I would distinguish between the rationality of a concept, meaning "goal advancing", and its reasonableness, meaning "defensible to another". Revisions to a concept "toward" disinterestedness (if that's a thing) will be along one of these axes, I should think, but they're not necessarily the same. A concept that's cheap but slightly inaccurate, for instance, might be rational but difficult to defend or to persuade another to adopt. (And people will likely hold proposed concept revisions to a higher, or at any rate different, standard than their original process of concept formation had to meet. In some cases, those processes may be just unrelated.)
— Srap Tasmaner
When you say you're more interested in the inferences than the entities in our discussion, that suggests to me the "reason" side of things rather than the "rationality", but I'm not at all sure you're distinguishing those as I would, so "inferences" for you might be taking in what I would lean toward treating as two different sorts of things.
Suppose instead we start with the assumption that a concept is a behavior policy that is designed to be revised. I can think of two natural ways this happens: you might initially categorize an individual (correctly, given your current version of the concept) as falling under a concept, but revise the concept so as to exclude them; or you might initially exclude an individual (again, correctly) but then revise the concept so as to include them. Categorization mistakes -- which I'm distinguishing, perhaps without justification, from revision prompts -- might not be completely irrelevant: if your current version of a concept is particularly prone to application error, that in itself might be reason to revise it, and, on the other hand, concepts that almost never fail might be particularly resistant to revision. And there's cost: concepts are cost-effective simplifications, so a concept that's 80-90% right and cheap is going to be more useful than a much more expensive concept that's a few basis points more reliable. — Srap Tasmaner
I think some exceptions lead to revising and some don't, and how that happens or doesn't is the interesting bit -- we're talking about learning. And analytically, we're in the same boat: some variations are just noise, but some we choose to treat as noise because they're not what we're interested in. — Srap Tasmaner
And "interested in" brings us back to the point of concepts and some kind of functionalism, because concepts have a role to play, they have a use. It's one of the things I find a little unnerving about your account: it's very highly intellectualized. So while I see the point (even with scare quotes) of — Srap Tasmaner
I think it's a mistake to describe them "purely" this way -- it has to be empirical regularities that matter to us, or to the wombat or to the aardvark or whatever. I'm not sure the "disinterested" concept is a thing. — Srap Tasmaner
Not sure where to go from here — Srap Tasmaner
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