No, I said that if one effect was no greater than the other, not one effect is identical to the other — Pseudonym

Alright, then I'm still not following. Bring it down a little for me, if you don't mind.

the effect on your identity of having a word used about you — Pseudonym

Which speaker are we talking about here? Jane or Mary?

is no greater than the effect of using a word about someone on the identity of the speaker. — Pseudonym

And here?

Sorry, I'm just getting lost in parsing this sentence.

I'm not trying to make a democratic argument, but a rational one. — Pseudonym

That's cool. Then what is the rational distinction to be made that includes Mary but excludes Jane?

What I'm arguing about is very simply that the effect on your identity of having a word used about you. . . is no greater than the effect of using a word about someone on the identity of the speaker. — Pseudonym

So to call someone a woman is equivelant to saying I am a woman? There is not a difference between the third and first person uses? Is that what you're saying?



As for feminism:

If "born as" is the condition of womanhood, then aren't the trans individual and the cis individual actually the same then? If it's not even up to chromosomes, or sex characteristics, or some such but rather simply being treated differently because of who you were born as then there is even more similarity than what I was saying. "Trans", as a category, may be novel (at least relative to the history of patriarchy) but the basis for said category isn't. And patriarchy punishes trans women just as it punishes women for nothing other than how they are born.

Mary was born as a woman and is treated differently because of this, and yet she feels she should not be treated differently. She identifies with people who have been similarly discriminated against. But she does not recognize Jane as a woman, as someone who is discriminated against on the basis of being born a woman.

But why? If sex characteristics are set to one side, and being born a woman is all that is to be considered, then what includes Mary but excludes Jane? Shouldn't they actually identify with one another, given that both were born in circumstances against their choosing yet they are discriminated against for it?

I recognize that for some feminists it does not work this way, though I'd like to know why. But it's worth noting that for some feminists it does.

I conflate sex/gender precisely because you have yet to establish a real, objective distinction between them. — Harry Hindu

What ruler would you accept with respect to determining anyone's identity?

As for Nagel -- Eh, it's just a manner of speaking. There are more tools in the toolbox than hammers, and not everything is a nail. My world-view is not architectonic, but piece-meal and always changing.

John says "I'm a woman" - meaning that he feels like he is something which he would describe as 'a woman'. It's important to him that his feelings on this are respected because having other people acknowledge his feelings is an important part of being in a social group.

Mary says "you are not a woman" - meaning that the thing she associates with term 'woman' is something you're born with, it has meaning to her that womanhood is nothing more than your biological status because she (as a biological woman) wants to feel she can be anything she wants to be. She feels a bond with those previously oppressed for their biological status and its important to her to have her feelings about this definition respected.

How is one oppressed and the other a bigot? — Pseudonym

Well, let's leave oppression to the side for now. My direct answer to the question would be that this isn't a dichotomy, that there are multiple classes of people who are oppressed, but this would take us pretty far astray.

Also, in the manner you are describing here -- in the hypothetical -- you're making the dispute about meaning, it seems to me. Where the argument is over the proper, right, or true meaning of the term "woman". So what we have is two people talking past one another. Naturally Mary is not a bigot. They're just confused about what's being talked about due to the phonetic similarities of the words they are using.

But I suspect that the phrases used in practice "I am a woman" or "You are not a woman" do not hinge on the meaning of "woman". They are words being put to use, and what is in dispute is the identity of a person.

Some aspects of identity are social. If I am a teacher then that means I hold a license to teach, I am given income and benefits for my efforts in teaching, and -- so we hope -- I actually do teach students.

Some aspects of identity are not social -- they are personal. They are impressed on and expressed by the person who is the identity. If I am a pluviophile it's something I know about myself, and I can tell you that I am a pluviophile but you won't feel the joy I feel when it rains. You can develop metrics of a sort to determine whether I am who I say I am -- perhaps you'd expect me to sit on the porch when it rains, or to treat you more kindly than average when it rains. But the metrics wouldn't be the feeling, and I would be the one in the best position to determine whether what I say about myself is true -- since I do, at least, feel my feelings, where you do not. After all perhaps I come from a culture where joy is expressed differently. I also may be wrong about my feelings, but I have the benefit of feeling them.



So I'd say the question here turns on one, how do we determine the personal identity, like the case of the pluviophile, of others?, and two, what is appropriate in such determinations? In short form my answer is: by asking to the former question and listening to the latter question. And that naturally leads me to say that Jane, formally called John, is in the right above, whereas Mary is in the wrong. Mary can say "I am a woman", just as Jane can say "I am a woman" -- and if they listened to one another they would both be able to express their identity and understand where they are coming from.

Transgender individuals being treated in accord with their gender-identity does not erase the very real struggles of women, or the identities of women. I'd say that it offers an expansion of identity that allows for the feelings of both the hypothetical Mary and John. Both Mary and John are accorded the respect they deserve as individuals with their own feelings on their identity.

But Bill and William are simply references, they have no other meaning, so the request is a neutral one. The meaning of the word William doesn't have any significant connotations, nor reflect any major world-view. This is not the case with - 'woman' or 'him/her', they are extremely loaded words with years of oppression, struggle and social demand packed into them. It is not a simple request to ask others to use them in the way you personally see fit — Pseudonym

I am sympathetic to looking at how words have and are used through time, to the specificity of individuals, to details. I think that this is why I've been drawing examples such as depression, pluviophilia, race, sexuality, and so forth with respect to transgender identity. There are enough similarities here to see a kind of grouping with respect to how it is we determine so and so is this or that, as well as to attempt a generalization towards an ethic of identity.

I'd say that transgender identity is so unlike the belief that you are Jesus, for instance, that this is a case that falls by the wayside -- for the technical reasons I specified, such as historicity and the methodology in determining the interior lives of others, but also in a more commonsense way. They just don't seem related at all.

Though I'll admit that if someone really pressed me to call them Jesus, and I came to believe that this is really how they felt and it makes them feel happier to be called Jesus, while I certainly wouldn't believe him to be that Jesus -- given the historical nature of the man -- I'd be willing to accommodate them.

I admit I was not going to reply until you goaded on further down the replies. I am merely an autodidact after all. So take these thoughts as you will -- the words of Wittgenstein, and a few others (Searl, Austin, and Davidson -- in large part thanks due to @Banno's postings about them in the old forum, especially with respect to Davidson and Austin) have passed through this mind of mine, but I may not have understood them really.

Wittgenstein is one of those philosophers who is fascinating because the very act of reading him seems to have something of a transformative effect on the way I thought after reading him -- even without fully understanding it. And the act of coming to understand him changed the way I thought about some problems. I'm aware of hermeneutic disputes with respect to Wittgenstein, so I am hesitant to say that I am one who understands him still -- because I couldn't confidently take a position with respect to these disputes -- but I have a big picture idea of his thinking, at least.

I'm also naturally resistant to his position, or at least what I take to be a general consensus about his position with respect to philosophy -- that the problems of philosophy dissolve with an analysis of language. In a way I see his philosophy as an examplar case of a lot of 20th century philosophy -- where philosophy comes under philosophical scrutiny -- and his challenge to philosophy is very strong evaluated by those same philosophical values. But even so I've found in my own thinking taking on his criticisms of philosophy as a practice in my own thinking.

So I suppose I see the philosophy of language ala Wittgenstein sort of in the vein that Kant saw his critical philosophy -- as a propaedeutic which outlines common pitfalls in thinking, but which doesn't quite live up to the claim that all the problems of philosophy are resolved through therapy. I'd say that that is more the result of another bad habit of philosophers -- overgeneralization.

Is it the meaning that's being dictated, or is it a demand to be treated with respect? A demand is being made -- I'll grant that. But I think there are circumstances where demands are warranted. And I think that the demand here is one of social recognition and basic respect.

Consider a man named William who prefers to be called Bill. Should someone else get to insist that since his legal name is William that they will continue to call them William on that basis? I'd say that Bill's demand to be referred to by his preferred nomination takes priority, in spite of the social nature of meaning. They just feel like a Bill -- down-to-earth, not making much fuss, not prissy; not like a William. Now in this example perhaps there is about one or two persons who he runs up against who are like this, and he finds them fairly annoying. But imagine a world where you have to argue for something as basic as your preferred nomination with a large percentage of the population. Might your demand, in those circumstances, often come across as a little bit brash out of sheer irritation for having to ask for this basic respect yet again?

Again, if both men and women can do something, like grow/cut hair and wear/not wear makeup, then there is no point in making a distinction of masculine/feminine between these behaviors. Again, the distinction lies in the boundaries between cultures, not between sex or gender. — Harry Hindu

There may not be a point to you -- but it would be foolish to believe that there is no such distinction. And, in fact, the distinction is very important to some people.

How do you break out of this circle of inconsistency? — Harry Hindu

Well, this is where I pointed out that there are facts to the matter with Jesus, and you then said there are facts of the matter to gender -- but then proceeded to conflate sex with gender with gender-identity on the basis of, what I take from your above, that there was "no point" to these distinctions, and that I was offering something too vague for your taste -- that my view was "incoherent" on that basis.

The separation between the three being biological, sociological, and psychological facts and how we ascertain these things. There's nothing incoherent in applying different methods to determine different sorts of facts, though. It would be foolish to believe there was only one method for determining truth and to use other methods is inconsistent -- mostly because you'd miss out on the varied ways we do, in fact, determine the truth.

Would that make us irrational then, to fear death? If nothing can be done about it's inevitability then isn't the proper attitude to calmy accept it? — Posty McPostface

I don't know. I think I'd put it like this -- there are different kinds of fear. And one kind of fear of death is where death ends up ruling your life. I think I'd term this sort of fear an irrational fear. This, I believe, was the target of Epicurean therapy -- in some interpretations the fear of death was thought to be the root cause of accumulating wealth and power, for instance, as if you could literally stave off death by becoming powerful or immortal in the minds of others.

But simply feeling the fear? I don't think that's irrational. I don't know if it's rational either. But I do believe that death and vulnerability are closely linked together, and that the ancient therapies which made nothing of death were also aiming at something almost inhuman -- invulnerability. Since we are mortal they aimed at an invulnerability of the mind or heart.

I suppose I'd say that if you or someone happens to land in a place where death is nothing to you, and you live in ataraxic equanimity then that's great. But I don't know if it's necessarily a goal. More like -- if it happens to you and you're happy then fine, but if not then you can come to terms with your fear, feel it, without it dominating your life. And the latter seems like a much more achievable, human goal.

Because we fear death, and because there's nothing you can do about it. While it is possible to come to terms with your own mortality, not everyone has -- and even when you have the fear doesn't disappear. It's just something you have accepted.

Also, one's relationship to death is fairly personal. So talking about death is something you do with people you are close with, since you are revealing something that is vulnerable about yourself.

Isn't short or long hair PART of your physiology, just as being bald is? — Harry Hindu

It is physical, but it is not a sexual trait. It's not even a biological trait. Things like the maximum length hair can grow to are, but aligning short/long hair to masculine/feminine is not. There are myriad examples of non-sexual masculine/feminine entities.

How do you go about consistently determining which feelings are accurate or not? — Harry Hindu

So then the feelings that believers have would be the arbiter of the truth for the existence of their god? — Harry Hindu

It seems to me that you don't see a difference between feelings and beliefs. Before I said there is a difference between feelings and claims. There is a difference between feelings and beliefs as well.

Feelings are not true or false. Beliefs are.

If I feel hunger it would be strange to say that my hunger is accurate or not. What could be accurate is my belief about hunger -- I can be mistaken about how I feel after all. That is cognitive. That is in the realm of belief. My hunger can also be felt for reasons which are out of harmony, unnatural, or irrational; say in the case that I feel hungry any time I am bored even though I do not need food.

But the hunger is not true or false, in either case.

So if I feel like a woman then the feeling is not true or false. Or if I simply want to be a woman, even if I do not feel like I am one now, that feeling is not true or false. What can be true or false is my belief about my feelings. We can be confused about ourselves -- we are not infallible.

But neither is the clinician, and they don't even have the benefit of feeling my feelings to sort things out.

If they feel like the opposite "gender" then why do they need go about performing physical changes to validate their feeling? Why would they need to change the length of their hair, their style of clothes, hormone therapy, replacing their genitals, etc. if their feeling is all they need to validate the accuracy of their belief? — Harry Hindu

And don't forget my question (one that I've asked half a dozen times with no answer (and no it's not rhetorical. I expect an answer if you expect me to understand what you mean about "gender")) about those that talk about how they feel like a different "gender", yet go about changing their sex via surgery? — Harry Hindu

How do you know that every transgender person is seeking to validate their feeling by means of physical change? Or validate accuracy? That is a wild overgeneralization.

The simple answer is because someone desires to.

It's worth noting that not every aspect of human psychology is wrapped up in the game of accuracy, truth, evidence, and independent corroboration. You seem to believe that it is. But this is a false belief on your part.

EDIT: Just to highlight -- feelings are the arbiters of truth with respect to identity, not all beliefs.

For if we did not will the return of rings then there would be no rings to steal, hence we would land in contradiction with ourselves.

OK, so can we go with that? What might such gender norms look like? — Banno

Keeping in mind that my focus has mostly been on interiority, and there are people in a better position than I to answer these questions --

Since we're talking specifically gender norms, as in the social dimension of gender, it seems to me that self-identification is one of the stronger norms. So I couldn't say to you that you are this or that gender-identity, but you could say so -- and you could change your mind, depending on how you feel. Another social norm is that one's gender-identity and the expression of that gender-identity should not play a role in social role. So regardless of what identity you identify with and express you should, for instance, be paid the same as someone who identifies differently.

Here's a list of genders embedded in an article about such terms. What do you make of it?

And how would they be separated from sexual differences.?

It seems to me that masculine and feminine are already separated from sexual differences. What does short hair, for instance, have to do with one's physiology? Sexual differences play a very minor role, at least when comparing the number of entities in the set of gendered entities, in marking what is masculine and what is feminine.

So removing them entirely from the set of gendered entities is all that would be required. Feelings, as vague as that term is, would be the arbiter of identity rather than physiology.

Gender is re-invented precisely because physiology is not important, and gender doesn't bind one to a social role -- but not eliminated because there are people who feel a need to express and identify as such.

The word you use isn't important. But I don't know quite what you mean by the explanation though --

"How one exists in the moment and how that environment effects your experience"

How do I exist in a moment? Assuming this is a question to be answered it seems to be asking after a sort of phenomenological structure of experience. But then why would a single experience have that character? Wouldn't all experience be structured in accord with the structure of experience? What would make an experience metaphysical then, as opposed to simply an experience?

"How that environment effects your experience" seems to be asking after how the environment I'm presently in effects experience. What makes this question different from the former question?

Ah ok, I now get the distinction you are trying to make. I was lumping everyone with a philosophy PhD in to a single pot. I'm still not sure how a "professional philosophy education" differs from something else, but am interested to learn more as your time permits.

In case it's not already blaringly obvious, I don't have any kind of philosophy education, unless you wish to count my attendance at Netflix University. :smile: Point being, I'm viewing academic philosophy from the outside, and don't claim to have a complete view. — Jake

Eh, my formal training is minimal. I'm more on the outside than in. All classes in philosophy I've taken are undergraduate level, which is where I'm forming some of my opinion from, though.

But just take a look at this article. I'd include people with a bachelor's degree in philosophy in the set I'm talking about in addition to the doctoral degrees. Whereas, in the case of a professional philosophical education, I'd count just those with a PhD (though not all of those actually go on to be professional philosophers, it should be noted too -- so the culture of academia could also differ from those who just get the education).

But note how there is a much greater number of Bachelor degrees awarded to the number of doctoral degrees. So there are more people with a philosophical education than there are people with a professional philosophical education.

The same would hold for a religious education. Most of the people who undergo some kind of religious education are not there to become priests (or their equivalent). So we'd have to actually look at the set of people who underwent said education to make a comparison.

Heh. No worries.

I mean, I know there are groups of PhD's. I'm saying that the set of people who undergo a philosophical education is larger than the set of people who undergo a professional philosophical education. At least as I was meaning the comparison in terms of a religious vs philosophical education -- so there are many people who attend seminary, for instance, but only some of those people are there to actually become a professional theologian of sorts.

So even if the professionals might look a lot like priests, the educational process itself could still have different results from the professional education. It would just be a matter of looking, there's something empirical there that I admit I'd have to look more into -- but we're looking at different sets.

Does that make sense?

I agree. If I'm actually correct, rather than merely following a moral impulse, then it would actually be impossible to get there.

But it's worth talking about because 1) it's an end-goal of some scientists, so it's possible, and 2) it's basically what would be required if we were to medicate the mind, rather than the body, in the case of transgender individuals.

I wouldn't call the blog in question a social gathering so much, as there is very little back and forth discussion such as we see here. It's more a case of members sharing their latest article and then vanishing. Anyway, the articles taken as a whole (written by many different PhDs) seem to offer at least some window in to the educational process these folks have been exposed to. — Jake

That's still different, though -- a religious education doesn't make priests, and a philosophical education doesn't make philosophers. There are avenues for those professions which do do that, but the great majority of people who are a part of the educational process are not professionals, but simply are, or were at one point, students.

In choosing between modifying the feeling or modifying the body --

While modifying the body is a dramatic change, I think that modifying the mind is equally dramatic when it comes to something as basic as identity.


Right now we have no such surgical power to modify the mind. We do not have that level of understanding. But what we do have is physical surgery. In a way physical surgery is actually easier because we at least understand the body and can perform physical surgery with relative safety.

But mental surgery? We're basically poking in the dark. We are largely ignorant of how the mind works, at least in comparison to our knowledge of how the body works. And any attempts that I've read about thus far usually end up hurting a person rather than healing them because of this ignorance.

So, relative to our time at least, it's actually more in the interest of a person's health to modify bodies to fit feelings on the basis of what it is we know and what we can accomplish.

In a theoretical future, when we have a better science of the mind, we could perform surgery on persons to modify their feelings -- to make them homosexual, to make them feel a certain gender-identity, to make them vote a certain way, to make them empathetic, to make them motivated to kill, to make them better workers, and so forth. It's a scary power to think about, but a science of the mind would allow for an engineering of the mind. We're just not there yet.

Well, factually speaking I don't know if religion is really any good at directing people's behaviors, either.

Also, I'd say there's a difference between a blog of academics -- a social gathering of people in a profession -- and the actual educational process.

We are in disagreement whether or not gender is anything more than biology or the arbitrary ways humans expect the different sexes to behave within any culture. — Harry Hindu

Where you say "or" here that is where the distinction between sex and gender lies. So as long as you understand that there are these two components -- physiological characteristics, and human expectations (of various sorts, behaviors are just easier to point to) -- then you should be able to understand the distinction between sex and gender.

Doesn't that mean that you should maybe try a different tactic rather than throwing up your hands and blaming me for being to ignorant to understand your whack wisdom? — Harry Hindu

I'm not blaming you. I said I don't expect to persuade you. Mostly because of past experience with philosophy -- if I'm being strict with myself then I should say I don't expect to not persuade you too as persuasion also happens, but I am a creature of habit and usually philosophy does not persuade.

I'm not sure how else to proceed other than ostensively, though. I don't have another tactic. I'm not throwing up my hands and blaming your ignorance, but I am ignorant on how else to proceed.

You can persuade reasonable people with reasonable evidence. I was a "born-again" Christian, took my Bible to school, involved in my church, etc. when I began to question the very basis of what I believed. Eventually, after many years, I considered myself an atheist. I did a complete 180. I was persuaded with better arguments and consistent answers. Have you ever done that? Can you be persuaded, Moliere? — Harry Hindu

Yes, certainly. I've changed beliefs many, many times. But it's a process that happens over time, not in a single conversation. And, in the end, there was no one person who persuaded me -- it was me who persuaded me.

I was interested in calling out this discrepancy between philosophizing and the practice of religion? Why is a religion so good at commanding people to behave a certain way and philosophy, which relishes in how people ought to behave. Is this simply an is-ought problem, and why so? — Posty McPostface

One thing that differs dramatically between religion and philosophy is in its education. A religious education will teach someone a particular way of life -- whether that be in the form of precepts, beliefs, arguments, faith, community, whatever. There is a sort of answer which the teacher is bringing their students to.

In a modern philosophical education, while the teacher will of course harbor beliefs of their own that will influence the class, the attempt is made to expose students to many ideas that are often contradictory. The end-goal is to get students to think about ideas, arguments, and be able to articulate the ideas and arguments well but to think on their own in choosing said beliefs.

There are more free-thinking religions out there that want students to question. But they still offer a way of life. A philosophical education does not, outside of the use of reason.

The training aims at different ends. So you get different results.

Also, next to the three dots there is an arrow pointing to the left. It only appears if you hover your mouse over the post in interest. But if you hover over the arrow pointing left you'll see it is labeled "reply"



Clicking that button auto-populates the required syntax to link back to the post you are responding to, as above.

And, Moliere, I understand the notion of gender as a patriarchal construct. — Banno

Heh, sorry. I didn't mean to be patrionizing.

SO let me put the problem in terms of the critique of that patriarchal construct. Let's dismantle the distinction between man and woman (gender, not sex). Yet Transgender people insist on that distinction.

Where do they fit?

It seems to me that they don't quite fit, but that transgender still responds to patriarchy -- only in a different way. Rather than abolition it's reinvention. So gender stops being patriarchal, though it still has both social and psychological components.

And the only reason I can't agree with you is because you haven't even defined "gender" in any coherent way. — Harry Hindu

I haven't defined sex, either, but you don't have a problem there. I've been using a more ostensive approach -- by denoting the various things I mean to indicate with the words I am using.

Now I will just say here that I don't expect to persuade you. But identifying where disagreement springs from is still a win, plus it helps us to better see our own beliefs.

So what's going on here? What is happening? Why can't we stop? — csalisbury

It seems to me that there must be some need or desire -- and perhaps it's the sort of desire which is not fulfilled. It can be like thirst, in that the need is reoccurring, or it can be like anxiety, in which the desire is productive of itself -- where desire forms a kind of self-reinforcing feedback loop, so the very act of declaring the Truth makes us desire to do so again, but more.

I imagine that the desire at play probably varies. With Plato you have a profound disappointment with the world as it is, especially the political world, and an attempt to make it better. With Aristotle, so it seems to me at least, he has an incurable curiosity. This psychologizes what is properly philosophical, and is of course very speculative on that count, but I only offer these as possibilities for answering your question (possibilities that are my best guesses, but I recognize how weak these sorts of claims are too).

I'm not sure if this is satisfactory, but it's my best first attempt at answering the question in the spirit you pose it.

Yes, but then it seems contrary to what we're talking about. Or, while I could have read him in that way, that seems to be the very distinction over which disagreement is following -- what Harry said follows if we make no distinction between the three phenomena.

But even the radical feminists, at least, acknowledge a distinction between sex and gender. Gender-identity is the term of disagreement there.


There's a book I read a few years ago (Kate Millett's Sexual Politics) that gives a structure to patriarchy -- in a patriarchal system biology is believed to imply mentality is believed to imply social role. And by 'biology', of course, all that is meant is sex. The mentality could be read as a social expectation, though. Women are expected to be nurturing, and so they are given the role of mothers, teachers, nurses, cooks, and so forth. The trick of seeing this as patriarchy was to inverse the relationship, and see the role as being prescribed, and having the rest follow as post hoc rationalization of said role.

Of course the mental lives of people are not expectations of said mental lives -- hence why women would object to such nonsense. And truth be told, isn't the determination of someone else's mental life the real question here?

If that be the case then distinguishing the three on the basis of biology, sociology, and psychology seems to make sense of the difference between the three. So we have at least a theoretical basis for the distinction. Also, I prefer to say the abolition of patriarchy to the abolition of gender, though the two look the same in a patriarchal culture since gender is built/grown with patriarchal values in mind.

A subtle distinction. :D

I let this sit for a bit because my immediate thoughts were repetitions of things I had already said. Nothing new has come over the past few days so I think we might have just reached that point where this is where we disagree, but I'm not certain what else could be said to elucidate our persuade one way or the other.

They claim that they are a woman or a man, which are claims about sex. — Harry Hindu

That there is the primary point of disagreement.

Shouldn't the question be: "What is it about SEX that keeps us from scrutinizing those that feel as if they are the opposite sex, when we scrutinize all other feelings that are not consistent with reality?"

People can come to the wrong conclusions about the meaning of their feelings. We have no problem telling religious people that their dead loved ones don't exist and that there is no afterlife and we often get the same reaction that we get from the trans-people.

I have to point out here that this is something you have no problem with, but if we includes me then part of we does.

Any aspect of identity that contradicts reality - like claiming that you are actually an alien, Jesus, President Obama's secret mistress, feeling like you are morbidly fat and need to starve yourself to loose weight, or that you are the opposite sex. When someone's feelings are not a true representation of reality - that is when we have a responsibility to question the claims of people. — Harry Hindu

Identity is a part of reality, and feelings are not claims.

It's not sex that's being claimed. Sex is distinguished from gender is distinguished from gender-identity. Sex is biological. Gender is social. Gender-identity is psychological. Biology has to do with what you're talking about in getting pregnant and giving birth, but it's more complicated than that even. If a man cannot impregnate someone, because he is impotent, does his sex change? If he has erectile dysfunction, does his sex change?

Not at all. So the sex category a single person belongs to isn't exactly based on what a single person can do. It is based on their physiological characteristics or genome or what-have-you -- and there are people who don't fall neatly into the two categories there too, it's worth noting.

In the case of gender-identity there isn't much of a standard outside of the statements a person makes of themself and the actions they take.

When someone claims to be Jesus then there are facts to the matter which are ascertainable outside of the psychological profile of someone. I would believe the person feels like Jesus if they claimed they are Jesus. But there's more to the matter than the statements the person makes and the actions they take -- that he is the son of God, that he was resurrected after being crucified, that he has a second coming to judge the living and the dead. There is something else to look at.

In the case of gender-identity there is not. And the feelings someone has are as much a part of reality as the chair I'm sitting upon. And since the feelings aren't making claims about physiology (sex) there is no contradiction.

No one has been able to define "gender" in a meaningful way that implies any of what you have said. Gender is not some feeling of being the opposite sex. It is the behaviors unique to a certain sex that cannot be duplicated by another - like getting pregnant and giving birth.

Dressing a certain way, or wearing make-up, or shaving your legs are things both sexes can do and therefore aren't related to gender or sex. If it were then you are telling every woman that has ever existed, and that presently exists in other cultures, that they aren't actually women if they don't wear long hair, make-up and shave their legs.

I'm just going to note here I don't believe that gender has a fixed essence -- so any behavior can potentially be associated with the gender "man" or "woman", be it shaving, wearing makeup, making decisions, dieting, exercise, or what-have-you. In actuality there are certain behaviors temporarily affixed to genders, but they change over time and with place.

Fear is what keeps people from asking the right questions - fear of being labeled a bigot and being disowned by your friends or social group. Fear and feelings should be the furthest thing from one's mind when trying to determine the truth.

I suggest we just agree to stick to the topic. This is pretty out there, given that right here, at least, we are asking questions.

It helps to write out a summary of what you read. I've found it very helpful to just sit down and write down what I have read in my own words. You'd already have to do something like this in a formal setting, and forcing myself to articulate what I think in a structured form helps me, at least, to identify what I really feel I have a good understanding of and what I am uncertain about and needs further reading.

Having laid that out, if you don't mind putting up with my framework for a moment, it seems like you're saying that some science is actually quite far along the 'difficult to get agreement on' part of scale 1, and plenty of the sort of metaphysics I might dismiss as pointless is actually quite far along the 'really important to get agreement on' end of scale 2. Is that a fair translation of your view into my framework? — Pseudonym

Yeah, I think that's fair. And I'm glad you set out the framework because it helps me to disentangle the argument better -- I can see clearly where our disagreements over the point of arguing metaphysics seem to lie. Or, at least, where we have been having a back and forth and now why I've been a bit confused at times in our conversation.

To me it just follows naturally from how I should take the statements people make about themselves. Feelings may change over time, but the person (usually) in the best position to say they are what they are or that they have changed or that they were different is the person feeling them.

What other aspect of identity comes under scrutiny like transgender identity does? It seems to me that we have no problem with people who identify as Christian, men (when their sex is in alignment with their gender identity), Democrat, liberal, stern, black, a foodie, an artist, and so forth. There is a certain ambiguity involved in all such identities, and can even be contradictory when we consider the multitude of people who identify as such.

There is something Cartesian in my approach to interiority. But there is a sort of truth that this approach captures that others do not. There is a very real sense in which, because I am not you I do not feel what you do. We can both see cats on mats, but we cannot both feel what the other feels in the same way. Feelings are contagious, but they aren't objects. They are internal. They are a part of what makes us unique. And I can feel what you feel only insofar that I feel it -- sometimes I won't, even if you happen to. With cats on mats, on the other hand, this is not the case -- someone may be blind, of course, but they can still pick up the cat. The cat is something like an object, just like our body is something like an object. There is just also an interior which is exterior to our own interior -- another's interiority appears as an exteriority, and not in the sense of an external world. Rather it is external to anything we experience -- it is outside of our field of vision. And it is only through relating to another that we come to encounter the fact of the exterior, while also never actually making it our own interior. Hence my emphasis on the act of listening.

I don't think that there is an unbridgeable gulf a priori -- sometimes it can come to seem like it is so through discussion, but I think that you have to try in order to determine if there is just too much divergence between persons. Then our interior experiences become something like a beetle in a box -- except to the extent that there are still some individuals who can relate, even if not everyone can.

I hope this will explain, though I'm not entirely sure what you're asking. — Pseudonym

Eh, not entirely unusual there. I always wish I was more clear, and upon rereading what I write some time later wish I had said it better. I guess I'm just expressing what appears to me to be a conflict in your thinking -- one which, on one side, makes sense of all you say, but on the other side, seems like you'd be more liable to agree with me in saying that metaphysical disagreement is meaningful in the way that it is productive. In particular I have in mind science, which to me isn't all that different from metaphysics though a distinction can be drawn (and is, though I think that it's more an accident of our particular moment in history).

I suppose I don't see a very reasonable distinction between the two. There are degrees of uncertainty even in very well rooted empirical matters. Uncertainty, from my perspective, doesn't come to define metaphysics. And if metaphysics is the study of what is the case then science is a part of all that -- and, depending on how we might feel about certain forms of argument, it can be a large or a small part (or the entirety or completely separate from, at the extremes of commitment).

From my experience with science agreement is not easy, nor is it even common. So disagreement in science is something that seems very normal to me. Science is uncertain and rife with disagreement. It's almost the engine of science. The products of science are just accidents of history, things we have garnered thus far and are always up for reinterpretation or experiment. To me it does not seem so easy to find agreement and feel certain about it from the scientific perspective. And that becomes more apparent in the details, rather than in the textbooks. Even in cases of engineering, which rely upon the highly specific circumstances and empirical testing.

To me, at least, there is no certainty in science any more than there is certainty in the ambiguity of what I ought to do. So therapy seems equally applicable in both cases.

Maybe I just feel more affinity for Quine's thoughts on the lack of a distinction. Or, better to say, on the lack of a distinction with rigor -- I can get a feel for what people mean, but I can't see the difference really. So we either reject science as an arbiter of truth, if we are thorough-going and oddly consistent therapeuticians, or we somehow reconcile the notion that philosophy is therapeutic and we still care about truth in spite of what therapeutic value it might bring.

I really like this youtube channel as well -- it's just a guy who records him playing classical music on his piano. And I particularly like his rendition of Philip Glass's Metamorphosis.





My favorite composer is still just plain old Beethoven though. lol.

I usually disengage for a few reasons - 1) I can't think of anything more to say, and I'm uncertain about what I could write that would be worth writing. 2) I feel like we're repeating ourselves a bit too much, and can't seem to get over that hump. 3) I had other things to do besides philosophy, came back and saw that someone already said what I would have said and so I let them have at it rather than repeat what has been said.

I try not to disengage just because I think the other poster is lower quality at the time. Sometimes I've been surprised, and sometimes I'm just misreading, and it seems like a habit that would be too easy to get into. But it's not the sort of thing I view as rude from others. I understand that I may not be the most important thing on someone else's list of things to get to -- I'm just a random guy on the internet after all :D

I voted "all but lounge topics" -- mostly because I've been on forums where when categories were presented there still ended up being a main discussion hub. So the highly specific categories would often go unchecked.

But it would be nice to have the broad separation between more philosophy-specific and more community-specific topics that you could hop between depending on mood.

I'm sorry for the long delay replying. Interestingly (to me anyway), the reason I took such a long break is exactly the topic we're discussing here. — Pseudonym

It's all good. I take breaks too. :D

I think that your response gets to the heart of the matter better anyways. Where you state:

I think that there is really no other sensible question than "what should I do next?" — Pseudonym

I was able to reread your previous post and see a different emphasis.

Where I got "shared world of experience" from was when you were talking about the effects of electricity in a computer, and your example of two engineers where one believed in gravity and the other did not yet both wanted to build a bridge. My strategy was two-fold: to demonstrate that we can accomplish goals, such as bridge building, with competing and contradictory beliefs about the world. So bridge building has been around a very long time, well before the theory of gravity and Newton and all that. And then also to point out that we have better bridges now specifically because of what I would term metaphysical speculation which was two-way and aggressive. Newton is a great example of this because in his time metaphysics and science weren't separate fields of study as they are now, and he was extremely aggressive on such points -- yet that sort of passion and vigor is what allows us to build more complicated bridges now, since it laid the conceptual groundwork that would be necessary to build more impressive bridges.

Also, I'm perplexed by the two-fold categorization of approach when it comes to myself. I feel passionate about philosophy, I can be aggressive, but I don't think I'd endorse all forms of aggressiveness. Further, I don't think I'd say my interest is dispassionate, one way, passive, or something along those lines.



But now I would say that it seems to me that your approach to philosophy as therapy is consistent, except for the exception you give science. You say science is unique...

because it deals in things described by their effects. So, from a therapeutic point of view, I only see it as harmful to persist in the notion that some metaphysical positions can be demonstrated to be incontrovertibly 'right' in the face of the overwhelming evidence that it cannot. — Pseudonym

Ancient skepticism is a hallmark case of therapeutic philosophy. They even go so far as to say that arguments are literal medicine, so we need not feel attached to any argument but rather should view them as a way of persuading people of the virtues of skepticism. Those who deviate from the skeptical path are ill, and those who take their medicine are cured.

But for you you're talking about your interests, from an ethical point of view. So an aggressive argument is justified only if there are souls to be saved (in the Christian case) or your personal ethical ends are being served (close to but not the same as hedonism) - so not the same as skepticism in that the end goals differ (or the set of possible end goals are wider than what the ancient skeptic would say).

But if therapy be the guide then the end-goal is what justifies the approach, up to an including non-rational means. At least that's what I get from you saying:

That might be rational argument, but that rarely works and it's more likely to be rhetoric, or even outright deception if necessary. — Pseudonym

But how does that square away with the unique place of science? What gives it a pass, from a therapeutic perspective? And if the goal is what justifies any means, be they rational or not, why would science get a pass on this?

Science is interested in making claims on what is the case. At least, on its face. I suspect, given the unique position you've given science, that we agree on this much. To me that means that we would care about things like truth, evidence, inference, and knowledge. But truth, evidence, inference, and knowledge are not grounded in ethical goals, in what we ought to do next. From the perspective of the question "What should I do next?" they are only worthwhile if what we should do is generate knowledge in a specific way, a scientific way. And the history of science shows how this knowledge is ethically neutral -- it can be used for great harm or great benefit. It can threaten the world with nuclear holocaust, and it can cure polio. Knowledge of the world brings about power. It doesn't bring about the wisdom required to wield such power.

I'd say it does this specifically because it's merely concerned with truth about what is the case. But this is not moored to any ethical consideration about what we should do next.

If that be the case it seems to me that you believe in more than philosophy as therapy -- you must also believe that science tells us what is the case in order to give it a unique place among fields of knowledge. You'd have to give favor to things like current evidence, and causal frameworks -- a bare minimum epistemology and metaphysic, but they still count as more than "what should I do next?" none-the-less. Unless you can somehow link this approach to your therapy, it seems to me that this is just a case of special pleading.

I bring up the ancient skeptic for that reason -- to highlight how this is special pleading in light of a therapeutic philosophy. For the skeptic any claims on knowledge, be they evidential and based on cause or otherwise, were secondary to the goal. Arguments were medicine to bring someone to the perspective that they withhold judgment. (of course this is a general treatment. Specific skeptics differ, and it's a richer tradition than a few sentences gives credit)

Or, at least, why it seems to me that this is special pleading. How do you reconcile these commitments, to the only sensible question you introduce, evidentialism, and a belief in cause?

I am not you. I have my experiences, and you have yours. But rather than saying I am alone I think I'd prefer to say that I am unique. To fee alone is to feel the need for others. But an other is always other -- I need another to be with me to satisfy my need, rather than to be me. If we had the same experiences, thought the same things, had the same body in the same space and time then I would still need another, someone who is other than myself to satisfy my need for others.

In saying I am unique I am acknowledging my individuality, as well as the individuality of others. I am not so unique that others do not know what I am going through, or what it might feel like to be in certain circumstances. Sometimes others are able to confirm they've been there, done that, and know what it's like. We retain our uniqueness, in the sense that it was I or them at a certain time doing something, but we are not alone.

And I'd say we share our uniqueness through relating to one another -- an other who is always exterior to our interior, but is encountered through the face-to-face relation.

A common, and sensible enough, response to concerns you cannot do anything about is to accept them for what they are and move onto concerns you can do something about.

From a day-to-day perspective the issue of nuclear warheads is a big picture problem. Big picture problems are the sorts of problems that don't have anything immediately actionable -- Global Warming, Racism, War, Pollution, Poverty, Sexism, Nuclear Armageddon. They are real, but they are larger than life. They are too big for most of us to feel like they fall into the category of things we have control over.

It takes a lot of motivation to look at such problems as something you can do something about. But then you have to direct your energy in a way that breaks such things down into day-to-day actions. A pretty common example is to vote. With respect to the problem you're talking about there have been other concrete actions taken, but they aren't the sort of thing you're going to get many people to do. (edit: There's also a plethora of other things that fall in-between the extremes of the mundane and the heroic)

If all you do is talk about how this is a big problem, then all you do is make the problem appear bigger, and thereby making it even more sensible to just shrug your shoulders. Without concrete action big picture problems appear to be the sort of thing you might agree is a problem, but you give up on because there is nothing to be done. Making a problem concrete doesn't take the course of making an analogy -- like a gun in my mouth -- but rather it takes the course of outlining a plan of action that is something we can actually do.

One test for depression is the following series of questions, rated on a scale from 0-3:

Over the last 2 weeks, how often have you been bothered by any of the following problems?

Little interest or pleasure in doing things?

Feeling down, depressed, or hopeless?

Trouble falling or staying asleep, or sleeping too much?

Feeling tired or having little energy?

Poor appetite or overeating?

Feeling bad about yourself — or that you are a failure or have let yourself or your family down?

Trouble concentrating on things, such as reading the newspaper or watching television?

Moving or speaking so slowly that other people could have noticed? Or so fidgety or restless that you have been moving a lot more than usual?

Thoughts that you would be better off dead, or thoughts of hurting yourself in some way?

One thing this has in common with gender is that the statements of the person of interest are taken at face value for what they are. That does not mean they are unintepretted, or that there couldn't be other facts or inferences that play a role in making a determination or that they are not truth-apt. Just like the ruler -- it reads 10", but if you measure any one thing several times over you'll see that it's actually very precise, but you don't get the same measurement every single time. It also doesn't mean that everything said by a patient is just treated as true all the time -- that saying so makes it so. Another commonality is the imprecision such a test has -- it may be accurate, but it is imprecise. Notice how even in the very same question behaviors or feelings which are even opposite one from another are used to determine depression.

Now I use this mostly because it is a diagnostic, in the sense that is demonstrates how one might determine how another feels -- it is simultaneously imprecise and ambiguous, but not meaningless and not futile. And the best judgements are had over time -- that is, they require some kind of a relationship with another person, they require some amount of trust (rather than control), and they require sharing and listening.


Now there is an aspect to this that really is a social construct. Depression didn't always exist, and the medical treatment of the soul is quite novel. The identity of depression is certainly novel and invented. There are particular activities associated with the word. One need not have any of these trappings. And one could even de-construct it, reinvent. One could believe that the world would be better off without such identifiers.

But the feelings would remain. The interior experience would still be something which is only partially shared, partially not shared, and only determinable by asking questions within a relationship and listening to the answers.