How to do things with words (and gender identity)
Nathan Robinson of Current Affairs recently wrote a scathing review of the satirical documentary “What is a Woman?” by right-wing provocateur Matt Walsh. I haven’t seen the film, but from what I gather it consists of Walsh interviewing academics and activists working on transgender issues, and asking them to define what a woman is. Hilarity ensues, as they say. This is exactly the kind of exercise designed to generate more heat than light, in the tradition of the Sokal Hoax of the 90s or Sokal Squared twenty years later (apparently Walsh got the interviewees to participate under false pretences). None of that interests me. What does interest me is the way Robinson frames his critique of the film. His main complaint is that Walsh, like other critics of the transgender movement, takes what is really a controversy about language and the way words are used to be a dispute about scientific facts. In arguing for this, Robinson sketches a theory about the nature of language and the arbitrariness of the categories we use to represent reality. It is this implied philosophy of language which I would like to discuss here; a subject that is more general than specific questions to do with gender identity. While I’m sympathetic to the stance Robinson takes on transgender issues, I find the picture of language he paints to be simply untenable. Although I do not draw any conclusions from this about gender issues, I hope that a more rigorous understanding of how words come to mean what they do might encourage a more critical and ultimately more persuasive approach to making sense of such controversies.
Through the looking glass
As just noted, Robinson’s main objection to the film is that Walsh confuses matters of language with matters of biology. Specifically, he thinks that people ought to be free to use gender categories, such as “man” and “woman”, regardless of the biological facts of the matter. For reasons that will become clear, I’d like to describe this as a claim about the appropriate circumstances of applying categorical terms.* Robinson argues that the appropriate circumstances can be independent of any facts of the case because there is no rule which tells us that we must use words in a certain way. Robinson writes:
Walsh makes the same core error as other anti-trans bigots like Ben Shapiro, treating a debate about language as if it’s a debate about biological reality. I have discussed this error several times before, and Natalie Wynn has an excellent explanation in her video on Shapiro. Wynn points out that saying a trans woman is “not a woman” because of biology is like saying adoptive parents are “not really someone’s parents” because they are not blood relations of their children. It is fallacious, pure and simple. It assumes that the definition of the word “parents” is handed to us from on high, that there is some fixed rule in the universe prohibiting us from using it to refer to people who have a social rather than a biological relationship with their children. There is, similarly, no rule saying that the word woman “really” or “must” be used based on the criteria Walsh prefers.
Here I would like to highlight the claim that the use of a word is not “handed to us from on high”; that there is no “fixed rule in the universe” which prescribes or prohibits us from using a word in a certain way. This is a general point about language and not limited to gender terms. One might be inclined to challenge this claim by appealing to the role of a dictionary. Are not dictionary definitions rules which establish under what circumstances a word ought to be used? Well, not in the sense of “rule” that Robinson clearly has in mind here. Dictionaries derive their authority from studying how language is in fact used. They don’t stipulate that people must use words in a certain way, only how people do so use them. In that respect I think Robinson is right, that there are no rules prescribing how to use words in everyday discourse (though of course there can be when it comes to specific institutional contexts).
Does the absence of such rules mean that anything goes when it comes to language? Can we just leave it up to the speaker to decide how they are going to use a word?
In Lewis Caroll’s Through the Looking Glass, Alice encounters Humpty Dumpty sitting on a wall. After some perplexing exchanges, Alice asks him what he means when he says “There’s glory for you!” Humpty Dumpty tells her that the word “glory” means “a nice knockdown argument.” Alice objects that “glory” doesn’t mean any such thing, to which Humpty Dumpty replies: “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”
We can describe Humpty Dumpty as a semantic anarchist. He does not recognise any normative constraints on how he uses words: neither rules, conventions, dictionary definitions, standard usage or social expectations can be taken as authoritative when it comes to interpreting what he means. But note that in order to make himself understood to Alice, even with respect to his idiosyncratic use of the word “glory”, he needs to use at least some words in a way that conform to their standard meanings. If, over time, Humpty Dumpty becomes more determined to use words without regard to those meanings, then one would expect communication between him and Alice to become not just frustrating, but completely impossible.
The lesson to be drawn from this fictional episode is that if language is to work in a social capacity, as a means of communicating thoughts and coordinating action between people, then it requires that participants be normatively constrained in how they express themselves, at least some of the time. The relevant norms here are the standard meanings of words, as well as grammar insofar it contributes to establishing meaning.
While Robinson maintains that rules do not determine how we must use words, this is not yet to endorse semantic anarchism. He may still accept that there are norms, in the sense of meanings, which need to be followed for the most part if we are to make ourselves understood. And conceding this does not exclude the idea that meanings can change over time; that words can have multiple standard meanings; and that such norms do not have to be explicitly written down or institutionally sanctioned in the way other rules are. However, I do think that in the course of his critique of the film, Robinson oversteps the line separating common sense from semantic anarchism — which to my mind is a step too far. To see this, let us follow him down the rabbit hole (or through the looking glass).
Circumstances and Consequences
I noted above that the main point of contention, as Robinson sees it, revolves around the circumstances of applying gender categories. The question is: should the application of these categories require certain biological facts to be present, as Walsh seems to think, or should it involve some other facts, or perhaps be left entirely up to the speaker to decide what the circumstances should be? Robinson argues that resolving this is not a matter for the sciences, because it does not involve accepting or rejecting certain facts (which presumably is a matter for the sciences), but only of organising or grouping salient facts under a particular category or term.
Science cannot resolve whether we should choose to apply gender categories based on genitalia, chromosomes, secondary sex characteristics, self-identification, the performance of social roles, or the perception of others.… There is no fact of the real world being denied [when gender is applied independently of biological facts], just a different set of terms being used to categorise the facts. We are not made for the categories, the categories are made for us. A trans woman is not claiming to have chromosomes different to the ones she actually has; she is simply using a word differently than the way Walsh would prefer it be used. It does not follow, however, that the usage is improper or irrational.
As part of the justification for this claim that the sciences do not have a role to play here, Robinson embeds a link to a post on the popular philosophy blog Slate Star Codex (SSC), which argues that categorical terms are conventional in the same way that the borders drawn on a map are conventional: they may at times prove to be impractical or silly, but they cannot be objectively false because they are based on a social agreement about what they demarcate, rather than some fact about borders or categories to be found in nature.
This argument appears plausible when one focuses exclusively on what counts as the appropriate circumstances for applying a term. To take an example from SSC, if a community defines fish as “finned creatures that swim in the sea”, then it follows that whales will be correctly classified as fish within that community. It doesn’t make much sense to claim that the speakers would be wrong to classify whales in this way, because that would assume different criteria for applying the category than the one that is actually followed by that community.
Things get more complicated, however, when one also takes into account the consequences of applying a term to something. By consequences I mean the inferred beliefs which are said to follow from (or be incompatible with) the application of a term in an assertion. A community which defines fish as “finned creatures that swim in the sea” and classifies whales as fish would not be able to consistently believe that fish are creatures which exclusively lay eggs, since whales do not lay eggs but give live birth. There are in fact a long list of features which are used to define fish under a modern zoological taxonomy which would not be inferable under the definition of our imagined community. Now this may not end up mattering to the community, or it may lead them to modify their definition of what a fish is. But the point is that the consequences of applying a term are not arbitrary in the same way that focusing only on the circumstances of application might seem to suggest.
Why should we be concerned with the consequences of applying a word? Because focusing solely on the circumstances cannot adequately account for its meaning. Here we need to acknowledge that the meaning of a categorical term isn’t just a matter of reference, of knowing what a word picks out or points to, but that it also involves deploying concepts, of knowing what other concepts are being implicitly attributed to something (or implicitly excluded) when I say that something is such-and-such. The philosopher Robert Brandom makes this point by asking us to imagine making sense of the word “gleeb”, when all we know about it is when to correctly apply it:
“You do not convey to me the content of the concept gleeb by supplying me with an infallible gleebness tester which lights up when and only when exposed to gleeb things. I would in that case know what things were gleeb without knowing what I was saying about them when I called them that, what I had found out about them or committed myself to.” (Articulating Reasons, p. 65)
To return to Robinson’s argument, while it may be up to us to decide which scientific facts, if any, inform the criteria or circumstances for applying a particular term, it is not then up to us to decide what follows from applying that term. This is just another way of construing the normative constraints of language. What the standard meanings of words do, when understood holistically as conceptually related to one another, rather than individually as labels, is to map out the consequential relations of applying words under certain circumstances. To borrow another example from Brandom’s work, when I say “Pittsburgh is west of Philadelphia”, then I know just from the meanings of the words “east” and “west”, and without having to consult a map, that it follows “Philadelphia is east of Pittsburgh”. The second proposition is a consequence of the first. And accepting this consequence is a normative constraint on my applying the term “east” in the first proposition. If, like Humpty Dumpty, I choose not to be so constrained, then not only my capacity to communicate will be called into question, but also my capacity to reason rationally about the world.
Despite recognising the distinction between circumstances and consequences of application, as we will see below, Robinson nevertheless rejects the need for normative constraint. This becomes apparent when he addresses the charge of “circularity”, or the problem that when one defines gender as whatever someone self-identifies with, the semantic content of that identification cannot be derived from anything but the act of identification itself. The circumstances and consequences of application would, as it were, be interchangeable, thereby evacuating the term’s meaning of any substance. (I don’t think circularity is inevitable here, but the threat clearly motivates Robinson’s moves below.) In order to avoid this charge, Robinson adopts a position which effectively amounts to semantic anarchism, because to break the circle it is necessary to detach the circumstances from the consequences of application.
[T]hink about the question: “What is an American?” We could answer “someone who is born in the U.S.,” “someone who holds American values,” “someone who holds U.S. citizenship,” or “someone who has lived in the U.S. a sufficiently long time.” There is no “right” answer here, and we might decide as a practical matter to say that our criterion for deciding who an American is will be “whether you declare yourself an American.” We are here establishing a procedure for determining who belongs in the category. How the category is meaningful to those who adopt it is a separate matter, and there will surely be as many answers to the question of what people’s American identity means to them as there are to what womanhood means to different women.
Here we have tacit acknowledgement of the distinction between the circumstances and consequences of applying a term. The circumstances are the “criterion for deciding who an American is,” while the consequences, which he says are “a separate matter,” are described as “[h]ow the category is meaningful to those who adopt it.” By treating them as seperate, Robinson hopes to salvage the semantic content of a category whose circumstances are limited to the act of identification, leaving it up to each individual to determine the consequences: “there will surely be as many answers to the question of what people’s American identity means to them as there are to what womanhood means to different women.” But this solution to the charge of circularity is, in my opinion, worse than charge itself. On Robinson’s account, the term “American” would effectively mean whatever the speaker wants it to mean. It would be impossible to attribute any thoughts or beliefs to a speaker when she called herself an American, because the speaker would be entitled (on Robinson’s view) to reject any and all such attributions as not what they mean. Indeed, it is not clear that the speaker would be committed to anything as a result of applying the term, since there is no norm by which others could decide whether her speech and action is consistent with her claim to being an American or not.
This is semantic anarchism, and I put it that Robinson cannot really be committed to this position in any consistent way. Indeed, that he isn’t can be seen in the way he defends transgender positions from the charge of irrationality. He considers the case of someone in the film who appears to hold both that “men cannot get pregnant” and “men can get pregnant”. Robinson makes the perfectly reasonable point that we can interpret this person as meaning something different in their respective applications of the word “men”. The consequences in each case are different (either “can get pregnant” or “cannot get pregnant”) because the circumstances of its application are also different (in one case established by biological facts, in the other case through self-identification). But if we really thought that the consequences of application were entirely up to the speaker regardless of their criteria for applying the term, then we wouldn’t even be able to make this minimal assumption of rationality. There would be no reason for us to think that the speaker would be bound by any of the consequences which we take to follow from something, and so no basis on which to assume that they would be troubled by what we take to be incompatible beliefs.
Robinson takes the fact that words have different meanings as evidence that there can be more than one set of circumstances in which it is appropriate to use a word. But he goes wrong when he concludes from this that “as a practical matter” we can leave it up to individuals to manufacture their own circumstances of application. He should instead have realised that a word may have different meanings because circumstances of application can involve different environmental or social considerations, which in turn inform the consequences of application. For example, if I am conducting business in an immigration office or an embassy, then describing myself as an American simply because I share American values will lead to confusion and may even get me into trouble. That is because the semantic consequences of using “American” in this context are bound up with legal and bureaucratic implications. Such consequences do not follow, however, when I describe a political candidate as a “real American” in order to distinguish them from their opponent. Part of what becoming a proficient speaker of a language involves is a practical mastery of the various roles a word can play in different social contexts.
This is related to another issue which I have already touched upon, which is that Robinson has been misled by the conventional nature of language. He seems to understand categorical terms as labels which we use to group individual objects together, and that changing their scope is simply a matter of social agreement. However, categorical terms are not just labels. They have conceptual content, which is why they can be predicated of things (while names serve to identify things). And as concepts they are related to other concepts in an inferential network, which is why we can talk about the consequences of applying a term. These consequences allow us to reason about things, as well as anticipate other people’s responses, by determining what else might follow from saying that something is such-and-such.
And so while we can change our conventions regarding the terms we use — and indeed do so all the time, in science as well as other areas of life — these changes have implications for an entire web of meanings, the boundaries of which interact with the way we perceive the world and act in it. And surely transgender activists understand all of this, which is why the way we use language is a matter of social justice to them and not just a matter of semantics. Robinson attempts to defend the academics and activists in Walsh’s film from the charges of nonsense and irrationalism, by arguing that the way we use language is a matter of convention rather than nature. But in making this argument, he deprives words of their conceptual content. At best, this makes the debate over gender categories seem like a pointless semantic exercise; at worst, it seems to promote semantic anarchism, which plays into their opponents’ hands.
*By “applying a word” I mean the use of a term in an assertion, on the presumption that its meaning when used in other types of speech acts is ultimately derived from its assertoric use.
