[quote Positrans]@9toenails
I agree with all the main points, but I already said that - I'm a sceptic, and if I am open to the idea that I'm not even typing this, I must surely be open to the idea that I am mistaken about other things. But as I said I have no particular reason to believe I'm wrong at the moment.[/quote]
This thread has expanded since I last looked, possibly because of your engagement, I suspect, positrons. Can we keep this little discussion going a little further, I wonder?
I asked whether you could accept the possibility of you being mistaken ‘without descending into the realms of … hyperbolic scepticism’ (the reference is to Descartes, of course). You do not wish to answer that, but, well, let us go with what we have.
How might we disagree? It seems to you you are a woman. Could you be mistaken that it seems so to you? Without claiming we are brains-in-vats, or utilising any extreme Cartesian-style scepticism or anything like that, I suspect you are mistaken, as I will explain. Let us see.
I do not know you. You may be a woman for all I know. So let us depersonalise. How about this: some transwomen feel they are women. I think they are mistaken, for reasons I will explain.
I mentioned earlier that the issue is semantic: about meaning. (I do not intend any formal semantics here, model-theoretic or otherwise. Just run-of-the mill common sense stuff I hope.)
So. What does ‘woman’ mean? I use ‘woman’ of female adult humans. -- ‘Female’? As I said earlier, I take ‘female’ as one of a binary pair, the other being ‘male’. (You wish to deny this binary, I know. But please stick with me, pro tem as it were.)
‘Woman’, like all words, depends for its meaning on how it is used. And there is a use of ‘woman’ that has it as one of a binary pair, the other being ‘man’. The practice of using these words in this way has a history. This is a use my mother would have recognised … that I recognised as a child … that my grandmothers and grandfathers used … that many people still use ...
[A word about definition. It is something of a diversion to think of definitions of words in contexts like this. Take definitions as the OED explicitly does, not prescriptively, but roughly as snapshots of use, possibly changing with time etc. The use is primary (although of course definitions are useful in special cases; ‘A Noetherian ring is a ring that satisfies the ascending chain condition on ideals ’, for instance, is prescriptive).]
This use of ‘woman’, now – this meaning of the word – is one you will recognise, I am sure. And, I claim, using this meaning of ‘woman’, transwomen who claim to feel they are women make a mistake because this meaning of ‘women’ denies such a possibility.
That is, those born men (where ‘men’ is used the way I have indicated) who claim to feel they are women (where ‘women’ likewise is used in that old-fashioned way) make a mistake – a mistake, in the end, dependent on what ‘women’ and ‘men’ mean – on how these words are used in the practice I have outlined. Can you see how this plays out? I hope so.
OK, now, you say, perhaps, you want to use ‘woman’ etc. in a different way. Fine. Two things:
(1) How?
(2) Note that a change of meaning entails in many cases a change of topic. So in our case, if we agree to use ‘woman’ in a different way, this will not challenge the conclusion we came to above, that transwomen make a mistake in claiming to feel they are women, where ‘women’ is used there in that old-fashioned way.
Finally for now, what about the question, ‘what does ‘woman’ really mean?’ Or, equivalently, ‘what is a woman, really?’ These look like metaphysical questions (or perhaps scientific questions). Can we answer them with our examination of semantics? Maybe not. But once you get to grips with the semantics, it may be that such questions lose their force. We may, in the meantime, feel we understand each other, anyway.
The question left hanging at the end, now, is of course the ‘How?’ from above. How might we use ‘woman’ and correlative terms in such a way that the binary ‘woman’/‘man’ disappears? (Let me emphasise that this is a semantic question: it asks what new meaning of ‘woman’ is to be offered; it is not a question about real definitions, a metaphysical question or a scientific question about women.)
Any answer? I do hope you can give this a go, positrons.