“The Game,” with Michael Douglas. An underrated David Fincher movie. They currently have it free on YouTube. — Mikie

Yeah I like that one.

I'm thinking there's a movie subgenre, or sub-subgenre, that nobody has identified before: secret organization approaches main character at a crisis in their life and either invites them to employ their (mysterious) services or otherwise begins a program of obscurely guiding their life. Other examples are Seconds from 1966 (recommended), The Adjustment Bureau, and maybe The Substance fits too—it uses a similar structure though it's tonally completely different, delighting in body horror.

For some reason I did not receive a notification of a reply — Leontiskos

I assumed you’d slunk away defeated and whimpering, your tail between your legs.

Anyway, thanks Leon, I appreciate the magnanimousness of your response.

I don't see that Adorno succeeds in brushing away the self-refutation of relativism. What does he do? He calls the objection "wretched," gives a single sentence of justification, and then moves on to a critique that he likes better. And his critique is fine as far as it goes, but he doesn't provide any argument for why the less "fruitful" objection is "wretched." This is probably because he doesn't have one.

[…]

I don't think this is right, but neither you nor Adorno are offering much to respond to in the way of argument. Obviously the person who thinks relativism is self-refuting would say that the "critical vs positive" distinction is _ad hoc_, and therefore it is hard to believe that this is a serious attempt to point up some problem with that objection. Indeed, if by "wretched" Adorno means something like, "The interlocutor would not be amenable to this objection," then his own objection surely suffers from the same problem, no? — Leontiskos

Maybe it’s best not to interpret him as offering a standalone refutation of the charge of relativism’s self-refutation. It’s better to see him as briefly indicating that this charge conflates the logical form of an assertion with the immanent critique of the conditions under which assertions claim universality. The self-refutation charge treats the latter as if it were the former.

In a general sense Adorno's quibble is usually taken into account by speaking about performative self-contradiction rather than simple self-contradiction, and that would include the relativist's belief that he has license to argue "critically" rather than "positively" in order to avoid the matter of applying his own criteria to himself. But in a more general sense, there is a strain of continentalism that sees simple arguments as passé. Like the basketball player who loves to dazzle with complicated plays and maneuvers, they have a disdain for the simple layup, and would almost argue that it should not count. Yet even if such individuals must label it "wretched," it still nevertheless counts. In some sense it counts more, because even (especially?) the uneducated can see that it is correct. — Leontiskos

Your reading takes his critical vs. positive distinction as an evasion, whereas I think what he is doing is describing an actual difference in the form of the claim. That distinction may be rejected, but I don’t think it’s just a hand-wavy gesture.

This is of course related to our differences over validity vs. genesis, direct engagement vs. metacritique, and justification vs. genealogy. Adorno, in the context of the section of ND under the heading “Against Relativism,” is much more interested in the latter of these pairs, because he thinks it is neglected by the focus on formal consistency, refutational success etc.

So in this respect he belongs to a tradition, which includes Hegel, Nietzsche, and Foucault, for whom insight, interpretation, and experience are modes of philosophical cognition, not reducible to argument or refutation. They are not rejecting reason, but rejecting the idea that reason is identical with formal validity. It’s an expansive concept of reason, a lot like the one explicitly set out in Horkheimer’s Eclipse of Reason and implicit in Dialectic of Enlightenment.

I’m sympathetic to this tradition. This might be a fundamental difference between us, although you seem quite far from the ahistorical tendencies of some Anglo-philosophy.

Incidentally, this tension is one of the fascinating things about Negative Dialectics: he is very sensitive to the suspicion that his emphasis on the philosophical centrality of spiritual experience, insight, and rhetorical expression might be interpreted as irrational. So he spends a lot of time explaining why Bergson, for example—who valorizes intuition over reason—is not where it’s at (despite having sympathies).

Puzzles about the one and the many are very old, and there is an established school of thought that favors the universal over the particular. Still, I worry about thinkers who wish to reconfigure the relation of the one and the many based on a practical aim; or who wish to reconfigure speculative reason on the basis of practical reason. To make the truth subservient to our desires is truly wretched, even where those desires are noble. Obviously I am not a Marxist. — Leontiskos

The point is that the division between theoretical and practical reason is itself historical, and that it breaks down historically—after Auschwitz. We can no longer take seriously the idea of purely speculative thought. But this is not the same as subordinating truth to our desires. Adorno is trying to show that the Enlightenment’s own conceptual scheme produced blind spots that had catastrophic consequences.

You seem to be worried about some ideological corruption of philosophy. It’s as if you’re advancing a more philosophical version of the “facts don’t care about your feelings” critique of the Left. I think this is misplaced, not least because much of what Adorno wrote is not easily packaged in terms of ethics; is difficult for the Left to swallow and is written off by most Marxists as pessimistic and counter-productive; and explicitly goes against many of the tenets of revolutionary politics. The whole point for Adorno is how to reach truth—not how to ground a political or ethical project and the truth be damned. The truth is that people suffer and they ought not to (he rejects the complete separability of facts and values).

Well, there are two things at play here. I never thought Adorno's opposition to identity-thinking was a first principle or originary ground, and yet this does not mean that he is not monomaniacal. To be possessed by a singular idea or ideational current is monomaniacal whether or not that singular thought is seen as originary. So Adorno may or may not be monomaniacal, but I don't see that your argument here is to the point. — Leontiskos

If the possession of a singular idea or ideational current is the criterion, then many of the great philosophers become monomaniacal. The distinction Adorno draws is between a fixation that hypostatizes a principle, and a critical focus that traces a structural feature of conceptual thought.

EDIT: Correction: it's not a distinction Adorno draws, but one I am drawing. If Adorno were monomaniacal about identity-thinking, it would be a fixation that hypostatizes the principle that identity-thinking is bad or whatever; whereas I think it's more like "a critical focus that traces a structural feature of conceptual thought."

The critique of identity thinking is not a doctrine, but is the confrontation with the historically dominant form of conceptual mediation, which any immanent critique must confront all the time, simply because it’s so ubiquitous. Calling that “monomania,” despite what you say, does seem to mistake the object of analysis for the ground of a system.

As for totalitarianism, I think it's too easy, or perhaps superficial, to say that an anti-totalitarian philosophy might itself become totalitarian if it goes too far. — Jamal

But wouldn't you agree with someone who says that? — Leontiskos

Sure. The point of my comment was that this truism is not a good criticism of Adorno. There is no totalizing program in Adorno.

I grant that the danger you describe is real: becoming so horrified by X that one becomes doctrinal in opposing X. But Adorno actually resists that move by refusing to convert catastrophe into the foundation of a system or determinate political programme. Instead he is arguing for a particular kind of attentiveness, because philosophy cannot proceed as though nothing happened.

As an auxiliary point, I favor traditions of philosophy over novel, heroic individual efforts. Philosophizing within a tradition (and in relation to other traditions) helps smooth out rough edges and avoid the monomaniacal tendencies I alluded to. This is another reason why I am generally skeptical in cases such as these. But I might be wrong. — Leontiskos

Adorno is steeped in tradition and is alive to both its importance and its dangers. He comes out of Kant and Hegel while also analyzing the genesis of their ideas to reveal their constitutive blind spots. So he is both traditional and anti-traditional.

And like you, he is significantly suspicious of the heroic individual in philosophy. Contrast him with the “heroic” Heidegger (who he hated). Heidegger sought to sweep it all away and start again from the pre-Socratics, and Adorno put a lot of effort into exposing this as a fantasy—the fantasy of starting fresh (one which expresses ideological commitments and presuppositions).

As evidence, two observations:

1. Adorno doesn’t reject the subject-object structure. He doesn’t think we can step outside it or replace it with a better alternative, by fiat.
2. The method of immanent critique depends entirely on inherited concepts and categories and would be impossible without them. The whole point is to interrogate our inherited concepts from within.

EDIT: I missed an important one:

3. Consciousness. He doesn't abandon the Kantian notion of consciousness, which many later thinkers dropped (and criticized Adorno for not dropping).


So I think Adorno is to be commended for his restraint. Even though he has the intellectual range and imagination to attempt a Heidegger-style heroic rupture, he refuses.

Shadow Ticket by Thomas Pynchon — Jamal

I'm sad to report that after a great first half, I got really bored with this and dropped it.

It's like a spinoff from Against the Day, in the style of Inherent Vice, but without the bite of either. I wouldn't have expected to be wishing, during the reading, that the protagonist did not go to central Europe and had instead stayed in Milwaukee. The Milwaukee section is great fun; the ocean voyage and Hungary become super-zany but lack any real texture or substance.

But maybe I just wasn't in the mood.

I think there's a view you're not considering, one which is probably closer to the way @T Clark sees things. I mean the view that sees the idea that sex is dirty or that the animal in us is something to be ashamed of or to transcend—that this idea itself is what is offensive, rather than sex or the "bestial". In other words, it is disgusting that people find sex disgusting.

The idea that our animal nature is "base" and "dirty" has deep links with philosophy and religion, of course. That's a problem for philosophy. If this discussion could go in that direction, that might be enough to raise it up out of the Lounge.

The traditional scheme is that the good is what is eternal, necessary, pure, and rational. The contingent, mutable, finite, passionate and affective—like life and love (real love, with sex and everything)—are relegated to inferior status, as belonging to the wordly realm that philosophy is meant to transcend.

I am very much against this binary scheme, and I like the philosophers who have challenged it. Nietzsche, Merleau-Ponty, Foucault, and Adorno. Generally, 20th century scepticism towards reason, and its inclusion of the body, saved philosophy from becoming a complete idiot.

One interesting angle is the possibility that a neurotically adolescent view of sex, as expressed in the OP (which is not to say it's unusual), might actually be founded on a long-standing philosophical tradition going back to Plato and Siddhartha Gautama.

Cool. I don't want to always sound like I'm taking a pro-AI stand in a new culture war, but it is worth pointing out that he is against the bubble more than AI itself, against capitalism more than the technology:

AI is a bubble and it will burst. Most of the companies will fail. Most of the data-centers will be shuttered or sold for parts. So what will be left behind? We'll have a bunch of coders who are really good at applied statistics. We'll have a lot of cheap GPUs, which'll be good news for, say, effects artists and climate scientists, who'll be able to buy that critical hardware at pennies on the dollar. And we'll have the open source models that run on commodity hardware, AI tools that can do a lot of useful stuff, like transcribing audio and video, describing images, summarizing documents, automating a lot of labor-intensive graphic editing, like removing backgrounds, or airbrushing passersby out of photos. These will run on our laptops and phones, and open source hackers will find ways to push them to do things their makers never dreamt of. — Cory Doctorow

But then, in his call to action, he conflates anti-AI-bubble with anti-AI, thereby undermining his whole point or at least confusing his audience:

To pop the bubble, we have to hammer on the forces that created the bubble: the myth that AI can do your job, especially if you get high wages that your boss can claw back; the understanding that growth companies need a succession of ever-more-outlandish bubbles to stay alive; the fact that workers and the public they serve are on one side of this fight, and bosses and their investors are on the other side.

Because the AI bubble really is very bad news, it's worth fighting seriously, and a serious fight against AI strikes at its roots: the material factors fueling the hundreds of billions in wasted capital that are being spent to put us all on the breadline and fill all our walls will high-tech asbestos.

EDIT: It's more sloppiness than contradiction. In the second quotation, "AI" means the project of monopoly capitalism now underway, whereas in the first quotation it means the actual technology. This is such an important distinction that the sloppiness is unforgivable.

I've ensured that the archive won't be indexed by search engines until we close this site, so at least for the next couple of months, nobody should be able to find a story by searching in Google or whatever.

I could only recall @hypericin and myself being concerned about the visibility of stories, and we're both ok with things as they are, but I can remove any story from the archive on an ad hoc basis—so let me know. I'm not taking any content over to the new site.

I don't know. I'm out of steam. Over to someone else.

e

Ah, it's intelligent.

:groan:

Enlightened.

o

:chin:

s

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Interesting. It might even be interesting to see if crip theory and some kind of Aristotelianism might be reconciled, though on the face of it that seems a bit mad.

As a programmer this is the only feature of Cursor that I use. I've never once asked it to generate code for me. I'm stubbornly old-fashioned. — Michael

I'm not. I've used AI a lot for coding in the last couple of years, maybe because I've mostly left behind coding as a career. Using AI in this context can be frustrating but it ultimately saves time and avoids tedium. It's also a very direct and fast way of understanding the ways that LLMs get things wrong generally.

I haven't used Cursor though, just copilot and externally with DeepSeek and ChatGPT. I guess I'll end up trying Cursor to get it all integrated.

What I've enjoyed about using LLMs in coding is that I can quickly build small, clean applications with very few dependencies and no bloat.

But I don't think this is a "social construct" model. The latter is too ontologically dualist, whereas this view is relational. So maybe it fits disability. — Jamal

I just did some light googling and inevitably it turns out there's a lot of work been done around this, all of which I'm ignorant of. For example, there have already been proposed social-relational models of disability, and maybe that's close to what I was getting at (though no doubt mostly without my Adornian dialectical framing).

So it’s not their body that is disabling so much as its interaction with its environment. — Banno

the social model; the view that disability is largely created by architectural barriers, institutional practices, and social attitudes that fail to accommodate human variation. — Banno

That rather than being inherently negative, having a disability is just one more way of being a human, not inherently a disadvantage or a negative, but treated as such by many in the community. — Banno

I see a parallel in depression. A person with depression, it could be argued, is not incapacitated by a biomedical abnormality but by a disconnect between themselves and the social world. Depression is the lived form of the contradiction between human needs (for meaning, purpose, agency, etc.) and a society of alienation and domination. This contradictory interaction is constitutive of the personal "condition".

But I don't think this is a "social construct" model. The latter is too ontologically dualist, whereas this view is relational. So maybe it fits disability.

:up:

Out of interest, and I'm not holding my breath, but I don't suppose there is any chance at all of turning particular buttons on or off in particular categories? — bongo fury

A.I. features can be restricted to certain groups, so I could conceivably make it available only to those who ask for it, by creating a group called ... whatever the opposite of Luddites is.

But I'd prefer to turn features off for everyone, rather than dividing the membership like that. People can always use their LLMs independently, just as they always do.

1. AI Summaries (Topic Summaries)
4. AI Bot
5. Post Editing Assistant
6. AI Autofill / Autocomplete — Outlander

NOTE: I'd like everyone to know that I have not decided on which features to use, so we may not have these features turned on at the new TPF. I just reported on what was available in the AI plugin and expressed some tentative views.

@Paine @Hanover

To summarize:

AI on Discourse will not participate in discussions but will just do background labour—things like summarizing, filtering spam, providing help (like telling you how to change the background colour). It's just a clever tool, not a member of the forum.

I suggest you don't think of it as a participant. As I say, it won't do philosophy, just grunt-work.

any plans for the use of AI in our new home? — Banno

Rather than worrying about how much of a post is generated by AI, it might be useful to have the AI as a participant in the forum, so that the sort of questions at which it excels can be asked and answered quite openly. — Banno

There are several AI features included, and we may use some of them, but they won't replace one's own use of AI for research, and I won't be paying to integrate GPT5 or Claude or Gemini, since users can access those LLMs through their own accounts. The AI features will be powered only by the free LLM provided on Discourse hosting.

Additionally, hosted customers can use the CDCK Hosted Small LLM (Qwen 2.5) pre-configured in the settings page. This is an open-weights LLM hosted by Discourse, ready for use to power AI features. — meta.discourse.org

The features are:

1. AI Summaries (Topic Summaries)
Automatically generates short summaries of long threads, helping users catch up without reading entire discussions.

2. Semantic Search
Search powered by embeddings rather than keywords, returning relevant results even when queries use different wording.

3. AI Moderation
Detects spam, toxicity, NSFW material, and problematic content, reducing moderator workload.

4. AI Bot
A chat-style assistant that users can interact with. It can answer questions using forum content or general knowledge, depending on the model used.

5. Post Editing Assistant
Suggests rewrites, clarifications, translations, or tone adjustments while composing or editing posts.

6. AI Autofill / Autocomplete
Offers context-aware writing suggestions to help users complete sentences or refine ideas as they type.

7. AI Tools for Staff
Provides moderators/admins with tools such as user-history summaries and condensed views of long discussions.

8. AI Tagging / Categorization
Automatically assigns tags or recommends categories, improving forum organisation with minimal manual effort.

9. Related Topics (AI-powered)
Suggests similar past threads based on semantic similarity rather than keyword matching.

10. AI Translation
Provides instant translation of posts or post drafts, supporting multilingual community participation.

In other words, it's not for doing philosophy but for (a) managing the forum, (b) providing help to users ("how do I update my avatar?"), and (c) other unobtrusive useful things like summarizing topics, translation, and suggesting titles.

We can turn all those features off, but some of them are too useful. Those who don't like the encroachment of AI might not like the "Summarize topic" feature, but I actually think it'll be good. People are often too lazy to read a whole discussion before commenting, and sometimes it's so long that nobody is going to do it. In those cases its better that they have an idea of what's been said than no idea at all, no?

As for using it for moderation: nobody is going to be banned or anything by the AI bot. It will probably flag problematic content and then the human team will review it.

There’s room for everybody but the modern world loves building walls and categorizing everything. Am I a man, a woman, are we an Indigenous band, a queer band? All these boxes feel like barriers and we just fly right over the top on them — Zaachariaha

The interesting thing is that this actually reflects a non-binary attitude, rather than representing a typical trans outlook (not that I'm assuming there is such a thing). The idea that the problem is the boxes themselves doesn’t describe the experience of a lot of binary trans people, for whom the issue isn’t “why do we have categories at all?” but “why am I being put in the wrong one?”

As we know, the situation for many trans men and trans women is that they seek recognition according to the common gender binary. This is crucial to their dignity, safety, mental health and day-to-day life. So a slogan like “we just fly over the categories” doesn’t really speak for them.

That’s not a criticism of anyone; it just shows that “trans people” don't speak as one.

Isn't that supported by basic evolution? Even common layperson knowledge (caveman grunts, etc.)? A child can barely speak, but typically, gains the ability to as most every person can today. Isn't this a parallel to evolution of human society? — Outlander

The "caveman grunts" idea is not supported by any evidence. It's just a nineteenth century stereotype. The fact is that we cannot know, looking back in time, what language was like beyond a certain point. But the earliest languages we can actually study, like Sumerian, Old Chinese, and early Indo-European languages, are more complex grammatically than many languages today. So the evidence actually runs the other way.

So as I said, historical linguistics doesn't support your speculative claim, which is an empirical claim best settled scientifically (i.e., by historical linguistics).

And no, child development does not recapitulate evolution: the speech of children does not mirror some earlier, ostensibly simple, stage of human language. Children speak simply because they're starting out in learning a massively complex system, and within a few years they've mastered it, whereas adults from other language communities take many years to become fluent. Crucially, this quick mastery is evidence of how deep and ancient our linguistic capacities already are—it does not in any way say that earlier languages were simpler.

I honestly don’t know what you’re referring to, and so your post seems to me unmotivated and out of the blue. In any case, you’re off-topic. To complain about a member of staff, please create a new topic in the Feedback category.

But first you'd have to show that languages were simpler in the past, and I don't think that's supported by historical linguistics. And @Hanover might be interpreted as pointing out the opposite: the simplification of languages over time, rather than their complexification.

But I don't think historical linguistics is in the region of what Hanover is really getting at, although with Hanover it can be difficult to tell, such is his wildly fecund mind.

I've read the lectures on Kant's CPR. Really good. He talks about the block quite a lot there.

Your circumlocutions are making me nauseous, Outlander. :wink:

The way I put it was inadequate. What I should have said is that those who disagree with the OP find that statement, or more specifically its role in @Philosophim's argument, to be problematic.

EDIT: It's what is implied by "the default goes to sex" that's the problem, namely that we can be satisfied with the definition of "man" and "woman" as relating solely to biology.

The reason I posted was to try and understand the impasse between OP and @Banno. — Outlander

:up:

Otherwise, I still have no idea what you meant by "behavior no person of any sex or society should tolerate."

For what it's worth, the OP's substantive claim is this:

Most of the world does not view man and woman by gender, but by sex, so the default goes to sex. — Philosophim

Most of those who disagree with the OP therefore disagree with this claim or with its significance.

to normalize behavior no person of any sex or society should tolerate, let alone normalize — Outlander

What behaviour are you referring to here?

I'm sure Banno is perfectly capable of referencing that if that was his intention. From my point in the context of the discussion, I did not feel that Wittenstein's term was what was implied. Its odd that out of that entire discussion you pulled one line that really wasn't key to the core argument. Was this another attempt to make me look ignorant to persuade people I'm not worth listening to? Didn't really work Jamal. — Philosophim

No, I'm not trying to score points, just helping out by correcting your faulty interpretation, since I know @Banno better than you. There is never a time when he says "language game" and does not mean it in the Wittgensteinian sense.

In fact, I'd go so far as to say that there is never a time when any seasoned philosophical thinker, in the Western tradition, uses the term "language game" and does not mean it in the Wittgensteinian sense.

I recall I clearly pointed out how you are NOT being friendly or honest in your critique. I have yet to see you even attempt to tackle that, look inward a bit, or even an apology or an attempt to start over. Nice try. — Philosophim

I don't think there is anything in this post—the post with which I today re-entered the discussion—which is unfriendly or dishonest. Can you point it out?

Is it because I said "the exchange between us got heated," rather than directly apologizing for calling your post stupid? I thought it was better not to bring it up, in my effort to start again. It seemed accurate at the time, because your post dismissed my critique without taking it seriously, and refused the chance to learn. I count this as classic stupidity. However, I did not say that you were stupid. Even geniuses have stupid moments sometimes.

Prejudice seemed like a good explanation for this behaviour, so maybe that's what I believed about your motivation. But as I said, I re-opened the exchange today because on the basis of other posts of yours which I've read in the interim, I've grown to believe that I was wrong about that. I was open about this; it's pretty bad form to again complain about the very thing I am attempting to reverse (my hasty and disgusted withdrawal from the discussion).

By starting it off saying my original post was prejudiced without explaining why? Good faith wouldn't have been trying to defend yourself two months after the fact and complimenting another poster I've been discussing with as "Having a strong argument" without any reason why. Please. — Philosophim

I specifically said that I no longer believe you were motivated by prejudice. May I humbly request that you read my posts more carefully?

Yes Jamal. You're wrong. You were wrong on your first logical fallacy post, wrong on the second double down post, and are wrong in trying to save face instead of moving on. I really have nothing else to say to you as you have done nothing to prove to me you have any intention of an honest debate. — Philosophim

Let's start again. I apologize for calling your post stupid. I should not have done it, because it was not conducive to reasoned discussion.

But you have not addressed my criticisms:

our OP seems reducible to this syllogism:

1. A man is an adult human male.
2. A trans man is not an adult human male.
3. Therefore a trans man is not a man.

(The same pattern for “woman”; and “male” understood biologically.)

In isolation, this does not technically beg the question, because the conclusion isn't present in the premises. But it does beg the question in the context of the debate, because the very meaning of "man" and "woman" is exactly what is disputed—and you stipulate one of the contested meanings as a premise.

And in your concluding paragraph you say this:

"So are transwomen women? Are transwomen men? No. The terms man and woman indicate a person's age and sex, not gender." — Philosophim

So your OP effectively does this:

1. Assume the contested definition.
2. Derive a conclusion that follows only under that definition.
3. Present the conclusion as if it supports the definition.

This is classic begging the question. — Jamal

And I also showed that I was not committing an ad hominem fallacy:

I wasn’t attacking your character. I was criticising your assumptions—specifically that you presuppose a contested definition and ignore the relevant existing counterarguments. That is a critique of reasoning, not of person.

This is where the two points connect. Saying "you haven't addressed X" is not personal; it is a point about dialectical completeness. My claim is that your argument stipulates the very definition of "man" and "woman" that's being disputed, and therefore does not engage with those philosophical analyses which define those terms differently. — Jamal

Can you respond to this? Can you show in what way I was doing an ad hominem? You argue that this is the crucial ad hominem:

The debate has been going on for years, and you have made no attempt to research it or address the arguments that defend the notion that trans women are women etc — Jamal

But this is to accuse you of ignoring the relevant arguments in what is a debate which is not restricted to this thread or TPF, i.e., it is one that has been going on for years and has been addressed by philosophers. If you fail to address the debate, and instead assume precisely what is at issue, I think it's philosophically legitimate to point it out.

Please break down how my accusation is ad hominem.

But if you want, we can draw a line under all that, because there is too much baggage in it and the result will be more petty bickering and grandstanding. Instead, I can just ask you: do you agree that the OP assumes a definition which is the centrally contested definition in the debate over whether trans men are men etc? And how do you propose to support this definition? Since you did not support it in the OP, it's fair to ask you to face up to the relevant criticisms of your definition.

Crucially, I do not actually need to argue for my own understanding of "man" and "woman" to show that your reasoning is at fault, although it's fair that you ask me to make such an argument.

Meaning all you have in response to an honest and friendly critique is rhetoric, so it isn't worth pursuing in the philosophical spirit in which I intervened on both occasions (page 2 and today). Each time, you respond not with argument but effectively by sticking your fingers in your ears and attempting to disguise it with bluster. I admit it’s particularly galling this time around because I was very deliberately friendly, attempting to re-open the exchange in good faith.

It seems to me that you agree with me: that the OP does not in any way support your definition, since it stipulates it. Where is the argument for the definition of “man” and “woman” which the OP depends on? I have seen you appealing to common sense and repeatedly saying that it’s the most rational definition and so on, but that’s about it. Or am I wrong?

I should have known better.

Yeah, I've learned a lot from that thread too. I'm sure there are several books I've read because someone posted about them there. I've added several of your own choices to my reading list, though inevitably it has taken me a long time to get around to reading them.

Language games are attempts to use language to confuse concepts. — Philosophim

I'm just going to butt in here to point out that the term has a technical sense, to be found in Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations:

2. A is building with building stones: there are blocks, pillars, slabs and beams. B has to pass him the stones and to do so in the order in which A needs them. For this purpose they make use of a language consisting of the words “block”, “pillar”, “slab”, “beam”. A calls them out; B brings the stone which he has learnt to bring at such-and-such a call. --- Conceive of this as a complete primitive language. — PI

7. We can also think of the whole process of using words in (2) as one of those games by means of which children learn their native language. I will call these games “language-games” and will sometimes speak of a primitive language as a language-game. And the processes of naming the stones and of repeating words after someone might also be called language-games. Think of certain uses that are made of words in games like ring-a-ring-a-roses. I shall also call the whole, consisting of language and the activities into which it is woven, a “language-game”. — PI

EDIT: But note that these comments are not the last word on language games in PI. The point of quoting Wittgenstein is to show that the term has a philosophical meaning that is nothing to do with "confusing concepts".

Yes, and I want to keep it in a category which is not hidden from the main page.