I've been in several, disparate 'gay' and 'queer' communities. I fucking hate them. I detest everything I went through trying to be friends with those people. Any opinion that didn't align with the group was grounds for not just ostracization but attempts to belittle me in my work life, family life and other social endeavours. It was harrowing, and disgusting (in two specific examples, anyhow). One of my children was put through essentially a Struggle Session in an attempt to have them tell their school that i was an unfit parent. And this is a common experience. — AmadeusD

Was the group’s push for you to conform an example of ‘hive-mind’? Let’s start with the motivation behind trying to force or convince someone to conform to one’s own ways of thinking. I suggest this is the structure of anger and blame , which underlie most concepts of justice. If you meet someone and share with them your views of gender or gayness or whatever, and they are outraged and disappointed by your thinking, they have convinced themselves that you are willfully disregarding their needs or suffering. The anger they feel impels them to try and get you to ‘mend your ways’ , to ‘get with the program’, to think more ‘ethically’ or righteously. Because they believe that your beliefs are irrational, arbitrary, or selfish, they justify their judgmental attitude toward you. They basically have thought themselves into a corner. If they are unable to see the world through your eyes, you become a danger to them.

What’s true of an individual can be true of a whole community united around shared values. I dont believe in the concept of hive-mind, brain-washing or mindless conformity. People don’t blindly introject ideas from others. The interpretive nature of cognition makes this impossible. We can only assimilate ideas from others that make sense to us in relation to the way we construe the world, and everyone’s construction system is unique to them to some extent. If a group all seems to believe the same things and share the same values, it is not because they are being blindly led by the hive-mind, but because they have gravitated to that group based on the fact that they have, as individuals, already arrived at that way of thinking. I have never met any group that thinks in lock-step, regardless of how much the leadership tries to define and enforce a party line.

Once you dig beneath the surface , you’ll find all sorts of splits in ideology among members of the same group. My impression is that you have strong convictions and values yourself, and that there are issues where you blame others for their moral failings as seen from your perspective. You wouldn’t be a part of the legal profession unless you believed in a concept of justice that is able to determine guilt and innocence. So you yourself belong to a community with that shared value, and when you declare someone guilty of something, you are imposing those community values on that person. So what makes you different from that gay community who tried to impose their values on you?

You emphasize your individuality and your not fitting into any group. But all the views you have expressed on this forum fit into a familiar slot in terms of a philosophical and cultural background they draw from. So as much as you may want to think of yourself as an outsider and non-conformist, your ways of thinking express a cultural
worldview shared by many others, a worldview that finds ways to impose itself on others, or at least uses itself as a standard on the basis of which to judge others.

Groups of affinity aren't designed to foster difference (nor do they incidentally do so). This context is actually an apt one - trans individuals who do not tout the same concepts and ideas we're, perhaps wrongly, discussing, are ostracized as not the 'right kind of trans' (as it is with blacks, Jews, feminists etc....). Affinity groups seem to reinforce irrational self-image. — AmadeusD

Let’s say you want to excel at something and soar beyond all your competitors. How do you do this? Well, first you have to have to find people to compete against that are the closer to your level of performance as possible. You cant up the level of your tennis game against a backboard; you need a community of players to push you further. Isnt this true in any creative endeavor? Don’t we need to hone ours skills in a creative social environment consisting of those who can bring out the best in us? One of the things I loved most about the gay community I interacted with was that they were more colorful, free and creative than the bland hetero environment I was used to. They encouraged my individuality, not my conformity. Their ‘gayness’ was more of an open tent, a welcoming attitude toward all kinds of alternative ways of being, than a ghettoized clique.

The reason I love living in a big city is that the diversity stimulates my non-conformity more than if I lived in a cave in the middle of nowhere or a small town. How can it be that being surrounded by 3 million people fosters eccenticity and non-conformity better than living an isolated existence? My neighborhood has a sense of community that is built on celebration of diversity. Just because people gather in a group based on shared interests doesn’t mean that they are there to form a hive mind. The opposite may be the case. This is also true of romantic love. The relationship may be stifling and confining for one or both participants, or it could be a union that frees each person to be themselves more authentically than if they were alone.

IN a world where there are female and male brains, easily identifiable and uncontroversial - aberrations in development could feasibly lead to an otherwise fully male person attaining some behaviour due to their brain structure, only found in 'female brains' — AmadeusD

I was, and still am, a very, very odd person, from most people's perspective sexually, hobbies, mentation, habits etc.. and this from being very, very young and open about myself because I chose not to care what others did. My 'outsider status' never arose, because it didn't occur to me as helpful. I do not think your inability to overcome yours says much more than that you perhaps were naturally predisposed to reject things you didn't relate to. — AmadeusD

I don’t want to give the impression that my childhood was some sort of nightmare. It was pretty typical, and I know everyone in their own way feels like a freak in some respect when they’re growing up. It doesnt take much;. a weird name, a big nose, geeky clothes will do it. And the value of finding a community of people with common experiences or behaviors is much more than just therapeutic. It’s a crucial way to learn about yourself, to define who you are and who you want to be, not by conforming to the group but by comparing experiences so that you can define yourself uniquely. Can one thrive without benefitting from this engagement? Of course, but one has a big advantage if one has the opportunity to learn from the interaction with those like oneself in some respect. I’m a no -conventional person by nature, and have always gone my own idiosyncratic way. Plugging into groups on the basis of shared perspectives was a valuable part of the foundation for

Think about non neuro-typical communities. Imagine how connecting with such a group can help a non neuro-typical individual discover their strengths and build their confidence.

Do you have sources on Heidegger denying the label? I see that Camus and Sartre have. — flannel jesus

In Existentialism and Humanism Sartre writes,

The existentialists, amongst whom we must place Heidegger as well as the French existentialists and myself . . . what they have in common is simply the fact that they believe that existence comes before any essence—or, if you will, that we must begin from the subjective.”

Heidegger, in his critique of Sartre, writes:

Sartre's main point about the priority of existentia over essentia justifies the word `Existentialism' as a suitable name for this philosophy. But the main point of "Existentialism" has not the least bit in common
with the sentence from Being and Time cited earlier: "The `essence' of existence lies in its life."

https://cah.ucf.edu/fpr/article/why-heidegger-is-not-an-existentialist-interpreting-authenticity-and-historicity-in-being-and-time/

As for me personally? I don't think of myself in terms of gender. I'm the sex that I am. That's it. — Philosophim

I wasn’t talking about sex. I had in mind memories of growing up feeling different and alienated from most of my male classmates, as well as my father, brothers and cousins, on the basis of behaviors and comportments that I believe I was born with, that I didn’t fully understand or know how to articulate. And not overcoming this outsider status until I found a gay community within which I could see myself as normal. I saw many aspects of myself in members of this community. There was the joy of mutual recognition, the relief that behaviors and dispositions that I thought were utterly unique to me were shared by many others in that community. The experiences of those on the Asperger’s/Autism spectrum who found their way to a community of shared disposition remind me of my own experience.

It sounds like you have never had to think about yourself in terms of gender because your gender behavior never stood out from your peers. I notice you haven’t said anything about the studies associating gender with functional brain organization, like that mentioned earlier in this thread by @wonder1:

A recent paper suggests that it is deeper than culture:

Deep learning models reveal replicable, generalizable, and behaviorally relevant sex differences in human functional brain organization

Significance
Sex is an important biological factor that influences human behavior, impacting brain function and the manifestation of psychiatric and neurological disorders. However, previous research on how brain organization differs between males and females has been inconclusive. Leveraging recent advances in artificial intelligence and large multicohort fMRI (functional MRI) datasets, we identify highly replicable, generalizable, and behaviorally relevant sex differences in human functional brain organization localized to the default mode network, striatum, and limbic network. Our findings advance the understanding of sex-related differences in brain function and behavior. More generally, our approach provides AI–based tools for probing robust, generalizable, and interpretable neurobiological measures of sex differences in psychiatric and neurological disorders.

To me, the transgender/transexual community is finding its footing in its desire to be accepted by society, as well as accept itself. As such it is at an extremely immature stage of rational thinking, and is mostly in a reactive and nascent stage of thought. If it remains this way, it will fail. People do not tolerate such things for long. It needs rational discourse. It needs to refine its language and be more clear in its desires and intents. It needs better arguments. If not, I feel it will cause damage both inside and outside of its community and find itself in a worse position than it started with. — Philosophim

What do you imagine to be the ideal endpoint of rational self-definition within the trans community? In the best of all
possible worlds, how do you see people taking about and performing gender in 50 years? How do you prefer to think about your own gender?

Heidegger and a Buddhist monk. An interview? Of course, there is that famous Der Spiegel interview where he mentions Buddhism, briefly. Where would I find this? — Astrophel

I’ve been reading Heidegger’s Contributions to Philosophy, where he states

Da-sein is the grounding of the truth of beyng. The less that humans are beings, the less that they adhere obstinately to the beings they find themselves to be, all the nearer do they come to being [Sein]. (Not a Buddhism! Just the opposite).

But the basic point is, I take it, that basic arithmetical principles are true in all possible worlds, as the saying has it…If the truth of mathematical statements can be confirmed just by thinking about them, then why not ethical problems, or even religious questions? Why bother with empiricism at all?" — Wayfarer

Are we talking about truths, or a method that is self-confirming by its very nature as method? Don’t mathemarical statements have to be true in all possible worlds by virtue of the fact that the method of ‘same thing, different time’ stipulates the very concept of ‘true in all possible worlds’ as empty repetition of identity? Wittgenstein recognized the truth of mathematics as ‘hinge propositions’ that are true in virtue of being the unquestioned ground of assertions within a language game.

Rorty, of course, we leave behind....and keep. There is no such thing as non propositional knowledge, her says; yet what it is that is to be fit into a proposition is indeterminate. As I see it, the world can once more BE, what it once was, arguably, prior to the bloating of knowledge assumptions that fixate it with such vigor and authority. Standing in the openness of Being is not a philosophical exercise. It is something else. The world is something else, something "tout autre". — Astrophel

If you haven’t ready Lee Braver yet, I think you would really enjoy him. He reads Heidegger through Kierkegaard.

nature only becomes exact, only becomes number, when we turn our attention away from what we actually experience in order to count.
— Joshs

Sure. My contention about number is a simple one: they are real as constituents of reason but not materially existent, and I think that says something important. — Wayfarer

If the concept of number emerged at some point in cultural history , was this a necessary or contingent event. And if it was not necessary, that is, if we could conceive of a different trajectory of culture in which the concept of number did not emerge, can we still say that it is independent of thought?

Truth is made, not discovered.
— Astrophel

Can’t let that go by. I’ll refer back to that quote I mentioned the other day

Frege believed that number is real in the sense that it is quite independent of thought: 'thought content exists independently of thinking "in the same way", he says "that a pencil exists independently of grasping it.”
— Frege on Knowing the Third Realm,Tyler Burge

I see no reason to doubt it. The basic facts of arithmetic and logic are not made up but discerned — Wayfarer

Number is based on ‘same thing , different time’
We look ar may aspect of our word and we see ‘different thing, different time’. How do we get from that to repetition of identity? It’s it just that there is no pure repeated identity in nature, but even in our imaginings of nature. The answer is , from a historical view, we got to it when it became useful to construct the ideality of ‘same thing’, different time’, which didn’t occur all at once, or just in one region of the world. We had to create a rule telling us that when we observed or thought of a multiplicity of things, we should abstract away everything else about the things other than the fact of their being individually noticed by us. This is a very specific concept designed for a specific human purpose. With this rule we now had the concept of pure , empty unit. We arrived at this concept well before it occurred to us that we could impose it back on nature as the ideal of scientific exactitude, forcing nature into categories of unitized things. Thus, we convinced ourselves that nature itself is made of numeric relations, fixed calculable qualities in relations of numeric exactitude. But nature only becomes exact, only becomes number, when we turn our attention away from what we actually experience in order to count.

It is only when we empty the world of everything natural that we locate the context-free abstraction of ‘same thing, different time’. Number is the very essence of thought in its most stripped down functioning, as associative synthesis. Frege believes that number refers to a concept in the world , but Husserl argued the opposite:

…the number relates, not to the concept of the enumerated objects, but rather to their totality . Its relationship to the generic concept of the enumerated is simply the following: If we count a group of homogeneous objects, e.g., A, A and A, we at the outset abstract from the intrinsic nature of their contents, thus also from the fact that they are of the genus A. We form the totality form one, one and one, and subsequently note that "one" in this case is to have the signification "one A " Thus, it is only after the enumeration, which as such is totally indifferent to the circumstance that the objects are A's, that the generic concept links up with the number as a defining factor. It determines the unit, i.e., the representation of the "something" enumerated, which is at first void of content, as a something falling under the concept A. The relationship between number and the generic concept of the enumerated is thus in a certain manner the opposite of what Herbart and Frege maintained. The number does not say something about the concept of the enumerated, but rather the concept says something about the number.

Also, I really appreciate your thoughts and replies. I can see your viewpoint articulated well and I hope the discussion is enjoyable. :) — Philosophim

:up:

A recent paper suggests that it is deeper than culture:

Deep learning models reveal replicable, generalizable, and behaviorally relevant sex differences in human functional brain organization — wonderer1

I’m actually sympathetic to this argument, but very carefully qualified. Let me ask you , to the extent that you think they’re onto something, would you agree that , since anything biology is capable of , it will do in many ways, it is reasonable to assume that a whole range of intermediate differences in functional brain organization are regularly produced? This would give biological justification not only for binary differences in gender behavior , but also for gay and transgender identities. Of course, all this would be intertwined in complex ways with culture.

but is it any more relevant and useful than inserting skin color into the conversation of a mixed group?
— Joshs

Oh, yes, obviously. Men and women have on average very different experiences of hte world, even if you can conceptualise a socially equal 'treatment'. Though, we're definitely going to be differing on the extent to which we have moved toward that goal — AmadeusD

. I think it is not reasonable to think males/females or in typical parlance 'men and women' are the same, or that they would be the same in any circumstances. They are biologically different, on average, in significant ways and require different things from the world, and provide different things to the world. That this is the case seems inarguable to me, and so attempting to minize the aspects that make people what they are seems odd to me, and counter to reality. Knowing whether someone is female will alter the way i speak with them, in light of what I can assume their experience has been in a world where females, on average, experience certain positives and certain negatives and male, a differing (and, obviously - though again, we'll disagree in degree - disproportionate) set of those. — AmadeusD

I assume by biological differences between men and women you’re not referring to feminization of brain connections producing characteristic gender-related behaviors from birth. Rather, I take it the differences you have in mind are socially imposed due to women’s capacity for childbirth, their size and strength relative to the average man , etc.

So you think the use of he and she in everyday conversation, and the gendered grammar of many languages, arose due to their different social roles based on bodily differences? I think they arose just as much because of a belief shared by many cultures in history that women were mentally inferior to men, that they were biologically programmed to be too emotional, to have limited intelligence, to act in childlike ways , to not be responsible or capable enough to study religious texts, go to school, get a job or vote. I don’t think we perpetuate the ubiquitous use of he and she pronouns simply because of differences in life experiences between men and women

As noted earlier, this is pretty silly. You're describing the function of names. People are allowed to choose their own names — AmadeusD

What is it about ‘he’ and ‘she’ that make it important to use these terms in everyday conversation? If you are in a room with 5 white people and 5 black people, most likely none of the conversation will include terms that refer to skin color. Why not? Because skin color is not considered relevant or useful to what we need to be reminded about each other in the interchange. But such a conversation will be littered with he and she, his and her if it is a group of 5 men and 5 women. This is certainly a matter of habit, built into our language use, but is it any more relevant and useful than inserting skin color into the conversation of a mixed group? Can you see that the origin of the everyday use of he and she goes back to eras when there was a sharp difference in roles between men and women? Of you think it’s silly for individuals to invent their own roles, is it any less silly for an entire culture to impose binary roles?

Being transgendered by definition, is committing actions associated with the cultural expectations of the other sex, and not your sex. You do not own gender. Culture does. Gender is not genetic. You can be a girly boy or a manly man. Neither is gender. You can like painting your nails or not as a man. That is not gender. Gender is culture's expectation of how you should act based on your sex. — Philosophim

Do you think that the umbrella of transgender can include within it a notion of gender ( genderqueer) not tied to any knowledge of biological sex? For instance, those who believe that everyone has their own unique gender, just as everyone has their own personality dispositions, and that biological sex is not relevant to this fact.

1. You aren't disregarding the old words to make a new word, you are using the same word. We're still using 'him' and 'her'. This would be like me still continuing to use negro but saying, "Yeah, but it doesn't mean slave or black anymore, don't think that way."

2. The disregard for negro was to regard what was offensive or oppressive. There is nothing offensive or oppressive about the part that pronouns were used primarily to identify sex. — Philosophim

I haven’t mentioned the move to discard black in favor of African American. What was behind this initiative? The concern was that black, in referring to a biological feature common to certain people , associated that group with the concept of race. Race is no longer considered by geneticists to be a coherent scientific notion, and has been used mainly to discriminate against individuals. It wasthought that African, on the other hand, would direct one toward a cultural rather than biological identification, just as indigenous or native peoples accomplishes relative to ‘Indian’. African American has not replaced black the way that black replaced negro and colored, partly because an increasing percentage of blacks in America were not born there, and partly because the term black was redefined away from its racial connotation in favor of culture and ethnicity.

The term ‘person of color’ achieves something similar but in a more inclusive way. It’s important to note that built into the embrace of blackness as a term is that it includes within its meaning the sense of being a minority in danger of marginalization. In other words, it is considered important that a word which distinguishes one group from others on the basis of the particular surface indicator of skin color should be used not only as a banner of pride but of continuing struggle for acceptance.

This strategy to knowingly keep using a term that in part connotes marginalization is seen in the embrace of the word ‘queer’. It has built into its sense both the recognition that certain groups have been considered as freaks, perverts or pathological by the dominant culture, and that these groups are turning that meaning into a positive by celebrating their non-conformity. By contrast , the term homosexual has been rejected because it is considered to be hopelessly compromised by years of medicalized pathologizing of gays.

You have argued that black means the same thing as negro or colored; they all refer to skin color. But the fact is all these words mean different things in different contexts for different people. What is relevant here is that there were predominant meanings associated with some of them that were damaging to the group they weren’t being applied to. The terms colored and negro weren’t phased out slowly, but all at once. In 1967 in the U.S. one could find the word negro used in almost all publications. In 1968 they all but vanished in favor of the new term ‘black’. Did black mean ‘skin color’ in 1968? It certainly could be used this way, but its emergence was associated with bold messaging such as ‘black is beautiful’ and ‘black power’. Beauty and power are concepts that were not generally associated with negro and colored. Blackness was designed to be as much a cultural as a physical concept, reflecting the rapid and dramatic changes in attitude that took place in the 1960’s.

Can we equate ‘he’ and ‘she’ with the damaging cultural stereotyping associated with colored and negro? Many women would say yes. But what evidence do we have that cultural stereotypes are ingrained within the word ‘she’ that have affected women on a day to day basis? For starters, applying for a bank loan, mortgage, credit card or job was a very different experience for a woman than for a man. But one might ask, is there a way to change attitudes about femaleness without eliminating she? Can’t we ameliorate the imbalance by substituting ‘humankind’ for ‘mankind’, and using the word she as often as he in generic descriptions? Or perhaps put an asterisk or something after the word she to catalyze the kind of shift in cultural presuppositions that swapping negro for black aimed for? Of course, it would require more than this to bring our language up to date with our cultural attitudes. Why do we refer to certain inanimate objects, like a ship, as ‘she’? Is it because a boat looks like a vagina, or because we apply a certain cultural notion of femininity to things? And what do we do about languages that use grammatical gender? Do such languages not color the whole world in terms of anti-feminine bias?

So far I’ve been arguing that harmful cultural prejudices make their way so frequently into what we mean when we use a word like ‘negro’ or ‘she’ that the groups affected by these uses felt it necessary to call attention to such uses by playing with the language. Your concern has been that, however we decide to re-educate ourselves concerning the detrimental cultural aspects, we must protect those words that provide a clear meaning of physical and biological differences. “Blackness” allows us to have our cake and eat it , too, by changing attitudes without getting rid of the physical meaning. But eliminating words that refer to the biological sex binary would seem to block access to such clarity.

But how many of the occasions when we reflexivity use the word ‘she’ involve a need to know the biology of the person we are dealing with? When we describe someone as being a black person, it may be a description that helps us and others to identify them, just as clothing and hair color, height and weight. But in social interactions we don’t insert the world ‘black’ into every sentence because it isn’t relevant anymore. (not that long ago, pronouns such as ‘Massah’ were used to different blacks from whites in a room). And yet , he and she are built into all social interchanges. I suggest the reason for this is our tacit belief that our cultural assumptions concerning the roles and behaviors of maleness and femaleness of those we are interacting with is relevant.

And perhaps it is. That is, sharply defined , binary differences in role and behavior were the way that so many of us lived our lives for long that we really didnt have the concept of alternative genders. They didnt exist because we weren’t ready to think of ourselves in such multidimensional ways yet. For older and more conservative people , that is still the case in their social circles .They don’t have a need for language that expresses gender fluidity when there is very little of it in their own circles. But for a younger , more progressive population, the old, simple gender categories seem artificial and constraining, since they no longer think or act in terms of these roles. So ‘he’ and ‘she’ need not be used in social interchange. And when there is a need to refer to biological sex differences, which is relatively infrequent, there are plenty of ways to do it. Some may accept a biological binary, some may not. For those that do, they can simply refer to it directly, leaving out all gender implications.

In sum, it seems to me that , on the one hand , you’re advocating for a split between cultural gender concepts and words pertaining to biological sex. But on the other hand, you’re in favor of elevating what should be an infrequently used, technical vocabulary (sexed plumbing and genes) to the status of everyday usage in all social conversations (he and she). It seems to me you confuse the fact that our culture has traditionally communicated this way with the reason they have done so. If you really want to keep biological and cultural ethnic or gender terms separate, then there is no earthly reason to force ‘blackness’, ‘he’ and ‘she’ into conversations where they are largely irrelevant, and that means most social conversations.

Slavery. A difference of use that was so controversial an entire war was fought over it because negro was synomyous with 'inferior person'. But pronouns don't have an objective abuse like this. Further, the color change had the same underlying meaning it was trying to get to, "that they had black skin". The idea that pronouns change to gender defies the entire purpose of the underlying word, which is to describe sex. — Philosophim

And one could argue the purpose of the word negro was to describe color of skin. But it was likely never simply a neutral label, because it was shaped right from the start by the cultural context of its use, just as pronouns were never purely about biological sex. The modern scientific concept of sex didnt even exist until recently. Tracing the etymological history of male-female pronouns through different cultures would produce in every case meaning in which whatever ‘natural’ sense of the binary was hopelessly and inextricably entangled with cultural understanding of gender roles.

Society is not obligated to view you how you view yourself. This is what a child does. "I'm strong!" "No you're not" *Child gets mad and storms off* Part of maturing is realizing that you exist in society and other people see you differently than you see yourself. Part of existing in society is learning how to get others to see you the way you want, which requires effort on your part. No one is every obligated to see you as you see yourself simply because you tell them they should.

If I want others to see me as strong, I need to lift heavy weights. If I want others to see me as kind, I'ld better act kind. Even then, people will have their own opinions. "Nah, they're not that strong, that's just 120 pounds" "Kind? All they did was listen to another person's problems, that's basic." — Philosophim

You want to be careful here , because look how easily we could insert the word ‘negro’ into your account. In fact , conservatives like William F . Buckley used a justification not unlike your argument for not supporting the civil rights movement. Society was supposedly not ready for such changes. The burden was upon the negroes to convince the larger population of the need for the changes they advocated. I agree that whether one’s cause is worthy ultimately will be decided not simply by our own desires but by convincing others. And I would argue that this is precisely what we are now seeing across Western cultures. Advocates have put enormous effort and passion into changing minds, and as a result today’s culture, especially the young, are showing a desire to change their vocabulary.

To be clear, being transgender does not mean you've changed your sex. You have not become, "Something else". You are simply dressing, acting, or behaving in a way that a particular culture expects people of a particular sex to do. If I'm a male that likes putting on nail extenders and painting them hot pink, I'm still a male. The action I'm doing is transgender, as normative American culture expects that only women do this. — Philosophim

This isnt quite accurate. ‘Trans’ isn’t simply slot ratting within an already defined and culturally familiar binary. It can mean ‘transcend’ as well as ‘transition between’. It can just as well be true that a transgender perceives themselves to be acting in a way that defies all gender expectations of a culture. Not because they are acting like either a male or a female , or some combination thereof, but because their gender is idiosyncratic and outside of the familiar categories.

Since different cultures have different ideas of gender, it is not rational for pronouns to be used to match culture, to keep their clarity. — Philosophim

Why do you think it has become important for those advocating for changes in the way society thinks about gender to alter the traditional association of pronouns with plumbing? Isnt it because they believe that the use of these pronouns has evolved in most cultures to associate maleness with power and privilege not accorded to femaleness? You may believe that these pronouns only refer to plumbing, but centuries of self-justifying oppression against a group that is categorized on basis of plumbing shows that most have not understood the relation between plumbing and gender roles the way you do. So how do we define what it means for the meaning of a word to be used accurately?

The etymological history of language shows that the meaning of words continually shifts over time. Shouldn’t accuracy of words be defined on the basis of the dominant way they are actually understood by a culture, rather than by recourse to categorization based on a presumed authority ( such as biological plumbing) that the culture is not paying attention to? Why was the word negro changed to black? After all, one could argue that it is merely a translation of the French word for black into English. But those who advocated for a change knew that this is not how negro was understood by the dominant culture of the U.S. in the mid 20th century. The word black was chosen as a more accurate verbal representation of a being with equal social status to whites than the word negro symbolized.

Similarly, allowing individuals to chose their preferred pronouns over ‘he’ or ‘she’ is designed to offer a more accurate verbal representation of what they consider as their gender and/or how they want their social status to be perceived. To what extent they succeed in achieving this through their chosen pronoun will vary from person to person, and I’m sure some will try out different variations to see if they achieve the desired response. The ongoing reinvention of gender-related language is a an experiment still in progress. Like all etymological changes that have taken place in history, we will likely go through a number of permutations before society settles down for a time with a consensus on what ‘accurately’ reflects the emerging understanding of the relation between sex, gender, status and power. But I am assuming we will not be returning to ‘he’ and ‘she’ for the same reasons that ‘negro’ is not likely to be making a comeback any time soon.

↪Joshs I love how people are like "Ad hominem" So what, an attack is an attack, it's only fallacious when you're using it like "It rains outside when AmadeusD cries," "AmaduesD Cries a lot," "Therefore it rains a lot."

Not when making a basic observation. — Vaskane

Rationalists have a grab bag of ‘em for all occasions : ad hominem, false equivalence, category error. They whip them out like a crucifix to ward off the idea that the rational is a species of the irrational.

quote="AmadeusD;888011"]↪Joshs your ad hominem is duly noted[/quote]

But from one hominem to another, I have a point, no? Did you form your opinion by reading Foucault’s texts or listening to your prof? Btw, what do you think of Thomas Kuhn’s view of how science works?

[

Foucault was and remains risible — AmadeusD

He must remain risible for you in order for you to maintain your way of understanding the basis of scientific fact.

consider Wittgenstein's example re persuasion. IIRC, the king who has been told the world was created when he was born fifty years ago isn't described as being from some radically different culture or speaking a different language. His difference with Wittgenstein lies precisely in his having been told the world was created at his birth, making the problem individually situated.

But Wittgenstein doesn't describe a process whereby any such disconnects must be solved by some sort of purely affective maneuver. What the case highlights is the way justification hangs together, not that justification is some sort of unanalyzable primitive. Rather, PI basically sidesteps and ignores the issues of how practices arise. Yet presumably they do not spring from the ether uncaused, nor are their causes unknowable. Wittgenstein even provides a narrative of the reasons that the king holds this belief. — Count Timothy von Icarus

It’s not a private situation , but an intersubjective one. We are brought up into, or inherit, our practices, because they are language games, not solipsistic opinions. “ why should not a king be brought up in the belief that the world began with him?” As far as the role of justification and reason with respect to the king’s belief, Witt says

“… if Moore and this king were to meet and discuss, could Moore really prove his belief to be the right one? I do not say that Moore could not convert the king to his view, but it would be a conversion of a special kind; the king would be brought to look at the world in a different way…I did not get my picture of the world by satisfying myself of its correctness; nor do I have it because I am satisfied of its correctness. No: it is the inherited background against which I distinguish between true and false. The propositions describing this world-picture might be part of a kind of mythology. And their role is like that of rules of a game; and the game can be learned purely practically, without learning any explicit rules.”

So how do practices arise? The same way that Kuhn tells us paradigms arise. Via a gestalt shift. We turn the picture upside down, change its sense. This is a different notion of causation than that of empirical reason.

fact remains that the biological sciences are moving away from the male-female binary.
— Joshs

Hmm. I don't think it does. It never really was, either

Bringing in a single speculative quote does not overturn the sex binary.

And in any case, some subset of biologists 'calling into question' something doesnt' represent a trend. I would also posit that in science, trends come and go. So, I hear your point - I think its very weak, and doesn't serve the claim you're making.

In fact, the paper I quoted from disagrees with the non-binary view.
— Joshs

Seems to me, a rather odd conclusion given the claim quoted above. But, neither of us are biologists and I am open to your postion being hte case. I simply see no evidence for it. This type of stuff only turns up in pop sci — AmadeusD

Ok, is this still just ‘pop sci’?

Sex Redefined: The Idea of 2 Sexes Is Overly Simplistic.
Biologists now think there is a larger spectrum than just binary female and male

BEYOND THE BINARY

Biologists may have been building a more nuanced view of sex, but society has yet to catch up.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/sex-redefined-the-idea-of-2-sexes-is-overly-simplistic1/

Or this?

the term “biologic sex” is understood by many to be an outdated term, due to its longstanding history of being used to invalidate the authenticity of trans identities. Although sex is typically misconceptualized as a binary of male (XY) or female (XX), many other chromosomal arrangements, inherent variations in gene expression patterns, and hormone levels exist. Intersex categorizations include variations in chromosomes present, external genitalia, gonads (testes or ovaries), hormone production, hormone responsiveness, and internal reproductive organs. Medical classification of intersex individuals is not always done at birth, as many intersex traits do not become apparent until puberty or later in life. Currently, there are at least 40 known variations that fall into intersex classifications (Carpenter, 2018). Notably, complex biologic variations can occur in everyone, and sex may best be viewed as a spectrum comprised of many traits.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9355551/

The point is that for them to count as reasons, the interlocutor must already share a form of rationality or argu­ment language-game, which in turn cannot be imparted by reasoning on pain of infinite regress.

Sounds like a pretty serious problem for an interpretation of Wittgenstein to have.

Is this supposed to be a communitarian interpretation of Wittgenstein ala Kirpke? I — Count Timothy von Icarus

What you’re seeing here is a particular kind of theological interpretation of Wittgenstein. Braver, like contemporary religious thinkers such as Caputo and Critchley, read Wittgenstein through Kierkegaard and Levinas. They believe that in order to rescue god from idolatry, we must not allow empirical fact to become captured within presuppositions concerning the nature of ontology or reason.

Getting stuck inside the box of language is quite akin to getting stuck inside the box of "mental representations," and I don't know how advocates of our being stuck in either box justify the one over the other. It seems like the same mistake in either case, mistaking the means through which something is grasped for the thing that is grasped. E.g., "we cannot drive a car, we can only push pedals and turn steering wheels; we do not experience the world we can only experience ideas; we do not exercise reason, we can only participate in language-games." — Count Timothy von Icarus

The irony here is that Braver’s reading of Wittgenstein is meant to protect true novelty from being dissolved into subjective schemes of language. He is unhappy with my claim that we can never be truly surprised by anything.

“Lately, I've become interested in these moments of revolutionary experience, when our whole sense of what the world is like gets turned inside out and we are forced to form entirely new concepts to process what is happening. According to what I am calling Transgressive Realism these are the paradigmatic points of contact with a reality unformed by human concepts, when a true beyond touches us, sending shivers through our conceptual schemes, shaking us out of any complacent feeling-at-home.”

His aim would seem to be in accord with your desire to keep the real a radically surprising phenomenon. But he believes this aim is compromised by dictating the terms of what counts as real and true by sneaking into the real a series of assumptions, as Kant does, which claim to be universal and outside of history but are instead a contingent product of a particular historical era.

Me:

Keep your eye out for the direction of the trends over the coming decades concerning the usefulness of the concept of the male-female binary within the social and biological sciences, and the wider culture.

Amadeus to @Vaskane

You have presented precisely nothing to 'overturn' the sex binary. There is no such thing as a human is not either male or female. — AmadeusD

Male/female are extremely important in biology and biologists, on the whole, reject entire the attempts to trivialize them.But I would also add engineers to that list. They use the terms constantly to refer to something non-biological which is analogous. — AmadeusD

I’m not just making this stuff up. From a recent paper in a biology journal:

Biomedical scientists are increasingly calling the biological sex into question, arguing that sex is a graded spectrum rather than a binary trait. Leading science journals have been adopting this relativist view...

You may want to explain this as bowing to political pressure from the left, but the fact remains that the biological sciences are moving away from the male-female binary. It shouldn’t be difficult for you to find papers in biological journals justifying this position scientifically. Why don’t you read a few. I’m sure they can satisfy your questions better than we can. I’m not suggesting a new consensus has been reached yet. In fact, the paper I quoted from disagrees with the non-binary view.

Can I ask you, setting aside the complex theory, if you had to explain trans to a group of people with no understanding of the issue, how would you frame it? — Tom Storm

Freud said we are all fundamentally bisexual. I say we are all irreducibly trans. Gender is like personality. Just as no two people share the same personality, no two people belong to the same gender. We can of course group people in loose sorts of ways by similarities in personality and gender behavior. The same is true of the concept of biological sex. Right now most still find it useful to think in terms of two categories, but I think eventually biological sex will be melded with gender in most people’s minds.

There is not anyone who isn't male or female, but current understanding. Why isn't that good enough? — AmadeusD

It’s good to the extent that it’s useful. It’s obviously useful
for you. Is it useful for your teachers and your peers? Keep your eye out for the direction of the trends over the coming decades concerning the usefulness of the concept of the male-female binary within the social and biological sciences, and the wider culture.

But if people can understand each other, I see no reason to understand this as people learning "Arab Reason," "Hindu Reason," or "Jewish Reason," through some sort of non-rational process so that they can then communicate. It would seem to be more the case that people learn these different contexts of reason through reason — Count Timothy von Icarus

There are many different systems of reason, perfectly logical within themselves, but no overarching way to arbitrate between different systems of rationality.

Wittgenstein argues that heterogeneous language-games cannot be resolved rationally, since rationality exists only within particular language-games. He calls the process that changes the way someone thinks a kind of “conversion”
brought about by “persuasion” rather than autonomous, rational discourse. While freely admitting that reasons would be given, he asks, “but how far do they go? At the end of reasons comes persuasion. (Think what happens
when missionaries convert natives).” The point is that for them to count as reasons, the interlocutor must already share a form of rationality or argu­ment language-game, which in turn cannot be imparted by reasoning on
pain of infinite regress. Wittgenstein even employs violent imagery to make the point: “is it wrong for them to consult an oracle and be guided by it?— If we call this ‘wrong’ aren’t we using our language-game as a base from
which to combat theirs.( Lee Braver)

I understand. My point doesn't change. If behavior is necessarily associated with one's biological sex, it must only exhibit in that sex. If the same behavior can be seen in both sexes, then it is not sexual behavior, but human behavior. Unless the transgender community can counter this, they do not have a valid argument — Philosophim

They do counter it. You keep referring to two sexes. Many within the transgender community no longer accept this binary, even if we treat it as two opposite poles of a spectrum. Btw, I don’t necessary accept every facet of this argument, but you dont seem to accord it even a smidgen of validity.

Its a contradiction to say that behaviors belong to one sex, but can cross into the other sex. Thus the transgender communities rationalization is not rational — Philosophim

It a not a question of crossing from one sex to another, but of questioning the categorical purity of the concept of biological sex.

The brokenness is the desire to be the other sex to the point of thinking you can actually be the other sex. Its not that you were born in the wrong body. — Philosophim

I think the transgender community as a whole has been moving away from this trope of ‘being born in the wrong body’, which is why there has been a move to marginalize the term ‘transexual’. Many in the transgender community believe that gender is intertwined in a hopelessly inseparable way not only with cultural influences, but interweaves culture and biological sex just as inseparably. A sex isn’t a slab of anatomy. it is defined by how it is performed. Sexed bodies are processes of interactive behaving, not simply collections of dna, so gender isnt something to be tacked onto a scientized specimen after the fact.

I think Sex and Gender are patently, inarguably different sets of properties and are easily discernable from one another. It is totally bizarre to me that it's taken seriously that they are either the same thing, or somehow reliant on one another — AmadeusD

Would you agree that in humans and other mammals there are sex-correlated differences in brain function that lead to the differences in behavior between males and females that allow, for instance, dog owners and trainers to quickly recognize males and females on the basis of these inborn brain differences and they are manifested in behavior? would you further allow that if there are such inborn sexual-related differences in psychological-behavioral gender , that there are likely intermediates between male and female inborn brain organization. In other words, an inborn basis for a spectrum of psychological genders?

We can never be radically surprised by the world.

The words of a person who has never smoked toad venom or watched Tom Brady win a Superbowl despite being down 28-3 at the end of the third quarter. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Novelty is in the eye of the beholder, you would agree. There are distinct varieties of novelty, defined by their affective meaning. A joyful surprise is a very different assessment in comparison with a horrifying surprise. I want to make the bold assertion that there is nothing but novelty, and we can group its varieties into two general categories:assimilable vs unassailable. Assimilable novelty is perceived as creative satisfaction , and unassailable novelty is experienced as what is boring, frightening, confusing.

Experiences of unintelligibility and meaninglessness represent a type of movement characterized by apparent emptiness and paralysis. Boredom, monotony, weariness and exhaustion connected with redundant experience would be, paradoxically, of the same species as the shock and trauma of dramatic otherness. As counterintuitive as it may seem, repetition of experience could only be perceived as redundant to the extent that such monotonous experience disturbs us by its resistance to intimate readability. Boredom and monotony are symptoms not of the too-predictable, but of a previously mobile, fluidly self-transformative engagement beginning to become confused, and thus seemingly barren of novelty.

So-called wearingly redundant or vacuous experience evinces the same pathology as the shocking and disturbing because these two types of events are variants of the same condition; an ongoing dearth of coherence or comprehensibility. The confusion, incoherence and mourning at the heart of experiences of monotony and exhaustion as well as shock and surprise manifest a
strange territory barren of unrecognizable landmarks. The `too same' and the `too other' are forms of the same experience; the terrifying mobility of the near-senseless, the impoverishment, moment to moment, of the meaning of each new event. It is AS IF the rate of repetition of novelty has been decelerated during experiences of crisis. We know that we are no longer what we were in such states, but we cannot fathom who or what we, and our world, are now; we are gripped by a fog of inarticulation. While still representing transit, such a destitution or breakdown of sense seems like an ongoing redundancy, a death of sense.

If the affectivities of disturbance and incomprehensibility we tend to associate with significant novelty are in fact symptoms of apparent stagnation and paralysis , which sorts of affects are indications of effective novelty? The unknown, the absolutely novel, may be most intensely available to us to the degree that we anticipate the
unanticipatable, which is only to say that a certain intimacy, continuity and gentleness pervade our most effective movement through repeated novelty. It is not affectivities of the shocking, the surprising or the strange which inaugurate our escape from the monotony and complacency of perceived authoritarian, vacuous repetition, since the latter are precisely species of the former. It is affectivities of joyful, interested engagement which express an acceleratively mobile engagement with otherness. The most stimulatingly fresh pathways imaginable are direct measures not of the confused incomprehension of disturbance but of the intimacy of familiar anticipation.

I entered this thread in order to set out a distinction between belief and truth, which ↪Astrophel apparently conflates.

What are you doing here — Banno

Just slumming. But dont you think that teasing out the relation between identity and difference, the familiarly same and the surprisingly novel, is relevant to the OP’s assertion that existence is part and parcel of justification itself?

. One recognises novelty from a base of familiarity. If that is what you are trying to say, then yes. But the world need not be bound by what you are capable of recognising, if that is what you are trying to imply.

Otherwise, we would understand novelty as soon as we encounter it. But while we might recognise that something is new, it does not follow that we recognise what that something is. — Banno

We can never be radically surprised by the world. Even objects we have never seen before are recognizable at some level with respect to a pre-understanding. We haven’t seen this particular thing but we have seen things like it , or we at least recognize it as a thing. But we dont spend much of our time simply staring at things, we use them, and their status as objects with properties dissolves into the uses we make of them in order to do things. Most of our surrounding world consists of value objects that mean what we use them for. We then notice what is novel as an interruption of our goal-oriented activity. But even when things are going smoothly and according to plan, novelty is already at work every moment. We wouldn’t be able to experience anything if that were not the case.

But once again I am attempting to condense a droplet of clarity from the cloud of chestnuts and quotes that habituate your posts. By not setting your account out clearly, you leave yourself plausible deniability.

Which I find wearying. — Banno

How many postmodern writers have you read who you believe to have set out their account clearly? Heidegger? Derrida? Deleuze? Foucault? I figure if you dont see the clarity in their arguments, and they articulate in a much more effective way what I’m trying to get across, why not save my breath and just quote them?

Everyone's a realist in some sense, no? :wink: — jkop

God forbid. It might seem that way if you haven’t stumbled upon a satisfying alternative view of the world, but there are quite a number of these. The catch is that they require the overthrow of deeply entrenched metaphysical presuppositions. Given Searle’s longstanding clueless hostility toward postmodern thinking, I wouldn’t count on him to offer guidance in this respect.

he never denied this about the phenomenon, that it was true that there was something beyond the "noematic sense" So there is an object "inherent to the sense" as well as the transcendent world that is put in parentheses. Husserl excludes "the real relation between perceiving and perceived." When he talks like this, he proves himself not to be an idealist, acknowledging what is there and actual, just suspended, and he does present the basis for following through on the promise of the reduction which is to establish the ultimate marriage between what is known, liked, disliked, approved, rejected, accepted and so forth, and what is "there," for the status of the noematic world is not to be deemed simply derivative or representational — Astrophel

You’re misreading the meaning of transcendence of the object for Husserl. What transcends the noematic appearance of the spatial object is not external to the subjective process. It is immanent to it. For instance , out of my objectivating constituting performances, a football is given to me as this object which maintains itself as a unity through all the changes in its appearance. But the football as a unified thing is transcendent to what I actually
see. I strive to get closer and closer to the object as a unity via further adumbrations. But i can never achieve complete fulfillment. In this sense the idea of unitary object will always be transcendent to what I actually experience through constituted modes of givenness. But notice that the object’s transcendence is already defined in relation to the direction of my intending activity. The world can never transcend me except in relation to , and on the basis of, my already structured intentional sense. In this way what is beyond me always in some sense belongs to me. Husserl was not a realist. Husserl says the following is the incorrect ,Cartesian way of interpreting the Transcendental Ego:

“In my ego there is formed, from out of the proper sources of transcendental passivity and activity, my “representation of the world, ” my “picture of the world, ” whereas outside of me, naturally enough, there is the world itself. But is this really a good way of putting it? Does this talk about outer and inner, if it makes any sense at all, receive its meaning from anywhere else than from my formation and my preservation of meaning?”(Phenomenology and Anthropology)

“All that exists for the pure ego becomes constituted in him himself; furthermore, that every kind of being including every kind characterized as, in any sense, "transcendent” has its own particular constitution. Transcendence in every form is an immanent existential characteristic, constituted within the ego. Every imaginable sense, every imaginable being, whether the latter is called immanent or transcendent, falls within the domain of transcendental subjectivity, as the subjectivity that constitutes sense and being. The attempt to conceive the universe of true being as something lying outside the universe of possible consciousness, possible knowledge, possible evidence, the two being related to one another merely externally by a rigid law, is nonsensical. If transcendental subjectivity is the universe of possible sense, then an outside is precisely nonsense. But even nonsense is always a mode of sense and has its non-sensicalness within the sphere of possible insight.”