The question is: in the story in which the pot is conscious, is it that the author is telling falsehoods? Or is it nonsense? — frank

You can unask the question. The author is not telling falsehoods about the pot in the story, if the author were speaking about a talking pot, in the same manner, out in the street, it could be falsehood or nonsense. There won't be a context independent criterion for falsehood, truth, sense or nonsense. Variations in the rules binding contexts of expression undermines forming a univocal criterion for making sense. "Is the author telling falsehoods?" "Or is it nonsense?", to those questions you must ask: "in what game?".

§281 and §282 are part of a discussion regarding sensation language. The pot's sensations, and the child's game involving them, are analogies to provide insight on the boundaries of senseful sensation language. Specifically how the ascription of sensations should be understood in normal contexts, so that we can understand how we might err in the uncritical use of that language in other contexts. So the pot story is a signpost that says: "Look! Here's somewhere outside the normal use of sensation ascription language! How could this work?"

The broader context of the entire discussion regards what conditions need to be in place for sensation ascribing phrases to make sense. Like "I'm in pain". And what illusions paying insufficient attention to those conditions creates. Like the illusion that when someone says "I'm in pain", they're evidencing the presence of a pain entity or process somehow "inside themselves".

Not sure where to go from here — Srap Tasmaner

Same. I think we went to the bottom of the barrel and found out that the answer was in another barrel. If it exists at all.

I'll have a think and get back to you.

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

Yep!

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

I think that's true. Do you think this analysis also applies to crick vs creek? Maybe we can sidestep the issue of whether your potato is my potato by saying that both are correctly assertible in "the same conditions". As for what "the same conditions" are, I have no idea.

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

Seems your context relativity is my ceteris paribus.

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

I think that's also true. There's another parsing where they're using different concepts, and what changes is their relationship with them. Though the individuating processes of concepts, and the entities within them, are still an issue in both accounts.

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.

The interest in inferences I said, sorry, is just the one we ended up talking about with functionalist accounts. So yes I think this is "reason" rather than "rationality". Largely reason within this thread.

But I suppose also more broadly now that you mention it. I don't much care what someone identifies as, I'll try to treat them as what they say they are, or failing that what they seem to me to be. I don't expect rationality in that, other than that it feels right to them. I'd expect (something closer to) rationality in a law about it though. I do care about what would make that identification count as correct, in the abstract, quite a lot though - which I imagine is about the "reason" side of things.

We're also quite close to a fundamental dispute about the role of political power in the generation of concepts, but I hope we can put that aside too.

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

I also don't believe in the "disinterested concept" if it comes down to brass tacks. More or less disinterested concepts, maybe. More or less disinterested uses of concepts, yes. I didn't mean to construe those empirical regularities as non-conceptualised observables, like raw sense data impressed upon a blank mind, rather as occasions which constrain our behaviour and what may be correctly asserted. Though there's also context sensitivity in what counts as an occasion and what counts as correctly assertible. I suppose that is unavoidable.

So regarding categorization mistakes, we could agree that calling the Thames a creek is incorrect because it's not a small stream. If a person believed things like the Thames counted as a creek, and they found they were wrong, they would be prompted to revise their understanding of the concept along with changing the use of the word; learning what counts as a creek.

We seem to be precisely in a period of transition about what counts as a man or a woman. So what's correctly assertible as a man, or a woman, is up for grabs. Which gives us the political power discussion again. If the norms regarding who counts as what are changing in all contexts, we can't say in a disinterested fashion that any person counts as anything else with regard to some norm without it being a political act in virtue of prompting others to adopt our use of language.

I'm really not sure what we can do with the discussion if it bottoms out in an "ontology and epistemology are politically relative in times of transition". Pick your poison I suppose. Interested deployment of concepts to the highest degree. We might end up having to accept different schemes of classification (gender, legal gender, protected category gender) for what were, originally, the same concept (sex=gender).

The other way to say that is "random variation". — Srap Tasmaner

I don't trust random variation as a concept here. When I think about random variation, I imagine that it occurs along a predefined concept. Like you repeat a measurement of pressure, and the measurements are different due to unpredictable atmospheric fluctuations, thus the results differ. That's random variation, but of pressure. The system you're measuring is the same regardless of the result of the measured variable within it.

The salient distinction between random variation and what I intended to convey was the multiplicity and ambiguity of what system is "being measured". Or out of the analogy, 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. Like does woman mean no pee pee, but what about if demipenis?

Where I was going with the stream example comparison, setting up an "isomorphism" is that I see Sellars as opening up a flavour of naturalism with the functionalism, when those tropes are constrained by regularities in the phenomena in question. Like we know natal sex and gender have a strong relationship, so our conceptualisation of gender should be able to include a relationship between those. And we know that recognising someone as a gender depends on their behaviour and appearance, so that should go into the concept somehow.

Which is also a restatement of the debate we're having, opening it up again, but that is intentional. I read @Isaac as denying that these tropes' contents are attenuated by regularities - so the existence of the tropes is causally influenced by regularities, but not what goes in them. Like we could have conceived of gender as separate from genital presence/absence, and can come up with a purely functional description of people without necessarily using either category. But the fact that we could create this functional perspective alone doesn't, thus, undermine the presence of constraints induced on those tropes by regularities. Thus there is room to make the content of our concepts "non-arbitrary" without "fixing" that content as a collection of essential characteristics (and entities) within what the content regards.

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

(self quote)

When it's granted that a functional description of a phenomenon in a context deconcretises the entities we take as present in that context , that thus isn't sufficient to show that the deconcretisation destabilises regularities in that context which were previously expressed using the behaviour of the concretised entities . When you referenced Sellars' inferential semantics, I think this construction is effectively quantifying over phrase "senses", what count as as what. To be clear, those sortals are concepts which aggregate and judge relatively nondescript tokens in the subject matter into intelligible chunks. And those acts of judgement, themselves, may be coordinated by some regularities in the subject matter - like the smallness of the stream. In essence, what commits us to the inference that this or that body of water is a creek would commit us to the inference that the same body of water is a crick, but not necessarily promote the same speech acts!

Having one's functionalist cake and eating a real cake too, even if it might be a soft layer biscuit or granular chocolate arranged cylinderwise.

So if I can put it into something like a syllogism:

1 ) If there is room for doubt about the terms of debate regarding gender norms in terms of the ability to conceive of gender in a functional fashion, then that doubt arises from the deconcretising effect of the functional description on the entities in the debate.
2 ) The deconcretising effect of a functional description on the subject matter tokens (bodies, behaviours etc) in the debate operates by undermining the norms by which tokens are aggregated into relatively stable entities/posits in that debate.
3 ) If ( 2 ) is true, then either the aggregation of tokens into relatively stable entities is undermined in virtue of the ability to provide an alternative grouping of tokens, or by the fact that this instability highlights that any grouping of tokens must proceed solely upon the basis of fiat.
3 ) The first disjunct in 3 - If the aggregation of tokens into relatively stable entities is undermined in virtue of the ability to provide an alternative grouping of tokens, this applies to any issue which a functionalist perspective can be applied to - which, I believe, is any issue. Hence the "meta-ethical equivalent of carpet bombing" comments.
4 ) The second disjunct in 3 - if the aggregation of tokens in a subject matter into relatively stable entities is undermined by the fact that these groupings must proceed solely upon the basis of fiat, then those groupings should not be constrained by empirical regularities in the tokens that coordinate word uses about them (like the small stream to "crick" and "creek").
5 ) I've provided an alternative functional approach where "the empirical regularities in the tokens" coordinate word uses in the subject. In this case things like social performance, the phenomenology of trans embodiment and so on. Stressing that the empirical regularities don't let you "read off" entities from the world in pre-individuated non-conceptualised chunks, but acts of conceptual judgement are nevertheless coordinated with each other through regularities in the subject matter tokens they concern.

So I believe we're in a place where either the capacity for a functionalist description of a subject matter works on everything, and thus works like "the meta ethical equivalent of carpet bombing" or alternatively we can debate whether the capacity for functionalist description necessarily precludes coordinating regularities in those descriptions' subject matter, like the spatial properties of the stream which enable it to correctly be called a creek or a crick.

We've yet to have that debate about coordinating regularities. I'm mostly writing this to orient where I am in the discussion too.

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

So my interest is ultimately about the nature of inferences in this discussion, rather than about the entities in question. The bridging of the inferential aspects of this discussion and the entities in its subject matter was achieved, I think, through the references to the deconcretising effects of functionalist description. So my recent intervention in this discussion is bombing the bridge.

Why would I bomb the bridge? I imagine it's because Isaac and I have a longstanding disagreement on whether the "true nature of conception" has to turn you into some form of Kantian within a transparent veil of judgement, or whether you can keep a qualified realism. And it shows up most places we disagree on things. And also because I don't think the inference works and I am a pedant.

On the record, I'm definitely more sympathetic to the trans rights groups and the attendant lobby than Isaac is, but I also think these things should be talked about in depth for ethical reasons. And also because when some norms of society are made a/recognised as a nonsense that's practically an invitation to philosophise.

Sellars's inferential semantics — Srap Tasmaner

Nothing in depth, SEP's article and Brassier's talk on it. I've been trying to use what I know in the posts, but I don't have the comfort level for an in depth discussion of it. AFAIK Sellars is also functionalist and a form of pragmatist with respect to truth. "Means" is illustrative, it's not a relationship between a word and a thing because it's not a relationship at all - the best you get is that one word (or speech act) precisely illustrates another. In addition, what it means for a statement to be true is for it to count as correctly assertible in a given context - which is a question of making the right moves for producing correct statements in that context.

I think a point of tension between (what I understand of) Sellars and (what I understand of) @Isaac 's functionalism+pragmatism cocktail is that Sellars allows some room for isomorphic relationships of the entities in some speech acts to environmental objects. Like when we were discussing creek and crick like what counts as a crick counts as a creek, that "what" requires a coordinating series of instances which makes (what counts as a creek) equivalent to (what counts as a crick). And that equivalence is more of a... logistics of organising items of language... than a semantic relationship of expressions. Pragmatism in a "use theory of meaning" and "use theory of truth" rather than pragmatism having "correctness = best approximation" and "belief = tendency to act as if".

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.

YMMV — Srap Tasmaner

LOL. Thou hast zinged me.

It did not cross my mind that words alone would have counted. The picture in my head was of speech acts of identification and the underlying norms which enable them, which aren't all words. Intuitions. Sensations. Wanted to be broad. Like why not treat pain as part of the semantical resources of folk vocabulary when we can say "pain", just a feeling brah.

I've really been going hard on the Sellars huh.

Thanks for the interesting comment @Srap Tasmaner.

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

I'm gonna get some symbols out. Most of this is trying to understand your position, then trying to relate it to other comments in the threat.

Let's say there's a class of entities E. Some of these are small watery bodies which can be correctly referred to as streams, creeks, cricks etc. This has the flavour of a set:

E= {the union canal, the water of Inverleith, the Thames..}

In writing it down, there's an act of the imagination which leverages previous uses of language, and knowledge of bodies of water, to put distinct named entities in the set. I think that the predicate "is stream" and "is a creek" would have the same extension in E. Since everything that is a stream is a creek.

There's no reason, which could be derived from that extension alone, to explain why someone would use "is a creek" vs "is a stream" in everyday language. Since by stipulation everything which is a creek is a stream. Therefore, as you say, an account could explain why someone uses "is a creek" rather than "is a stream" through the history of language use without reference to the ability to discriminate between tokens which satisfy "is a creek" vs tokens which satisfy "is a stream" - like the Thames vs the water of Inverleith.

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 see two ways of reading this, the use of "is a man".

1 ) "is a man" has an arbitrary extension because (it's a discursive, historical practice and the only thing which fixes it is that practice)
2 ) "is a man" has a non-arbitrary extension because (it's a discursive, historical practice and the only thing which fixes it is that practice).

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.

I'd have strong reservations about ( 1 ), too, because that would make the discrimination between instances of tokens which satisfy "is a man" arbitrary. Like "is a stream" vs "is a creek". I'd have fewer reservations about ( 2 ) because the extension which is fixed "only" by discursive, historical practices can nevertheless leverage (weasel word placeholder) properties of (synthesised classes of) the referred to objects. Like the presence of breasts in discriminating a woman from a man - not perfect, but a sufficient regularity that it goes into the "what a woman looks like" norm and also into the "what man should not have" norm.

An initial distinction between "is a man" vs "is a creek" is that the former is harder to treat extensionally. There's wiggle room about what counts as a small stream, but no wiggle room about some strongly characteristic properties - it's gotta be small, there must be water, the water must run. Those let you rule out, I believe, any entity from streamhood or creekhood or whatever, and probably suffice for showing an entity is a creek (up to wrangling about "small"). Contrast "is a man", where strongly characteristic properties can be deleted and preserve the predicate - like having vs not having a dick - or be present in women - like being highly muscular and having a deep voice.

Satisfying the predicate "is tall, has short hair, is very muscular, has a deep voice" - stereotypical attributes of a bloke - could serve as a good reason to declare someone a bloke. A justification of the speech act. And that reason would serve regardless of whether the person "ontologically"is "really" a bloke. Vs counting as a bloke in a nebulously defined circumstance.

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.

It's a good question.

Such a claim could be overwhelmingly down to the sex-determining mechanism evolution bequeathed you

Yes. "It's a boy" at birth because dick (as the story goes) and...

, or it could serve a psychological or a social role.

"I'm a boy" as a result of self exploration and embodiment constraints (insert possible phenomenology of trans embodiment here)

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".

Yeah! I think that is a good point. Functionalist approaches here work like an acid, annihilating salient distinctions as well as irrelevant ones, by treating every means of counting as X in the same socially constructed, designated token indifferent manner. Even when there's stronger constraints on what to count as X entails, like the stream (as a token).

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.

It was a good post. I'd be interested in hearing what you think of my response to @Isaac here. I trust the functionalism (with reservations), but like you I don't trust the arbitrariness using that in an unrestricted manner suggests about what counts as a man in our common uses of the word.

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

Apologies if I've given this impression to you as well, it isn't my intention.

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

My sympathies are, I believe, functionalist too. So we have that as a shared background of understanding.

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

It does depend upon what you want to do with the model. If we focussed on a particular law and its attendant behaviours, that law is indicated to provide a context of interpretation for correlating behaviours relevant to it. In that respect there are two regions of entities, the first contains laws and types of acts which break them, the second contains acts of their transgression and the curtailment of freedom. Those two vocabularies of description don't need to overlap on all points, but you do need to be able to take the context of interpretation on the law level of description to fix the relevant scope of tokens in the functional description context. You may also need to propagate back from the functionalist context to the law one to refine scope.

An example there might be Kahnneman and Tversky's analysis of sentences meted out by judges for similar crimes before and after their coffee break. They were different. To analyse that, you need to posit court proceedings in a more functional register in order to model how the enactment of the ruled laws is dependent upon (what count as) contingent properties of the acts of judgement on the law level. Nevertheless, if you wanted to study the rulings on a particular law using the latter functional vocabulary, you would use precisely that construct to fix the scope of which judgement occasions were present in the function level construct you were correlating events in those which involved the chosen law in the law level construct.

I think either construal can be done without granting an unrestricted sense of concreteness to any of the entities in this discussion - laws in legal construct land, correlated classes of behaviours in function land. Neither is "fundamentally" more real than the other, since they're both means of differentiating a shared substrate of less conceptualised tokens (events, behaviours, perceptions, coffee breaks) that both registers of descriptions parse in overlapping but distinct manners.

Introducing a functionalist vocabulary of description, then, will de-concretise a subject matter previously articulated in terms of pre individuated posits for methodological reasons rather than ontological ones. As a choice of lens on a shared substrate of events, rather than as stipulations of ontological primitives in that shared substrate. This occurs whenever you hold two vocabularies of description up side by side. Like previous references to hormones and desires+sensations - grehlin and hunger.

I understand the following as the move you're making in this discussion:

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

All is well and good with that. I agree that it is a sensible way of think of the effect of introducing a functionalist vocabulary of description. But I want to highlight that, if I've read you right, the underlying logic of the move - introducing a functionalist vocabulary of description - lets you doubt the conditions of individuating posited entities in any non-functionalist language of description concerned with the same subject matter.

It also isn't a unique feature of functionalism - eg do you see atoms as atoms or as quantum clouds? It's a feature of holding up two perspectives of the world which individuate (more nebulously encountered/less precisely conceptualised) events differently.

In that regard, the move is the metaethical equivalent of carpet bombing. If we grant that the side by side comparison is ground to doubt any normative claim - due to the underlying mismatch in how tokens are grouped/individuated in the functionalist and non-functionalist description types -, we'd grant that it applies to all normative claims which permit of at least one functionalist and one non-functionalist means of conceptualising them. That scope is extremely broad.

However, it's ultimately a methodological move rather than an ontological one - about a means of describing a more nebulously encountered/less conceptually precise subject matter than what it somehow "contains". No descriptive category would be committed to reified entities if the ability to hold perspectives which differ in this manner, side by side, on the same subject matter was employed.

The only way that this reification takes place is that someone treats any mode of description as having ontologically privileged entities in it. Which is good to highlight when it happens. But it should also be acknowledged that our beloved carpet bombing melts categories like sex as well as law, perception, gender, norms of scientific reasoning, good practices of inferences... Everything really. I think this also chimes with @Moliere.

It's also thus an inappropriate intervention in an inference between one regime and the "downstream" norms which apply to it. As it undermines the ability to construe that regime in a manner which allows norms to be applied to it in the first place.

However, that inappropriateness only applies, I believe, when the move being applied is holding up a functionalist description next to another description. Rather than seeing the subject matter through functional and non-functional means. If the norms are downstream of the non-functional articulation of the subject matter, we could see how a functionalist description of the subject matter perturbs (allegedly) downstream norms concerning the entities it conceptualises. This is why I highlighted the intersection between describing behaviour and sensations + the phenomenology of trans embodiment + speech acts declaring gender, it's a connection which allows the mutual perturbation of all of those regimes.

Why I brought up that example is that it illustrates that none of the vocabularies of description need to be discarded, even after their entities are seen as deconcretised. Since deconcretisation is a function of making another map, rather than changing the territory.

This is a very simplified story though, as I'm sure @Moliere would be keen to point out that we can't just adopt these perspectives like we'd change scientific instruments, we theorise from within them. In that regard the norms are never downstream of any folk vocabulary of description. And since the semantic resources of folk vocabularies are used in the articulation of non-folk ones, we have good reason to believe that the principles which flesh out the entities in non-folk categories of description are also tainted by the messiness of the folk ones. Which isn't to say folk categories get the entities right, it's to say folk categorisations and norms of association act as a constraint on forming new vocabularies especially on relatively novel social phenomena. Like there being a decent case (already gestured toward) that gender came before sex "in the order of knowing", even if not before it in the order of being.

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.

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.

Woke lefties of the internet, unite.

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?

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.

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).

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.

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

This is too meta for me to understand. :( — Srap Tasmaner

Oh, sorry.

Pretty much everything a mind allegedly does, if it involves what we'd describe as a judgement or interpretation, can be construed as having only ex post facto affects because the entities involved in those judgements/interpretations are ex post facto. Did someone go to jail for breaking the law, or because their motor units were recruited in a manner to move their legs away from... Did I eat the sandwich because I was hungry, or because the relative concentration of grehlin in my body was high...

I could be in jail, awaiting a sentence for stealing a car, and be able to tell the officer: "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. For a constrained sense of cause, anyway.. The same trick can be played with any conceptual register about people higher in degree of organisational complexity than the body - like an institution, a social encounter, a law, a norm, an identity.

This discussion contains laws and identities. Identities are suspect whereas laws are not. The criterion @Isaac is using to dissolve identity would also dissolve law. And all the other abstractions we'd use to understand social scenarios.

Edit: and to make clear why I think that's important, it would stop is from using any of the terms the debate was premised using to begin with. Nothing would make sense any more.

it has to get into the game earlier than our post-facto stories and justifications and rationalizations. — Srap Tasmaner

Aye. Something can be a post-facto story/rationalisation and still have whatever bodily state it secreted/was identified with be influential after the fact, I think all the change of vocabulary to "post factor" or "defence against uncertainty" does is try to put a gloss on whether social categories are primarily reactive or primarily productive. Considering that every social category, indeed every act of perception, would be primarily reactive under @Isaac's view, I don't think it operates at the required level of specificity.

Calling these norms post facto, or highlighting that they are indeed post hoc rationalisations, reads like the Less Wrong rationality trope "Uncritical Supercriticality" in this instance. In which a term from one context gets transported to another, and mutually elaborated upon cross purposes.

The specific form that would take here is that absolutely nothing of social life, no "mental furniture", ideology or even motivational state, survives the parsing. In effect it's a selectively applied table flip. Like choosing not to play the same game when one is out of moves.

Not saying that you're being disingenuous @Isaac, just that the moves you've made the last few pages undermine the starting premises of the debate. Even the law's post facto in this sense.

I've been out of the thread for a bit, but I wanted to thank you for how well written this is.

Also @Isaac, @Srap Tasmaner, keep up the good work. This is a rare conversation.

I know (feel??) myself to be a woman; the other side scrambles to find something else because whatever the criteria are that's not it. How will negotiation proceed? — Srap Tasmaner

Negotiation about what, though? It's relatively easy to use the pronouns someone wants you to. It's a bit harder to see someone as the gender on a gut level if they identify with if they look or act stereotypically otherwise. I think those are behavioural commitments though.

Do you think they're separate from whether it's right to call someone a woman or a man though? I think I do.

If you dial the clock back a hundred years, say, and someone born a woman claims, without being metaphorical or something, to be a man, not to have a preference for presenting as a man, in the culturally standard way, though a woman, but to be a man full-stop, then the likely conclusion would be that this woman is suffering from a delusion. — Srap Tasmaner

Yes.

I would even find that possibility tempting today except it just doesn't look delusional, or not like any delusion I'm at all familiar with. I literally do not know what it's supposed to mean, which suggests to me that people making such identity claims are up to something completely different. — Srap Tasmaner

What's not clear is whether my understanding is expected or required. Usually with words people say to me, it is, but I'm honestly not sure here, which is odd. I can think of two explanations for this: it is not a message, say, but a signal; or language is being used in some new way, and I don't just mean in a Humpty Dumpty way. — Srap Tasmaner

Yes. Such an identification might not have a a correctness condition. Since that correctness condition would bottom out at being judged, in the aggregate, as correct. Thus "I'm a man" or "I'm a woman" might be more of a declaration. An affirmation without a specifiable basis. Like an "I love you". Such a statement maybe forms part of the system of judging whether the declarations themselves are correct. If it's performance all the way down...

If it's the latter then the world has changed and maybe this is *real* postmodernism, not the piddly warmups we've been living through but the real thing, a through-the-looking-glass kind of change. All of us on the forum here are suddenly dinosaurs no matter how cool we thought we were. — Srap Tasmaner

Then we might be living through a recognition that our categories were always this way. And the only thing that kept them from evaporating was believing that we treat gender distinctions more rigidly, and acting in accord.

I do think it's very unlikely that we could get, even in principle, a list that boils down who counts as a man or a woman without also constructing an incomplete stereotype of the role - in terms of behaviour, attitudes, social standings etc. And we'd already know that behaving in accord with a stereotype is neither necessary nor sufficient for being the type of being that stereotype is associated with.

Maybe we can look at it in a pragmatist manner, which in some respect is a refusal to get down into these issues. You count as X if you have a tendency to act as if you are X.

it's creative rather than literal. If anything this is just thumbing your nose at all gender categories. — Srap Tasmaner

I think that might be true. Though it might also be typical of gender categories. Manhood and womanhood as creative rather than literal. That move always seems available. Manhood and womanhood as always thumbing their nose at each other - since they're internally inconsistent corpuscles of behavioural commitments and expectations. Why should their ascription be expected to work in a well behaved fashion when man and woman never had, and even something as concrete as "builder" has major difficulties by these standards?

So the change might be more of a collective realisation of how things were before.

I'm asking why it's only society that has the mandated role to play, why is my responsive behaviour socially restricted along gender lines, but not the performative behaviour of the actual person whose gender it is? — Isaac

There's room for there to be different classes of restrictions. As in: your responsive behaviour is socially restricted because it's the ethical thing to do regardless of metaphysics or social theory, the performative behaviour of the person whose gender it is is restricted on pain of counting as what they (feel they) are. So if you were to say "You're a woman! Not a man" to a trans man, because they were wearing a dress, what's restricted in that moment is the violence of your assertion... Not an academic discussion like this.

Admittedly some people really do think academic discussions like this are unethical and part of the logic of dominance. But I think talking about that would take us too far afield.

The trouble I have is that I want to get there by seeing those expressions as performance, but the people using these expressions keep talking like they're supposed to be taken as incontrovertible fact, or as witness -- however you do that you're opening yourself to the same types of skepticism and critique as any other expression. — Srap Tasmaner

I guess we could talk about correctness conditions for claiming an identity, and what they'd look like. We do have precedents for that in social roles. If I want to write "someone is", like "Sally is a woman", I'm going to treat that as "Sally can correctly claim to be a woman". I'll also stipulate that if there are any identities, social roles would count as them. Like a job. Or a profession.

Claiming a job has a clear correctness condition. I can correctly claim to be a builder in the employ of B.S Brick and Son's if and only if I am a builder in the employ of B.S Brick and Sons.

A profession is a bit more difficult. If I have worked as a builder for 10 years, and currently work as a builder, then I can correctly claim to be a builder. So it seems a sufficient condition exists for claiming professional roles. A necessary condition would be having helped build something at some point in your life. Addressing this with complete specificity seems impossible.

I might also be able to count as a builder if I have a certificate from a legally recognised organisation. Having such a certificate allows you to claim to be one and becomes a correctness condition for it. Perhaps correct in a different sense than we're after though.

We do have gender recognition certificates. Those might work operationally as correctness conditions in their society of issue. But they might not say anything about the normative but not-legal correctness condition for counting as that gender.

There's probably a constructive dilemma hereabouts, if we require a relatively sharp set of correctness conditions in order to claim that a social role can be correctly claimed, then we might end up committing ourselves to the claim that no one can correctly identify as a builder (while maintaining a non-legal sense of identity) or that identities cannot have non-legal correctness conditions in this sense. I'd personally want to treat that as a modus tollens, that since we have practical uses for identity categories, we can't require relatively sharp sets of correctness conditions for claiming social roles.

That would leave us in a space where social roles either have only operationally definable content - so you're a builder if you have the builder boiler plate, regardless of if you have ever built anything in your life - or that one can correctly claim to have an identity when that identity claim has largely unarticulated correctness conditions.

I stress "unarticulated" there, in contrast to the private language argument reference, since we've not established that perceived correctness conditions are unarticulable, or "private". We simply haven't established what they are yet.

I'd be willing to bet that counting as a man is similar to counting as round, semantically. Fuzzy boundaries, but with the ability to rule out some cases in some contexts.

No bother pal. Hope you have a fun time here.

Is 'well-researched' still a criterion for OP's? Or has this criterion shifted with time? — Leontiskos

I don't think we set the bar that high with it. If someone doesn't research their post, but writes a persuasive argument, I think we still tend to treat that as worthy of discussion. The only times in recent memory that we banned someone for low quality engagement are when their comments consistently are:

1) so poorly formatted or written they could not be understood.
2) irrelevant to the threads they're in.

Of course we appreciate people putting in a lot of legwork for OPs. It makes the discussion a lot better. I think we tend to follow these criteria for reviewing OPs, roughly:

A) OPs which are well researched and well constructed are exemplary.
B) Well constructed OPs are good ones.
C) An OP that states its issue or problem, or raises its question, in an understandable fashion is permissible.
D) If an otherwise deletion worthy OP attracts an interesting comment from another member, we often leave the thread up so that the discussion the OP provoked can continue.

If something isn't understandable, and hasn't attracted an interesting comment regardless, that's the situation it tends to be deleted in. Consistently producing threads, or posts, like that tends to get someone banned for low quality.

I can't be particularly precise about what "an understandable manner" is in point ( c ). All I can say there is that I believe the bar is pretty low. We've deleted OPs like (this is an exaggeration):

Sleeping Causes

What does it mean when unseen happens to happen?

Or Time Cube style walls of text.

Hope this helps.

tl;dr - so long as someone can understand what you write, your post will be fine.

The evangelism guideline generally gets used when someone repeatedly posts the same thing repeatedly, like a worldview, without discussing it in a reciprocal manner. Like a bad preacher. @Mikie's thread resembles other (hypothetical, but with precedent) topics like:

Should we be discussing whether perception is direct.
Should we be discussing metaethics when it has no practical import.
Should we be discussing formal semantics.

If you were to argue "No, we shouldn't" for any of those, making a case means arguing for an imperative. There's nothing wrong with any of that.

You can see that @Mikie 's engaged with @unenlightened charitably in the same thread. I don't think Mikie's comments being acerbic removes their charitable engagement with others in that thread. Despite that it may be distasteful.

tl;dr - the evangelism guideline is generally used to catch people who broadcast the same message, all the time, in multiple threads, and do not engage in reciprocal discussion.

You org can make it rain! Powerful org. — Isaac

We couldn't stop it though.

Do you think? It's funny how from different sides (only slightly different, I hope) the world looks so different. I can't, off the top of my head, think of a single act on the part of any institution at all in Britain that's been aimed at curtailing trans rights. I can see how the trans community might think the necessary changes aren't happening fast enough, but changes in the wrong direction...? I certainly don't know of any. We only narrowly avoided the Scottish bill to have birth certificates replaced. Maybe they should have been, that's a legal argument, but the bill was pro-trans and it didn't progress. It wasn't that an anti-trans bill did progress. — Isaac

Maybe! By curtailing I also meant to suggest "blocking the advancement of". We could talk about rejecting the Scottish Bill if you like, my understanding was that the official reason was largely "we haven't changed the law in England yet, so making this easier in Scotland would cause some chaos down here".

I think it's clear (from where I'm sat - leather wing-back armchair in ivory tower, of course), that the political climate is pro-trans but with the brakes on. Anti-trans I just don't see. — Isaac

Eh. I saw a lot of people donating to an anti trans charity just before the bill. They were getting donations on the streets of Edinburgh. People would go by and tell them all kinds of things. I know they were anti trans because of their pamphlets, and the "all trans women are rapists" rhetoric they were spewing onto the street. I can understand why people would get that impression.

My org kept poaching their punters though, they soon left. Buggers also couldn't stand light rain.

And the mods shouldn't have to work so hard to maintain it — Isaac

;)

Fair. I wasn't terribly confident in the analogy as I was writing it, but thought 'fuck it, it's going in anyway — Isaac

You can find TERFish references to the same analogy on SEP's Feminist Perspectives On Trans Issues. I think comparisons between identity categories are a helpful way of highlighting differences. I'm sure you've heard the lines about objectifying objectivity and appropriation before, so I shan't rehearse them.

For example, I don't think "It's a girl" is something like a scientific categorisation by a midwife - it's a declaration, a use of the term 'girl' (she looked at the reproductive organs and used the word 'girl'). — Isaac

Yeah! "Assigned woman at birth" and all that jazz.

but when later that girl decides she expresses herself more like a man, then she'll use the word 'man' and ask others to do so too. That also is a use of the word. Both legitimate uses of a word which has different felicitous uses in different contexts. The midwife wasn't wrong, nor the trans man later in life.

Yes. I can read that and know you intend the bolded "she" as a continued reference to the person with female natal sex who was declared a woman at birth and then identified as/behaved as/became a man later. I don't think I immediately need to read you as intentionally misgendering. Which could well have happened. Since my Internal Twitter picked up on it, and it is usually quite good.

I do not think that is productive. Though I can understand, in the climate of these discussions, there are so many disingenuous actors that it can make a lot of sense to assume bad faith on any interlocutor's part. And in that regard reinforce the worst excesses.

My Internal Twitter, when reading the EHRC report, wanted to scream at it for denying the reality of trans identity by equating natal sex with gender . Ultimately that would be based on a misperception, though. Unless there was further context that the EHRC report's recommendation came out for purely political reasons as a curtailment of rights (which I can imagine being the case, since I don't know what knock on effects this will have on current trans protections).

It's just that gender terms are not fixed to one use in one context. Nor do I see the slightest reason why they ought to be.

Also yes.

As an aside, I do hope that we can keep TPF able to have these kind of discussions in a respectful manner, it's something we've needed to argue about in the mod thread on numerous occasions.

Yeah. Couch this in terms of race and see how it sounds. Does one need to have had the past oppression experiences of being black to suffer the loss of privilege associated with that experience? Yes. Without a shadow of a doubt. If I had some random medical condition which darkened my skin, it would not be the same as having been raised black, I don't inherit that identity, just by meeting the criteria currently - there's a history which informs our current identities. For women (biological) that history is their childhood. For trans women it cannot be. That creates two separate identities (insofar as the idea of identities makes any sense at all, which I'm not sold on) — Isaac

I think you've equivocated between inheriting an identity and being subject to its systemic vectors of oppression when you count as it. If you look like a duck, people will treat you like a duck. I think I can agree with you that the socialisations are different - if you're currently a trans woman, you might've been socialised partly as a man, partly as a trans person, in a queer fashion and so on. As you say, the boundaries are blurry.

'Woman' always was a loose term which meant slightly different things in different circumstances, it never cropped up as an issue because there were so few non-overlapping elements, but the criteria for membership was never stable. — Isaac

There were so few non-overlapping elements in the public conception of things, anyway. Those instabilities were going to implode as soon as anyone shone light on them. I think it's a good thing this is happening.

Yeah, In the Equalities Act as we have it right now, gender reassignment is a protected characteristic. I'd like to see more gender identity types included than that. I think gender reassignment is too high a bar to qualify. Merely being trans should be enough, like being gay is. — Isaac

Aye. I think if this was a choice on the ballot, I would take it. More categories, more protective laws, more tailorable specificity.

I imagine you believe the same of masculinity, it's not an "all or nothing" thing? It's instead a big wibbly wobbly ball of manny-mascy stuff?

But at the systemic level, clearly a biological woman (grown up as a woman) has been exposed to discrimination that a trans woman (grown up a man) has not. — Isaac

I think that's true, but I'm not sure it's relevant from the perspective of what counts as a woman. I'd bet that oppression experiences don't uniquely characterise womanhood, they just apply to womanhood. Whether we can imagine a womanhood resembling the current one without characteristic oppression experiences I suppose is an issue. Your mileage may vary on whether the kind of subjectivity (womanhood) produced in tandem with oppression experiences of that sort (systemic discrimination against women) has an autonomous existence from those oppression experiences (womanhood simpliciter, possibly without oppression experiences).

Regardless, the expression you gave is tensed, right. There'd need to be an argument that past oppression experiences which are typical for women to experience are necessary for being a woman. Effectively this would exclude anyone trans. If it's treated as a theory of social identity as well as a legal classification. I think this also interfaces with the radfem/terf/feminist points you raised.

Isn't this against the point you made earlier? About the definitions of an oppressed minority should not depend solely upon the oppressor? Did I misread?

Though I imagine we're having the frames discussion you highlighted at the end of your post.

With regards to the clash with traditional feminism, this fully exhausts the area of conflict. I don't think any of those branded Terfs argued that trans women shouldn't be treated as women in everyday circumstances (and that would include an act of misogynist discrimination). It is the insistence, from many in the trans movement, that the definition of woman include trans women in all those other frames too. For example the recent Scottish bill to have birth certificates changed, which Baroness Falkner argues would undermine attempts to monitor systemic discrimination against women (much of which takes place during childhood, education etc). — Isaac

Perhaps a decent angle to come at this from, giving charity to the "cancel culture brigade" is that the frame separations are also politically charged, perhaps precisely because it's difficult to tell when the frames have switched. I doubt we'd be having this discussion if which operationalisations of gender are appropriate in which context are a settled matter. In that regard, being particularly militant about it makes a lot of sense. Especially when whether you count as the person you are is up for grabs. Like your rights.

That said there'd be nothing stopping the a code from having trans misogyny guidelines which enable some of the same legal protections. And try to clear up the entry to spaces issue. It's a pretty fine line between an organisation allowing someone into a space because legally biological sex lets them preclude it vs not allowing someone into a space under that same law because they're not seen as who they are. You see what I mean? I'd be fucking terrified of whatever precedents are set here. No wonder people get mad.

Misogyny is largely about sex. The 'othering' is sex-based, the effects are heavily sex-based (reproductive rights, treatment of female children,..). The lens through which it's examined needs to match that. — Isaac

On the level of systemic oppression, a trans person is going to have different hurdles than a cis one. This be true. A woman is going to have different hurdles than a man. A trans woman is going to have different hurdles than cis woman, a cis man or a trans man. Those things could have different categories ascribed to them yeah.

If you want to call cis women's oppression misogyny, trans women's oppression trans misogyny as a matter of nomenclature, I think that's fine. Though I doubt it makes sense treat its vectors as independent. Since we already stipulated that there are plenty of times trans women will be the recipient of acts which would be called misogynist acts if they were directed toward a cis woman. That articulation necessitates an underlying construct - gender.

Which is part of why that remains a useful category. In what frame? An explanatory one for acts of prejudice, independent of its an identity theory for it.

There exists a group who are misogynist. — Isaac

Though perhaps I misinterpreted you, it seems you've talked about a group of misogynists (I guess "the set of all misogynists", what a colourful lot!), do you see this group as the origin of systemic oppression of women?

There is a clear need to move the public debate on these issues to a more informed and constructive basis. This would be welcomed by the many who do not take the polarised positions currently driving public debate. — Isaac

...certainly a position I recognise. — Isaac

Same. Charity can often be absent. I like to hope TPF is a bit less reactive in this manner. Whether that makes it more of a cess pool than some other places is, of course, to taste.

There needs to exist at least one definition of 'woman' (in the EHRC's case for the purposes of the Equalities Act), which is based on traditional criteria. Women (the oppressed grouping) are not having their protected characteristic adequately defended if they cannot be defined (in at least these areas) by visible biological sex traits - the traditional means by which the patriarchal system would have identified them as targets for unequal treatment. — Isaac

While I can see the utility of it for the law, there was also some utility in leaving some points as it was. The article concludes that maintaining the biological sex definition of woman as a marker for the protector group clarifies some issues but makes others ambiguous or unintuitive. Explicitly, a trans woman with a gender recognition certificate would be able to appeal to protective laws for women under a social or subjective theory of gender identity but not under the sex one. Even if they were dismissed or undermined as a woman would be in the workplace.

If I understood the article correctly, a major source of the ambiguities in the EHRC's protected categories legislation is that they are currently revising the document. The document did not distinguish between sex and gender, so it will be unclear conceptually and practically which conception to use in which place. Perhaps it is considered elsewhere, but it I did not consider something more disjunctive or case based.

Something like "you can appeal to (protected category of womanhood) in (this circumstance) if you (have woman as a biological sex or have a gender recognition certificate that you are a woman". Notably this isn't considering legislation considering trans as a distinct protected human rights category. Which, practically, might dodge these issues.

Regardless, I'm sure you see the distinction between recognising an act of misogyny in the workplace and operationalising/defining terms in the law. It is difficult to conclusively establish that any individual act is born out of personal prejudice. And I don't believe we've established a reason that legal definitions of womanhood as a protected characteristic should behave as the criteria for recognising misogyny in interpersonal acts. The ability of a trans woman to experience interpersonal misogyny as well as transphobia is evidence of this. Surely you wouldn't contest that someone who counts as a woman for social purposes experiences misogyny too?

Also, this appears quite distinct from studying "toxic" masculinity as a category of social style/personal identities, since identity of that sort is largely autonomous from the legal codes surrounding it. Hence the article being written, it's revising a 2010 draft, and notes society has changed considerably in its gender dynamics and conceptualisations since then.

Whatever space of concepts that latter "gender dynamics" and "conceptualisations" lays in is the one relevant to the concerns of this thread, I believe, not the law.

All of which leads pretty much to the same conclusion that the Equalities and Human Rights Commission recently reached. — Isaac

Source? Sounds a good read.

What has happened in that instance? Has he, unbeknownst to him, not been a misogynist because he resented a man? Or has he been a misogynist all along, but the target of his misogyny is not self-identified? — Isaac

Lemme see if I've got this right, the underlying contrast you're disambiguating is between two concepts of misogyny which look like:

1 ) An act A by an agent X is misogynist = when A is a prejudicial act directed toward a woman on the basis of their womanhood with a means of identifying womanhood W.

That's something like a correctness condition for an act being judged misogynist, where W is a supplementary correctness condition for identifying womanhood. Be it a "subjective" identity, a performative one or whatever. The two cases you highlight are different values of W. In that regard, whether someone is a misogynist or not turns on a correctness condition for what counts as a woman.

There's another option - rather than a misogynist act being directed toward a woman, a misogynist act I think could be construed thusly:

2 ) An act A by agent X is misogynist = when A is prejudicial and directed toward someone X identifies as a woman on A's basis of identifying them as such.

That's also a correctness condition for misogyny, but it removes the need for disambiguating the concept of womanhood, or whether the recipient of an act of prejudice counts as a woman by some theory of identity. 2 ) instead incorporates counting as a woman as part of A's judgement.

The utility of that conception is that a misogynist act can incorporate a misjudgement of someone's gender identity (as construed under a sensible theory of identity), and all that matters is that they count as a woman to the agent doing the act.

Yes. I think that's the tension that many traditional feminists feel with the newer gender identity prescriptions. If there is a group that is oppressed in some way, it can't be a group that is self-identified because the oppressor does not ask questions about identity before oppressing, the object of their oppression is that group identified by them as deserving oppression and so the subject of any fight against oppression is the group the oppressor identified, not the one any other group identify. — Isaac

I also think the above addresses the concern you raised here. The criteria by which people socially count as women can be quite different from those which correctly count women as women in accordance with a robust theory of identity. In that respect, what matters for being a recipient of misogynist acts isn't "being a woman" (in accordance with a robust theory of identity) it's "counting as one" for practical purposes. Like Game of Thrones Arya stark pretending to be a young boy when she was kidnapped.

In terms of someone being a misogynist, I'd guess that consistently doing misogynist acts counts someone among their number.

my guess is that masculinity probably isn't related to where we landed — Moliere

Indeed it isn't. @Isaac successfully Mao'd over the thread.

Resentment is the emotion of toxic masculinity moreso than the pleasure of bullying. — Moliere

Everyone can resent. What flavours of resentment are uniquely masculine or essential characteristics of toxic masculinity? Can you give a list of contributors to toxic masculinity? Something like correctness conditions for the predicate "is an instance of toxic masculinity"?

and I don't understand how this happened or why people do it. — Srap Tasmaner

An aside: can confirm. People do this at book clubs.

Yeah, that's kind of where I'm going. Also, I think fdrake might have even posted it earlier, but Mark Fisher's seminal article https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/exiting-vampire-castle/. — Isaac

My concern is that this phenomenon isn't new, it's just out in public. The "Effeminist Manifesto" was written partly in response to perceptions of prejudice between anti-patriarchy groups, and you can see the weaponisation of the rhetoric of liberation for infighting in "Trashing, the Dark Side of Sisterhood". My impression is that the same dynamic is just louder now and is a public spectacle. Which is why I've been making the point that it's the same identity fragmentation dynamic as before. Just looks different due to the social form of organisation. We can see the factionalism out in public, so the representativeness heuristic is going to tell us the groups within movement are getting more factionalised than they were before and that this is stymying progress. Whereas, with @BC, what we're actually observing is the same "post left" period that there has been since Occupy, with the same characteristics of failure, just that the grievances get aired in public.

So I'm saying there are threee big groups of systemic effects;
1) The post left period @BC is right to point out. The institutions of solidarity we're used to imagining either died or have weakened. We should have our systemic analysis hats on after all.
2) social media pumping up the volume on extant left infighting dynamics.

There are two smaller effects:

3) This performative grievance culture mentioned in thread
4) An emphasis on intervening in the attention economy as political praxis among the most vocal

The impact of ( 3 ) looks a lot bigger than it really is because of ( 1 ), ( 2 ) and ( 4 ). ( 4 ) makes ( 2 ) broadcast ( 3 ) even louder, too!

So when I'm saying same shit different day, I'm saying ( 1 ) and ( 2 ) are the major drivers. ( 3 ) is essentially the dirty laundry which never aired in public. ( 4 ) is something we can quibble about, but there's no way it's working as the kind of driver ( 1 ) and ( 2 ) are.

With ( 4 ) I get the impression that the energy spent doing it wouldn't be spent doing grass roots work or coalition building. It's the modern day equivalent of rowdy politics chat in a bar.

I was with you up to the last. Surely it is a bad thing? Are we saying that the exacerbation of disunity in order to make a fast buck is morally neutral? That doesn't seem quite right. — Isaac

Oh. The tendency of capital to dissolve social forms also tends to dissolve stultifying ones. Disruption isn't always bad.

Really, really obvious intersectionalities are being missed again and again which just adds to this feeling of glib superficiality to these campaigns. — Isaac

That can be granted without having any import onto intersectionality as critical tool in organising practice. Ineptness, affectation, pick your poison.

I've no idea what is happening in trans, feminist or any other minority on-the-ground action these days, but I'd be surprised if it was radically different. — Isaac

I notice that people bring political commitments too. Just that it doesn't matter if they're an anarchist or a Stalinist, since they agree on the issue. Working out how to deal with marginalised identities within an org is something an intersectional perspective will synergise with. People bring the prejudice with them as a perspective generator, that's then mediated by the "conditions on the ground". Does it really matter if a Stalinist and an identity-first anarchist disagree on almost everything if they can agree on what needs to be done?

The folk getting disabled access ramps for the town hall are probably the local council these days - and that's part of the problem. — Isaac

You still do unfortunately. Getting the authorities to follow their own laws.

The broader point I'm making is that framing a big conflict between intersectional approaches and class first ones in terms of practical consequences isn't really directed to the audience it's intended to effect. If any org ends up shitting itself for reasons like this, it's our tendency toward forming a circular firing line and bullshit office politics. Rather than treating a four steps removed abstraction from the ground as a causal factor in lack of left unity. Would that the left had enough power that our quibbles over intersectionality had any impact on society's "melting into air". We just don't.

I'm gonna put my commie hat on.

thou 'victim' here is a difficult one to define - I'm going to assume it's both attackers and the attacked who are 'victims' of knife culture — Isaac

Thanks. That's part of why I chose the example.

So unless you've got something to hold against that impression, I'm not buying this story that these new forms of identity politics unite. Not from where I'm standing. If they do, they unite by simply crushing dissent. — Isaac

I get the impression that you are reading that this disunity is the left's problem, whereas it's likely society's. Capital's always going to be doing that thing where any identity division is exacerbated, monetised, coopted in an attempt to create and maintain markets. This ultimately isn't a good or a bad thing, it is just a thing that happens.

So it isn't a surprise that the current formation of emancipatory politics in the west is riddled with geopolitical hypocrisy. That's ideology working as normal. The critical impulse you're providing, as always, is a necessary moment in the dialectic. The Revolution needs people like you to remind The Left that global oriented politics is necessary. As a corrective to hidden hypocrisies. Though also as always, the cry toward heightened awareness of international issues also can serve as a means of blocking emancipatory struggles in left movements in the political north - see big disputes in orgs about class first postures.

The thing is, the cry of admonishment you're providing is less of a corrective and more of a lament. Which is also fine, there is a place for that, let's just not pretend it's directed at a fractiously organised Left, it's directed at a certain image of political north Leftists largely divorced from the situation "on the ground". You and @Moliere both highlighted that when you're in an emancipatory politics org, intersectional and class based theory only matters to the extent it informs your praxis. The corollary is that intersectionality as a theoretical abstraction plays just the same role as the geopolitical corrective you're providing within the left; a lens.

Neither intersectionality, or what you're espousing, have any concrete doctrinal or practical commitments. They're not even organisational principles. They're barely even informative theory for on the ground politics. They sit at least three degrees of organisational abstraction above moving bodies into the right places at the right times. They're means of forming/criticising means of perceiving means of organising norms of praxis, and let's not pretend they're anything but.

The perceived proliferation of identities results from a systemic fragmentation of identity and a partitioning of social space, as should be evident from it being widespread over the political north. The fact that this fragmentation creates a posture in left politics, an identity politics, is as much a reflection of the underlying fragmentation as it is a way that civil liberty destabilises stultifying identities - if they can be monetised somehow, and they will, that serves to make them more accessible. In some respects that can be celebrated. It's in general a good thing that corps must cynically show their commitment to LGBTQIA+ cause, as not doing so results in a widespread loss of social capital. That is an opportunity.

On the ground, a tankie and a blue hair can put their differences aside and get a disabled access ramp for a town hall. Or disrupt government through a well placed protest for a day.

This chat is for the most part a hobby.

Discrimination at SEP, Feminist Perspectives on Power at SEP. Both of them have intersectionality subsections.

I don't see what's gained by the intersectional approach over just tackling each issue as it is. — Isaac

Trying to see if there's any relevant interactions between the issues that present unique challenges. Eg: Glasgow knife crime, went down a lot through police intervention in the 2010s. Community education, giving people training and jobs, giving people places to go, counselling, more investment in social workers. Public health stuff. Great! Big impact. But on who? It didn't work as well for the people most at risk - poor people in the most deprived areas with domestic issues. That's a tough nut to crack. Worth thinking about that subdemographic works differently than the broader demographic.

Which is where something like an intersectional approach would be necessary? As in, looking at interlocking systems of oppression effecting people marginalised in more than one way.

Maybe that's a weak version of intersectionality though, I'm claiming that some of the time it makes sense to try it for some problems, rather than it ought to be the primary viewpoint used for formulating those problems.

Though I do imagine the majority of the time people use the word it's just lip service. Or academic paper farming. I've never seen a political act driven by an intersectional theory in the abstract. Just people working on issues in the most local fashion they can. Or designing institutional rules that allow marginalised groups to represent themselves better.

I don't care if people resent me for calling out their bullshit. — Tzeentch

So long as you don't resent them for doing the same, eh?