All right, we're recording. All right. Well, I'm here with, uh, Dr. Thomas Bogardus, after the famous, or infamous, depending on your view, uh, his debate with Bosch. Sorry about that, by the way. Um, condolences.

No, I think, I think it was fine. I'm, I'm happy that we did it, and I think it went, um, as well as I could have hoped. So, I'm all right with it. Well, yeah, I mean, I, I, I, I think you won the debate. There's no ques, I don't think there's a question about the victor there. Um, all right. Um, yeah, I, I agree there. Um, but what, so what I wanted to discuss a couple things, actually several things. So, number one, the topics I've listed are, um, the sex that people are is not a binary variable. Then, let me just read it out because I think I wrote this down. The other thing was that even if definitions are propositional, there's reason to have a definition of woman other than the traditional one, even if it is a secondary definition after the traditional definition. And then, our definitions even propositional in the first place? And then, what non-traditional, non-circular definition of woman best captures what people mean when they use the term in a gendered sense while avoiding the strongest, quote-unquote, reduction? Yeah, so I think we'll start at the first one, that the sex people are is not a binary barrier. Um, and I think I should disambiguate what I mean by those terms, uh, because I think as much as these words have been thrown around, it causes a lot of confusion when they're not disambiguated.

Okay, so, um, sex, I'm using a comedic entailed sufficiency criteria between large and small gametes. So, that is to say, though those who produce large gametes is a sufficiency criteria for being female, um, may not be a necessary criteria, but it's, on my view, as a sufficiency criteria. Uh, those who produce small gametes, uh, is the sufficiency criteria for being male, uh, not that it may not be a necessary criteria, but it's a sufficiency criteria.

Okay, hold on. Um, can I just stop you really quick? Yeah. So, uh, maybe this is gonna launch us into what a definition is, but, um, I would have thought a definition is necessary and sufficient conditions. Um, so, what, what's missing from this, uh, sufficiency condition to make, what, what else might be necessary to be a female other than? Yeah. So, I think, I think some sort of physiological proximity to individuals that produce large gametes, and similarly from the male side, some sort of physiological proximity. You can say organized around that's one that's thrown around a lot, or organized around, uh, phenotype that produces large gametes, or organized around a phenotype that produces small gametes. Um, organized around a phenotype. Yeah, I don't really like that term, but it's like, basically, it's a proximity of a phenotype or a phenotype. So, the disjunction is either producing, uh, large gametes, that is that, or so, either that, or having a close enough proximity, having a close proximity, uh, uh, in physiology to those that produce, uh, large gametes. And, you know, what that means. But, sure. Yeah. You don't mean like spatially close? No, no, no. I mean, I mean, like, like morphologically. Um, so, for example, just, just to help you, what I'm getting at, so I don't think that, you know, females who run through menopause are not females, right? That, that's the idea that I, what I'm trying to do is that, is to capture, um, what I consider to be females, but they do not produce large gametes. So, um, for example, um, females who are sterile. And so, what I would say is that if they're not female by virtue of producing large gametes, but they are female by virtue of something else, and that can be some sort of, um, biologic proximity, some sort of morph, could be morphology. So, if they have, um, certain gonads that, um, that normally would produce these, um, these gametes, but don't, uh, that would suffice. Um, if they, um, if they have some other sort of biologic proximity to us, to having structures that produce those gametes, but otherwise would not have. And, um, and we, and what, what we can dial in, what that is. There may be some vagueness there, but it's just a way of capturing, it's just a vague way of capturing other individuals that we, I think everyone knows what we mean when we say, okay, you know, grandma is a female, even though grandma doesn't produce large gametes.

Yeah, I wish I could agree with you that everyone knows what we mean when we talk. Well, but that hasn't been my experience. But, um, well, I, I think we're basically on the same page here. Um, I, I guess I would, I was, maybe you can correct me here, um, it's nice to have a chance to talk to you about this, but, um, I guess I thought, um, to be male is just to produce small gametes when functioning properly. And to be female is to produce large gametes when functioning properly. And I thought that little functioning properly addition would cover cases where there's been injury or old age or disease or, um, so, um, but I think that's different than what you're saying here. I don't know if we need to spend much time thinking about the differences, but what's wrong with the way I'm understanding?

Sure, sure. Um, yeah, yeah. So, so, so, I mean, ignoring, putting aside the question of what proper means, if we mean, um, you know, what's, if it's some normative thing, or if, if whatever we dial in, I'm sure we could dial something into whatever proper means. But I think you'll agree, if I give you an example, that, uh, this is not, quote-unquote, what, you know, the medical community would consider proper, what you would consider proper. Um, so, for example, if there was a virus, right, that infected me and changed all of my sperm into eggs, I would not, uh, be producing, uh, large gametes, properly. I would, but I would be producing them. And let's just say, for the sake of the argument, that they were, um, otherwise, they were just large gametes. They would, um, they could combine with sperm and produce offspring. And this whole time, I'm not producing, um, sperm. It has changed, you know, I'm not producing sperm, and it's, you know, changed my physiology such that I'm not even in the proximity of producing it, and I'm producing a whole bunch of eggs right now, and I'm mothering children. And the question is, am I female? And I think it would look crazy to say no. If someone were to ask you, you know, yeah, I've got news. I would have said no.

No, I'd say you're a male who's functioning like a female, but you're not functioning properly. This isn't, this isn't what your body was meant to do. Right. So, I think that's the thing. I'm sorry to hear that's the crazy view. Yeah. I, I think that's the difference, then. Because, to me, whether it's a quote-unquote proper function or not, whatever we consider to be proper, um, to me, that's not part of what being male or female is like. Even, even if we didn't consider it male or female, even if we didn't see that you are properly a male, um, you could still, on my view, at least, you could still be a male, even if you are not a male by virtue of some sort of proper function, as long as you are able to sexually, um, if you are able to sexually reproduce as a sufficiency criteria as a male and produce viable offspring, then, um, well, whether we include the viable offspring part or not is a different question. But on that notion, you would be a male. And if the, you know, if it's due to a virus, or if it's due to some chemical, you know, whether it's, you know, frogs with atrazine, you know, if you think the chemical is called atrazine or whatever, that changes the sex of the frog, even though that's not proper function, well, they still change their sex. And I think everybody, the biologic community recognizes that this chemical, though it may be artificial, though it may not be, you know, maybe some accident or fluke, they recognize that the sex of the frogs are changed.

And so, I kind of just asked a question about the frog case. Do these frogs have some sort of like natural disposition to change their sex in the presence of certain kinds of chemicals? And then we artificially expose them to some chemicals and trigger this mechanism, or what's going on with the frogs? So, um, I don't know all the, so I don't know all the details of the frogs. I just know that there's some chemical that, that does this, that, that changes the sex. I don't know if, I don't know exactly what pathway it's working on. We could, we could look that up. But I, I think the important thing that biologists are focusing on, like, even if, yeah, it, I think, but, but, you know, the question is, what pathway is it working? We could look that up, but I don't need to know the details of the pathway. But is there some natural mechanism in the frog that reacts to environmental stimuli and then, yeah, um, changes the sex of the frog? And in this case, we've artificially changed their, their, yeah. So, if that's the case, you can try to capture that by saying it's proper because it, the proper things are. But, yeah, so you can, you can try, you can, you can do that. But even if, you know, even if it, if there wasn't, and it's this chemical somehow created one, um, you know, so let's just grant that, you know, there, there is this mechanism in place for the frogs to change sex, and this chemical is just, you know, uh, triggering that mechanism. Um, you know, we can argue whether that's proper or improper. What? Because if it's due to the chemical, whatever, let's just say that if you have a definition that considers that proper, fine. Then you would maintain some, you would maintain a consistent view that it, that, okay, you would just capture that by saying, okay, well, that's not proper, and so that, that's why that is proper, and that's why they're there. In that case, um, but I think that would just be a difference in, in how we're viewing, uh, sex, then. Because I think that, um, I think that if there wasn't that mechanism in place, if there wasn't that natural mechanism, and then it just so happened to be that atrazine, um, just created the mechanism, just shifted the mechanisms in place there, I think the biologic community would look at that and just be like, okay, well, they're still, the sex is still changed. I mean, the, you know, it wasn't meant to be that way naturally. I don't know, whatever we mean by meant to be. But, um, lo and behold, the, the sex has changed. These ones are now producing large gametes, the other ones are now producing small gametes, and they're producing offspring that way. Now, maybe I'm wrong about that. Maybe the biologic community wouldn't say that. And that, that's just going to be an empirical discussion. If what we're trying to do is capture what biologists are talking about, unless there's some other goal.

Well, I wouldn't say it's entirely empirical. I guess we would be doing some conceptual clarification, and that's where philosophers might be able to help a little bit. But certainly, what biologists say and how they use the word would be relevant. Um, but here's something that comes to mind, and I'm not totally sure this is relevant now, but I thought one reason in favor of thinking of biological sex in terms of natural dispositions is that, don't we want to say of like embryos in utero, this is male and this is female, even though there's certainly no gametes being produced yet? But to say that it's a male fetus or embryo or zygote or whatever, is to say that it's got this natural disposition. It's ordered towards the production of sperm in the case of a male. So, if that's right, and that's enough to be male, then, you know, actually producing sperm or eggs isn't necessary to be male or to be female. It looks like all that's necessary, if these little embryos can be male or female, is a kind of disposition to produce sperm in the case of males or to produce eggs. And in that case, when, if a virus takes over my body and makes me start producing eggs, this was not a natural disposition any more than, you know, when a virus incorporates itself into my genome and hijacks my cells and starts making more of itself, that doesn't make me like a virus or something like that. That's the only example I could think of that's that actually happens. There are some far-out science fiction examples we could think of where, you know, a virus takes over my body and I don't know, changes it into like little lizard parts or something. This wouldn't be a natural disposition on the part of my body, and so I wouldn't have what's required to be female in that case. I wouldn't have the natural disposition to produce eggs. I would actually be producing eggs, but that wouldn't be enough to make me female, I would have thought.

So, let me just, let me just ask this. So, because I, I know at this point, I'm trying to decide whether we have to hone in on what naturally means to you. Because I mean, I think, but yeah, because viruses, we can just posit that there's some naturally evolved virus that does this, um, or we can posit that someone did it in the lab, or I just can can go for, you know, you know, without dialing that in. I mean, let me just, let me just ask a few questions to get a little more clarity on on your view here. Let's say, let's say we took an embryo and, you know, at the single cell stage, and we just changed, we, we changed the chromosomes. We just, we just took out, there was, we changed the karyotype. So that's 46 XY, and we just change it to 46 XX. Now, you know, we can say before the change, there was some natural, uh, disposition to produce, uh, small gametes. And now, after this artificial change, there's this natural disposition, or not natural, rather, there's this artificial disposition, artificially induced disposition, artificially induced natural disposition, however you want to frame it. Yeah, to, to produce the, um, to produce the large gametes. And if you want to say, well, it's an artificially induced natural disposition because the pathway's already there, we can just say, well, we introduce completely new, you know, we say it's 46 Z or whatever, and it just turns out, you know, I, we, we made it in such a way that this embryo will now have a disposition to develop into, uh, morphologically everything we look at as the archetypal, uh, female, and it will produce the same, uh, it will produce ova just like an archetypal female, and everything else will be just the same. It's just that, um, the pathways are, when we investigate the pathway, it turns out that just there's complete, there's a whole bunch of different pathways going on. The chromosomes are different, but the outcomes are the same. Like, it produces eggs, they combine with sperm, they produce, um, they, you know, they participate in sex the same way. All those other outcome things, outcomes are the same, but the underlying mechanisms are different. Would you say that, um, this, uh, being is a female? Or would you say that it's not any sex? Or would you say that it's a male?

Yeah, so the case is, um, we do some CRISPR, um, or whatever, and, um, we change, uh, embryo from when it's in the single cell stage from XY to XX. Have we changed it from male to female? So that is something I've thought about before, and I've kind of gone back and forth on this question. I don't know exactly what the right thing to say is. This is an unclear case. This is a difficult case that makes for bad law. But I guess today, I think maybe I'm inclined in the direction of saying this is, as you put it, an artificially induced natural disposition. Because I don't know, this embryo now, it's the XY, XX, I'm sorry, what? So if we, if we switch the XY to XX, you could say naturally, artificially induced natural disposition. Yeah. Now this embryo has everything it needs, all the programming required, um, to produce eggs. Um, yeah, so maybe that's right. That would be a way to change the sex of a human. Yeah. Let's say, let's say the original, the original case was, I get infected by a virus, and now my tissue gets co-opted, and I get some, some ovaries or something. Um, yeah, am I now, am I now forced to say this is an artificially induced? So it's not really artificial because it's a natural virus. But anyway, do I now have a natural disposition, um, to produce these eggs? It's the results of a virus. Yeah. I don't know. Am I, does my answer to the embryo question commit me to saying in the case of this virally induced tissue, now also I have a natural disposition to produce eggs? I don't know.

I would have thought no. I'm not forced to. If I think I can still say no in the case of, you know, the virus taking over some of my tissue, this is not a natural disposition on my part, and this is not what humans were meant to do. You know, I've been co-opted by this virus. This is not part of the human design plan. And I don't mean to commit us to anything supernatural here. Just like, you know, how a doctor can look at somebody infected with a virus and say, this is a disease, this is a disorder, this is not how things were meant to be. I think that's what we'd say about a case where a virus co-opts some of your tissues so as to produce even human eggs. Yeah, I think that's what we say even about cancer, when it's like my own tissue that's been co-opted like this is a disorder, this is, this is a disease, this is not the way things were supposed to be. Uh, yeah. I think, I think we'll have to come. I will ha, so I'm gonna continue down the the route of just continuing this work. But I do think that the whole, it sounds sort of realism, when you say like, this is what we're meant to do, or this is what we're, I don't know if that's where you're going, or if that's the view.

I'm generally in favor of realisms. I pretty much, I check, I check all the boxes when it comes to real life. Right, right. You can't, can't scare me with that word. Um, but I don't know what I'm a realist about here. I thought we were both realists about biological sex. We're just trying to figure out. Oh, I guess you're disagreeing about realism when it comes to proper function. Maybe we disagree about whether, yeah, exactly. Proper function is a thing. Well, yeah, I guess that's sort of surprising coming from a medical doctor. But you, let me know. Don't you often speak in terms of disease and disorder and health? And yes, yeah. How do you understand that if not in terms of proper function?

Well, I mean, I think proper function is indexed to certain goals. I think that, um, I think that there are certain goals that doctors have, there are certain goals that patients have. Is there a certain goal that the body seems to have? The human body seems to have certain goals? Um, I don't think that my view of it is not, doesn't the heart have a certain kind of goal? You know, to circulate? It has a certain kind of function. But I don't think that, I don't think it's teleological. I don't think it's goal, um, oriented in this, at least not in the same way that people's values are. Teleological your people's desires, um, are trying to, our people's goals are not to, yeah, people's goals are goal-oriented. The tautology, but it doesn't seem to be. Yeah, I don't think that. I think the heart evolved in a, um, certain, uh, you know, had a certain evolutionary history. I think it has a function, but I don't think that, um, it has a certain function and it can fail to perform that function. Right. Yeah. But does that just mean that it's supposed to perform this function? That's the, that's the proper function. That's what it's supposed to do. I think what you're calling a function is just a proper function, though.

Can I be heard right now? Am I coming through? Yeah, sure. I can, I can realize it. Yeah. Because to use "fail" is definitely just to reintroduce normativity, right? Like when we talk about something's proper function, if proper doesn't mean corresponding to some kind of desire that we have, then it's hard to understand what that would mean. They can have an anti-realist notion of proper functionality, like Avi and I are giving, right? To be properly functional is to operate in accord with some kind of desire held by an agent. But things like hearts don't have, you know, desires, right? So if you talk about proper substantiality, did you say things like parts? Parts don't know. Hearts. Hearts. Hearts. Oh, hearts. Okay. Yeah. Hearthstone, I guess. I guess what I'm, what I'm trying to say is, what, what does it mean to be proper if it doesn't mean to, um, yeah, being a part of the desire? Oh, well, um, I don't know. Do we agree that like, all throughout biology, there's a lot of talk of function? Like the function of an enzyme, the function of an organ, um, the function of the eyes is to see? Well, wait, but what I'm, what I'm trying to get clarity on is just, what, what does proper mean? If proper isn't just saying, um, corresponds to some goal we have or some desire we have, what would proper mean?

Well, yeah, we're not trying to tell you a function like the one should a function. I understand. I agree there's a function because I think, yeah, like, I take the view that like realism is like, like it just sounds like gibberish to me. Like I understand what it means to say that something has a function that's correct with respect to some kind of goal, right? With respect to some agent's desire. But to say it's just correct, like without, without that qualification, it's like, what do you mean? I don't under, like, I don't even have a concept of, like, are you talking about some notion of like, stance-independent correctness?

Well, yeah, I was trying to explain what I meant when I asked you, do we agree that like talk of function is ubiquitous in biology? And I thought we had agreed to that. Um, but I think when biologists say things like, the function of the eye is to see, the function of this enzyme is to do such and such, they really just mean proper function. Because of course, you know, when somebody's suffering from glaucoma, we don't say, ah, yes, that is but one more function of the eye. Now we say, this is, you know, dysfunction. I'm not asking if they mean proper function. I'm asking what proper means there. Oh, well, I was just going to get you committed to the idea that this exists, and then we could try to figure out what it means. No, I don't know. I can't, I can't accept some proposition like X exists if I'm not sure what X refers to. It might not even be a proposition to say it exists. Right. Imagine if it just reflects. I think you can't accept some propositions. It's true, you know, if you don't understand what they do. No, no, you didn't, you missed me on that. I said, I'm not even granting it's a proposition because it has a term in it whose meaning I don't understand. That term, once I know what, it might not even have a meaning, right? Once where, once the gap is filled in there, just like the term "woman." Right. It could turn out, it could turn out it's just vacuous, or it could turn out it's circular, it could turn out it's non-propositional. And if it's non-propositional, it's not something that's even in the category of that which I think you're claiming. You're claiming not to understand function talk in biology. No, I'm claiming that I don't understand what you mean by "proper" if you're using the term in a stance-independent way. Do you understand function talk in biology? I don't know why you're avoiding the question. Can you explain what you notified? Look, yes, I'm not asking about function talk. I said, when you use the term "proper," are you using it in a stance-independent way? That's my. So, don't ask me a question. Just, that's my question. Are you using it stance-independently?

Do you mean that some things can have functions and this is not determined by any human agent or something? Is that what you mean by stance-independent? I'm saying when you use the word "proper," to be stance-dependently proper, it's just to say this thing accords with someone's desires, right? Now, are you okay? Then I think there are some functions in biology that don't accord with anybody's desires. They need not accord with anybody's desire. And are they nonetheless proper?

Well, I guess, I mean, setting aside God, let's say that, set aside God for one sec. Why did my screen just blank out? Sorry. Wait one second. I'm getting some kind of glitch here. Okay, so sorry about that. I think it was just my screen timing out. And Avi appears to be gone. Do you see Avi right now? I'm, I'm here. I'm here. Okay. One second. I'm just gonna leave and rejoin. What's? Okay, sorry about that. That was very weird. Sorry. Please continue. Um, so, I guess what I was saying was, um, if I understand your question correctly, you're asking, are there some things in biology that have functions and this has nothing to do with the desires or goals of humans? No, I'm, I'm saying when you use a term like "proper," when I say this is the right thing to do, this is the correct thing to do, this is the proper thing to do, you should do this, you ought to do that. When you use that kind of normative language, if that kind of language is not being used in a stance-dependent way, which is to say, to say that something is correct, proper, should, what you want, do is to say that it is in accord with someone's desire, with some kind of goal, right? If you don't mean "proper" in that kind of way, I don't understand what it means. So I'm saying, do you mean it like that? And then, if not, I need a conceptual analysis before I'm even going to grant you that anything containing a term like that is a proposition. And if I'm not convinced it's a proposition, it's not something that's even in the category of that which I think you're claiming. You're claiming not to understand function talk in biology. No, I'm claiming that I don't understand what you mean by "proper" if you're using the term in a stance-independent way.

Do you understand function talk in biology? I don't know why you're avoiding the question. Can you explain what you notified? Look, yes, I'm not asking about function talk. I said, when you use the term "proper," are you using it in a stance-independent way? That's my. So, don't ask me a question. Just, that's my question. Are you using it stance-independently?

To take a firm view on like theories of meaning or anything like that, I'm, I'm open to eliminating, once, one second, I'm open to eliminating the concept of meaning. Um, see, I, I forgot, I forgot what I think was happening. As I said, well, you just said something I was trying to respond to there. You used the word. Okay, sorry, Abby, go ahead. Yeah, he was just saying, um, what it means to be, um, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Right. I don't, so I don't, I don't want to take a view on, on theories of meaning. But as long as, long as if, if necessary and sufficient conditions, if you take that to just be equivalent to the meaning, the only thing that I'm guarding against is that we're saying that proper has some further meaning. You can have necessary and sufficient conditions, and then when you have those, you get proper, whatever that is. But proper has some distinct meaning. That, that is what I want to avoid. But if we're not doing that, that's fine. Uh, I didn't quite track with the last 20 seconds, but let me just run this by you again, and you tell me if I said something wrong. Um, you use the word proper regularly, um, and I think we're using the same concept. I mean, we can disagree. We're disagreeing about what proper function is. And unless we're just talking past each other, we're using the same concept. We have different understandings of what this concept refers to, what it is to properly function. You have a certain theory about what the word means, what it refers to, what the necessary and sufficient conditions are for there to be proper function. And then you, you see those conditions met in the case of like a starter motor or wheels on a car or something like that. You're like, ah, yes, here we have proper function. But then when we talk about hearts and kidneys, you have a hard time seeing how the conditions of your theory of what proper function is are met. And then here are two ways you can go. You've now reached a fork in the road. You could say, maybe, maybe my theory was wrong, and the conditions I thought were, I thought were necessary for proper function aren't necessary after all. That's one way you could go. The other way you could go is say, um, I don't know what the word proper means in the sort of case. And that's, that's the way you went. But I think you should just go the first way and say, if there's proper function here, which there may not be, then the conditions you thought were necessary for proper function aren't necessary after all. But yeah, I do know what the word means. I think there's just confusion here. There's no, there's no disanalogy between those two cases. In both cases, if we mean the term in a stance-dependent way, in a, in a goal-relative way, right? That makes sense. Now you're introducing, you're introducing a theory. Yep. Right. And I'm telling you that in both cases, I have the same evaluation, which is that it makes sense on a stance-dependent notion of proper function, and on another notion, it doesn't. Right? That's the same in the heart case or whatever case, the electric circuit. It doesn't matter. There's no disanalogy there. In both cases, if you're using the term in the anti-realist sense, I understand what you mean. And if you say you're not, I don't know what the [ __ ] you're talking about.

Well, let me, let me try this example. Do you use any words? Well, wait. How about, how about instead of, because I'm noticing an effort to, the thing, the thing is what's irritating me a bit is that I poked a hole in what you were saying, and now you're trying to flip into asking me questions. It's like, I'm happy to answer questions, but it seems like it's evasive, right? Like, can you, do you want to maybe, did you poke, what did I say that you poked a hole in? Yeah, so my issue is that I have no idea what you mean when you use the term proper. Right? My response is, yes, okay, so do you mean corresponding to some standard? Um, that's a yes or no. Okay, then I don't know what you mean. Well, okay, let me give you this example. There are words that you understand perfectly well that you can't analyze. That you can't articulate necessary and sufficient conditions for. Sure, right? Sure. I think proper might be one of those. You, you think you've analyzed it in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions, but those are two different things. Understanding what a word means and being able to articulate. Oh, wait. I have necessary and sufficient conditions. Hold on. Are two different things. And you may have gotten an associate. I thought you just said that. Well, I'm not sure. See, I don't, I don't like talk of necessary and sufficient conditions. Those aren't terms that I brought in here. When I talk about, um, the, look, this is just, this is what I want to reply to. Okay, I understand what it means to say this thing is in accord with this standard. If you mean something else by proper, I just want to know what you mean. Now, if you want to say I can't convey what I mean, that's fine. But then, and this is the point of my criticism, we've hit a kind of roadblock where there's a term in the dialectic, dialectic, that you're insisting on introducing that I don't understand the meaning of. So I can't analyze any ostensible propositions that use the term. Right? So I am denying that you, you need to wait. I just want clarity about this. Are you, are you granting that you can't convey the term to me, or do you want to try to convey the term to me? I am saying I don't need to try to. No, I'm articulate necessary and sufficient conditions for you to understand the term. It's, I did not necessarily say that. I, I made this, I already made this clear. Do you remember what I said about family resemblance? Do you remember what I said about semantic primitivity? I remember you mentioned those. Okay. And what did I say about those things? You're not taking a view on what a term means. It could be the meaning of a term might be given by family resemblance. A term may be primitive and inarticulate. You cannot be articulated in necessary and sufficient conditions. Yeah. What did you say? Yeah, the point that I had made was that I'm not saying that a term is meaningless if it can't be conveyed by providing a definition or something like this. I'm open to semantic primitivity. I'm open to family resemblance concepts, which presumably don't have definitions, but we convey by a series of cases or something like that. I'm, I'm completely open to that. So I just don't want to be attacked with this straw man of like, I'm saying something is meaningless or some [ __ ] like that if you can't give me a definition. I'm just asking if there's any means you can use to convey the term to me. And if there's not, that's not to say you're wrong. Maybe everything you're saying makes sense. It's just to say there's a roadblock that we're not going to get over in the conversation.

Okay, so you are open to other ways of defining a term besides articulating necessary. I didn't say defining. I'm open to other ways of conveying a term. And when we talk about defining, I have, I haven't thought exactly about the relationship between defining and necessary and sufficient conditions. So I'm, I'm just being clear. I'm not signing off on on any specific view there. But yes, I'm open to other means of conveying the meaning of a term. Sure. Okay. And so if I pointed to things that biologists are saying, it said like, look, they say of the heart that hearts pump blood. They say of kidneys that kidneys filter waste. They say of the Golgi apparatus that it, whatever, packages stuff, yada, yada, microtubules do such and such. There's all this, this function talk in biology. And they use a lot of dysfunction talk and malfunction talk and disorder talk and disease talk. Have you now glommed onto the concept of proper function in biology? If proper, there is used in a stance-dependent way. So for instance, to say that the heart is functioning properly, I don't know anything about the heart, but is to say that it's pumping blood at a certain rate per minute, or it's doing some certain behavior or something. I understand what that means. That's saying the heart's behavior is corresponding to this standard. But if you say that proper function is not about correspondence to a standard, no, I have no [ __ ] idea what you or anyone else means by that. So now it sounds like, in, or it sounds like you're saying, in order to understand a term, I have to grasp like a theory of it. Like, if it's stance-dependent, then I get it. If it's stance-independent, I don't get it. And that's not what I said. That's a strong enemy. I didn't say I need to grasp a theory to understand. I didn't say anything like that. I'm open to having terms conveyed in whatever means you want. I'm not sure what kinds of ways there might be to convey a term. And I'm also not saying I don't understand anything unless it corresponds to some specific view. I'm just saying this is a way that I can make sense of a sentence like that. And if you're asking me to make sense of it in another way, I don't know how.

Here, let me ask you this. Is what I wanted to ask you when I got back from my little phone call. Um, do you think that philosophers have come up with a satisfactory analysis of the word knowledge? But wait, wait. I'm happy to talk about whether we have a satisfactory understanding of the word knowledge from, from philosophy. But I'm, I'm one of those people who's very sensitive to, is the conversation shifting around at all? Right? And where this started was, I was saying, I don't understand what you mean by that term. Is what you're trying to do now to convey that term to me? Like, what are we doing right now? I'm about to tell you what you do with the word knowledge is the same thing you should be doing with the the term proper function. Okay, so that's not what I, what I'm trying to, I'm not trying to help you understand what to do with this term. I'm not asking about, I mean, what to do. I'm asking you, you're claiming not to understand it. Yeah. I'm asking you, I'm trying to help you understand it. Okay. All right. Because I don't want to hear about what to do with it or this or that. I just want, I want to know, is what you're trying to do to me, or trying to do, hopefully not trying to do anything, it's what you're trying to do right now to convey the meaning of that term to me? It doesn't have to be by definition, but is that what you're trying to do right now? Because that's a fine, that's a fine direction to go with. I was going to give you an example of how you came to understand a word directly. Doesn't it frustrate you if you ask a yes/no question and someone just careens off and you don't know if they're answering you or not? Like, that's really frustrating sometimes. I don't do that. Sometimes Isaac questions have false presuppositions. Okay, what was the false presupposition and what I just asked? Because I agree with the question. Can you answer the question? I, I don't know if I can backtrack, but, um, I, I, what I can say though, is don't just throw around things like false presuppositions if you're not going to substantiate it. Right? I don't think that I asked anything with a false presupposition. If you think a question I ask is loaded, then instead of careening off, just, just say, I can't answer that with a yes or no because I think it's loaded, and then just explain why it's loaded. Okay. Right. I might ask something loaded by accident. That's completely possible. Okay, so we agree that you might ask a yes/no question and the proper response is neither to give a yes or no answer, but to question a presupposition. No, it seems like, no, no, neither one of us can quite remember what. Well, I, I can't remember the exact form of it, but I can remember roughly where we are in the dialectic, which is that. Right. But it's possible that an appropriate response to your question is neither to say yes nor to say no, but to perhaps, if there was a false presupposition in there, um, to correct that. And maybe there are other cases where the appropriate response is neither yes nor no. Yeah. Though it's preferable to make it clear you're doing that, right? Because when you're talking to someone and they just careen off, you're like, dude, like, maybe you're coming back to the point, but I don't know if you are. Like, reacting to what I just said, or if you're just going somewhere. Right? Like, if you say it's loaded, then I'm like, okay, he's under, he thinks I've slipped something in there by accident. Maybe I have. I'm gonna hear that explanation now. Yeah. Okay. I think the question was, are you about to convey to me the meaning of the word proper function? That was the question. That's that's right. The question. Okay. Yeah. But the idea is, because if you, if you are, that's like the right step in the dialectic, because that's what we're hung up on, right? And the assumption is that's the only appropriate next step in the dialectic. And I think the only one I can see. I know, here, I'm going to show you an appropriate next step that you don't see. Wait, just to be clear, to this is a step in a dialectic. To have a conversation about a term whose meaning I don't understand. You think that there's a question. You claim not to understand. Yeah. Okay. Wait, that I claim not to understand. You think, you think that there's some strategy other than getting me to understand the meaning of the term that will get us through that conversation? I'm going to help you see how you can understand. That's a yes or no. [Laughter] Are you, are you saying that there's some other means than providing me the meaning that you're, that's what you're going to try to do so we can have the conversation without me understanding the meaning of the term? Or are you just, you're going to try to convey the meaning of the term? Okay. Can I, um, sorry. Okay, go ahead. I, I think, I, if I could maybe do a little in, uh, translation, I think what, can I call you Thomas, or or Tom? What do you know? Yes. I think what Thomas is going to try to do is say, I think Thomas thinks that you're doing something with the word knowledge that, despite it having all the things that you're saying about the word proper, you still understand the word knowledge through some means, presumably. And maybe that you can use that means that you understand the word knowledge to proper function, even if, um, it doesn't have any of the features that proper function or is what you're saying the way that you understand proper function. Now, he could be wrong. So that, that does fall into the category of trying to show a way to understand, uh, the term, right? Trying to convey the meaning of the term. He's trying to get you to understand where proper function is to keep your knowledge. Yeah. And as I said, I'm happy to talk about knowledge or whatever. Um, am I representing you, by the way, correctly, Thomas? Yeah, that was good. Except I, I've already tried to convey the meaning, um, through ostension to Isaac, but that didn't seem to work. And then I was responding to the bit where he said, well, yeah, I see all these examples of biologists attributing proper function to natural organs and molecules and so on, but I only understand that on a certain theory. And if it's this other theory, I don't understand that. And so he starts, like, I don't grant the other theory. To be clear, I don't know. The assumption seems to be like, in order to understand this word, I've got to have a theory about it. What do you mean by it? Well, just because what he's saying is that he does recognize that he understands it on this, uh, way of understanding. I don't know if we call it a theory or not, but on a stance, what he's saying is on a stance-dependent way, whatever the stance is, when biologists are talking about hearts or enzymes, if what they mean by proper function is that it corresponds to whatever stance they're referring to. So then, yeah, he understands that, right? Yeah. Yeah. I want to respond to what you said. You understand that everything you described when you spoke earlier falls into the case of trying to convey the meaning of the term, right? And the reason, the reason I asked about that is just because I want to make sure we're staying on track because very often dialectic just flips into the other person randomly trying to 20 questions you. And it's like, look, I'm, I'm fine. I mean, it might not seem like it because I'm pressing the critique right now, but anyone who knows me or watches my content knows I'm fine sitting there at length having someone 20 questions me and try to find the hole in my view. And I'm even happy to do this after, if you want. But it's just, that's not what we were doing right there. What I was doing right there is raising an issue with this notion of proper function. I'm not here for a critique on my view, right? But having, having said that, if, if what you're actually trying to do is you're trying to convey the meaning of the term to me, and you're trying to do that by getting me to reflect on that, that I'm all open to. So I make sure we're on track, right? Do we agree on this? You can, you can grasp and competently use a concept even if you can't articulate well. Yeah, I was going to say necessary and sufficient conditions, but you don't really like that. Even if you can't, whatever the theory is, definition. Yeah, whatever the theory is, exactly. You mean articulate the definition, right? I grant, I'll grant that. I, I can understand what something means and not be able to articulate the definition. Absolutely. Oh, okay. Um, yeah, to be clear, you just said, here's, I thought we started this with, I was like saying, well, what's wrong with this theory of biological sex, um, in terms of proper function? And then you started saying, I don't understand what proper means there. And you were like asking me to, it sounded like convey the meaning in terms of maybe not necessarily in sufficient conditions, but to give you a definition. No, no. Okay. And then my reply was, no, no, everything was right until there. That was, that was wrong. That's not what I did. Just to convey the meaning by whatever, whatever means, any means you like. Okay. To convey the meaning by any means you like. Okay. But do we also agree that you can understand and grasp a concept even if you're unable to convey the meaning in any way? I think that you could. You, yeah, you might be able to grasp it and not convey it to anybody by any means. Sure. Yeah. Okay. But you, this, I was thinking, I think you might be misunderstanding my criticism, right? You don't think that I'm saying you can't convey this to me, therefore your view is incoherent or something like this, right? Is that what you think I'm saying? Or therefore, your viewers, I just thought you were sort of asking for too much. Like, gosh, I don't, you were saying, I don't understand this word proper when you use it in this context. But did you, what did you think, what I needed from my critique was? Do you think I was trying to say your view is therefore false or is is contradictory or something? Because that's not what I was doing. I was just pointing out a barrier to understanding. Yes, you were saying that, here's a barrier to understanding. Here's something I will need before I can understand the word proper, unless you have another meaning, you, unless you have another means to convey it. Yeah. Yeah. You were saying I need you to convey the meaning of that word to me. And what I've been saying, that's not my full view. I, I also grant, if you think there's a way for us to have the conversation about some term T where I don't understand the meaning of T, if you think there's a way to do that, I'm open to hearing that too, right? But either of that term, you, you understand the meaning of proper, improper function perfectly. I understand it on a stance-dependent construal. Yeah. I don't understand it if you, if you say, that's, look, this would be like me saying, dude, you understand what dog means, right? And you're going, yeah, like, I mean, I understand it if it's the concept that classifies, like, like the thing that was barking earlier in this conversation, all the stuff. And then I tell you, like, sorry, I'm trying to think of a good, a good analogy here, but it's like, it's like if I leverage a term that you, you have your own concept of, and then I say, because you have your own concept, you must have my concept. And it's like, no, right? Like, that doesn't have to be the case, right? I know what I understand all of that language, all that normative talk. Like, here's a good analogy. Okay, this one, this one's good. Say that, say that I say, the tree over there is taller. Okay. Now, most people get what taller means. Okay. Most people would interpret a sentence like that. And I don't, I don't think lay people are fit to, are equipped to articulate what's going on here. But I think most people, like, there are implicitly understanding that the concept of tallness has relationality built into it, right? You are taller than something. You're not just taller. Even when I say, hey, look at Billy, he's taller. I'm implicitly saying taller than his past self. That tree is taller, as in it's taller than it was, or maybe it's taller than the surrounding trees. Okay, so we have this notion, taller. We understand it. Okay. Now, say that, okay, so I asked you that, and you said, yeah, I know what taller means. Now, say that I insist to you that there's a sense of the word taller that can be used without relationality. Something can just be taller, full stop. You, you would react presumably to that by going, wait, what? What the what? What are you talking about? I have no idea what you mean. I understand what taller means in the way I'm typically understanding it, to be taller than something else. But when you start talking about non-relational tallness, I don't know what you mean. Okay. And that's what's happening to me when you talk about stance-independent correctness. Okay. Um, so that was supposed to be an example of a word that I understand, taller than. And then you present me with a claim like, X is simply taller than, and there's no Y that X is taller than. Yeah. My response is that doesn't make any sense because taller than is a comparative relation and there's got to be two relata. And this, you're saying this is what's happening to you when I started talking about proper function in biology. That, yeah, that's, that's roughly right. Yeah. It's like you have your notion of that term of taller has built into it relationality. So when I start invoking non-relational tallness, you're just going, I, I don't know what you mean. And when I start going, dude, like, you know, look, I see you, you used taller just earlier today when you're talking about, you know, like your kid or something, you use it all the time, you obviously know what it means. You're like, yeah, I understand what relational tallness means, right? I don't understand what your weird notion of non-relational tallness means. That's what you'd be saying to me, isn't it? Yeah. So I imagine that's how it feels to you from the inside. In the taller than case, it is obvious that this is a relation and so we're going to need some relata. And so if somebody claims that the relation has been instantiated but there's only one thing standing in the relation, obviously that's impossible. Um, and from your perspective, no, they have a non-relational notion. Tom, they have a non-relational. No, or sorry, I don't, I don't, what do you prefer to be called? I don't want to abbreviate your name if you don't like that, though. Thomas. Okay. Sorry about that. Um, yeah, like, no, Thomas, they're using a non-relational notion of tallness. It's not contradictory. When you, you're just begging the question against their notion when you say that taller, right? Aren't you getting tempted to just say to me, what the [ __ ] do you mean? Like, what do you mean by non-relational tallness? Aren't you starting to want to say that to me? Well, now it sounds like I misunderstood the case you originally described. I thought we were using the same concept and somebody was claiming something that is clearly impossible. Not quite. But now you're saying, you know, it was a, they're, they're expressing a different concept with the same word. Yeah. Well, expressing a different concept or the same word. It's closer, but not quite. So, so same concept is not close at all. Different concept, same word is close. Concept and thing that might not even be a clear concept, same word is what I'm dealing with. Concept and thing that might not even be a concept. Oh, yeah. I don't even know what people are talking about. They, they might just be making sounds for all I know. Uh-huh. Well, yeah, when they say non-relational, or it could be that, it could be that they're right. It's possible that there really is some non-relational, uh, tallness that we're all crazy about. We're all wrong about, and they're the right ones here. I don't believe that, but, um, they could be right. Or it could be that they're wrong about it. Or it could be that they're saying something nonsensical and they're just stuttering gibberish. And, and if you want, if you want, if, if it was lost there, like, I don't know if that whose fault was. Could very well have been mine. But if it was lost there because you were considering it as, I'm, I'm giving a scenario where we both have the same concept. Like, do you want me to go through it again so it's kind of clear the way I'm playing it out? Or, or do you need to kind of get it? I think I have an understanding of how things look from your perspective. I think I understand. Yeah. When I say, you get it, I don't mean, do you get the correct truth? I mean, do you get what I, what I mean? Obviously. Yeah. Yes. Um, I just really want to say something about knowledge really quick because that would help convey how things seem from my perspective. So imagine we come into an epistemology classroom and we start talking about, you know, what knowledge is and who has it and do we have it in certain kinds of scenarios or not? What are some things we know? I know my name. I know that I'm conscious. I don't know how many grains of sand are on the beach. And so we're using this word knowledge in many ways. We brought it into the classroom with us. Um, and now suppose somebody says, you know, in response to like a stopped clock case or something, we say, oh, well, look, if you happened to form a correct belief about the time by looking at a stopped clock, that's not really knowledge. That was just a lucky true belief. If somebody responded, I don't know what you mean by knowledge. I just mean true belief. That's just what I mean by knowledge. I have no idea what you're talking about. If you say there's no knowledge in this stopped clock case where there's true belief, that's how it feels from my perspective. We brought a concept of proper function into this conversation. I'm just telling you that biologists use it all the time, speaking of health and disease and disorder and malfunction. And then you say, well, I've got an understanding of proper function that's stance-dependent. I get it. I get what proper function is on that understanding. This other stuff, I have no idea what it means. Um, and unless you can articulate an analysis of knowledge or convey, I'm going to claim to not, I'm going to claim to not know what you're talking about. Um, that's how things look from my perspective. Claim implies it's a lie. I don't know why you'd assume I'm lying. But I mean, claims do. Claims don't imply that something's wrong. I know that the term claim does not literally imply it's a lie, but when I say you claim to not understand, it just kind of has that feel to it, right? It's a connotation. But yeah, so you're right, it's not denoted by the term claim that something is a lie. I can claim it's implicature, I guess. It's implicature. Sure. That's fine. Implicature. What is, is connotation not the right word there? The connotations were like associations that we have with words. Like, I don't know, ruby connotes valuable or something like that. Okay. Well, there's no, there's no actual entailment. Yeah. Either way, whether it's, whether it's, I, I'm fine. I was just like, are those different? But whether it's implication or whether it's connotation or whatever, I just wanted to just make it clear that if there's an implication, I'm lying. Like, no, I'm not lying. And it's really, like, it is a frustrating thing for us anti-realists because like, well, I'm kind of from a different species of anti-realist, right? Like, there's kind of like a newer breed of us who are raising this critique that realism just isn't even like, it's not even clear it's a coherent position. We're not like granting it then arguing, granting certain things and arguing against. We're like, we don't even understand what you're saying, right? So with a view like that, it can be very frustrating when, when people just tell you you're like lying, right? Which I'm not saying you're doing that, but it's very much like a Christian just going like, you know, God exists, like, you have access. It's like, dude, like, he's never talked to me. I, I don't know that. Okay, so don't like assume that I really do not know what you mean if proper function. Yeah. It, I just wanted to quickly say, it sounds like maybe your audio is going in and out. Oh, sorry. It might be my distance. Is it better if I'm close? Is, does that fix it? I think, I think that sounds better. Okay. Sorry about that. I remember listening to a video you guys made, it was like a year ago, and your audio was going in and out, and I was worried that was happening again. Yeah, it's because I think if you're closer, maybe that's better. It's totally my fault. It's because I start leaning back in the chair. It's my fault. Yeah. Okay. Um, I'm just gonna put something on the table. You know, you let me know what you think about this. This is an interesting conversation, and I'm happy to keep going. I am intrigued when you say you're an anti-realist, and you, it sounds like you kind of just mean that generally. And I, I do want to know, um, what your views are, and we could talk about those views. Um, alternatively, we could talk about like gender and sex stuff. Yeah, like the thing we're supposed to have the conversation. Yeah. Well, maybe I'll pass it back to Avi, because like, I'm, I'm sure you know, yeah, like, that, that's fine. It's just, but I, I do want to, but I would like to continue. Yeah. We should, we should continue that. But it's important to notice this isn't just a tirade here that I've gone on like this. It connects back to the topic, right? Because we're talking about sex being, um, to, to be the right sex, it was defined in terms of proper function. I thought, like, right, right, right. And let me just quickly add, I'll throw, if it sounds spooky and supernatural, I'll just say, you know, there have been naturalistic accounts of proper function. You don't have to believe in God or intelligent design or anything to be into proper function. You can just say, I'm awful. Yeah, it's great. I was going to apply it to like natural things like a heart. To say that the heart pumps blood is to say pumping blood was the advantage that, um, was conferred upon an organism, um, and that's why it's the function of the heart. That was the advantage conferred on the organism. Yeah. But that's a standard notion that we understand that, like, that's fine. But the point, so, so if by proper function, we mean that the function that conveyed an evolutionary focus to come to the advantage or whatever, like that's fine. That I understand because that is a stance-dependent, uh, notion, because it's with, it's with relation to some, uh, reference. I want to reference this. Yeah. Okay. I want to say yes and then give it back to you guys fully here because, but this is just, I want to, I want to explain the reason that I brought all of this up, though. So because we had this whole pathway about proper function, so it feels like I just want to put a tie on it before we move, move on. So the reason I brought it up is because I'm not sure you guys are saying different things when Avi says that being having a given sex is to have genetic proximity to, um, a, a, a being that has, um, or that that produces large gametes. Yeah. Proximity, either either construed genetically, physiologically, whatever, where proximity just means overlap in the quantity of propositions true. Right? We can set some threshold or whatever. But when he defines sex like that, and then you say, um, sex, biological sex is about the proper function. I'm going, I feel like they're actually saying the same thing. There's just a layer of spooky realism getting in the way. I think if we explain, if we get into proper function and we show proper function that's kind of bringing in metaphysical spookiness, so that we don't need, and we get, we kind of get rid of that, it's like, what, what are you actually getting at now? I could be wrong, but I, I do think you're wrong, by the way, because I, I do think we're generating different answers to different hypothetical situations about different beings being different. Yeah. But yeah, some of that could be from working from those notions. But, but anyway, I was just, at least, at least my, my mind went there of like, I'm not sure if, if they're different, because you both want to say things that are close to this kind of archetype is like woman. And whether you call that archetype, whether you define that archetype genetically and then say close to it is about physiological or morphological proximity or whatever, or whether you define that archetype as the like properly functional woman, or what it's like, I'm just curious if there will turn out being a difference if we clear out any metaphysical clutter in there. So that's, that's where I was coming from with that whole kind of line. It, as Avi said, it looks like there might be different verdicts in different cases, um, that we would disagree about. But, um, I think that Avi and I agree that there are two sexes. And I thought what Avi was going to try to convince me of is nevertheless, sex, the sex of an organism is not a binary variable. Yes. Okay. So, and I remember when you, you said you wanted to talk about this, and you said this should probably be short. Yeah, I was, I guess that was my words. Now, um, okay, so, so yeah, there were two paths. There's two pathways to under, to understand it. I can do it. I can give you examples and see what your answers are, or I can try to dive into the realism, proper function. Um, just to whether we call realism, right? Just, just real quick. I understand when that biologists and doctors talk about proper function of different organs, organs, that they talk about just improper function. Um, but the thing I, I would just say about that is that, um, I think when they do that, I think at least in my experience in the medical community, when they, they are, if not explicitly, implicitly having some reference there, that they can judge whether it is proper. And proper with respect to, and there's disagreements about what the reference is. Even when we talk about cancer, like there's a, I was at a conference and there's a disagreement over, you know, a certain type of cancer that doesn't make a very big, um, huge difference to a patient. It is pathologically a cancer. It has uncontrolled, unregulated cell division. And if that is your standard for what is improper function to make something a cancer, um, sure. Um, but if it doesn't make that much of a difference to the patient, then some others would say, okay, well, no, that's not actually what we should call cancer. Now, there's different standards, but I understand what each side is talking about there. The reason I, I think I understand it is because it's with respect to something. But if they just said it's proper, and hey, like, then I'm, I'm, well, it might be proper with respect to this standard, that standard. But they say, no, no, no, you don't understand, it's not proper with respect to any standard, it just is proper. Then at that point, I'm, I'm left in the fork in the road. I can either try to dig in into what that means, or I can just generate hypotheticals and see what the answers are and try to figure out, try to figure out if there's a disagreement and if there's a difference in the answers and maybe try to get in. So, I mean, there's two ways that can happen, and I was taking the second approach, and Isaac was taking the first approach. Does that make sense? I think so. Um, yeah, but it sounded like both of you were willing to sign off on a kind of naturalistic proposal about what proper function means. And it's something like to say that the proper function of the heart is to pump blood is to say that pumping blood was the, um, was the, what's the, how do you put it exactly? That was the compatible with naturalism, anyway. I don't know about it. Benefit conferred upon the organism. And that was the benefit that this organ conferred upon the organism in ancestral environments. That's, yeah. And pumping blood was the benefit conferred on this organism in ancestral environments. That's what we mean when we say the heart is meant to pump blood. Um, I, I guess I'm there. We still have this word benefit in there. And there's this conception of like, what is good for the organism, what helps the organism, what benefits the organism. Yeah. I think I'm kind of surprised that Isaac's just going to let that slide. Well, I don't want to bring it to his attention because I'm so happy we finally agree. Nope. I already have an idea because of the familiarity with it with evolutionary biology and what the evolution of viruses and the things they say, what they generally mean when they use the word benefit. Yeah, they mean it in the evolutionary sense. And they just mean in a, uh, the type of way they mean that they will produce offspring that will produce more offspring and out-compete the rest. That's what they are talking about by benefit. And so if you know whether that's the best way of understanding it or not is not a position I'm taking on. It's just, but I am telling you, I understand it. If someone were to say, you know, what proper function means is just what was evolutionarily beneficial, and what that evolutionary beneficial is, is just what resulted in, uh, the most fecundity. Um, I understand what that means. Now, whether that's how I understand, you know, that matches my understanding of proper function or not, maybe there may be some counter examples of that. But I get it. I under, when someone says that, that theory, I understand what they're doing. We're all good in terms of that. I just want to chime in for two seconds, but I don't call them understanding there. It's just proper, and it's, it, it's proper in a st, in a stance-independent way, without any reference. Yo, am I coming through here? Can I be heard now? You're coming. Okay. Yeah. Sorry, I just, um, I just wanted to say something just because I was called out by name there. Um, I wasn't gonna come back in, but, um, yeah, so, um, just, just be clear, that's, that's a good criticism. And I always do this to people, right? If I'm asking them for a definition of the term, and then the very term that I'm confused with shows up in the definition, or a further term that raises the same problem. And of course, benefit sounds normative, right? So if I'm saying I don't understand this thing because it's a weird normative language, and then I use that very language, it's like, well, oh, wait, there's some kind of weird double standard there. Maybe you haven't noticed you've got this problem too. But just to be clear, either it slipped past me, the benefit was set, or whatever, but at the end of the day, I would cash benefit out to just mean something like, oh, it maximizes, how many like offspring there are or something like that. If you tell me that you're using the word benefit there in a, uh, stance-independent sense, then yes, that would be equally confusing. Um, I am happy to move on. Do you guys want to move on or do you want to keep talking about others? Oh, no, I'm just [ __ ] around. I just, I just said, you started. I'm just teasing because you said by my name, you're like, well, Isaac might think. All right, I just wanted to give you a chance to come in and say exactly what you said. I'm just, I'm just consistency has been restored. Yes. Okay. Harmony has been restored in the universe. Okay. So, so, so my, what I'm, so what, so what I'm trying to answer is, is the sex people are a binary variable, um, on, uh, your view, and what I take binary variable to mean is a variable that can only have one of only two outcomes. Um, so for example, truth in a boolean sense of the truth of a proposition in a boolean sense is a binary variable. So a proposition can be true, a proposition can be false, if we're using a classical logic. Um, but it can't be true and false. Um, that bar setting dial atheism aside, a proposition is not going to be true and false. Um, so it's a binary variable. It can only be one. So there is, you know, the bit system is, there's only two bits. You know, there's only two sexes. There's only two bits, you know, true and false, male and female. But, um, what can't happen is that, um, is that you could ever have a proposition that is both true and false at the same time. Similarly, if sex is a binary variable, what can never happen is that, um, you will have a person who, um, properly on your view, however he cashed that out, produces both, um, small and large gametes. And so, so my question is, is that, and I don't think you, and I, I thought this would take a short time because I don't think you believe that. I don't think you believe that you could never have a human that properly produces large and small gametes. It, I'm sure you could conceive of some human that may have some naturally producing large and small gametes. And there are other organisms that do it on the regular. Yeah, yeah. Theoretically possible. Hypothetically possible for a human to do it. Um, we did briefly on Twitter discuss one case from like 1973, allegedly of a human doing this. Um, I'm not sure whether that's an actual case of a true simultaneous hermaphrodite in a human. But maybe it's just enough for us to agree that it's at least theoretically possible for humans to be both male and female. Sure. Sure. When you say that you're not sure if it's a case of true simultaneous hermaphroditism, is that because you require this proper function predicate in order for something to? Okay, so if that's what it's coming down to, then yeah, I think like, you, you had mentioned it was probably a case of mosaicism. Yeah. Is that right? So I would think like, the one before I had spoken with you about this, I thought about this, and I thought maybe here's a way you could get a true simultaneous hermaphrodite in a human. I mean, it would be extremely improbable, but it could happen. Like a 50/50 split of mosaicism, like a true 50/50 mosaic. And then I think, yeah, maybe the right thing to say is we've got an organism with both natural dispositions. But it looks like the

case that in this 1973 case, it's like a much smaller percentage of the body was mosaic. And then it's just, it's less clear to me that that bit of the body that's producing ova, if that's what was happening, um, whether it's true to say of the organism that the organism had this natural disposition to produce ova. Instead, it kind of looks like the case you described of like a virus taking over a bit of your body and producing ova. Um, yeah, I mean, I'm willing to admit that it's, it's unclear in that case.

Yeah, it's theoretically possible to get a simultaneous from affirmative humans. Yes. And I think, I think what happened is that there was, um, there wasn't an even, uh, just, it's not like they were split down the middle, uh, with, you know, this karyotype and that karyotype. I think, um, they had, there were certain organs that this individual had that fully had a karaoke, a likely had a female karyotype, and then there were other organs, um, and probably the majority of the body that had a male karyotype. Um, I'm not sure exactly what the split was, um, although I don't think you would say it has to exactly be 50/50. I mean, if it was 40/60 or something like that, or if it was 30/70, you know. But they were really, you know, if there was even a 30/70, and then, you know, you still have the, you know, a uterus with a hundred percent female karyotype and ovaries, understand female karyotype, and testes with 100 male type. Um, and, you know, I, I don't, would you say that, well, no, the proper function is the 70 one, and that's the, yeah.

So I would just say of all these cases, like, sure, it's unclear. And this is going to be like, you know, one of those things that lawyers say, you know, hard cases make bad law. This isn't the sort of, these aren't the cases we should look at when we're trying to figure out what biological sex is. These are difficult cases. And something that pulls me in the direction of saying, like, in this case you cited, um, of this, I don't know what the split was, 70/30 or whatever, um, this just isn't part of like the human design plan. I hope, maybe, maybe you can object to that very idea, but it's not what humans evolved to do to form mosaics in this way. It's kind of like a spandrel or a quirk of human development that it sometimes happens. But I don't think that it conferred any sort of advantage in ancestral environments. So, sound like we were okay with that language. And so when it happens, like, I don't think that it's clear. And in fact, it kind of looks like it's not the case, even if it didn't conventional this position, like even if it didn't convey an advantage, and even if we weren't.

So, wait, I saw the confusion. So even if it didn't convey advantages, and if we weren't, quote unquote, designed, whatever these terms mean, I'm resisting the temptation to go back into the music. But so let's just say we had the 50/50. Let's just, you know, say we had this 50/50, um, and it just was like, it was a fluke. This was some crazy fluke that was 50/50 karaoke split producing sperm and eggs. Um, you know, would you say that this person is both male and female? Is the question. Um, I think it's, I'm much more inclined to say yes in the case of 50/50. But again, it's not a clear case. And the difference is this, like, if it's a 99/1 split, then you can, it's easy to see that, like, the organism is the 99 bit, and then we've got something that is a bit like a foreign invader, you know. And so it doesn't look like it is necessarily part of the organism. It's like, you know, when a virus comes in and transforms some of your cells, that's not the way it was meant to be. This is a foreign body. Um, but when it's 50/50, then it's like, well, where's the organism with the foreign body? And are you going to pick the left half or the right half? We've just got this mosaic organism here. Um, and so there, I am, I'm much more inclined to say that would be a true simultaneous hermaphrodite. But on the other hand, like, at the same time, like, this was not part of the design plan. It's right. Not the way humans were meant to think. I'm drawing because again, I don't know exactly what you mean by the terms to be the proper design plan. But what, what I am getting a sense of is that you are inclined to say that, yes, this is both a male and a female. You've defined male and female in terms of what were meant to be proper function, those types of words. You don't believe that the 50/50 split is what we're meant to be proper function design, whatever you mean by those terms. You don't, you're evaluating it to false. And yet, you're still inclined to say that it's male and female. So I'm drawing a counter-example to how you're defining Valentine's Day. Yeah.

Well, here's what I think is going on. Like, the organism, it was not, it was never meant to be that we have an organism that's a 50/50 split like this, or just mosaics generally are sort of, um, different. Is it a kind of difference in sexual development? It's just a difference in development, anyway. Um, maybe we could even call it disorder. So it was never meant to happen. But here we are, and we have an organism with this 50/50 split, and we've got this functional ovary over here, and this functional testy over here, and they're making gametes. Um, and so, yeah, the question is, does this organism have a natural disposition to produce eggs? And, yeah, in this case, I guess it kind of looks like maybe yes, despite the fact that, like, this organism wasn't meant, there was never meant to be this kind of mosaic in the human species. Of course, that wouldn't mean that it's like not human or not worth value or respect. It's just, it was a difference in development, a disorder of development. Um, but yeah, I guess that would be the clearest case. Um, but yeah, I, I think we just keep coming around to the fact that I agree that it is at least theoretically possible. It's, I mean, it's certainly actual that there are organisms that are both male and female. So the definition of male does not exclude being female. The definition of female does not exclude being male. Organisms can be both. Possibly a human could be both. Yes.

And then, and then just the other, the other thing to, before we just reflect, it's so, it's so, we agree it's not a binary variable then. But the other, the only thing is just, I don't know if we agreed on that yet. Um, so when you say, like, the sex of an organism is a binary variable, I just wonder, I wonder if there's, I don't know what the right way to put it is, but is sex supposition in there that there's got to be one sex, or there's got to be one assignment, one sex assignment? Because if I'm right that the definition of male and female aren't exclusive, then as we say, it's possible. That's what binary variable means. But as understood, yeah, then I just wonder whether there's only one variable. When I ask, like, what's going on with an organism with regard to sex, I don't think that there's just one slot to answer that question. Um, I think there's, I don't know how many. That I guess in theory, you could have lots of sexes. Sure. And as things actually turned out evolutionarily, we just have two. Yeah. And so there really should be two slots in there for, there should be two variables. Um, wait, I'm, I'm not an understanding. If I ask of an organism, what's going on with this organism with regard to sexual reproduction? Um, I think that just saying male doesn't, doesn't answer the question because we'd also want to know, also female, is this organism also female? Um, so yeah, I don't think that we can say, what are the, what are the sex, parentheses, like, what are the sex or sexes that this organism? Yeah, or this organism. And when it comes to sexes, there's only two. But when it comes to combinations of sexes, there are, yeah, four, I think. Four, because, yeah. Well, you haven't either. Yeah, because, well, you can get into some excluding some philosophical debate about if neither should be considered a sex. Um, I don't think it is a sex. No, but it's a, it's a possible combination of sex, possible combination of sexes. I agree. Yeah. So then, there, there will be four. So then we agree it's not a binary variable if there's four possible outcomes. There are five combinations. There are four combinations of sexes. There are only two sexes. Yeah. Yeah. And now we're wondering, yeah, because binary variables is a binary variable. Yeah, because with binary, looks like the internet is down for a few minutes. Thanks, Rogers. Really appreciate that. There's, if, if sex is binary, there should only be two answers. If it's a binary variable, um, there's only, um, there's only two outcomes. Yeah. There's only two possible outcomes. So, um, so if I ask the set, so if I, yeah, so it would be either male or female, if those are the two bits. If it's, yeah, so I'm sorry to go back to like presuppositions and questions again, but I think that question has a presupposition that like, if a human has a sex, um, it only has one, or if an organism has a sex, it only has one. Because you said, like, for any human organism you pick, what sex singular is it? Oh, no, it wouldn't work. Or we can put the parentheses there. That's fine. Yeah. Yeah. So, okay, but then, but then we're talking about like combinations of sexes. Yeah. Yeah. Combinations of them. We agreed there's four of those. Yes. Yeah. But so, what the point is, what it, what it means to be a binary variable is that in the combinations of the bit system, that there are only, um, that each, um, each, uh, unit will only have one of only two possible outcomes. So if it was, yeah, but notice we changed the question. We asked, like, pick any organism you want, what's going on with regard to sexes, biological sexes, in this organism? They were talking about combinations of sexes. Do we have just male? Just female? Oh, yes, there's a, okay. So I don't, yeah, so we can disambiguate any equivocations on the word sex. So, um, no, no, I think, I mean, if the question were just like, hey, I've got an organism here, um, it has a sex, um, what are the possibilities for this sex? Then I think we agree there's only two options. So if we are very clear that we're talking about, like, we've, we've gotten, we've got a manifestation of biological sex here, what are the options? There's only two. But if the question is, if it only has one? Yeah, if this organism only has one sex? What I didn't know it. No, it may have more than one. But I'm saying, like, it, it has at least one. I'm speaking, I'm thinking about at least one sex that's instantiated in this organism. How many options are there for which sex is instantiated? Two. Are you considering, um, are you considering, uh, male only an option? Female only an option? Male and female an option? No, I was trying to phrase the question so that it's clear. I'm, I'm looking at an organism that is that has a sex, a sex is being instantiated. And then I'm wondering, like, well, how many options are there? Um, and I thought we'd agree there's only, there's only. When you say sex is being, when you say a sex is being instantiated, do you, do you mean that there's just at least one instance of male or female? Yeah. This organism has a natural disposition to produce a gamete. Okay. How many natural, how many such natural dispositions are there? Okay. So then there's something there. Well, but this organism may also have a natural, another natural disposition to produce a different. There are two natural dispositions, um, that there are, such that the organism can have. However, there are three different ways the organism can have such of those two, or really four different ways the organism can have those. Um, yeah. And so if what we, what I mean by the question is just when, when we say, um, the sex, uh, the, because, because this is going back to what I was trying to disambiguate with the equivocation with respect to sexes that I think it may be happening. Um, it's just, I think that in, in ordinary language, when people, um, you know, if we were to ask it, like, let's just say this person existed with this, the 50/50 split that is producing both sperm in it, and they were to ask, you know, a hundred people, like, hey, the sex that, with the, with the understanding of this person, hey, the sex that I am is male and female, like, that's my sex. Um, then would they say, would they say, oh, yes, that's true, or would they evaluate it's false? And I think most people would evaluate it to true. And the reason is, I think they're using that word sex as the latter thing that we were talking about rather than the former. They're, they're using it as this outcome from selecting this at these bits, the bits being male or female, and the outcome that is of those four possible combinations is just what people are referring to, at least what I, yeah, yeah.

So I think it, if it happened that, you know, there were a, um, human who was a true simultaneous hermaphrodite, and this human said, my sex is both male and female. Um, and other people were inclined to agree. Um, I'm not sure whether that means we've got equivocation going on in different senses of the word sex. It could just be a misuse of the word sex. And a way to way to evaluate that is think about other species that do this. I mean, aren't there surely there are species where we've got organisms that are only male, organisms that are only female, and then we've also got some organisms that are both? Does that, does that happen in any species? Probably it does. But you tell me, medical doctor, I would have thought that when describing the species, biologists would not say there are three sexes here. No, no. Oh, yes. No, I agree that in the, in, so I agree that in a biological sense, that they're not going to say that there's three sexes. No, I agree with that. I'm just pointing out that there is a difference in, it's just, it's just like a secondary definition. It's not that there's, there's a misuse of the word. It's just that the word has different meanings depending on different contexts. So, for example, it may be ambiguity. Yeah, but it may also be misused. Well, I'm not saying it's ambiguity either. Like, I'm saying, so like, for example, my ambiguity, I just mean like two more than one sentence. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm just drawing. Yeah. It, no, it could be a misuse. They could mean, hey, listen, do you think that there's, um, three sexes? And they do some evaluation, say, like, oh, actually, no, um, there's not three or more sexes. And then, but you say, oh, wait a minute, but you just said this person, these sex that, um, is male and female, that this person is, um, so yeah, it could be that they're wrong, or they could say, no, no, I think there are three, uh, sexes, because I am using that word, uh, in a different sense than what you've described. Um, so that's fine. Um, okay. One of those two things is happening. Yeah. Okay. Cool. Um, so I don't know. I think we have a discrimination. So if we mean, if what we mean by sex is just that, is is the, the ordinary usage, if that is the ordinary, um, where, um, you know, if people were to just refer to the outcome of, uh, male or female, that an organism, uh, contains, that an organism manifests, then that would not be a binary variable because it is possible for an organism to manifest male and female. Uh, it is possible for a human to manifest. Um, I was thinking about this question ahead of time because we had talked about it previously. And let me know what you think about this analogy. Um, I thought it was sort of like, um, shoes. You know, we've got left shoes and right shoes, left-footed shoes and right-footed shoes. Um, but there are four ways you can wear shoes: just left, just the right, both left and right, or neither. And, you know, if somebody had both shoes on and said, this is a third shoe, I understand there are left shoes, left-footed shoes, and right-footed shoes, but I've got a third kind of shoe on. It's both. Yeah. I think the right thing to do in that case is correct them and say, this is not your third kind of shoe. Yeah.

Let me just have both shoes on. So, no, no, no. I am, I'm not saying to be clear, I'm not saying so to say that, um, I think there's a difference between saying you can, you can maintain, one can maintain that there's no third sex, and also maintain that sex is not, um, the sex a person can be is not a binary variable. Like, I'm not saying, like, my claim, my question is not, is sex a binary variable? My question is, the sex that people are, is a binary variable. So similarly, if we were to analogize that back to the shoes, I'm not saying there's a third shoe, because, um, people are, um, wearing, can wear left or right, and left or right, or so either left only, right only, or both left right. What I'm saying is that the shoes that people wear is not a binary variable, because if it were a binary variable, then what that would mean is that in, in people either only wear the left shoe or they only wear the right shoe, and they will never wear both. That's what a binary variable would mean. Yeah. That's that's right. I guess we're just disagreeing about this question about this. Is the sex of a person a binary variable? But we agree that sex is binary in this sense: there are only two of them. Um, and these two sexes aren't exclusive, they're not exhaustive. Um, but there are only two. And there are four combinations of these two sexes. I guess I was going to press one more. This is kind of an objection to, I take it your view is the sex that an organism is is not a binary variable because there's more than two options. I was just going to point out, and I think you briefly mentioned this already, that, um, I think what you're really talking about is combinations of sexes. And one possible combination is the neither, neither combination, neither, yeah. Well, just the neither combination, not male, not female. Um, but I think it's pretty clear that this is not properly called a sex. And so this shouldn't be one of the values if we're thinking about like, how many values are there for this variable of sex? Neither should not be a value for a variable of sex because it's not, it's not a sex, right? Well, that, that could be granted. We can grant that neither is not a sex. We could grant that, um, this, but the quest, again, the question is just, the question wasn't, is sex a binary variable? So if, if you, my question again is, is, is the sex or sexes that, that a person is, a binary variable? And what that just means is just, with the shoe example, like the same, the same thing, like the shoes that people wear, um, the type of shoes people wear is not a binary variable. And you could say, well, you know, hey, if people don't wear either shoe, then we shouldn't be calling that a shoe, and I agree, we shouldn't. But it doesn't change the fact that the shoes that people wear is not a binary variable. It's a way of being with respect to shoes to have neither shoe on. Okay. And there are four ways that people can be with respect to sex. Sure. But even though there are two senses. Sure. But the, again, the fact that not wearing either shoe is not a shoe, um, is that doesn't in any way change the fact that the shoes that people wear is not a binary variable. Similar with sex, the fact that neither sex is not a sex doesn't change the fact that the sex that people can be is not a binary variable. Okay. Yeah, I'm still, I don't know. I'm still kind of tripping just this idea of what, what a binary variable is. And this, I, I still don't feel confident that I understand the question. But yeah, the standard, pretty confident that we agree on the reality of the situation, and we're just wondering about this question when it comes to binary variables, what's the right answer? And we just disagree about that. Well, under the sense of binary variable that's that, that is well, which is the, um, standard definition in data science, in mathematics, in, um, in logic, I believe as well. And I can provide citations if you'd like. Um, what it means is just to only be able to take on, uh, one of only two possible values. And so if I were to, uh, model the shoes, I would, uh, if, if there were, if there were a left shoe and a right shoe, um, each, uh, and I would model the organisms, each organism would only either have a left shoe or a right shoe. For it to be a binary variable, um, the binary variable being that the shoes that the people can wear. Similarly with sex, if male and female are the, um, are the bit system, it's like left and right shoe for these sex or sexes, that is, it's like we're dealing with a little more trash. Internet, sorry. That like when you shoe a horse, you know, you like put horses, you put shoes on. How many ways can a person be shoed? Four ways. I were to ask the question, how many? Look, if I were to say, is, if I were to ask, is the kind of shoes left versus right a binary variable? I'll tell you, yeah, it's, it's, it's true to be a binary. But notice how I didn't ask the question, is sex a binary variable? That's not the question I've asked you. The question I've asked you is, the sex that people can be, is a binary variable? Right? Which is different from, is sex to binary variables? Just like with the shoe, I'm not asking if shoes are, if the type of shoe, left versus right, is a binder. I'm asking you, the, the shoes that people wear, the way that people wear shoes, is that a binary verb? And that's not the same thing with sex. So if I understand the question in the same way, I would understand if it's supposed to be analogous to how many ways can a person be shoed? If I just take the analog in the sex case and ask, how many ways can a person be sexed? Yes. What can be happening in this organism with regard to sex? Then, yeah, there are four things that could be happening. Okay. Cool. We agree. We agree. Not a binary variable. Depends on what you mean. I guess we'll agree on that. Depending on what you mean. It's just, well, with that understanding, I think I, I think you do understand what I mean now. Okay. I think with that understanding, it's not a binary variable. All right. I think you agree with that. I'm just going to leave it at the last thing I said. And then, what's with the hesitation? Well, yeah. Do you want me to just repeat what I said? Like, if you mean this, um, you know, how many, if it's like the analog of how many shoes are there? You don't need to say, if I mean it, I've already specified that that's what I meant. And the question is, given that meaning, it's not a binary variable. Yes. Yeah. If it's analogous to how many ways can a person be sued? Question. Yeah. There are four things in my domain that could go into that variable and make the sentence true. So the question is, yes, then given that meaning of the question, the sex a person can be is not a binary variable. We agree. I guess the reason I'm reluctant is like, I mean, obviously you're aware there's like a big debate about whether sex is binary or whether it's a spectrum. And I just worry if you say this out loud, like, well, the sex, the sex of a person can be is not, it's not binary, it's not a binary variable. People are going to hear that as, oh, Dr. Avi thinks sex is a spectrum and there aren't actually two sexes. Let me just point one thing out. So, so that's not, so that is a good reason to provide clarification. Uh, it's not a good reason to avoid and like be hesitant to avoid answering the question when I think it's very clear what's being asked. And I think it's clear that you agree with, with, with what the answer is, given that I stipulated the way I meant it. Um, so I can clear it for the audience, that's fine, if that's your concern. Um, maybe it's a, it's a product of, um, philosophers aren't the only ones that do this, but we try to write in a way so that we can't possibly be misunderstood. You know, and teaching undergraduates, I have to be really careful about that, like, try to do that. Happy to communicate that. Yeah, it's not enough to be clear, you have to like forestall all misunderstandings. Um, so as long as, as long as we've done that, you don't, you don't think sex is a spectrum, right? If I ask you, hey, is sex a spectrum? You'd say, no. I don't. Well, it could, this could depend on how you define spectrum, because the right, the light spectrum could be discretely defined, um, and you could have some, you may be able to have some like small amount of values. But regardless, like, putting that aside, like, no, I'll just say very clearly, the fact that, um, the fact that sex is not, that the sex of people are, is not binary, uh, it's not a binary variable, uh, it doesn't follow from that that the sex people are is a spectrum. Uh, I will, I will happily say that and clear that for the audience. One does not follow from the other. So I don't, I don't want anyone say, um, I don't want anyone hearing that, oh, well, the sex people are is not a binary variable, therefore the sex people are is the spectrum. I don't know how it's, yeah, I don't, and we're taking spectrum to mean that there's like a, it's a continuous barrier, that there's many multiple different values, like, like a digit, like a, like a scale, like the same way numbers are, or the same way, um, yeah, like the, um, with decimals and whatnot, and you could, you know, go anywhere from one to zero to infinity, or like negative infinity, positive infinity, like that's, or anything like that. There's multiples, like innumerable values that, or something like that. Like it doesn't follow. I'm ready to sign. I think we agree. Good. Good. Great. Okay. Thomas, non-binary sex is a spectrum. I knew. Okay. All right. That's gonna be the clip, huh? They're gonna clip that out. There you go. Okay. So then the other thing, um, boy, if I took this long for one, how long is two gonna take? Um, even if, yeah, I'm gonna have to leave in like 25 minutes, by the way. All right. Cool. So I, all right, uh, even if definitions are, maybe we can have a part two then, um, even if if you're, if you're okay with it, if you didn't suffer too much already, um, I sort of regret, I don't know if Isaac's still here, sort of regret that things got a little tense there, with Isaac. Um, I don't think I resolved to do better next time. I think so. Yeah, you can be heard. Yeah, no, don't worry at all. I mean, yeah, it's no problem. If anything, I mean, I, I was probably more intense than you were. All right. I appreciate that. Um, what's, what's next on the agenda? Even if definitions are propositional, there is a reason to have a definition of woman other than the traditional one, even if it is a secondary definition after the traditional definition. Yeah. So I guess the reason would be, um, the positive consequences of affirmation of people's gender self-identifications. That's the reason. No, I, that wouldn't be the reason. I, in fact, so, so I mean, it may be a reason, but I wouldn't be, um, in terms of like a definition, I'd take the motivation to be to capture, uh, public meaning, to capture, or, um, ordinary usage. And I don't take it to be, well, I don't take ordinary usage to be limited to 50 plus percent. Um, so if we were, and I think regardless of how you quantify, whether you do it over the globe, it will be most, most people would mean the term woman as adult and female. I think if you do quantify over the United States, most would mean it as adult team and female. Some might make a claim about the trend. There was a recent Pew poll, of of the different years, and people are saying, oh, it's getting lower and lower with the six percent difference, and no analysis of any statistical significance or confidence intervals. But, um, even if that is the case, um, which it hasn't been shown, but even if that is, um, the, um, and then, oh, and just to clear up, if I think you quantify over the quote unquote, the West, that I'm not convinced that I think actually most people may mean something else other than adult human. But the point is, whatever proportions, that's an empirical discussion. But the, the point I'm having is just that if the goal of deaf dictionaries putting definitions is just to capture, uh, public meaning over a given quantification, then, um, it may be or may not be the case that you have another, uh, definition. And I think the number of people that are using it in some other sense other than the traditional census, high enough that it, it would merit at least the secondary definition. Just like when I, um, um, now, I'm not saying that's the only, to be clear, I'm not saying it's the only motivation for dictionaries. Maybe I think there are cases in dictionaries where you have the first definition as the less commonly used definition, and the second definition is the more commonly used definition. An example of that would be the word [ __ ] um. In that example, the number, if you go to most dictionaries, the number one definition is a female dog, and that is not the most common usage of that word. And they do have the other usage, they do have the most common use of the word, but it's a secondary definition. Um, and they place it there. But regardless, they have both of them. Um, even though one of them is used a lot less often. Yeah.

I, I mean, I'm just, this probably doesn't need to be said, but maybe it's because the secondary sense there is derivative of the primary sense or something. It's the primary sense used in an insulting metaphorical way. Um, so maybe that's why they put it second. I don't know. I'm not a lexicographer. But maybe they have some justification for that. I mean, let's just say, let's just say it wasn't. I mean, the fine, I mean, well, there's two ways we could take that. We could take it to be like, well, I think that, I think it is derivative in the gender case too. I think there's a derivation, uh, there. But so I think that would still be parallel. But even, even if it weren't, I think, I think even if, you know, we just did some analysis and found out that actually just people just came to this word as some insult and, uh, independently, I mean, let's just say that happens, like they still would have both definitions of the word. People are using the same word in two different ways. Yeah.

I guess, let me just see if I'm tracking with you, and I'm not sure if we're disagreeing yet. What you're proposing is there is reason to think that the word woman is being used in multiple ways. Um, yeah. So that might be right. Yeah. I think that's probably, I mean, if you look up the word women in the dictionary, there are several entries. I mean, a lot of them. And the primary sense relates to adult human females, but there's other uses too. But as far as I know, none of these, like more recently proposed revisionary definitions of women that are meant to be trans-inclusive, those haven't made it in there yet in the department. But they may not have. Well, but they could. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly, exactly. So the point, the point is just that, um, if not already in there, there is some, the point is that there is some usage of the word woman other than the traditional sense that has made it to enough, whatever threshold is to enough popularity to the point where it merits its definition, it merits some definition in the dictionary other than the traditional sense. Now, what that is, how we cash it out, how big it is, like that's a whole different conversation. But yeah, but yeah.

Well, I will say this. Um, there's a little bit of a fly in the ointment here, a little bit of a challenge. And we touched on it earlier when we were talking about whether, um, sex was ambiguous, whether the word sex was ambiguous, or whether there was some equivocation going on. And I said it could just be misuse. So that might be happening as well. When, for example, transactivists and trans-inclusive philosophers use the word woman and don't seem to be using it in a way that is expressing at all human female. One possibility is they have introduced a new concept. They've sort of intentionally, um, used the old word to express a new concept. I guess I can't think of an example of when we've done that. Well, we do that with names all the time, right? Whenever you baptize a kid with a name. I get what you're saying. Yeah, yeah. Um, so they could they could be doing that. In which case, yes, ambiguity. But something that pushes in the other direction is, um, they also seem to want to disagree with, like, dominant mainstream context and contradict them. So when someone in a dominant mainstream context says, trans women are not women, somebody in one of these trans-inclusive and queer communities typically says, like, you are wrong. On the contrary, trans women are women. And it sure seems like they're disagreeing. And that puts pressure on us to like, when we're interpreting what's happening here, we get this pressure to maximize relevance. We want what the people are saying to be relevant to each other. And so that again pressures us to think like, um, they're using the same concept, but at least one of these groups is misusing it. Yeah.

I don't think, and by the way, I don't think that they're using the same. So I think that they're, they are, um, I think if, so I'll tell you my intuition on this. I think that if you took a, um, if you took a, um, person who says, you are not a woman, to a trans person, the average person who, with, on basically the average, uh, at your level of understanding or greater, so the average Thomas, and went to a, uh, transgender, um, scholar or, uh, gender studies awareness, listen, and let's say this person is trying to say, listen, you're a transgender woman. He said, you're not a woman. And they say, no, no, on the contrary, I am a woman. I don't, I actually don't think that you're using the same concept. I suspect what's happening is that, um, you are using the word woman to mean adult human female, and, uh, and by, uh, female, you, you mean properly, um, however we cash that out, uh, disposed to produce large gametes. And I, and we may, it may be some ambiguity of which gender scholar is using what they mean, what they mean by women. But I know they don't mean that. I know that when they say I'm a woman, they're not referring to that. Like, I, there may be, well, let me give you an example from the philosophical literature that's kind of relevant here, maybe you've heard of it. Um, it's from Tyler Burge. Pretty sure he's still at UCLA. Um, involves arthritis man. Have you heard of arthritis man? He's a guy who went to the doctor complaining of arthritis in his joints. This didn't really happen. This is fictional, but he complains of arthritis, or sorry, not in his joints, in his thigh. He complains of arthritis in his thigh. Um, he conceives arthritis man conceives of arthritis is like any sort of pain or discomfort in the body, basically. That's what he thinks arthritis is. And so he's got some pain in his thigh. Unbeknownst to him, arthritis is a disease of the joints. He couldn't possibly have it in his thigh. Let me know if I'm getting this wrong. This is like philosophical urban legend. But that's what we think about arthritis. Okay. The doctor corrects him and says, look, it's a disease of the joints. It couldn't be in your thigh. Um, the, the arthritis man accepts correction, defers to the expert, and says, okay, my bad, it's, it's something else. Um, so this is an example of how somebody can use a word with a meaning that is obscure to the user. In his mind, arthritis was any sort of discomfort in the body, but that's not what he was referring to. He was referring to a disease of the joints, unbeknownst to him. This is kind of why I spent, this is why we talked about water so much in that Vosh debate. That was supposed to be an example of how somebody can refer to something and have a totally different conception of what they're referring to. Aristotle thought of water as an element. Unbeknownst to him, it was a molecule the whole time.

So we can't just, wait, hold on. It could just be that the arthritis person was referring to some pain when he said, I have arthritis in my thigh. He's just referring to some pain in his thigh. And then upon realization from the doctor, when he said, when the doctor says, no, you're wrong, it's not arthritis because arthritis only applies to joints. What's happening there, um, is just the person is maybe realizing, either implicitly, explicitly, consciously, subconsciously, it's just that this is not the way the term is used. I was, in fact, referring when I said that word, when they said that word arthritis, I really was referring to the pain in my thigh, and I wasn't wrong about that. It's just that when the doctor said, I'm wrong, what's being, what really is being conveyed is just that on the standard usage of this term, the way we're all using it, we don't mean that it can't mean that. On this, on this usage, maybe it can mean that on your usage, but on our usage, we don't. And if you want to come, well, just one second, and if you want to use these terms in a way that you will be understood, which presumably is one of your goals, you'll use the word arthritis to refer to arthritis in the joints. And then the person shifts over. So if he were to say, like, this pointing to his thigh, this is arthritis, it's pretty clear that this is referring to the pain. But think about the whole sentence, this is arthritis, is what he said, true or false? So that depends on what he means when he says arthritis. Yeah. We add to the story that he accepts correction, defers to the expert. Okay. What do you think? So if he's, if by accepting correction and deferring to the expert, what that means is that he acknowledges that he was saying a false proposition and understands that. Then sure. I don't understand that. That's spooky to me. Um, but we can get into that. But I, I think it's spooky for someone to, um, so let me just finish the thought and we can get to that. Um, if on the other hand, when he says, I accept correction, what he means is just that he has some goal of using standard terminology. The doctor corrects him, he says, okay, I accept correction. I, and by correct, I just mean I have the goal of using standard terminology. I wasn't doing that. I was out of accord with my goal. Then yes, he accepts correction, but it's not that he was uttering a false proposition. So he could say, like, this is not by accepting correction, I'm not admitting that I was uttering a false proposition. That's not the type of correction I'm talking about. I'm just saying that I was out of line with my values. So my values are to use these medical words and the way that doctors are using them. I realized that I had failed to be in accord with that goal, and so I'm correcting myself to be in accord with that goal. But that doesn't mean that I've uttered a false proposition when I say, this is my arthritis in the thigh, because what I was referring to really just was the pain. And when I accept correction, I'm not, it doesn't mean that I'm saying it's a false proposition. Yeah.

Well, I, I agree again that he did succeed in referring to the pain in his thigh with that demonstrated this. If he says, like, this is arthritis, okay, this refers to the pain in the thigh. But what he says of that pain is, this is arthritis. And then the question is, like, what concept would be using there? What proposition was expressed by that sentence, "This is arthritis"? Was he using the common concept, or was he using some idiosyncratic concept? Yeah, yeah. And the point is, most people judge, I'm not saying you have to conform with the herd here, but most people judge, oh, he was using, he was misusing the common concept. Okay. Yeah. No, I, I grant that there are two possibilities. Someone could be, someone can, can really say, like, hey, listen, the pain, like, this arthritis in my thigh, and what he means by arthritis is a pathology of joint. And then of course, he's mistaken. Like, he's, there is no pathology of joint in your muscle of your thigh, because there's no joint there. Or he can be saying, there's arthritis in my thigh, and what he just means is that there's pain in my thigh. There's something, cause, there's some kind of, his notion of arthritis is something other than a pathology limited to joints. The point is just that he can, whether he's right, whether he's uttering a true or false proposition, it just depends on what he, what the proposition expresses. And it could be idiosyncratic. And if it's idiosyncratic, then it's not clear that he's saying anything false on, on that idiosyncratic notion of arthritis. Yeah. Um, so I agree with you, those are the two possibilities. And we probably agree that it has happened and commonly does happen that people misuse common concepts and end up saying things that they don't intend to say, but what they say is false. Yeah. Um, I think some problems there may be both. Probably happen in, in the transgender community. There may be, look, I'm not going to deny that there aren't some transgender people that have said that they are, um, a woman in the sense that you're talking about, and it was, they were miss, they were misusing or something like that. Like, I, I, I grant that that could happen. I also think that there are transgender individuals that mean something else than you when they say they are a woman. They don't mean, they don't have the same concept in mind. There's going to be some proportion. Now, it could be one side or another, but there's going to be a chunk of transgender individuals that just are talking about something else than what you're talking about when they say that they're a woman. Yeah. So I agree that, I mean, some philosophers are quite explicit about this. They say, like, you know, let's just get rid of the ordinary concept and replace it with a new concept. Which concepts should we use? And then they specify it with necessary and sufficient conditions. They give you a stipulative definition. They say, henceforth, let us use the word woman to express this property or set of properties. Um, and then, I guess, yeah, it's pretty clear in that case that when they say woman, they're referring to some other set of properties, not adult human female. Yeah. So, yeah. So, so what I'm saying is, I suspect, and I have, I have this, so I know, I am confident that at least some subset of the transgender community, the disagreement is not re, is not really.

A disagreement in that because you're not using when you say you're not a woman and they say I am a woman, you're wrong. You're just using, you're just talking past each other because you're talking about different concepts. I suspect that might be the majority of what's of the cases, but at least at the very least, I think that's there's a good chunk of transgender people who are who that would be the case for where it's not really just a disagreement where you're using this.

Okay, um, so it sounds like again, we may have agreed. I think I guess, I mean, what I've what I've pointed out in my work is that, I mean, one problem [Music] that these new definitions have. I'm sort of granting that, yeah, you could stipulate a new sense, a new concept to be expressed by this old word "woman." Um, sure, we do that all the time. I mean, the kids do that with slang words, you know, they use an old word to express a new concept. Um, we do that with names, you know, whenever we use a name, we use an old word to express a new concept. So it could happen. But one problem is these concepts that the philosophers keep coming up with tend to be trans-exclusive. They don't include all trans women, and it looks like they may also fail to exclude trans men and at least some non-binary individuals. And so like, so, so when you say trans women, you just mean people who consider themselves trans, identify it? No, I would have thought it's, uh, somebody, yeah. So I know this. I watched the review of my debate with Vosh, um, and so I thought like, oh, here's what happened. I had, um, I had a slide where I defined a trans woman, believe it or not. I had like [Music] and I realized this is gonna be way too long, and it it turned out way too long anyway. Um, but one of the things I cut was the definition of trans woman because I thought I was just using it in a standard way and nobody would, um, be tripped up about that. But then when I watched your review, I was like, ugh, should have. And later on in the Q&A, I did define trans woman, but I should have, should have front-loaded it. Um, but I, what I thought the standard definition was, I thought the standard definition of trans women was, um, somebody who identifies as a woman but was a male at birth. Gotcha. Yeah, so that's the community. Yeah, we, I completely reject, like, I completely, um, abhorred that definition. Like, I, I don't, I don't know. Abby, I watched a debate you had with two people named Lauren, and you said the definition of transgenderism is the condition of someone feeling that they are not the same gender as that. That's not the same thing. Wait, that's not the same thing as I, as identified. Having something is that there's still like a possibility of error. It's still possible in this definition that you get. But in the, in the review I watched of my debate, you said, well, trans woman is just a woman who was assigned a male at birth. Wait, but that, what, in the, in the review? Yeah, you said, like, well, you know, if we define trans women as just a woman who was assigned male at birth, plus some other character. Wait, it's a subset of women. It's a, it's a subset of woman. Um, uh, that, yeah, so we can find transgender as a subset of woman. Yeah, that's fine. That is, that is male at birth. And what, what it means to be a, a, um, is just has some properties, and it could just be that feeling of being a woman. And, oh, and so you're pointing out that when I said what it means to be a trans woman is, um, is, I mean, I agree, feeling is different from self-identification. But sure, the definition isn't just a woman who was assigned male at birth. It was rather, you, I mean, the typical definition is identifies as a woman, we've got a female gender identity, although assigned to male at birth. So typically, it's put in terms of gender identity. Sorry, just, it's more than just a feeling. Like, you might be able to like pick out a thing. I said in a Lauren debate, um, where I didn't mean like, yeah, I didn't mean to hassle you about the use of the word feeling. I just meant to point out that there, in the definition, um, being a trans woman isn't active, so to speak. It doesn't entail being a woman. Um, rather, we've just got male gender identity but assigned male at birth, or a feeling of being a woman but assigned male at birth. I'm not like, wait, wait, wait, hold on. So just because I don't think it, so you might have been able to pick out something that I've said where I said, okay, well, being a trans woman is to have some feeling. My view, I think I've elaborated that many times. It's, it's a weighted gender character, weighted gender characteristics, and what those characteristics are are the type of, um, the type of characteristics that are archetypical of, uh, a female. Um, so you could think of it as femininity, but it's just more weighted on the mental characteristics, the more weighted on the mental traits. I thought that was your view of what it is to be a woman. Is that right? Yeah, yeah. It's, it's my view of what it is to be a woman. Um, what it is to now, I may now, when I said, uh, what it is to be a trans woman is to, um, is to be assigned a male at birth and have those characteristics. To me, that, uh, just is to be, um, a assigned male at birth and to be a woman. Because to have those characteristics is just what it is to be a woman. Do we at least agree that's not the standard definition of trans women? If by standard you mean 50/50 or or above, I mean, like American Psychological Association of Spain, Tom Thomas. I am, I am more than happy to grant that. Um, what, especially in the online world, um, and yes, in this, in, in many, many, you know, academics, I'm happy to grant that self-ID is complete garbage. It should be excised from. And I think, by the way, that it harms trans people. I think that, um, I think it's a terrible way of defining trans, uh, people. I think it's, and I think it does more harm to the trans community than good. Um, but yes, I agree that there are plenty of people who push self-ID. Yeah. Can I say something? Can you hear me right now? I grant, I wouldn't be surprised if they turned out to be the majority of trans individuals. Okay. Although, yeah. Can I be heard? I, I just feel like we should really emphasize how much of a point of agreement that actually was. Like when you pointed out the, um, circularity stuff and how you can do like term substitution to show it's infinitely regressive. Like these are things that we've been like yelling at people about for like, what, like two, two years now or something. So to see someone else independently, because presumably, presumably you're not getting your philosophy from random YouTube people, to see someone else independently reach the same conclusion and then deliver the same kind of critique down to the T with like even doing the term substitution. We both were very happy to see that because we were like, thank God. Yeah, yeah. No, after I started watching your videos, I was like, oh yeah, we, we're doing the same thing. And, um, I mean, here's why I think that's happening. I think it's, I mean, that was one of the things that jumped out at me when I started reading in this area and researching this area, um, back in, I don't know, 2017 or 2016. Um, I mean, I heard like self-ID definitions and I think it has to be the case that anybody with even a little bit of training in philosophy or mathematics or logic or anything, hears the definition, it's like, wait a second, that's circular. You know, like that's a problem. And, um, it was just sort of shocking to me that nobody had really said that in the philosophical literature, even though I'm sure it occurs to virtually everybody who hears it. And unfortunately, I think that might just be an effective, it's like a chilling effect, you know, people are, they'd rather not say it because I feel like they'll be punished for it. But it is pretty obvious. It's something you learn in philosophy pretty early, like circular definitions are bad. Um, but yeah, I did see that you all had been on that too, and that, um, that encouraged me. Um, but I was going to say something else that I thought we agreed on. Oh, no, this was something we disagreed on. Um, so I had said, um, here's, here's how I've come to understand the circularity problem. I think that as an attempt to convey meaning, like, like Isaac, Isaac and I were trying to do a little while ago, circular definitions are hopeless. You cannot convey the meaning of a word in that way. There are other ways to convey meaning besides, you know, giving necessary and sufficient conditions. You can point, that's one way to do it. You can give necessary and sufficient conditions, that'll do it. But what you can't do is give a circular definition. That's not going to convey the meaning. But something that I said, and maybe I sort of regret mentioning this because I don't know, should have been developed more, but something I said in the debate was, even if the word got a meaning independently of this definition, still the claim that to be a woman is to identify as a woman must be false. And I remember watching your review and you're like, wait a second, if there's no meaning, how could there even be a proposition here? How could it be false? So what I meant was, it's possible for a word to have a meaning and be commonly used. I mean, just take like knowledge, for example. I think that has a meaning, and I think we all grasp the term and we use it all the time. Um, it is hard to convey the meaning with necessary and sufficient conditions. Philosophers have tried for a long time and failed. Um, but the word already has a meaning. Suppose I tried to convey the meaning to you with a circular definition, I would fail, but the word has a meaning nonetheless. And now suppose I claim to you that to know something is to identify as knowing it. Now, of course, this didn't convey the meaning of the word to you, but the word already has a meaning, and you can see that that sentence has to be false. It's not true that to know something is to identify as knowing it. Um, so that's what I meant to say. Like, even if the word "woman" has a meaning, we didn't get it from the circular definition, but suppose it has a meaning, it just can't be true that to be a woman is to identify as a woman because there's just no property like that. There's no property such that you have it if and only if you identify as having it. Yeah, so that's what I meant to say. Um, so what do you think about that? Are we, yeah, can I be here? We're on the same page now? Am I coming through? Am I coming through? Yes, you're coming through. Yeah, so I actually, I think I tried to generate a counterexample to that in the debate, but then I realized the counterexample didn't make sense. I can't [ __ ] recall it and think of why you said it's the property of identifying, uh, with property. Yeah, but that's that's confusing. That doesn't work when you actually look at the sentence, it and highlight the thing that it, like, I can't remember it, but it does it didn't [ __ ] work. So that didn't end up making sense ultimately. But yeah, I mean, I think I think we even said in there because we're like, when you when you said it's false and it's meaningless, I was like, I have a feeling he's he's misstating something. I think I even literally said, like, this guy's like a phil, PhD, that's basic stuff. Like, he's probably misstating something there because there's no way he, I'd hope I didn't say anything because that'd be bad. I think I said it can't convey meaning. You said it, and it's necessarily false, didn't you say? Unnecessarily false? I could be wrong. I think I did say that on my slides. I said this can't convey meaning. Um, but it's consistent with not the circular definition not being able to convey meaning. It's consistent with that to say, nevertheless, it has a meaning. Um, so what I meant to say was, like, it definitely can't convey meaning, and even if it has a meaning, it's got to be false. Yeah, it's, I think it's just a phrasing thing. It says if it is circular, doesn't convey meaning, and it's necessarily false. Um, it's, yeah, so who the [ __ ] cares though? It's like, it's, we, we all understand it can't be meaningless and false at the same time, and we understand. I'm not sure. I'm not sure I get what you mean by the false. You're, you're making some different point though. You're saying like, if it has, um, if it has a meaning and someone can, I'm not sure I followed that. But I understand you're not saying that it's meaningless and false at the same time, and that was the criticism. Yeah, yeah. I think I also, yeah, I'm actually not sure what to say about this, and maybe I'll just run it by you really quick, and you can help me think through this. Um, I think I said in the debate, or at least not true. And that was me, at least, at the least, not true. Yes, yeah. Because, uh, here's, here's my confusion. I think what's being claimed when somebody says, to be a woman is to identify as a woman, they're saying like, hey, there's this property, being a woman, and here's, here's something very interesting about it. You have this property if and only if you identify as having it. And I think what you see upon reflection is, there is no property like that. There simply is no property like that. So the predicate is a woman. Yeah. Can I just understand why your example fails, Isaac? Like, I, I want to understand this from my own, like, let's say I say, um, uh, you know, people who, uh, identify. So what does, if I ask, is, so let's say I say the property is, uh, having the property of identifying, uh, as intelligent. Right? So I say that's the property. The property is, um, uh, so let's say I asked, does this person have the property of identifying as intelligent? Well, I think the only way that someone can have the property of identifying as intelligent is to identify as intelligent. But yeah, well, the sentence is like, well, the general form of the sentences [Music] were wondering, is there some property such that you have it if and only if you identify as having it? And if you're saying what about this property, identifying as being intelligent, then what we'd have to wonder is, is it possible to identify as being intelligent, um, without identifying as identifying as being intelligent? We've got a lot of the same thing. Yeah, okay. I got it. Yeah, you got to add the identifying out front. Yeah, that's fine. And then it is possible to identify as intelligent without identifying as identified as intelligent. Yeah, yeah, exactly. I agree. Yeah. All right. So anyway, if there is no such property, there's just no property such that you have it if and only if you identify as having it. Basically, you're saying like, there's no. I thought you were asking, I thought you're asking if your your hedge of saying at least not true worked. Um, and I, yeah, because that's a different. Yeah, because to that question, I think it, it depends. So when you say not true, it's like, it can work because the kind of things that are not true, like things that aren't propositions, have proper, have the property of not true. Right? Like, it's not true that bottle. Right? So, so I see what you're saying there. But there is one level someone could go to where they could say, well, if the thing being talked about is literally incoherent, it can't even be part of propositions, in which case it's not going to be able to have features like truth. So someone, someone might try to go there. But if you grant that it's, it's at least like, like referring to something, I guess, um, then, yeah, just saying at least not true is, um, sufficient. Yeah. And so again, this is a little obscure to me, but I'll just try to express it one time, and I'm gonna have to leave in about five minutes or so. Um, but the sentence was like, somebody's a woman if and only if she identifies as a woman. And now I think I've proven that like that predicate "is a woman" doesn't express any property. So what's happening with the sentence now? Does it express any proposition? It's got the equivalent of like an empty name in there, like Zeus or Harry Potter. Um, it's saying like, somebody has this feature which doesn't exist if and only if she identifies as having it. Do we say that's false because there is no such feature, or do we say like, this didn't even express a proposition, so it's just not true? And yeah, there, I just genuinely don't know. But happy with the disjunction, either false or not true, one of those things is happening. Yeah, yeah. I guess it's just when you say, when we take something circularly defined and you, you infinitely, um, you, you do do the infinite term substitution, you just get this like, like infinite, um, regression kind of stuff. Do you think that has any meaning? No, I think if that was an attempt to like pick out some property, saying like, you know, when you, when you baptize a baby, you got the baby there and you're like, I dub thee John or whatever, right? I think we do something like that with, um, predicates, but we're trying to pick out properties. We're trying to like baptize properties and say, let's call these properties this set of properties, women. I mean, I guess that's what you guys are doing with that set theoretic thing you got going on there when you define woman. But anyway, the attempt to do that with a circular definition just fails. Like nothing is dubbed, nothing is demonstrated. Um, and so, yeah, the word doesn't latch onto anything. But this is a little bit different, and I'm sorry, I'm just going to kind of, I don't know, I feel like I'm talking over you, and I'm sorry about that, but, um, I have to, I have to run really quick. But I, I feel like this is like an extra little step in the dialectic, which is interesting to think about. So I'm just going to throw it out there, and you can tell me what you think. It was, it was pointed out to me by, um, another philosopher, Alex Byrne, at a conference. He like, it was like a friendly objection, but he just pointed out, you know, you can have necessitated by conditionals using terms, and the term is on the left side and the right side. So it looks like a circular definition, but it can still be true. And I gave you an example. Well, I don't know if I gave an example, but here's one. S knows that P if and only if S knows that P. And you're like, well, that's got to be true, right? Even though I mean, it's circular in a way. This wouldn't be any good as an attempt to convey meaning of the word knowledge, right? But it's true. Um, so mightn't like set aside the fact that the self-ID definition of womanhood cannot convey meaning for sure, it cannot do that. Might it be true nonetheless, if the word somehow got a meaning in a different way, the way that knowledge did? Could it be true that necessarily someone is a woman if and only if she identifies as a woman? Could that be true? I mean, it it reminds us of a circular definition, but we're setting aside the fact that we were attempting to give meaning to a term. We're just like looking at this by conditional, assuming that the word woman means something. We don't know what it is, but it means something. And yeah, I think what I've, if it means what I'm trying to prove is, if it means something, yeah, but if it means something, how could you say they have the property if and only if they, um, they, what was it? Identify as having? Identify as having it? Yeah, yeah, because it has whatever meaning it is, that's that's beyond just what they identify as. Sorry, beyond is a vague word to use, but it's, it's, it's the meaning of the term is is something more than just that they identify as it, right? So how, how could you say they are the thing? I, I guess I'm just confused. How could you say that they are the thing if and only if they identify it? Well, saying that a necessary property of it is something other than self-identification, I think, I think that'll involve a logical contradiction, but I'd have to like sit there for a minute and do a deduction to see if it does. Yeah, it would have to turn out as like cluttered. Yeah, what they're claiming is like woman refers to something we can't really tell you what it is, um, but here's an interesting fact about this property that woman picks out, uh, you have it if and only if you identify as having it. And I guess what I'm trying to say is, there is no property like that. I think, I think that you don't, you, you can, is the reason you're saying there's no property like that because if there were, there would be a logical contradiction, or just because you can't think of one? Because if it's the latter, I think you can probably strengthen what you're saying. I think there's probably, I could probably do it right now if I sat here for a minute, but you understand this. Yeah, it would be stronger. Yeah. Well, in the paper, I just sort of like challenge people to come up with counterexamples. Yeah, but I do also say something like, given the contingency of human cognitive capacities and our capacity for attention, doesn't it have to be true that like, whatever property you put in there, there's no guarantee I'm going to identify as having it? I just might miss it, you know, I might not attend to it, I might not notice it, because like identification is a, it's a mental activity, and there's just no guarantee that I'll do it. And if I do it, that I'll do it correctly, you know? Um, so that's the closest I came to a proof, but it's not, there's no like logical contradiction here. It's just supposed to reflect on the nature of the mind and realize, whatever property you pick, I may notice I have it, but I may not. And if I think that I have a property, I may, but I also may not. There's just no guarantee either direction. Well, I think that it's, I think that it's good to raise the question, right? Like, what kind of property could there be that you have if and only if you identify as having it? And like, give people ways to think about that, and that then that might start seeming really screwy to people. I think that's probably all good. I, I just suspect that you can actually tease out a logical contradiction, then instead of just saying, I'm not convinced there is such a property, can you find one? You might be able to say there can't be. Um, and I, I'd have to think for a second about the contradiction, but it's something like, um, uh, X is a Y if and only if Phi. But there exists an X that is Y despite not being Phi. Right? You could write that in first order logic, and that would be, you'd get a contradiction. I could sit there more carefully and go through it, right? Like, if we say, let's see if it makes sense. Um, you, you are, so X is a Y if and only if, uh, Phi. Right? Is a Y is a, it's a predicate. There is a Y is a predicate. We use like, um, or G or something kind of humming. Uh, it's okay. So we want us, we want to say, sorry, wait, what? Uh, oh, you just have a preference about what, uh, what letters to use, like, you, you use some over others. Well, you usually use like Y as variables, and you know, F's and G's, capital F and G as predicates, and okay, all right. So, um, here, do you, are you, are you wanting to write it out formally? Because like, what, what I'm, what I'm going for is something that's going to have the structure of like, here, I can, I can think of how to write it out. I could write it. Here, do you want me to take a minute to write it in in FOL while you guys talk and then, yeah, yeah, come back maybe formalize it? Because I, because I actually did want to like, in the interest of time, I just wanted to say, say a few things. Um, so first, I was like, um, I enjoyed this conversation. I hope we have a part two because to really get at the heart of the matter because what for me the heart of the matter is, I think self-ID is harming the trans community. I think that it's either incoherent, meaning that it conveys no meaning, at the very least, um, or that it, if there's a use-mention distinction, that it's just going to have some hilarious reductions that people are just going to dunk on people with. Um, so if it's just like, well, by it just means utter the label, "woman," so then that's not circular because, you know, W-O-M-A-N, they're using the sense. Well, it's the five-letter sound, but you know, I think it's, it's clear that, um, you know, we, we want to say that people who are otherwise the same, but they lose the property of being able to identify as a as anything with five letters, um, we still want to say that they're, they're trans women, and the fact that they only got the first four letters, um, it doesn't really change what we want to say about that. So for me, I think there is a way of, and again, this is not saying that we want to be all in, like all ontologically inclusive in the sense that we are infallible, that people can't be wrong about what they are. I think that's crazy too. I think that's, I think there are some trans people who are wrong and they're really cis, and I think there are some cis people who are wrong and they're really trans. Um, and that's on my view of what, uh, gender is. So, and, and I think that it would be crazy to think that, um, you know, just that's part of being human, like some, there's some percentage of people that are wrong about the nature of themselves. It, this happens all the time, and I think that's okay. Um, there's this real push to be like, oh no, like, can't be wrong. Like, well, yeah, you can. I, but I don't think that that adopting my view is going to result in people like just excluding people. And I think a lot of that is just because of technological limitations, can't read people's minds and look at the properties of their minds, their preferences, and a lot of their attributes to make some kind of judgment. But anyway, the point I want to raise is that I think that there's a better way of cashing out gender, a way that by better, I mean avoiding, um, circularity, avoiding all the crazy reductives that self-ID does, and still capturing, um, quite a bit, if not, uh, a substantial amount of what the transgender community is capturing, um, in a way that would warrant a, at least a secondary definition in the diction. Um, and that really is what I'd like to have as a secondary conversation. Yeah. Hey, that's a nice cliffhanger, Avi. And I think you're right, like, um, if I'm seeing things correctly, it looks like the next step in this cultural conversation is re-evaluating self-ID. And maybe, maybe the pendulum swings back in the other direction, and trans activists, trans-exclusive philosophers, kind of back off that requirement definition of woman that it respect everybody's self-ID. Um, and then it's interesting to think about like, what, how would things be in a post, a self-ID world? What would things look like? Um, [Music] I guess, yeah, that would be interesting to talk about. But I really do have to go, unfortunately. Um, it was nice talking with you both. Uh, again, um, I, sorry, I got a little prickly there. Maybe next time we could revisit the realist anti-realist conversation a little bit. Totally. Do you want, I, I can remove that part from the conversation if you don't, uh, if you don't like it. Oh, well, I mean, to be honest, I don't really. It was, this was a long conversation, two and a half. I resented. I don't exactly remember how it went. Um, but I don't know. I'll leave that up to you. I think I think it went well. We typically don't, unless he has a really strong preference, we typically, um, upload conversations in full without any editing, just to show that we're not like taking people out of context in any way. Um, yeah, I just don't want him to think he got a realism thing like sprung on him, and he, he said he said things like that, he, he's a bit unhappy with how it went or something. So I just want to give him the chance to. I'm happy with how the conversation, by the way, just to be clear. Oh, yeah, me too. It's just if someone, if I, if I'm talking to anyone and they, they voice a little regret about the conversation, whether it's their fault or my fault or whatever, it doesn't matter. If, if they say that, then I'm always just going to ask, like, yo, would you rather it like, not be uploaded, like, or that part cut out or whatever? It's just like, I think it was, I mean, it was, I think it was fairly typical for philosophers. I mean, it was, it was like a philosophy seminar room. Um, I don't think anyone was particularly, I mean, I was just doing the equivalent of like reaching out and shaking hands or something. Oh, yeah, no, I mean, to me, it's totally normal that, but sometimes people are very sensitive. I don't, I don't know if you don't care. I don't care even remotely though. I'm just trying to be polite by giving you the option to have it removed if you didn't like it. Yeah, I just mean to say, there's no hard feelings on my end, and, um, it was nice talking with you. Yeah, same to you. Totally. I'd be happy to do it again. Well, you got to do something about that [ __ ] dog. Okay. Um, I'll see you guys later. I'm going to take off. I'll reach out for, uh, for setting up a secondary conversation. Good chat. And thank you for showing Vosh that, um, the proposition that water is H2O was in fact still true before we were, before we had such a definition. That was, uh, that was, I certainly, I certainly tried to do that, but I don't know. Yeah, I, I think it was really good [ __ ] you, you got to go, but I just want to say about that particular part of the debate, if you don't, if you don't mind. Um, yeah, it was just really funny because you kept, you kept saying like, look, you understand what the proposition means, right? Now, that had a truth value at any given point in time, and the truth value was true, right? And he tried to say for some reason, the truth value of that proposition hinges on whether humans have like term meaning or something. So what the [ __ ] are you talking about? We're not talking about could a historic being have understood this proposition, or could they have had epistemic access to its truth? Or we're just talking about was it true? Obviously, it was. And he seemed like a [ __ ] lunatic when he said that. So I think that was well done. My only complaint was not pushing it further and like just annihilating him on that. Uh, but you were being polite, so, you know, whatever. All right, well, thanks again. Um, I appreciate it. It's good talking with you. Okay, peace out. Things that are true have constructed premises that necessarily lead to an outcome, a resolution, but the definitions are punctured. Okay, end of discussion.

Get Our Mobile App

Avi & AY Discuss Gender and Sex with Tomas Bogardus (Part 1)

Transcription