Male and Female Robots

That’s not my argument… nor the reason we’re stuck.

We’re caught in a loop… allow me to show you the loop.

Loop it from here…

Where do bull dykes get to go to the bathroom? Transvestites?

Mad Man, your last step in that loop is nonresponsive, that’s why we’re looping. “Is being a woman more like being a lizard or more like being a blonde” is not answered by the reply that “It’s on [me] to propose an alternate definition”.

You offer the lizard hypothetical, because you’ve argued all along that woman is an inherently biological term. That’s question-begging because it effectively says, “look how we would treat this obviously different case that’s more biological; therefore, we should treat this case the same way.” I point out that we can come up with more biological and more social cases, and we need to decide which one is relevant here. Returning to your claim that woman is biological is non-responsive.

What’s more, I then responded on your terms: the biological definition isn’t the only definition in the dictionary, the source of authority to which you appealed. I don’t need to invent my own definition, I pointed you to three sources that attest to the fact that woman has a social meaning that isn’t reducible to biology. And now you seem to be saying, “well I don’t accept the authority of the source of authority to which I’ve repeatedly appealed, so I guess we’re back at square one. It’s a loop!”

We’re looping because you’re cornered, by your own use of the words and concepts we’re discussing, and by the source of authority on which you’ve based your argument. Let me spell this out:
You claimed that “woman” is a word purely based in biology. But you acknowledge that it would be inappropriate to call a transman a “woman”, even though the change is superficial, non-biological. You may prefer a new word, you may prefer to multiply the genders, but your own acknowledge use of the language is one that doesn’t not depend solely on biology. When biology and social role don’t match, you admit that the word no longer applies.
You claimed that the authoritative definition of woman is biological, and I pointed to the same authority where it provides the non-biological meaning that you’re claiming doesn’t exist.

But let me offer another argument for the proposition that social sex is different from biological sex and doesn’t depend on it:
Young children frequently learn about social sex before the learn about biological sex. Their concept of social sex differences (hair length, style of dress, activities, household responsibilities, etc.) is often significantly more developed than their concept of biological sex differences, because they see a lot of the social differences and few of the biological ones. They may breastfeed at first, but they generally forget about breastfeeding at a fairly young age (anecdotally, my daughter stopped breastfeeding at around 1, and had forgotten about it by the time her sister was born around 2.5). They see few genitals other than their own. But they see social sexual roles in every interaction, in much language about the people around them, in every book and show and story they are exposed to.

One might argue that this meaning is indirectly biological, because their parents’ use is biological. But 1) this too will be question begging, and 2) we don’t disagree that the distinction between men and women is historically rooted in animal biology, only that the current meaning is not. And to the extent people’s present understanding of the difference currently starts with a social understanding, and only later includes the biological differences, the supports the idea that it’s primarily a social concept as used by modern speakers.

One might also object that though kids don’t see genitals, they do see differences of body type, hairiness, strength, etc. that are due to differences in biology. 1) They are also socialized to see e.g. Winnie the Pooh as a boy; the modern concept of social sex actually derives in greater and greater part from fictional representations of sex, and in particular from cartoons, in which biological is not depicted. 2) Most of those are social, in the sense that testosterone supplements will increase muscle mass and hair growth and strength, and if biowoman+testoerone=“woman”, I will consider that a vindication of my point.

The best countpoint I can come up with is that while the initial meaning does not depend on biology, once the biological understanding is added, it tends to dominate in importance, and supplant the earlier meaning. I think this is plausible, but not right.

I don’t know. I don’t think this is a simple question, and I don’t think easy answers are required. Indeed, I think one that ostensibly provides easy answers to complex question is more likely to be wrong.

With advanced modeling, the differences based on the need for choices will narrow, and ultimately disappear, as dynamic human control mechanisms will fade out of institutions.

The differences between biologal and learned differences will simplify as repressed instinctual motives can be extracted .
This mode has been known from the fallacious view of simpler things entail more complex levels of cognitive circuitry. Modeling inhabits both, and the only way that such models can become more prone to acceptance, is to reduce the fallaciousness between the real and the more true to real version.
The Hollywood cliche is developing as well, lets not forget the outworn model of the dumb blonde.

There will be a time when models will accrue an authenticism where models can be sold as real.

The meaning of a word is whatever we collectively decide it is…

It seems to me you are either unwilling or incapable of providing any reason to adopt your definition of “man” or “woman”… apart from pointing out that there are others who have adopted it.
I refer you to the dictionary to show it’s not yet the default understanding of those words and if you want it to become the default you have to convince people, like me, to use language the way you propose…

And if we’re supposed to come to some sort of agreement about how to use language, utility seems the only objective measure…

I thought I made my argument quite clear… we need a way to convey a person’s gender.
Even if it’s not those words, other means of conveying a person’s gender will be invented.
People suffering from gender dysphoria will wish to have the WRONG gender conveyed to or about them… that’s the nature of the condition.

This problem will persist, until either we cure the condition, ignore their plight, agree to LIE or eradicate all means of communicating gender.

Your attempts to “catch me out” already using language your way, despite myself, have failed and now you’re reduced to inventing a success.
And I’ve already addressed your points with respect to reverting to a more ignorant understanding of the phenomenon we call gender, sans biology.

And so we are stuck between groups, if you are correct, who are wrong. The ones who think that the boxes are simple and clear and biological and there are two of them - read: conservatives in the main; and the ones who think that if you feel female/female, you are female, and if you feel male/masculine you are male and others should think of you that way also or they are being bad.

On the internet I can happily explore, play devil’s advocate, trigger intentionally either or both of the main sides. But IRL: that’s dangerous. Easy to get labeled incredibly harshly, and actually right now, in my world, easy to get professionally damaged and seriously by the Left. Both sides are harsh and binary on the issue. But sides can make extreme judgments and I am sure in their areas of control, subcultures where they can make policy, each can punish those they disagree with. But in my world, not being Left PC and simple on this issue, can actually cause me professional damage, like loss of job and removal as a potential candidate in a number of fields.

And not for, say, attacking an individual or discriminating, but even for questioning certain polices - like, say, transwomen participating in sports against not transwomen - or talking about the issue at an abstract level. This can be taken as a kind of generalized hate speech and cause all sorts of problems. I don’t see a lot of true freedom of speech in practice in organizations and on the ground. One could see this as all fair and good, since it was the other way for a long time.

On the other hand, that shouldn’t be the range of choices.

This bathroom thing is another red-herring… though I think KT did a good job bringing it back on point.

One might try to ask why do we have gender specific bathrooms?
Presumably it had something to do with people’s comfort as well as practicality.
Ideally we each have our own private bathrooms, but because we can’t have that as a compromise maybe we can make people more comfortable by at least separating the boys and girls.

Now maybe times have changed… maybe we’re more comfortable with unisex bathrooms… maybe we’re less comfortable.
Maybe it has less to do with gender now and more to do with sexuality… maybe in today’s world it makes more sense that only the people not attracted to each other share bathrooms.
Maybe in today’s world, it’s as it always was, impossible to make everyone happy, so we should simply do the thing that makes the least amount of people unhappy.

And maybe that changes based on location, culture and/or subculture… so maybe not all bathroom policies need to be identical.

But language is where we can’t so easily dispense with conformity… communication requires we agree that a spade is called a spade so we all know what the hell you mean when you say something is a spade.
The words we use to describe a person are either meaningful or meaningless noises we make… the question should be what are we describing and is it accurate?

If “man” or “woman” is a description of appearances, what are those appearances? The appearance of a “man” or “woman” is not defined… it’s just an amalgam of our experiences with members of that gender.
The notion that being a woman has something to do with long hair or wearing a dress is just an accident of culture. It might mean having short hair and wearing a plate in your lip, in another culture…
So are those cultures then devoid of “women” since no one has long hair or is wearing a dress? Or is our culture devoid of women because we don’t have people with plates in their lips?

Maybe it’s not appearances, maybe it’s something to do with how you feel… It then becomes an indication of an individual’s preference to say someone is a woman. But what is it that they prefer?
A specific social treatment, perhaps? But which treatment?
Could a person who wishes to be called a “man” not also prefer the same social treatment as women, without the label? What if they prefer a mixture of the treatments, or something novel?
Well there’s a whole slew of non-binary “gender” terms to cover this exact conundrum…
But we treat people uniquely once we get to know their preferences, anyway, and their names are how we distinguish them.
So why do we need to memorize a giant list of pre-packaged preferences instead of just getting to know individuals?
Or is it just the label that matters? a title or label that doesn’t mean anything amounts to us making redundant noises, because others like those noises.

This is all a muddied soup of nonsense…
We’ve gone at this for so long now and gotten no closer to a conclusion than when we started… I’m ready to throw in the towel at this point.
Please say something that moves us in a forward direction Carleas.

Let me ask what I think is the same question in another way:

J is a transman. Is he a transman or is she a transman?
K is a transwoman. Is she a transwoman or is he a transwoman?

I think it’s the same question as the “is X a ‘woman’?” question, and as the “which bathroom should X use?” question, except simpler. I don’t see the pronouns as as strongly tied to biology; biology is about humans-as-objects, where pronouns are about humans-as-subjects. And the bathroom debate raises complicated skeeviness and safety questions that I think are beside the point.

Unsurprisingly, I’d say “he is a transman” and “she is a transwoman”. I wonder where others fall, or if you even see this as a useful distinction from what we’ve been discussing.

Also, to something Karpel Tunnel brings up: as I’ve tried to say elsewhere in the thread, there are distinct questions about the ontology of gender and the morality of how we deal with it. I’m mostly concerned with ontology here, although the ontology of intersubjective facts is necessarily normative.

My first reaction is none of the above, or, better thought out, it depends and its not enough information, and I don’t even want to bother boiling it down to a pronoun. These are very unique rare cases. Like hermaphrodites, though not as part of the same category of rare case.

Now that’s easy to say, and I can work out a defense, but doesn’t give them or us an easy way to relate. But why can’t, off the top of my head, they just be trans. I get that this leads to all sorts of practical problems, but there’s something odd about having to maek an answer that everyone else must accept, especially since the context is that…

he
and
she should not be considered the way they used to be…
we should get used to freedom, more freedom with those terms.

Well, let’s have freedom then. we could be less binary. It’s weird to be told in the same context, stop being so rigid and traditional when the same people are demanding to be included by the language use of others in the old rigid categories. A transwoman wants to be called a woman and that it mean they are in the traditional box. But they ain’t. If they manage to simply get called that, then the practical issue is gone for them. But the ontological message of the Left is demanding flexibility and rigidity in the same breath.

Be flexible in precisely the way I want you to be (remember his is in law also) while I demand the rigid binary determination of sex is used to describe me. I am in that rigid box. Or, she is in that box. Period.

EDIT: let me take one more shot at this because I think it is important. Transpeople, some of them, are demanding, and advocates for them are demanding, that we apply rigid binary categories to them. The transwoman wants the she and her pronouns to be applied to her (me doing this here) and that this means, that, really, she is a woman. She has, often, though not always, changed her biology, as much as she can, to make herself be in that box. She wants us to think there are men and women, and that she is in that latter category. And that men and women are different and they are different physically and the physical differences are important. She is saying that her internal feelings lead her to know she is a she. That is what she is. She is supporting binary sexes and that certain feelings and personality traits mean that one is either male or female. She got the wrong body for that personality.

Then if people react to her differences and do not want to use those pronouns, they are not being flexible and respectful. She is radically free, they are not. They need to consider her the category she wants to be in. They need to think or at least act like she is in that category. People who go against this desire on her part can be and are being punished by organizations and even the law.

This is happening inside a Left wing politically correctness that also says that women and men need not be different. There are no traits, thinking mainly of personality, skills and emotions, that men have that women do not and vice versa. Men can be anything, women can be anything. Be flexible. Don’t put people in boxes. Allow them freedom, allow them diversity.

Be flexible and don’t have boxes. Have boxes and honor my sense of the box I am in or that she or he places herself in. Accept the butch woman and don’t put women in a box. Accept the transwoman and put her in the woman box. She is a woman, she is like a woman inside and now, as much as technology/endocrinology allows, outside also.

I think a better direction is staying with the freedom. Allow for freedom and diversity. Men can be all sorts of thigns, women can be all sorts of things. If some people want bodies that are like X. Let them move their bodies in that direction. Allow people to think of them as they will. Allow diversity of response and conceptualizing of other people as they think of gender and sex.

You can’t demand diversity of thought and conception of gender/sex with one hand, when also promoting a rigidity of sex/gender. Allow the diversity which inlcludes other people not seeing a woman when there is a transwoman standing there. Let the whole system move towards freedom. Freedom to categorize self and other.

Inhibit behavior, in some case. Inhibit discrimination or violence against transpersons. But leave go of thinking other people must conceive gender/sex as you do. Since this is what is being demanded the other way.

This does not solve all the problems. I don’t think transatheletes should compete in women’s sports. I don’t think that actually makes sense. I feel like the fastest woman in the world inside is what that will end up amounting to.

Note: I by no means, think I have solved the issue. But I realized that is my gut reaction. I am being told to be loose and very tight in the same breathe. To forget the old, and apply the old, at pain of fines or worse in some jurisdictions and companies. My reaction is…nah, I don’t have to say he or she. Maybe we could have some new terms.

A

Well, for me with my beliefs, ontology of sex/gender is more complicated than physicalism allows, at present. But that doesn’t mean I think transwomen are all women, lol. Some are, some are not.

I also think the ontology is not binary. The door is open. Once you open that door, you can’t demand everyone else uses the binary boxes the way you want them to. (you, in that sentence is not Carleas)

J is pregnant: is HE pregnant or is SHE pregnant? is HE the mother or father? is SHE the mother or father?
K impregnated J, as pertains to K: is HE the father or the mother? is SHE the mother or the father?

Well I do… so how do we resolve this?
How can you and I reach a consensus?
To what do we appeal in order to sway each other?

Karpel Tunnel, what if we apply what you’re saying to the case of a cisman, who I decide to call “she” and “her” and “woman”. I see where you’re coming from, and agree there’s a tension between deconstructing traditional sex roles and putting people in traditional boxes. But I think it’s significant that we aren’t there yet. We actually do have sex roles, we actually put people in boxes, and while we do it’s not really a live option to let people call people whatever sex they want. It’s important to cis people that they be recognized as the sex they identify with; you can see this by calling your average male bar patron a woman and observing the (likely violent) reaction. So long as we recognize and expect that, and so long as our language has two gendered pronouns and we expect everyone to fit one, it’s not really an answer to say that we should change those things.

And while there’s a tension between two ideals, there’s not a tension in saying that one option is achievable now, and another option is something we should aim for in the long term.

MMP, mother/father is an interesting case. Like sex, it’s rooted in biology, but it has more clearly been divorced from its biological root. Adoptive parents are considered the mother or father, even though there’s no biological connection, it’s purely legal and social. So it seems an easy question for present purposes: if X is a woman, she is the mother, if X is a man, he is the father, regardless of that person’s biological connection to the child. Combining that with a system where a person can be a man regardless of biology does lead to weird cases where a biological mother is socially a child’s father, but that’s not really that different from a case where a biological father is not socially the child’s father (because of e.g. divorce or emancipation), and some biological third party is the child’s social father; or cases where a child has two social fathers or two social mothers (e.g. gay couples that adopt, or a spouse that remarries and the new partner gets some parental rights).

I think you are wrong about your own use of those words, and you are certainly wrong if you think that any significant part of the speaker population uses the language that way. Pronouns just aren’t biological in the ways that other linguistic indicia of sex are.

Unlike ‘female’ and ‘male’, ‘she’ and ‘he’ don’t have biological meanings, biology textbooks don’t call female trees ‘she’, they most likely don’t call female newts ‘she’. But female humans will ~always be called ‘she’ in those contexts.

Look, if I refer to a boat or a dog as “it”, most people don’t bat an eye. If I refer to a woman as “it”, it sounds incorrect at best and offensive at worst. And people are likely to have similar reactions for a family pet to the extent that the pet is part of the ‘pack’, i.e. to the extent the pet is granted agency, to the extent that it is a subject.

Now, maybe you mean that where you use ‘she’ or ‘he’, which one you use is always dictated by the underlying sex. I’m not challenging that claim. Rather, I’m challenging it on the other side: there are lots and lots and lots of biological examples where you don’t use ‘she’ or ‘he’, and instead use ‘it’. And the reason for that is that those pronouns are reserved for subjects: they are less strongly tied to biology in that biology is not a sufficient condition in the way it is for ‘male’ and ‘female’.

(It’s harder to show for ‘man’ and ‘woman’, since those are only used for humans, and humans are universally granted agency. But I think it’s still true: a dead male body is the body of a man, but it’s appropriate to call it ‘it’.

Note also the family pet case: ‘it’ becomes ‘she’ where a dog becomes a family member, but it does not become a ‘woman’. So it’s not just that ‘he’ and ‘she’ refer to male and female humans, they refer to male and female subjects)

and are. But also, not to all. There are people happy to be androgenous. There are those who know they are presenting ambiguously and don’t care.

The transperson knows, generally, that they don’t quite pass. There are exceptions, and then they get taken as the sex they want, at least in most interactions with strangers.

But that’s my point, we are being told not to keep things binary by the vast majority of the people who are telling us to, in the case of transpeople, keep things binary. The same lefty pc people want there to be a wide variety of sexualities including non-sexual or asexual. I think many butch lesbians are not concerned about being considered male and many gay or transvestite men who are not concerned about being called female. There are movements to eliminate gender pronouns - see Sweden and ‘hen’. There are arguments, from that group, to eliminate determining, the social act of determining. Except when someone who is a transperson wants it. I am sure there are transpeople who are not aligned with this. I know transpeople who think that men and women are different, period, and they are a man or woman who was born in the wrong body. But the movement as a whole is absolutely trying to complexify all things, but not this part.

It seems to me the nature of PC is to expect it now and expect people to conform, now, to have very little transition period, and to be considered bad or evil if one does not shift now.

And I really see no option for a physicalist but to sympathize with people who do not want to say person X is a woman, when they can see a male body. An adam’s apple and large hands and a bulge in the pants.

Why can’t we let them react as they react and let the transpeople Identify as they wish?

There is a serious difference from racism here. To call someone a nigger is to label them extremely negatively - if it’s going white to black, say.

To call someone a different sex than they identify with is not the same, unless one thinks men or women are bad. (you haven’t raised this parallel or as a parallel, but I noticed my own mind wondering here) I do get that it hurts.

If the physicalist can accept that being a man is a choice regardless of a body, then it seems like other physical categorizings are now on the table. Age. Being older gets one rights and one is treated differently. A 15 year old who feels older says I am 18. We know the age related rights are based on statistics, people at this age tend to be better able to handle alcohol, etc. Yet, would we open the door for self-determination of age.

7 year olds enrolling in High school. 35 years requesting social security benefits and free rides on buses (in those cities). People who feel they are black but are born white applying for scholarships or afro-american artists -certainly there are white who grew up in black areas adn are culturally immersed in afroamerican culture, may even have dreads and experience some of the oppression. Handicapped parking for people without disabilities doctors can verify, but feel handicapped, in need of closer parking.

Accepting long term work absence based of feelings of being sick that doctors cannot verify.

Disability claims.

Heavyweight fighters who feel lighter and destroy featherweight fighters.

Discrimination suits for actors who feel like they are women but look like men and didn’t even get to read for the part.

Demands for passports from other countries - that the UN supports - because while born in California, they feel like they are Brazilian. They want to be taken as brazilian.

People who believe they are animals.

As I said to Mad Man P, I don’t think it’s useful to point to different cases where we aren’t willing to grant people their choice of identity, at least not without going into more detail about how the cases are relevantly similar. I don’t find it hard to distinguish your cases in the same way I distinguish treating someone as a woman in an office setting and treating them as a woman in a boxing ring. For other things, like “7 year olds enrolling in High school”, I don’t see why a 7 year old who can keep up with the material should be prevented from attending high school classes (and indeed, that’s exactly what we do).

But similar to what I asked Mad Man, is being a woman in an office setting more like being a heavyweight in a cage match, or more like being a 7 year old in a high school class? We can produce cases that cut either way, and merely producing them is just question-begging.

Granted. I think we can safely ignore them, and focus on the people who care about what social sexual label they receive.

Consider a group of people, and a set of beliefs A, B, and C. A, B, and C have a relation such that one can consistently believe any two, but not all three. If a third of the group believes A and B, a third believes A and C, and a third believes B and C, then the group as a whole will on average believe A, B, and C (66% believing each), which we agree is inconsistent, and yet no individual has any inconsistent view. This is a problem for the group as a coalition, and may be painful to work out, but no one is being irrational in their beliefs in coming to this situation.

I think that might be partly what’s going on here. As we discussed earlier, there is a growing schism in the left between pro-trans and “gender-critical” (AKA “TERF”, Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist). They’re having exactly the argument you point out, with the pro-trans faction demanding recognition and complete inclusion, and the TERF faction rejecting that demand in favor of destroying gender roles.

Now, I do think there are a lot of people ‘on the left’ who have inconsistent beliefs because they just take what they perceive to be the accepted wisdom and go with it. But I think we should be cautious about how we use them as an example, since people that don’t critically examine their beliefs in the philosophical mode are likely to have inconsistent beliefs.

And it occurs to me that I don’t really know how to deal with their beliefs for the purpose of examining intersubjective facts. There doesn’t seem to be anything requiring that intersubjective facts be mutually consistent, does there? Especially if different facts are made salient at different times, so that the inconsistency generally doesn’t usually present itself in situations where you have to act on the facts. I need to think more about how to think about intersubjectivity, it seems a significant and underdiscussed part of these issues.

Your mistake is thinking we can “grant” people their choice of identity.

I’m not a genie capable of granting wishes… I cannot make you a woman by calling you woman.
No more than I can turn a 7 year old into a teenger or human into a lizard or a white person black or make an idiot a genius… I have no such magic powers.

I think it is useful to open doors in conversations, even if we don’t know everything yet in the conversation. I was not presenting final words or self-evident coversation stoppers, but trying to probe the idea of self-determination of identity despite body. I think coming up with parallels and partial parallels presents us with a more diverse set of tools and cases to see if what we think makes sense.

  1. in this case you decided that there would be certain criteria that child would have to meet 2) that’s a rare situation where someone so young gets to do that. In this kind of rare situation we do not instruct people not to age categorize children as a whole. We have not created a culture where one must accept first their own determination. 3) I’d also be interested to see a holistic determination of whether it is good for the whole child, not just the academic child, to be in high school with peers who are different in a variety of ways. Is High School just an academic thing?
    There is also emancipated minor as a concept. One can get the courts to determine that one is ready to be an adult or an adult in some ways. But this, again, is not done by the person alone. It is a rare exception. Most kids cannot walk into bars and get alcohol because they know they are 21 inside. Driver’s licences and so on. And this would have to do with grades, moving between them. I probably could have handled high school academics not at 7 but by 11 for sure. It would have been terrible for me to go there. And that’s the academic, college focused high school I went to. Other high schools I could have cleared even younger. I would guess you could have also. Hopefully the guy you linked to, his family made a lot of adjustments are took care to make sure the potential problems he might face he could handle. IOW a team made this work, a team with ongoing presence in his life, and a team that determined he was capable despite his chronological age. And probably they have some kind of caer around that kid NOT being taken as a 16 year old by his peers and teachers, except academically.

And all the other kids in his home city and state, were not being told to not assign age to any other child, that they must accept the age determination a person gives of themselves, that they are bad if they don’t, that they themselves must not think of themselves as a certain age and so on.

Why not use all such examples to triangulate. What is ‘being a woman in an office setting’?

And that ‘care’ includes teaching them not to care and then also that they must care. Right now. That is the message, care and don’t care, and don’t mess that up or you are a bad person.

I don’t think this is the case. I meet people regularly who combine traditional feminist ideas about gender being cultural and transwomen are women, they felt that and this must be honored and if you don’t you are bad. I encounter this systematically, not just in individuals. IOW through organizational policy, political party policy and even law. I’m not in the US but while the laws are not the same I am pretty sure organizational polices reflect the contradiction also.

It’s a good point to nuance the debate. I am sure you are correct that there are individuals that fit your breakdown above. But I don’t think your breakdown fits most. I think this is a big cognitive dissonence being not noticed. Further those individuals who are not aligned with the coalition’s internal contradictions are not making enough noise. And this in a context where people on boht sides are daming each other. The Right’s coalition must have similar nuances and they are also not making enough noise, the ones who are not aligned with whatever contradictions their coalition has.

We have teams, and ‘patiotism’ to that team is overriding nuance.

Great. It is not trickling down yet.

I think that is the vast majority. Likewise on the Right. I used to be able to get thrive in the Left. Not always smoothly, but in general. Not anymore. Please see my posts as, shit, I lost my home, now they are as volatile as the Right. I would guess there are people on the Right who feel this way also.

Sure, but right now they are in power. Whatever internal battles are not affecting life on the ground. I could pick out a consistent lefty position on sex and gender and relate to that, but that’s an academic issue, and actually it would be one I could be damaged by if it was public. Or I can react to the whole thing. It is not like the whole thing is not being pushed. So the correct A belief is being pushed in the way it is being pushed in the context of B and C being pushed. That is the reality I face. To just push A without complexifying and reacting to the rest of the Left is problematic. If A was being pushed with such nuance, my reaction would be different. Trying to breathe here.

Sounds like a useful line. I don’t know exactly what you mean by ‘requiring that intersubjective facts be mutually consistent’, but my sense is that freedom needs to cut two ways or all ways. That each person need not be consistent, ok. But then why not let others not be fully consistent with your beliefs also. Keep them from being violent and not renting apartments to you, but let them have their subjective sense of your gender, also. Why must one utopia come today, and then for whom?

I keep wanting to come back to this, since my gut reaction is there is something fundamentally confused here, but I haven’t yet been able to tie this down. I certainly don’t think C3PO is male. I don’t think he exists. And beyond that I don’t think I, in the immersed in movie sense, though of him as male, but as made in male-ish form. Even if we go to a better example, I think, Ex Machina, where the robot looks like a beautiful woman and probably feels like it, when her metal parts are not exposed, even in those sequences where we are presented by her as seemingly human - with emotions and a subjectivity - in the back of my mind, I kept thinking - we have no idea what this things internal states are like. What is simulated, if there is an experiencer, let alone is it female. IOW I never decided it was human. Many do. We have many films these days that present machines as oh, so human, really inside. I don’t like this.

I feel like your argument is a kind of argument ad populum. Now it can’t be dismissed merely for this. If people believe wrong thing X, but this wrong thing X contradicts other beliefs they have, pointing this out to them can be an effective argument. However it doesn’t mean that believing X is right. Or that believing the Y, that really they should also believe, given their belief in X, is right.

We suspend disbelief, to varying degrees, when we enter fantasy worlds. I am not sure how that carries over into everyday life.

If the argument is, we suspend disbelief with C3PO, so we should suspect disbelief with transpeople, I don’t think that holds. I doubt it would be enough for the transperson either, since it entails a temporary being entertained by a fantasy relation to them, then walking away no longer suspending disbelief. I think, as an analogy, it ends up with some pretty poor analogies. Plastic surgeons and endocrinologists become special effects people, the latter being people whose job it is to make you think something is happening that is not happening, for example. Mona Lisa, sure we might refer to her as a woman, in the special as if thinking we do with art. We wouldn’t let the painting adopt a child.

I don’t think I’ve quite got this yet, but this is a first probe.

I take your point, and I think I was not as clear as I should have been. My use of “grant” here is related to what Karpel Tunnel talks about at the end of his post in terms of “suspend[ing] disbelief”, but even more so: I would say we “grant” people their declared religious identity, in that we don’t seriously inquire about it most of the time once they’ve stated, “I’m an X”. But you’re right, “grant” isn’t really the right word or concept here.

I agree, I’m not trying to say that it’s not useful, only that it’s not useful by itself: we need to take the examples and pick them apart and make connections to the case we’re examining here. For example, I think your analysis of the 7 year old in high school is useful, and it’s that analysis that makes the example of the 7 year old informative for the case of the transwoman.

So, we should absolutely triangulate, and that’s what I mean in asking, Is this case more like example X or example Y? What is it about e.g. the cagefight that makes us agree that there biology matters, and what is it about the case of the bleach blonde that makes us agree that biology doesn’t matter?

My take is that the bleach blonde case, we ignore biology because we see hair color as superficial anyway, so we’re fine treating bleach blondes as real blondes (contrast Nazi Germany, where blonde-ness wasn’t merely superficial and natural blondes and bleach blondes would have gotten different treatment). And note that we don’t have a blonde league and a brunette league, or a lefty league and a righty league; we treat those differences as superficial, and not salient in the realm of sport. But we see certain biological and physical differences as salient: sex, weight (e.g. boxing weight classes), disability (special olympics, murderball), age, etc. And to a large extent a transwoman doesn’t change in the relevant way when she becomes a woman. For the same reason we ban e.g. doping with testosterone, we ban people who naturally have too much testosterone from the woman’s league, which will include a lot of transwomen.

But it also seems relevant to me that a more complete sex-reassignment procedure could overcome that, right? If we had a procedure that could more fully change a person from a man to a woman in more physical respects, at some margin we shouldn’t care that they are a transwoman or a ciswoman. That tells us that, even in the realm of sport, it isn’t the biological man-ness, it’s some contingent property of biological man-ness that we care about (e.g. increased testosterone, different body mechanics, etc.).

Organizational policy and law are especially likely to have the kind of breakdown I described, because they are advanced to placate a coalition of groups that may each have internally consistent views but whose views are inconsistent together, and who can still get behind the inconsistent policy because they agree with e.g. 66% of it.

But, I think this is a more general problem with coalition politics in a democracy, right? So much of law is inconsistent. In almost every area of law, we can find different parts of the law working at cross purposes, because of some compromise somewhere along the way that brought enough support into a coalition to get something done, if imperfectly. Is it particularly a problem here? If so, in what way?

I’m not sure how to deal with the division between sophisticated and unsophisticated people discussing these issues, because on the one hand, much philosophy is incomprehensible to someone who’s never spent any time with it, but on the other hand, these arguments depend on appeals to intersubjective concepts and words defined across a culture or speaker population made up mostly of people who don’t think too deeply about the issue. So I’m torn between dismissing the perspective of people who hold obviously inconsistent views (like “there’s no such thing as gender” and “transwomen really are their chosen gender”), and needing their perspective to make any of the concepts we’re using meaningful.

To clarify what I mean by intersubjective, because I’ve realize googling around that I may not be using its most common meaning (I picked it up not too long ago from Yuval Noah Harari’s book Sapiens; it apparently has some meaning in phenomenology that I don’t understand enough to know if it’s the same thing), I’m using it to refer to things that are true by virtue of shared subjectivity. Here is a quote from the book, cribbed from this review:

There’s an objective element to sex, i.e. biology. But there’s also an intersubjective element, i.e. social sexual roles. That’s certainly true of the language we use (language being a paradigmatic intersubjective phenomenon), but it’s also true of the underlying concepts of social sex, which we can see by the progress of sexual equality and the different presumptions about gendered behavior across cultures.

So when I say that, “There doesn’t seem to be anything requiring that intersubjective facts be mutually consistent”, what I mean is that these concepts can be inconsistent, they can be logically incompatible, and nonetheless be true. It might be that a “woman” is “a female person”, “female” is about biology, and yet “woman” is not about biology (I’m not claiming that, I’m just offering it as an example). The only thing constraining intersubjective facts is what the nodes in a communications network can believe. That leaves open the possibility that inconsistent individual beliefs can get written into a kind of fact external to any particular individual, or that the sum of beliefs may be inconsistent even where the individual beliefs aren’t.

Something I touched on earlier and didn’t go far enough into is the way that all social identities are fictions, and all require some degree of suspension of disbelief, and I think if that’s the case, then it’s not so unsatisfying to say that transpeople are asking for a similar kind of suspension of disbelief.

Complex concepts like “male” and “female” have a lot of associations and connotations tied to the idea in general and dropped as necessary when applied in the specific. Like, if we try to think of the archetypical man or woman, it’s pretty easy to see that most instances don’t match on any number of dimension. And yet when we describe those individuals as “man” or “woman”, those archetypical features come over in part; like C3PO, individual biological men are “made in male-ish form”. Obviously they are more central in the concept of “man”, but in the Venn diagram of man-ness, an individual will only partially overlap with male-ish traits. And every individual will also have a different concept of “man” or “woman”, so that people will disagree about how to classify the marginal cases.

But we suspend disbelief in the sense that we don’t interrogate the specifics too much, we use “man” and “woman” as though they are Platonic forms and we ignore the ways in which we know, upon reflection, that individuals don’t fit, and don’t even mean the same thing we mean when we use them. We use those concepts to sum people up and align expectations, and we’re OK with our expectations being only mostly correct.

I don’t think it’s too great a stretch to draw parallels between the ways in which we shape ourselves towards these identities and the ways movie-makers shape robots towards them. We choose clothes that make our bodies appear more man-like and woman-like; we up- and down- regulate our emotional expressions to convey a more man-like or woman-like mental mode; we cut our hair or wear makeup or engage in activities or select car colors with these ideals in mind. A lot of our choices aren’t about inherent biology, they’re about crafting ourselves towards some intersubjective fiction of what a man or woman should be or do or sound like or drive.

Even more generally that that, the extent that I think of myself as a unified whole, with a consistent personality and set of desires and preferences, is artificial. It’s easier to model myself and the world by conceiving of myself and others this way, but it doesn’t track what we know about people as physical objects or social actors. Once I tell someone my favorite food is X, I am much more likely to choose that food when we’re out to lunch together than I would have been if I just never thought about the question. That’s a case of a quasi-fictional identity feeding back to shape how we behave, who we are, rather than an identity that is shaped by who we are and what we do.

And I think this relates, too, to the conflict between de-emphasizing gender and also respecting (“granting”/acknowledging/privileging/whatever the word) people’s self-expressed gender identity. To some extent, we could find the same tensions in any identity; we can point out that all the concepts we use are fuzzy and less stable than we let on, and still apply them as though they’re sharply defined and fixed.

Isn’t it?

You have laid out two different aspects that you think more accurately define gender, the social and the subjective.
Let’s examine their merit.

First about the subjectivity.

Perhaps you might agree that a useful thought experiment is to imagine that somehow through the use of magic or sci-fi technology, a man and a woman underwent a body-swap scenario.
Would we say they are now members of the opposite gender or would we say they retain their original gender?

How should we address these people? As their subjective selves or their objective selves?

The truth is, to most people on the planet, your subjective self is utterly irrelevant.
The sole exception to this being the people that know you or want to get to know you, personally…
Your local physician doesn’t need to know what gender you feel like… he needs to know if you’re at risk of getting cervical cancer.
No one, not strangers on the street, your boss, co-workers, classmates, nor anyone else (who does not want to be friends, intimate or otherwise get familiar with you), needs to know nor care what gender you feel like.
They should merely treat you with the same courtesy that they do everyone else and just get on with their day.

Asking that they give a damn beyond that is an imposition… demanding it is downright tyrannical.

If you or I were body swapped with a female tomorrow I think we would both expect and be quite understanding of the fact that we would be addressed as female by pretty much anyone we came across…
We would even agree to frequent the ladies room rather than the men’s room… Because while we know we belong in a male body we’re also very much aware of the fact that we’re not currently in a male body.

No one can make us magically inhabit the right body for our minds with words or the use of bathrooms, the best such accommodations could ever offer is a LIE, or a fantasy.

And this is where you would bring up the social and linguistic aspect of gender.

What if you could clue people in on the fact that you feel like a man trapped in a woman’s body by way of your dress or surgery even. In the body swap scenario, you’re still Carleas and Carleas is male, right?
Would it really be inaccurate or even wrong that they address you as male?
The answer is yes, yes it would… gender was never about your subjectivity and to MAKE it about that would be very costly!

I repeat, this redefinition is not an insignificant change… it comes at a heavy price!

There undoubtedly is a social aspect to gender but you refuse to acknowledge that the social is a reflection of the biological and requires it in order to even make sense.
If you remove the underpinning of biology from gender, the social vanishes… your adaptation of “gender” as primarily informed by subjectivity would
a) make the social aspects of gender about accommodating preferences, establishing an expectation that people modify their behavior to suit your subjectivity when in fact they are under no such moral obligation and
b) once hinged on subjectivity, “gender” no longer lends itself to a binary “male” or “female”, it escapes any formal classification, fractures, diversifies and ultimately becomes individualised… reduced to being a personal identifier serving the same function as a name, but now with the expectation of some form of social accommodation… i.e. a massive imposition on others.

This process of diversification of gender is already underway and is currently taking place very much along with the social imposition…
This is a demonstrable and logical consequence of this linguistic and social adaptation that you propose.

Now I contend we neither need nor even could, utilize this language to communicate anything of any significance nor will the social “accomodation” of subjectivity lead to a more considerate society…
It will and has lead to a society where we selfishly impose on each other.

You might be tempted to argue, we’re not obligated to cater to selfish people but only those that truly need it to be happy in life.
If you did, I would agree… but unfortunately you seem to have trouble LYING to the people who need the lie and have instead opted to engineer language and culture to erase the lie from it.
It’s no longer a “special” treatment but you’ve made this the lense through which we’re meant to view all gender and thus universally applicable… you can’t have your cake and eat it too.

One trick with religious identity is it doesn’t come up. I don’t have to say ‘Hi, Jew.’ or something. There are not social phrases, thank God, that come up in conversation that parallel ‘I’ll be right with you mam.’ Where one is suddenly ‘misgendered’ or there is judgment over misgendering.

And, of course, with the example of being a Jew, one actually does need to meet certain criteria and this can be true in some Islamic and Chrisitian contexts. To have been baptized or circumcized as simple examples. Within the religion one may meet certain barriers to simply saying one feels on is X.

Beyond that in fact I and I would guess others call into question people’s actually religious beliefs/status given their behavior or speech and attitudes. With religion to make a challenge one must go out of one’s way. Hey, you don’t seem to be very Christian, something that will happen in a philosophy forum, where people who were, for example, pro the Iraq embargo and also claiming to be Christian might be called out given what happened to the children. But on the street you really have to take a rather huge step to call someone out on their beliefs, though I would guess this happens all the time. Muslims drinking or nightclubbing, Christians partying or not sharing their wealth and so on. The thinking the gossiping even social ostracisms to a wide range of degrees will be happening, even if it is less common these days.

With gender it often leads to both language and practical issues in secular spaces: at swimming pools, in stores and so on.

Yes, it might. And I think that would be fair. Though it might end up discriminating, rightly or wrongly, against women who had high levels of testosterone. But as it is now, I think it is hypocritical for a transwoman to say I feel like a woman and want to be taken as a women, but I am extremely fast due to my masculine hormones and beat other women in sport X. And this is happening. One could call into question separate sports for women and men, but women will lose out if that distinction is ended. At least in the short term. A long short term.

Further, some transpeople are not doing anything physical to change. I know a man who is now a lesbian woman and has no plans to do any medical changes at all.

The door is open for that. For simple declaration.

And actually that situation concerns me because I think it leaves open a role model for young men who are not transpeople at all but rather nice or PSTD suffers or any of a number of other categories and a false solution is being made.

Gotta go. I’ll come back for more.

Though a feminist might. IOW you have a woman raised in the priviledge of being a man, then shifting sex. This person is not necessarily, I would think, the same. It might be clearer to think of a white changing to black at 30. And I think there is something rather odd about deciding one is really black, though my belief system actually leaves room for this, I can’t see how physicalists or leftists would find themselves defending this.

Should there be transracials and what does it mean when a 30 year old, raised and presumably treated as white, is now black?

Now potentially contingent.

This may be true, but 1) I wasn’t just saying it was organizations but also in the individuals I meet: they hold contradictory beliefs and 2) institutions should check out these things. Of course they often don’t, batches of humans can be inconsistent also.

I can only stress that the mass of the left seems to me to support contradictory ideas about sex, depending on the situation. When it is on the feminist end, the focus is on not differentiating and characterizing (limiting) sex characteristics, when on the trans end, supporting the idea that there are specific characteristics and a man is X but not Y. Etc. I think the way they merge is both ideas are seen as supporting an oppressed person, and the underlying philosophy is not crosschecked. So the individual leftists, and again, I think this is most, focuses on the not accepting of the right or conservatives and pays no attention at all to the ontological stuff.

If you have one hand perpetuating sex roles and stereotypes and the other hand trying to eliminate them, then you 1) confuse children leading to future problems 2) erase your own work in complex undercurrent ways and 3) you more or less have to be wrong somewhere.

The sophisticated people seem rather silent. So what we end up with is those who react to it are treated as evil. It is team warfare instead of group search for solutions.

I don’t think these intersubjective truths, granting for argument here, are treated as intersubjective truths. If they were, I am not sure what it would mean, but they’re not. And then, these ideas are seeping into people, and this is especially true for children. I think we now have a much more confused set of messages to children.

Yes, though I don’t want to lose sight of the contexts where biology is relevant (e.g. boxing). It’s important to refer back to, since it’s a point on which we all agree, and when I talk about the contexts where it isn’t relevant, I mean to contrast those with the context where we agree that it’s relevant.

This trichotomy actually seems to track the objective/subjective/intersubjective division I mentioned in my previous post (i.e. biological, subjective, and social, respectively), so I’ll try to use that structure in replying to your hypothetical.

I actually don’t think this is an easy question, or one with a uniform yes/no answer.

Objectively, i.e., biologically/genetically (setting aside any of Gloominary’s ‘male brain’ claims), I think we agree that they are their new body’s sex. And I think this is what your physician is concerned with.

Subjectively, I think we agree that they are still their old sex (and this hypothetical is a much easier case on that question than that of trans people, where someone ‘feels like they’re the other sex’, even though any individual only has the experience of feeling like themselves, and can only mentally simulate being something that they aren’t imperfectly, cf. Nagel). I think the bathroom example might fall here, rather than in the social part below (or at least in both). Do I use the men’s room because society wants me too, or because I don’t want to shit in front of the opposite sex? Anecdotal reports of people’s experience in unisex restrooms suggests that the latter is actually a significant factor.

Intrasubjectively, i.e. socially, I don’t think it’s an easy question. You note that people who know you personally would care, but you seem to dismiss that as irrelevant. The people who know you best would treat you as your mental sex, rather than your physical sex. I think that caveat does more work than you acknowledge. It seems to indicate that in contexts where your mind is what matters, you are still a man. I would argue that this extends beyond just close interpersonal relationships, to e.g. internet web forums, where your declared sex is the whole of your existence. It also plausibly extend to places where bodies are expected to be functionally erased, e.g. formal environments like a corporate office. To your boss, co-workers, classmates, you’re better thought of as a mind than a body.

You say that “[t]hey should merely treat you with the same courtesy that they do everyone else”, but I think that downplays the degree to which people do in fact treat people differently based on sex. There are still norms around e.g. what you can and can’t discuss in mixed company, and ‘boys/girls weekend’ is still a thing, and gatherings often devolve into sex-segregated groups. For the purpose of such conversations, you-mentally-swapped-into-a-woman’s-body would still be a man, I would think. Or rather, you’d expect and want to be, and anyone who knew you well would expect you to be, and you would be noticeably awkward and stilted if you were mis-assigned. It’s not about courtesy, it’s about a distinct difference in social behavior and treatment. I admit, though, that most of these differences in treatment are unconscious, and overriding your gut reaction of noticing that a transwoman is a biological man may not entail treating them fully as a woman. Still, conscious shifts in perspective can feed back to influence automatic behaviors.

And part of what sex signals is about expectation: to signal that you are or wish to be treated as a woman is also to signal that you should expect me to “act like a woman”. Again, this gets to something that both you and Karpel Tunnel have noted, namely that there’s a tension between tearing down the whole idea of “acting like an X”, but that doesn’t change that men and women do act differently and are expected to act differently (in that last clause, let me be clear that “expected” there is meant in the sense that violating the expectation would lead people to feel that the behavior was unexpected, slightly surprising and incongruous, rather than the more schoolmarmish sense in which it is often used in similar statements, e.g. “I expect you to be home by 9pm, young man!”). So in that sense, too, you would be intersubjectively a man: people should expect you to act and to want to be treated like a man.

A last point on this body-swapping hypothetical: suppose the swap were into an ant instead of another human; is it a human or an ant? On the one hand, I’m tempted to say an ant, but I have the strong intuition that if someone knew that the ant had the mind of a human, and squished it anyway, that would be murder and not just bug-squishing. Do you agree?

I raised to Karpel Tunnel the hypothetical case where science advances to the point where we could more fully transition people. It seems to follow from what you’re saying here that such transition could ever change the fact that it’s a lie. Even if some kind of gene doping could fully replace every Y chromosome with an X chromosome, it would just be a yet-more-elaborate lie. Is that your position?

I assume it isn’t, given what you’ve said so far, so let me go a bit deeper here, because I think this hypothetical can help clarify our conflicting intuitions. Suppose some future technology that enables sex reassignment such that a person can be fully transitioned in every observable respect: their organs, genes, limb ratios, facial structure, etc. etc. are altered so that they are fully biologically their new sex, with no evidence of their previous sex remaining except in memories and paper trail. Is that person the new sex?

If so, the hypothetical converts the question of whether a transwoman is a woman into the Ship of Theseus: somewhere between a man who dresses and acts and subjectively identifies as a man, and a transwoman who is completely biologically converted into a woman, there exists a line where on one side we have to call that person a man and where we have to call that person a woman. Everything we’ve discussed so far is just pinning down that line. One step between being a born-man who identifies as a man and born-man super-post-op-woman who identifies as a woman is a born-man who identifies as a woman. Another step is a born-man who acts, dresses, introduces herself as a woman. Another step is a born-man who has undergone plastic surgery, hormone therapy, genital inversion, etc. etc. Do you agree that this constitutes a Ship-of-Theseus-like spectrum?

Karpel Tunnel, I’d be interested in your take on this hypothetical, since you’ve said your ontology has a concept of the male-ness or femaleness attached to the soul and not just to the body.

I’d point out again that this is something that happens to lots of words and concepts, it’s not unique to sex. Also note that its a largely a-rational process, tracking how people parse the world into fuzzy collections of connected ideas, and which ideas they tie to which words.

Certainly the social will drift from where it began, but I don’t think that entails it vanishing. There are many dichotomies divorced from their initial justifying distinction, but which continue through sheer intersubjective inertia, e.g. the US political parties, which were founded as 1) a pro-business, rural, small government, anti-immigrant, pro-party, and 2) a social and economic modernization and reform party that opposed the expansion of slavery and whose first president was responsible for abolishing it. They’ve morphed into 1) a pro-immigrant, pro-reform party with the overwhelming support of the descendants of slaves, and 2) an arguably white-nationalist party in the pocket of big business. Respectively.

Which is just to say, the social won’t vanish, it will drift.

This seems extreme, but depends on what constitutes treating someone with appropriate courtesy. To return again to the religion example, we might call not mocking Christian beliefs in front of a Christian, or not accusing someone of not being a Christian or not being a good Christian, treating those people with the appropriate courtesy. Applying a similar standard to sex would mean not pointing out that someone is trans, or not accusing a transwoman of not being a real woman or not passing. In that case, in which case I can agree with the idea that going further than that is something of an imposition, though I’m not sure what “going further” would look like; what is giving a damn beyond caring enough to avoid acts that you know will hurt someone?

My understanding is that the distribution of testosterone levels between the sexes is such that effectively no biologically women who aren’t at least partly hermaphroditic have anywhere near male levels of testosterone without supplementation, i.e. that there is no overlap in the distributions between those who are unambiguously biologically women and those who are unambiguously biologically men.

This is an interesting point, and I expect you are right, but I don’t know quite what to make of such claims. Suppose some 18 year old gets the surgery. At 36, are they as legitimately a woman as an 18 year old biological woman? What if they get the surgery at 1 year old? It also seems that the position is dependent on a certain culture and time, such that the future culture in which this technology exists may not have whatever pathologies create the issue in our culture. I suspect at least some such feminists would agree.

In terms of formal logic, potentially contingent is contingent, no? Potentially contingent = contingently contingent = contingent.

I think I take your point, that we’re using a hypothetical technology that doesn’t exist, but unless we think it’s impossible even in theory, we can still use it to show that biological-man-ness isn’t actually what we care about.

I think there’s a case to be made that they shouldn’t, though I present it more for consideration than because I am fully convinced of it: permitting inconsistent rules can lead to better outcomes where 1) the inconsistent rule produces better outcomes than would no rule at all, and 2) no consistent rule could get sufficient approval. And this is likely to be the case where an inconsistent rule is consistent as applied in most specific cases, and only inconsistent in theory, across many cases, or in outlier cases.

This is a non-sequitur in context. My claim is that, for any coalition C, there exists some area of policy P such that C’s position on P is contradictory. If that’s true, then pointing out that the coalition “the left” is contradictory on policy “sex” is not a particular strike against that coalition, it’s just an instance of a general rule.

I’d argue it’s moreso that the unsophisticated people are just very noisy. That may seem a distinction without a difference, but I don’t think so. Two consequences seem to be 1) that we should look for the sophisticated positions to steelman the ideas we disagree with, and 2) when we respond primarily to the unsophisticated position, we add to the din that drowns out the more nuanced positions.

I’m not sure what to make of this claim. Claims about the meaning of words are paradigmatically intersubjective, right?

I also think that there’s a strong case that complex concepts are intersubjective, particularly where they have socially relevant connotations. But the mere fuzziness of such concepts, for which there’s no sufficient or necessary condition, means that it’s only by a general intersubjective agreement that we have truths about them. Perhaps this just hints at a deeper disagreement in our philosophies; I would say that concepts are statistical rather than atomic, and that there is always more than one way to parse the world into coherent concepts.