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Many philosophical and ideological debates often hinge on disagreements over what "exists" or what is "real", in an ontological sense. This is certainly the case in debates between atheists and theists. Atheists may argue that belief in God causes greater suffering, but the theists see this as missing the point; God does exist, God and souls are real entities. While on the other hand, so-called “nominal theists” and social gospel theologians may argue religious belief makes them happy, to which atheists may retort that they’re missing the point; God doesn’t exist. There is no such entity.

What is shared between both camps is the adherence to what Hegel called “onto-theology”; the obsession over metaphysics, over “grounding” their arguments on what is ontologically ‘out there’. This is an ancient Platonic need to prostrate against something non-human and towards what is really anyway there, irrespective of questions of human happiness and well-being. Yet we find that, in the final analysis, the only relevant question in the dispute, the one that we actually engage with in practice, is the question of how we may best carve out our linguistic and social practices with respect to religion in a way that contributes to our goals and interests. The reflection on the ontological status of religious entities or the will of a purported deity only comes to the fore in hindsight, after questions about whether talk about such entities serve relevant social and normative goals, such as the goal of human brotherhood and love or hope and meaning .

In a similar vein, the question of whether gender categories are 'real' in an ontological sense is much less pertinent than the question of how we can best refine our linguistic practices when we talk about gender. It is often said, for example, that we should use language that affirms a person’s identity and experiences, such as saying "assigned female at birth (AFAB)" or "assigned male at birth (AMAB)" rather than "biologically female/male”, that we should refer to people by their preferred pronouns, update public signage to use more inclusive language, and to stop using the concepts “tranny” and “she-male”. The idea is to lessen the chances that questions like "What was their biological sex?" or "Is this person 'really' a man or a woman?" will be seen as relevant. The focus here is about how we may best refine our linguistic practices when we talk about gender, and hopefully come to the resolve that we ought to do so in a way such that fewer and fewer kids will grow up being asked, 'Why do you act the way you do when you're supposed to be something else?' and fewer and fewer of them will grow up severely distressed about the conflict between their identities and their bodies, and about how their family and friends treats them, and be condemned for wanting to change that.

Critics counter this line of thought by saying, "But biology does matter; sex is real." The rejoinder is: there certainly are biological markers between human populations associated with sex, but these markers do not, in themselves, correlate with any characteristics that give us good reasons to treat those individuals in a specific way as opposed to some other way. In medical contexts, understanding genetic and hormonal differences may be important, but not for most other contexts. So, the questions "Do these gendered categories exist in the way we traditionally thought?" and "Should we continue to talk of them in these ways?" are pretty much the same.

Unfortunately, however, onto-theology is still heavily part of our culture, with recent obsession over the metaphysics of gender overpopulating our thoughts. This brings us to… What is a woman? The question sparked endless debates and even political movements as gender identity and expression have become increasingly complex and fluid. While the conservative side of the debate leans on essentialist claims rooted in biological determinism, many progressives nevertheless indulge the question by attempting to define the essence of 'womanhood' in their own terms.

But again we're asking the wrong question.

The question 'what is a woman?', like the question ‘does God exists?’, is poorly framed, not because it lacks an answer, but because it assumes a representationalist view of language and ontology. This Platonic grasp on our culture attempts to define gender categories based on pre-existing "natural kinds," and assumes that language serves to accurately represent these kinds, so that those who wish to reform language are failing to track such representation.

If, however, we follow Wittgenstein’s use-conditional approach to language and meaning instead, we will free ourselves with the fixation over ontological categories and essentialist definitions and turn our gaze towards the more pressing normative and pragmatic concerns. Rather than trying to pin down the essence and metaphysics of gender, we would be asking how, above all else, can we maintain or reform parts of our linguistic practices so that more people can lead richer lives.

For all attempts to assert an authority higher than our social concerns - be it God, Truth, Reality, Biology, or Human Nature - are, in the end, disguised manoeuvres over such concerns. These asserted authorities are not, as their proponents hold them to be, language-independent or universal, but are products of past generations’ own social and linguistic practices. As these authorities don't exist independently of human practices, they should not, therefore, be accorded a primacy that supersedes or negates their social origins. So again, the ultimate question is thus: ‘how can we use our linguistic and social practices to make the world better for us to live in?’, as opposed to the question of whether p or q really exists.

People who do appeal to a divine or metaphysically distinct authority in disputes about how to carve our linguistic practices often seem to have a clear idea of what this authority commands or desires. And yet, these commands and desires also just so happens to be closely aligned with their existing moral and social beliefs, which are, in turn, shaped by their specific cultural and societal context. What is being presented as a metaphysical mandate, in other words, often merely reflects whatever happens to be part of the linguistic norms the individual is socialised into in their respective linguistic community, and the sleight of hand of adding metaphysical weight to this norm, such as in claiming that it is part of “Human Nature” or corresponds to “Reality”, is nothing more than a table thumping exercise.

So going back to the ‘What is a woman’ question, the injunction I’m proposing demands prioritising normative considerations about how we ought to carve out our concepts with respect to gender, over pointless metaphysical investigations on its “essence”. The shift is particularly needed at a time where many media outlets are increasingly looking for ways to stratify society and assign blame for societal ills. Alarmingly, their attention is steadily shifting towards scapegoating the newest minority on the block—transgender individuals. Backed by pseudo-intellectual arguments, this scapegoating tactic uses quasi-fascistic strategies championed by neoconservative figures like Matt Walsh and Ben Shapiro on one side, and gender-critical feminists like J. K. Rowling on the other.

In the following sections I delve deep into and dismantle two related frameworks which I take to be influencing much of current transphobic rhetoric. The first is representationalism, the view that reality has an intrinsic nature which the task of language is to represent. And the second is essentialism, which holds that objects must have a set of properties that are necessary for their identity. They are both related because they both stem from foundationalism: the belief that the task of inquiry is to discover ahistorical and necessary foundations for our current cultural practices, ranging from the sciences to religion, ethics, and art.

Representationalism

Many philosophical queries, largely inherited from 17th century epistemology and metaphysics, center on uncovering the inherent nature of things, or, as Derrida phrased it, "a full presence beyond the reach of play." This search for hidden essences—which is taken as being important for its own sake—amounts to tedious questions over matters, such as:

• “What is qualia?”

• “What is Knowledge?”

• “Are there really universals?”

• “How do we know what we know?”

• “Do we know p, or its mere appearance?”

• “Is there a place of value in a world of fact?”

• “Are there moral or epistemic facts independent of any stances?”

• “Do these facts alone give us reasons for acting or believing?”

• “How many grains make a heap?”

• “Why is there something rather than nothing?”

• “What is time?”

• “Does God exist?”

• “Do we have free will?”

The common issue with these questions isn't that they lack answers, but that they are linguistically deceptive and poorly framed. Because of the way they grammatically appear, they seem expectant of an answer—when they shouldn’t be. All they do is merely mimick the syntactic structure of answerable questions such as “is there a cup in that cupboard?”.

Take, for example, the clearly ill-formed question, "Do chairs enjoy listening to Lady Gaga?" The question is perfectly grammatical coherent. But when taken in speech form, the question is semantically vacuous because it applies words and structures from our lived experiences to contexts where they have no meaningful application, and therefore just one more example of our tendency to treat all noun-like entities similarly.

Likewise, the classic “why is there something rather than nothing” assumes a grammatical form that invites an answer, but is mere gobbledygook because it has no application in that context. In everyday conversation we employ the term 'why' to ask for causes or reasons within a predefined system of understanding—typically within the boundaries of human experience. But when we ask 'why' about the totality of existence itself, we are misapplying the term ‘why’ in a way that strays from how the word functions in our language.

The allure of these philosophical investigations, as argued by Richard Rorty in 'Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature' (1979), stems from analytic philosophy's dogmatic commitment to representationalism.

Representationalism rests on three premises:

1. Reality has an intrinsic nature.

2. There is a medium that represents reality, thus bridging the 'self' and 'reality'.

3. This act of representation is valuable for its own sake.

Traditionally, the mind has been perceived as such a medium. But due to the nebulous nature of consciousness, language emerged as a preferred medium with the analytic turn in philosophy, particularly following Gottlob Frege's 'The Foundations of Arithmetic'. On this view, true descriptions represent a pre-discursive reality, such that sentences (e.g. Newton’s) are not just more useful than other sentences (e.g. Aristotle’s) but are more useful because they correspond to How The World Really Is.

This is often referred to as the correspondence theory. The correspondence theory of mind and language maintains that our mental constructs and sensory impressions are linked to real, external objects and phenomena that exist independently of human thought and social engagement. These objects and conditions remain constant, regardless of whether humans are aware of them or even if humanity exists. For example, our concept of "fruit" aligns with a biological classification of certain types of edible plants. This classification exists outside of any human-generated criteria for differentiating fruits from, say, vegetables or grains. In the same way, according to the correspondence theory of language, our words point to actual objects, and our sentences aim to describe states of affairs. A sentence is considered false if it doesn't accurately represent the way things are, and true if it does. This means that the structure of the world exists independently of human language.

Put this way, language is taken to mirrors the intrinsic structure of reality rather than being a tool for coping with it. Words act as pointers to a mental or linguistic representation, something which philosophers might call a ‘proposition’, like a picture referred to by words. And these mental/linguistic entities are taken to correspond to something that, as it were, looms behind such things, something called ‘Reality’. So when I say “this chair in front of me”, this is taken to mean that I have a mental image/proposition about it (as opposed to me simply using signs to communicate some intention I have, and trust that, because of our shared socialisation, my interlocutor interprets the signs as I intended). And this mental image I am referring to, in turn, is taken to represent the nature of reality.

Historically, we have looked for something eternal, transhistoric, above and beyond human social activity, as the arbiter and measure of discriminating true sentences from false ones; Nature, Reality, God, Truth. This representationalism is the backbone of the western intellectual tradition. It manifests in the sciences, such as neuroscience's portrayal of the mind as a Cartesian theatre where human cognition is an ahistorical, non-linguistic, non-social computational system "representing" environmental features. But most of all, it is the saving grace of analytic philosophy and what keeps philosophers in business.

This tradition historically held that the aim of enquiry is to represent what lays outside the human mind, be they Platonic Forms or the Will of God or the arrangement of atoms in the void. Its corollary is buckets of ink spilled on armchair philosophising about the ‘true’ and intrinsic nature of ‘p’, to which the average layperson is supposedly confused about. Much of analytic philosophy is parasitic on this representationalists tradition (notable in the Myth of the Given and the correspondence theory of truth), for if we forego it we will no longer be interested in asking bad questions that aim at ‘getting reality right’.

I will not delve into the full objections to representationalism here, as I have done so from a Pragmatist perspective in another post. I will only instead only discuss its implication on how we view the meaning of words, particularly with respect to gender.

Language as Representation

Philosophers often link meaning and truth together by taking a ‘truth-conditional semantics’ approach to meaning, where the meaning of a word is equivalent to its truth conditions - the circumstances or states of affairs under which it would be true. So in order to understand ‘the cat is on the mat’ requires knowing under which circumstances such a sentence would be true, that is, when there is a cat and a mat, and the cat is located on the mat. Accordingly, the meaning of a sentence, which results from the meanings of its component words and their arrangement, determines its truth conditions. The use and context (what is called ‘pragmatics’) of the sentence are usually - though not always - taken to be irrelevant and rarely factor in within the analysis; what matters most is the ‘semantic content’ of the sentence being communicated, which is the meaning of words in isolation from their use in real-world situations (pragmatics). ‘Semantic content’ is viewed in the form of “propositions” - the concepts or ideas that sentences express, which define their truth conditions.

For the representationalist branch of philosophy—which encompasses by far the majority of philosophers—the meaning of a sentence determines the conditions for it to be true, and these conditions are ‘when a word or sentence corresponds to reality’, so that ‘meaning’, ‘truth’ and ‘correspondence to reality’ come to be more or less interchangeable. Here, words are taken to directly correspond to pre-existing categories in the world, so that the job of language is to accurately represent those entities or categories.

Thus, it is unsurprising that when applying this view to the contemporary gender debate on the meaning of the word ‘woman’, it is taken to have a fixed meaning based on observable criteria. It has been held, for instance, by those against reforming this part of our language, though usually implicitly, that the truth of sentences containing the word 'woman' depends on necessary and sufficient criteria, typically including some notion of biological features such as having XX chromosomes or gametes. Essentialism provides the "fixed categories" that representationalism seeks to describe, while representationalism offers a philosophical justification for the essentialist views. When confronted, essentialists will thump their fists on the table and assert that we are beholden to a non-human entity called 'Reality' which their descriptions accurately represent, and it is on this basis alone that we should act.

This view of language, which posits a direct and unmediated link between words and reality, is precisely what Thomas Kuhn once parodied, saying that it is as if there is an independent Reality that has its own language, and when we utter a sentence and it is ‘true’, then it has been correctly picked out from within Reality’s language. However, if become Wittgensteineins and start seeing language as a tool rather than a representation of reality where each word has a direct, pre-existing counterpart in reality, and in which there is an isomorphic relationship between them, we will stop looking for “necessary conditions” for the possibility of language representation. Instead, we will understand the meaning of words in terms of their function, and acknowledge that they are descriptively determined by their usage among the linguistic communities in which they appear (more on this Wittgensteinian theory of language later on).

Gender Essentialism

Unfortunately, however, this general mode of reasoning where words that figure in sentences are held to correspond to or represent ‘Reality’ often implicitly bleeds over from philosophy departments (which Paul Feyerabend once rightly described as “the witches’ brew, containing some rather deadly ingredients”) into cultural politics. This has been most recently exemplified by the ‘what is a woman?’ debate popularised by right-wing reactionaries such as Matt Walsh and Ben Shapiro and ‘gender critical’ feminists such as J. K. Rowling and Germaine Greer.

These figures are gender essentialists. Gender essentialists typically hold that certain properties or traits are necessary and sufficient for determining one's gender. From this perspective, one's biological sex (typically defined by traits such as reproductive organs, gametes, chromosomes, or secondary sexual characteristics) is seen as both a necessary and sufficient condition for being a man or woman. In the case of "woman", an essentialist view might hold that having XX chromosomes, female reproductive organs, egg cells, are necessary conditions. This means that to be a woman, one must have these biological markers. If someone does not have these biological markers, they could not be classified as a woman. These markers would also count as sufficient condition; that is to say, they would be enough to classify someone as a woman. Put together, having these criteria (for example: XX chromosomes/female reproductive organs/egg cells) are both necessary and sufficient conditions to the meaning of the term ‘woman’ to obtain.

Today’s anti-language reform conservatives justify this essentialism by reference to ‘how things anyway are’—what a woman is just is that way! And the radical feminists typically justify essentialism by reference to sex-specific political considerations (such as protecting “real” women), while then ironically overlooking that discrimination against women is not on the whole accounted for by biology (even though biological markers are statistically relevant) but rather by social structures and schemas like gender expressions.

Why Gender Essentialism Fails on its own Terms

However—if we really wanted to indulge the representationalist view on its own terms about meaning and reference—any essentialist definition of the terms man and women nevertheless ultimately fails.

Essentialism is committed to an outmoded platonic reality/appearance dualism: a distinction between the world of "Forms" (or "Ideas") and the material world that we perceive through our senses. The Forms, according to Platonists, are perfect, eternal, and unchanging, and they represent the ‘true’ reality. The material world, on the other hand, is a realm of appearances—imperfect and ever-changing copies of the Forms. When this was taken up by the the Nazis (to jump to a more crude application), it was thought that one can appear human in all respects, but merely looking human is not enough to make someone human—there is something deeper that’s inside them, an inner human ‘essence’ within which the physical body might belie to the naked eye. The Nazis of course thought that Jews did not have this human essence, this necessary and sufficient condition for the meaning of the word ‘human’ to obtain when applied to such beings.

This dualism underlies the whole idea behind racial ‘passing’; though a multi-racial person might pass as white, race essentialists would maintain that they aren’t really white (according to the rules of their racial taxonomy). Appearance and behaviour alone does not make someone a member of a category—it is something deeper that does, an essence. While fool’s gold might look like gold, it is an entirely different chemical; and this type of essentialising we do in the sciences works the same way for kinds of humans—we think of some kinds as natural and others as invented, ‘merely’ social.

We can do this for any category we like. What makes a cat a cat is an inner cat essence, and this essence determines cat traits; having claws, being lazy, meowing, having four legs etc. This essence moreover dictates how a cat ought to be; any deviations from these traits (there are cats who don’t have four legs, aren’t lazy etc.) are abnormal (and even bad because the essence is not fully manifested in appearance). And lastly, the essence of the cat (or any thing) is unchangeable; once a cat always a cat.

So likewise, what makes a woman a woman, the essentialists argue, is an inner ‘womannes’—a woman essence, and once a woman always a woman. As noted, sex and gender essentialists’ definition of ‘adult human female’ usually maintain that sex chromosomes/sex organs/egg cells are this essence, just as the essence of gold is element number 79.

But this only moves the line of enquiry one step back, as the the traits listed by gender essentialists as being necessary and sufficient, are not always, in fact, necessary and sufficient. Sex chromosomes do not only come in xx and xy, and male and female phenotypes do not always correlate with those sex chromosomes. Any essentialist definition of man and woman would thus invariably be contested by counter examples, such as intersex individuals (who make up 2% of the population), individuals with androgen insensitivity syndrome, individuals with mixed genitals, and so forth.

Defining sex—as in the word ‘female’ in the definition of the word ‘gender’ as ‘adult human female’—based on certain characteristics, like genitals or chromosomes, over other characteristics is, in the end, a social decision. For example, the people in the image above have Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome. They are genetically XY (typically classified as "male"), but their body doesn't respond to androgens, resulting in physical characteristics that are typically classified as "female." Yet, society tends to classify such individuals as female, based on practical considerations such as morphology/physical appearance, despite their XY chromosomes.

If you want to see how the essentialist games really fails try and define the word ‘chair’ in essentialist terms. You can try and insist on some set of essential features for the word ‘chair’ that excludes it from ‘sofa’ ‘couch’ ‘stool’ ‘recliner’ and so on (or for the word ‘mug’ that distinguishes it from ‘cup’, or for the word ‘sandwich’ that distinguishes it from ‘burger’), but there will always be some chairs that fall outside those necessary and sufficient conditions. The meaning of ‘chair’, just as ‘cat’ and ‘woman’, is therefore determined in use. That is to say, the term ‘woman’, just like ‘chair’, may have some common "family" resemblances, but no subset of these resemblances can be minimally definitive.

Another issue with essentialism with respect to gender is that hardly anyone knows what their sex chromosomes are. A chromosome based definition is one that no one can actually use in practice; we don’t carry a test to determine people’s—or our own—chromosomes before gendering someone. On the essentialist sex-based theory of gender, people would then not know who is or isn’t a woman or a man (yikes!).

Nor does the theory capture our ordinary use of the term ‘woman’ and ‘man’ when classifying someone in practice. It would suggest that an intersex individual who was assigned female at birth, has female genitalia and female sex characteristics but has XY chromosomes and no uterus is not a ‘woman’. But, descriptively, most competent users of the term ‘woman’ would reject this, as they in fact do. It would also suggest that a trans person who has sex reassignment treatments, and so has most of the traits associated with the biological makers associated with the category ‘female’, is not a ‘woman’. Again, descriptively, competent users of the term often (even if unwittingly) use that designation. And at any rate, normatively speaking, it seems like we would want an intersex and trans inclusive understanding of the term. In short, the essentialist theory of gender seems to not fair very well in terms of theoretical virtue in capturing ordinary usage.

What we tend to do in practice is classify people based on family resemblances of the clusters of features that seem to coincide with gender expression:

Walking down the street, and we come across the humans in the image above. Most people will almost always identify the person on the left as ‘woman’ and the person on the right as ‘man’, despite their chromosomal make-up and gametes (both individuals are in fact transgender). That’s because we tend to go by pragmatic considerations such as morphology.

At any rate, descriptive accounts these (though often important because they sometimes give us pragmatic accounts of why we do something) should not be the final arbiter on how to carve our concepts: our main concern about ‘what is X?’ must take into account our normative considerations, such as whatever seems to make more people happier and less people unhappier.

Against Representation: All Enquiries are Pragmatic, Normative and Social

Ameliorative Approaches to Gender Categorisations

The premise behind the question ‘what is a woman’, as it is typically proffered, is an erroneous one. If we were actually interested in the meaning of a word, we would approach lexicographers and ask: ‘how is the term ‘women’ used in our ordinary language?’ The answer would probably be very uninteresting, something along the lines of: ‘currently the term seems to be context-sensitive, some linguistic communities seem to assign the term ‘woman’ to people who perform given social roles to a certain level, and at other contexts the term seems to refer to certain individuals which have similar clusters of biological markers, and at other contexts it refers to a gender-identity with which individuals sincerely self-identify and express themselves by’. Once we are given such an answer (which is at any rate descriptive), we could, more interestingly, also follow that by a revisionary normative question posed among ourselves: ‘should we retain that use, or is there a better one?’. The latter is the position of language reform advocates with respect to gender.

This reform is a kind of conceptual engineering that feminist philosopher Sally Haslanger calls an ‘ameliorative project’, that is,

an analytical . . . project that seeks to identify what legitimate purposes we might have (if any) in categorizing people on the basis of race or gender, and to develop concepts that would help us achieve these ends. I believe that we should adopt a constructionist account not because it provides an analysis of our ordinary discourse, but because it offers numerous political and theoretical advantages.

Intrinsic to Haslanger’s way of thinking is that, following Wittgenstein, language is a tool to help us achieve our ends and not a medium for representing reality.

Yet, what we get in popular conservative discourses is a nonsensical question underpinned by representationalist assumptions which asks: ‘what is a woman, really’ i.e. what is the essence of gender, or how does the word ‘woman’ correspond to the intrinsic nature of the world?

This question slides down the confused and misleading representationlist bent towards meaning by framing the transgender issue as a subject of metaphysical investigation concerned with getting at the ‘true’ essence of ‘womenhood/manhood’, rather than what it actually is in practice: a normative debate on how we ought to carve out our concepts related to gender. The question in the latter sense is therefore not ‘is there really such a thing as p gender/sex/race/caste/sexuality’ but ‘how should we talk about p gender/sex/race/caste/sexuality, if at all?’.

We are the Arbiters of Classifications

Categories are there for us, not us for them. We somehow forget that we are the arbiters of classifications and denotations, and that any analysis bottoms out on socio-cultural considerations. Even in the sciences, demarcating species in biology or talk about neutrons in physics are, in the final analysis, sociocultural issues that we agree upon based on consensus.

It was social consensus, for instance, that determined whether all swans should be white even after we later found their equivalent black ones or whether those black ones in Australia should also be considered swans despite their difference in colour; there was no fact of the matter on what the term ‘swan’ denotes other than our social agreement on how to carve it. Our consensus on the latter description does not mean that, after the fact, we can now say “it was chosen because it corresponds to how the world is”. It did not. The classificatory scheme was carved by human beings.

The mistake is to think that there are stand-alone, pre-theoretical Truths that are divorced from socio-cultural concerns. This is happens for instance when some people assert that “p is an ineluctable biological fact!” and consider that to be the be-all and end-all of what ought be done, when it is—whether rightly or wrongly—a way to justify antecedent social and linguistic practices.

So the question isn’t ‘are trans women women?’ just as much as it isn’t ‘is there such a thing as a black swan’ or ‘is there such a thing as neutrons’ or ‘is there such a thing as noble blood (i.e., a correlation between skin colour and IQ)’ or ‘is there such a thing as human nature?’; rather, the question is always ‘how should we talk about these concepts, if at all?’. Any question about whether p exists or what should we include within the category p has to be made in reference to our socio-political and normative goals.1 This point is missed when we adhere to the myth of an absolute fact-value distinction which representationalism affirms, or that the way we categorise, classify and describe things—from the sciences to culture and ethics—is to ‘represent reality’.

It is true that we often establish rigid criteria and boundaries for ‘scientific’ categories. But we only do so because it serves our normatively desirable interests for predicting and controlling. Even within such rigidness and essentialism, the descriptions adopted in the sciences are idealisations, conceptualised for making models more tractable. Most of these models, moreover, eventually outlive their usefulness—and the phenomena being described and categorised are themselves literally created where they did not previously exist (after all that’s the main task behind experiments) and often stop existing altogether, like phlogiston and the luminiferous ether (see Hacking 1983, ch. 16). But the point here is that essentialism, where certain universal and inherent characteristics define specific categories, has been wonderful for making predictions and generalisations (for why this does not, still, carry metaphysical implications, see my other post) but we have mistaken the usefulness of essentialist language in scientific modelling for the aim of predicting, for the idea that such language must apply to all other cultural domains.

Similarly, the binary conception of sex tied to biological markers in the population is a classificatory scheme that humans have usefully developed and applied for human medical practices, often even projecting onto the animal kingdom. But the model, like all models, is a pragmatic and idealised constructs that help us simplify and manage complexity, and is often forced to admit variability (as in the case of intersex and other conditions). For instance, though many species do reproduce sexually with "male" and "female" roles, there is significant diversity in the animal kingdom in terms of how these roles are defined and carried out. Many bird species have ZW sex-determination systems, where it's the females that can be either ZZ or ZW, and males are always ZZ, which is the opposite of the XY system in mammals. Some reptiles, like some species of turtles and crocodiles, have temperature-dependent sex determination where the sex of an individual is determined by the temperature at which the eggs are incubated, not by chromosomes. Some fish and amphibians can change their sex during their lifespan. There are also numerous examples of animals that don't fit neatly into binary male/female categories, such as hermaphroditic species which have both male and female reproductive organs. So while a binary understanding of sex tied to biological markers might be useful in some contexts (such as human medical practices), the understanding is not an isomorphic representation to properties in the world.

This applies not just to the classification of sex and gender, but to any system of categorisation we use—be it related to biological taxonomy, sociological demographics, linguistic semantics, or any other field; they are tools for our (social) goals. Them being tools, of course, doesn’t imply that “anything goes”, some categories are better than other ones for the purposes of carrying out specific goals. A hammer is better than a toothpick if our goal is to hit a nail. But because talking in some way about the existence of atoms or the existence of human categories is better than some other ways for the purposes of a given field, does not make those ways isomorphic representations. And it does not preclude the possibility of different ways of talking to be more suited in different fields.

When we take off our lab coats, and we come across a piece of gold-like substance or a swan-like being or a woman-looking person, we do not think of necessary and sufficient conditions (essences) and ask: ‘does this chemical substance have an atomic number of 79 and an atomic weight of 196.967?’, or ‘can this being produce fertile offspring with swans?’ or ‘does this person have egg cells?’. We don’t stop and go about testing the substance using an X-ray spectroscopy or inseminating the swan-like being with swan semen (which is, anyway, only one way of defining ‘species’ that is itself contested by other ways) or checking the chromosomes of the woman-like person. Rather, we classify such things through “family resemblances” of our over-lapping linguistic practices. In other words, ordinary speech—say, about vegetables, fruits, bovines, whales, women, chairs, cats, swans, gold etc., are not always co-extensional with their scientific counterparts. It’s pragmatism and normativity all the way up and down with respect to our classificatory schemes; pragmatic and normative social consideration, whether in the sciences or in ordinary speech, have primacy over ontology.

A Wittgensteinian Approach to Gender

Use-conditional approach to Language

Let’s turn to how Wittgenstein would have replied to gender essentialists. Providing definitions for words like ‘woman’, as Mr Walsh and Co. are demanding of us, is something that we rarely have to do outside of technical contexts because theres rarely any pragmatic point in doing so (for example, where we offer stipulative definition for the purposes of an academic paper or an operational definition for the purposes of conducting an experiment). We almost always don’t need definitions for our terms, all we need to know is how to use them in ordinary language. Wittgenstein argues this in his Philosophical Investigations when he writes: "I use the name 'N' without a fixed meaning. (But that detracts as little from its usefulness, as it detracts from that of a table that it stands on four legs instead of three and so sometimes wobbles)". Thats because the primary function of language is to facilitate communication and convey intentions, and if that can be done, then demanding essentialist definitions is superfluous.

To see this more clearly, we shall examine how Wittgenstein analyses the way we form concepts and meanings. First he starts by saying that the rules that govern the use of our language (what he calls “grammar”) do not make themselves up based on a set of independent ‘structures of reality’, on some essences over and above the rules. Rather, he says, the rules are constituted by themselves. That is, meanings and concepts are created by our linguistic practices; by the routines, habits and rules of language usage. The mere encounter with a “horse”, for instance, does not give us the concept “horse”; experience does not, in itself, determine how we carve out our concepts or how we categorise objects. Or in other words, the usage of a concept is not absorbed from an independent object, nor does it come from the mere similarity between a bunch of objects (and nor is there always similarities between objects that fall under the same concept!). And so, there must be something creative, active and dynamic in concept formation, and there must be something over and above the object being referred to. This, to Wittgenstein, is the users of a language and their linguistic practices; the way language users use different symbols to communicate intentions.

From this understanding of rules of language grammar, Wittgenstein takes the meaning of words to be coextensive with their use. And use is a rule-governed activity; it’s reality is created by human practices. Collectively, we agree on using this word in that way, and that rule is created by us giving it that force (think of rules for etiquette or rules of rights, rituals, laws and games). The act of reference to a rule constitutes its reality just like the act of reference to a ‘right’ or a ‘law’ constitutes its reality. There is no reality to rules other than people following them, just like a game is something people create merely by playing it. Wittgenstein uses the latter metaphor in describing what he calls ‘language games’; the rules of a game compel players to act in certain ways other than certain other ways, but this compulsion does not exist outside of the practice of following the rule. There is no logical or physical necessity to rule following, players can choose to break the rules of a game at any point. It’s just that, as rule-followers, players collectively impose sanctions on rule-breakers; there isn’t some external entity forcing the players to use a specific rule. And similarly, the corollary is that our linguistic practices do not ‘represent’ or ‘correspond’ to reality, but they rather constitute it. When people appeal to a “reality” to which a word corresponds to, what they are in fact doing is appealing to an implicit intersubjective standard of rule-following, where that reality is just a bunch of other people’s habituated readiness to make a similar appeal to a rule and act on it.

Language is a Tool

It happens that the rules of our language games tend to be shaped by reference to how expedient they are with coping with our environment, coping with external causal pressures. Such pressures often force us to adopt conditional rules as heuristics such as ‘if we want X, we should follow Y rule’; but the way we talk about those causal pressures is ultimately a matter of human convention and agreement. And so in this sense, langauge is a tool for coping rather than a medium of representing.

Philosopher Donald Davidson offers a hypothetical to demonstrate this point:

Suppose you stumble upon a native of an isolated community whose language is radically different to your own. Alien to each other, you begin forming theories about one another’s behaviours. A successful theory is one where you could generate expectations of the native’s future behaviours, about what she will do next so that you are not taken by surprise, and vice-versa. Successful communication is thus one where you are able to make predictions about the noises and marks the native makes and those predictions end up coinciding with her own, and vice-versa. It is clear in this situation that the use of language is one of coping with another language-user, coping with another causal pressure, and not in “representing reality”. And so Davidson concludes that all ‘two people need, if they are to understand one another through speech, is the ability to converge on passing theories from utterance to utterance’.

Sometimes it may helps to think of language as we do numbers, since numbers invariably elude essentialist definitions. We talk about the number five all the time, but if someone asks ‘but what does the number ‘five’ really mean, what is its essence?’ we would be left baffled. In answering this, all we can do is come up with relational descriptions; the sum of two and three; one more than four, half of ten, the subtraction of 15996544524568 and 15996544524564 and so on, but none of these descriptions come closer to the intrinsic nature of ‘fiveness’. To be sure, these descriptions are all in some sense related to one another in criss-crossing ways in that they all make use of the word ‘five’. But if we want to understand the meaning of ‘five’, we have to examine its use in language—and use is a rule-governed activity; usage cannot be “read off” an object. Thus, numbers are part of a language game that function as rules; someone tells me to go buy five apples, I go to the shop and find the section marked ‘apples’ and count to five, with each number I pick up an apple. The word ‘five’ in this sense did not stand in for an object or represent it, but rather it simply functioned as a rule in a game. The point is that rules (no matter how much consensus they garner or how much we have mastered them through generations) do no more than govern how people ought to use marks and noises.

In this sense, we English speakers can talk about bulls using the signifier ‘bull’, but we almost never need to define what the word ‘bull’ is, and most people would call castrated bovines ‘bulls’ even though the technical name in farming is ‘steers’—but it usually gets the point across. Likewise, children can name ten animals but when asked for specific definitions, they will be baffled.

I talk about computers all the time, but if someone stops me and says ‘wait, can you provide me a definition of the word ‘computer’ before you proceed’, I wouldn’t have an immediate ready answer at hand. But, with Wittgenstein, I will wonder what the point of asking this was, and think, in Wittgenstein’s words: “Why do you put it so oddly?”. Is she questioning my grasp of the English language, my competence with technology? What does she want to be reassured of, exactly? If she responds ‘I just wanted to make sure you knew how sentences in which the word ‘computer’ figures correspond to Reality in a non-contextualised way’ or ‘I just wanted to make sure you can specify necessary and sufficient conditions for the truth of the sentences in which the word ‘computer’ figures’, I will be baffled. What would it mean to utter a sentence that is divorced from context and its conditions does not correspond to reality? This is all to say that terms don’t need to be complicated; if they are clear enough for a specific use or practice, then they are “correct”, and providing definitions for such terms then becomes a redundant task.

To provide a last example, the use of the word ‘gold’ as referencing a chemical substance with an atomic number of 79 and an atomic weight of 196.967 would only matter when we want to use that substance in that way. We did not agree to carve the meanings of substances with atomic numbers of 79 and substances with atomic numbers of 47 (silver) differently out of hot air, there was a pragmatic reason for doing so. For most of our history this has usually been to regulate trade and exchange. But when a layperson who knows nothing about chemistry and physics points to a yellowy-brownish, bright, shiny, metally thing which has an atomic number of 78 instead of 79 and says “it is gold”, that meaning is not ‘incorrect’. (Again: meaning is language-in-use, the word ‘cow’ does not literally mean ‘cow’ and we often use that word to designate anything that is ‘cow-shaped’ even though the technical definition is a female bovine that has bred). So she is simply using the word gold as a family resemblance, and not the rigid and essentialist designators used in chemistry (which themselves often admit variability and are often replaced altogether by new descriptions).

All meaning is ultimately guided by our social practices and norms; there is no domain of enquiry that operates from an Archimedean point from which to arbitrate the ‘correct’ meaning of a term. The norms that guide the meanings of terms in biology and physics may not be suitable for guiding the meaning of terms in carpentry, literature, ethics and art—even if there are many overlapping standards.

What we gather from Wittgenstein is that the final analysis of the ‘what is a women?’ question is in the end a reference to our pragmatic and normative goals: ‘how should we talk about gender and sex, if at all?’. In our current society, if our goal is to reduce the number of human suffering, then we should probably move away from a completely sex-based understanding of gender and admit variability in what the terms ‘man’ and ‘women’ denote, and accordingly change our linguistic practices towards intersex and trans inclusive understandings of the terms.2 What follows is that statements like ‘I am a woman’ are not understood as communicating something about the speaker’s genitals, gametes or chromosomes but something context-sensitive (which would include, in at least some contexts, the avowal of the speaker’s gender expression).

In effect, this would be how we have always talked about ‘women’ and ‘men’ throughout human history, as people have grasped those concepts without ever having any knowledge about what gametes and chromosomes even are. Children, too, begin to grasp such concepts at a very young age, often before they have any comprehensive understanding of biological sex or sexual reproduction, meaning that our understanding of gender is not reducible to an understanding of differences in biological markers. Children learn about gender roles and norms not (just) through explicit instructions such as “a man is such and such and a woman is thus and so”, but rather implicitly through their observations of others. They see how people are treated differently based on perceived gender, and they internalise these lessons. They then begin to identify with a certain gender and internalise the norms associated with that gender long before they understand what gametes or sex parts are.

So, what may be useful references for the designator ‘sex’ in biological discourses, may not be so useful elsewhere, such as when treating someone as their preferred gender or using preferred pronouns, or getting people the affirmative medical care they need. Both the terms ‘gender’ in our ordinary discourse and the term ‘sex’ in scientific discourse are socially construed parts of our language, and the only disagreement between essentialists and anti-essentialists is about the sort of ways we want to use language—everything else is someone attempting to smuggle in their provincial normative goals and social practices into the definition, and then saying it is ineluctable because it represents the intrinsic nature of things. It does me well here to again quote Richard Rorty:

It is often said, for example, that we should stop using the concepts of “race” and “caste,” stop dividing the human community up by genealogical descent. The idea is to lessen the chances that the question “who are his or her ancestors?” will be asked . . . This line of thinking is sometimes countered by saying “but there really are inherited differences — ancestry does matter.” The rejoinder is: there certainly are inheritable physical characteristics, but these do not, in themselves, correlate with any characteristics that could provide a good reason for breaking up a planned marriage, or voting for or against a candidate. We may need the notion of genetic transmission for medical purposes, but not for any other purposes. So instead of talking about different races, let us just talk about different genes . . . the question “is there such a thing?” and the question “should we talk about such a thing?” seem pretty well interchangeable. (p. 3–4).

In other words, the rejoinder to “but there are biological markers between population clusters” is “there certainly are, but they do not, in themselves, map on to one’s gender identity, nor do they correlate with any characteristics that could provide a good reason to deny people affirmative gender treatment, respecting their pronouns, etc..” Biological markers (which anyway, are at best ambiguously mapped to gender and sex concepts) or any other descriptive claims about our current linguistic practices are not morally relevant.

‘The love of Truth’ is the Love of Chains

Facts Care About Your Feelings

The representationalist view (realist metaphysics more broadly) rears its ugly head once more in the rhetorical phrase common in right-wing neoconservative circles ‘facts don’t care about your feelings’. Let's momentarily accept the supposition that underlies this viewpoint, which posits that there are these chunks of "factoids" that exist independently and hold value in their own right, irrespective of human goals and interests.

This perspective falters on its own terms as even within the most rigorous sciences, there are extra-theoretical (and theoretical) assumptions made when interpreting empirical data. Our preferences for simpler theories, certain mathematical methods, or what we consider as evidence, in addition to our cultural backgrounds and individual psychologies, all play mediating roles in interpretation. Scientific theories are laden with the interests (or feelings, you could say) of various parties; the funders, the sponsors, the personal values of journal editors, and end users. The acceptance of scientific theories is often swayed by aesthetic criteria, the rhetoric of the scientists, and even the use of propaganda. What’s more, if two or more competing theories account for available results, there would never be enough experimental verification alone to choose one over another: adherence to things like simplicity or aesthetics will play a decisive role in the choice - making it abundantly clear that facts do not, in fact, speak for themselves.

All that scientific inquiry offers us, all that it can offer, are conditional statements about the implications of adopting specific descriptions and social arrangements; if we talk in this way, such and such will happen. If we use use Galilean-talk over Christian-talk, we are better able to predict the movement of the stars. It does not dictate which vocabularies we should adopt, nor do the picked vocabularies read off the intrinsic nature of the world. That choice is driven by our institutional values and auxiliary motives. A racist society, for instance, might favour educational structures rooted in race essentialism and race science given that such vocabularies further the desired social inequalities, as was indeed the case during Nazi Germany.

The slogan “facts don’t care about your feeling” is therefore simply a falsehood. Even when adhering to some idea of their being such things as facts independent of our linguistic constructs and our pragmatic considerations, these facts still nevertheless do care about our feelings.

However, I take it that the idea behind the phrase is more so that, in principle, there are presuppositionless Truths waiting to be discovered, and their pursuit is an end in itself, even if we are forever fallible with respect to some of these more metaphysical Truths. And, moreover, that there is a virtue called “the love of Truth” - distinct from the love of happiness - which the conservative mind possesses more acutely. This is a socially sensitive world we live in, a world full of pesky social, normative and pragmatic issues that can often muddle up this pursuit, so it is a very good thing indeed that we are in the midst of these truth-seeking minds that are able to penetrate what are otherwise vexing barriers towards the Truth. The progressives - so the thought goes - have chosen the love of happiness over the virtuous love of Truth, which is a grave sin when pursued for its own sake. They have it all backwards. Truth always supervenes over happiness and not vice-versa; indeed happiness is merely a derivative of Truth, a byproduct. This virtue of the love of Truth, especially prevalent in the conservative mind, sits within a gamut of other conservative virtues such as manly bravado and authoritarianism.

I do not mean authoritarianism in the political sense (though that may also be relevant). I mean it in the sense in which many conservatives often adopt a representationalist understanding language as being subordinate to some non-human entity that goes by the name capital T truth. Truth is in this sense a juvenile subordination and obedience to a non-human authority, whether it be the Will of God or Intrinsic Reality, rather that a product of a cooperative activity with our fellow discursive human partners. On this account, our social norms are reified, taken to be ontologically determined by the objective nature of the world. Pragmatist philosopher Robert takes note of this authoritarian nature of representationalism, saying that it

…is a hierarchical ontological structure of superiority and subordination, in which superiors have the authority to command and subordinates the responsibility to obey. In its later Christianized form, it is taken to have been instituted by the supernatural fiat of the ultimate superior and authority, God. Thence derives the “divine right of kings,” devolved through the various feudal ranks, bottoming out in the righteousness of man’s dominion over the beasts. In both forms, those that take the norms to be read off of the natures of things and those that also take those normatively significant natures to be supernaturally ordained, the ultimate source of our responsibilities and obligations lies outside of us, in something non-human, in the way things anyway are, apart from and independently of our practical activities and attitudes. Our job is to conform our attitudes and practices to these normative statuses of superiority and subordination, authority and responsibility, about which we don’t have a say.

This authoritarianism view also manifests in the neoconservative’s frenzied obsession with ‘free-speech’, come what may in terms of social harms, such as in talk of divulging the ‘truth’ on the correlations of skin colour with intelligence (or the decision to split the atom, nuclear winter be damned). Many like issues are framed as though metaphysics and ‘the fact of the matter’ supervene on social practices, and not vice versa. In tapping into these old Platonic assumptions about toughness as opposed to a perceived wimpiness when one is being socially sensitive, and about a disciplined moral crusade for the Truth at all costs that appeals to something overarching, non-human and deep, this advertising slogan “facts don’t care about your feelings” has recently brought a lot of rhetorical wins to the neoconservative movement, often at the cost of marginalised members of society calling for language reform.

The platonic tradition which it borrows from holds that there is a metaphysical “truth”, say, about the nature of gender, which must be uncovered. Never-mind about the social relevance of this “truth” because the goal of enquiry is to discover as many truths as we can—like Super Mario collecting gold coins—and the more truths we collect, the more we will understand how things necessarily are—like fitting pieces of a jigsaw puzzle together! Ontology matters over and above social cooperation all the way.

The challenge for us language reformists then becomes, how can we shift societal focus towards valuing social justice over essentialist and foundationalist beliefs? How can we redefine social justice from being seen as wimpish - as I myself once did - and make essentialism look old fashioned and, at times, sadisitc?

Pragmatism and Cultural Politics

Pragmatism holds that the problem with grasping truth, and indeed the very journey towards it, lies in our inherent predilection for determining the context within which it reveals itself. Whether it's truths of physical, social, psychological, mathematical, or theological nature, they only manifest as 'truths' within contexts we have antecedently constructed. Consequently, we've constructed the truth and, interestingly, only retrospectively invest in it as if it's 'out there', a fundamental aspect of the world.

This is not what is sometimes called ‘global scepticism’. Pragmatist philosophers rebuff scepticism as it insists on a naive belief in the 'out-there'-ness of concepts and categories, only to develop a spectrum for scepticism. This scepticism inherently undercuts the value of self-constructed contexts and, in turn, negates or obscures the potent process of belief investment.

Rather, pragmatists perceive truth as a process of self-construction that requires comprehensive embracement. It's not something we naively indulge in as divinely or universally granted “factoids”, merely to be passively recognised and later described as part of a truth-seeking enterprise. Pragmatism involves claiming responsibility for, and proactively overseeing, the entirety of truth as a process: from context creation and knowledge organisation within that context, to the development of methodologies for determining validity within a given context, to investing in the logical outcome of that knowledge organisation as dictated by the approved methodology.

The classic 'quest for truth' described earlier is an endeavour the pragmatists find fundamentally flawed because it shies away from acknowledging our inherent capacity to construct truth from scratch, and hence fails to enable proactive use of the truth-building process in a way that bridges people with their socio-environmental conditions, cultural knowledge base, and equitable interconnections. Far from being sceptics, they firmly believe philosophy should drive practical changes, reshape societies, economies, and psychologies. However, this pragmatic role of philosophy can only take shape by acknowledging that we are active participants in constructing our shared reality and not that we are, in some way, subordinate to it. We, language users, are thoroughly entwined, through our explicit and subconscious linguistic processes, in all procedures of world-modelling and meaning-making.

Once we acknowledge this, the goal of inquiry then becomes not to ‘represent reality’ but rather to find more useful descriptions from the least useful ones. Not capital T truth, but justification and intersubjective agreement are the elements that are sought after, and these elements are always indexed to specific audiences and not to something called “reality” or “truth”. This anti-representationalist view is a philosophy of hope, grounded in the belief that through social cooperation, the future will be better than the past - in whatever way we happen to define the future. It is egalitarian through and through in that it requires hope in an indeterminate future and faith that deliberate human action can improve human lives.

Pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty's notion of "philosophy as cultural politics" is a useful elaboration of these points. Rorty first distinguishes "real" politics from "cultural" politics, though “real” is not used in the metaphysical sense. The former kind of politics is short-term, engaging a practical moral vocabulary (e.g., initiatives like constitutional amendments or passing significant legislation like the Civil Rights Act, or decisions about elections, legislation, and resource distribution), while the latter is long-term, stimulating imaginative discourse about potential utopian futures. “Cultural” politics could involve such matters as language reform on pronoun usages and changing how different racial or sexual groups are described. And it is “long term” in the sense that it aims at such things as reshaping the language used by future generations. While real politics is transparent and routine, cultural politics can potentially transform society by creating new and imaginative - in the sense of ‘imagining what it’s like to be in a group’s shoes’ - descriptions.

This is not to say that real politics is more “important” - on the contrary. Rorty doesn't see these two types of politics - real and cultural - as contradictory, rather, they can coexist, with one addressing immediate, banal and practical concerns and the other aspiring toward yet unrealised utopian hopes.

The importance of narratives and language reform cannot be understated. We don’t think in thoughts (i.e., in intentional mental states) first and then look for signs and symbols to map them on to; to think is to use signs and symbols. To have thoughts, we have to have meanings; we can’t have the belief that cats are mammals without having an understanding what the meanings of those signs are. Those signs and symbols are passed on to us by past and present sign and symbol-using humans, thereby linking us to a linguistic community. And though many signs and symbols will be the same across linguistic communities given that they will be produced by very similar causal pressures, some others will be more contingent and sensitive to the particular linguistic habits of the community, including of the people the community want its members to be like and those who it does not want its members to be like and wish that they distance themselves from. So when the activist asks the ‘transphobe’, for instance, to redescribe the way she refers to others as to refer to them with their preferred pronouns, the activist is not only asking the transphobe to speak differently out of courtesy, but—because our choice of language shapes us—the activist is implicitly asking her to literally alternate who she is and change her moral identity, her community loyalties, commitments and affections.

Rorty also presents a radical perspective on human self-perception and its relation to other animals, rooted in Darwinian evolution. He suggests that recognising ourselves as "slightly-more-complicated-animals"—creatures that differ from other animals only in complexity—liberates us from feeling beholden to nonhuman forces (Reality, Truth, God etc.). By accepting our place as one product of evolution among other products such as the amoeba and the fish, we become open to the possibility that our descendants may exceed us, as we have “surpassed” these other life forms. This hopefully helps us progress to a point where nothing is considered quasi-divine, and everything, including language, conscience, and community, is seen as a product of time and chance.

Though language ability is the primary attribute that distinguishes humans from other animals, seen from another angle, the gap between creatures who can use language and those who can't isn't all that big. Whether through scientific breakthroughs, eloquent prose, or abstract theories, humans, like mollusks, mice, or moose, are merely responding and adapting to the world around us. All human activities, from the most basic to the most complex, are just varying degrees of coping, such that the idea that there's a permanent truth or final answer to life's biggest questions seems juvenile. Instead, life is a continuous process of finding better ways to cope, as our habits and beliefs evolve.

This background makes it easier to understand the pragmatist slogan which Rorty famously articulated, "There is no such thing as the search for truth, as distinct from the search for happiness." This is to say that happiness is not a final state to be achieved, something that can exist eternally for everyone everywhere, once and for all, but rather it is an ongoing process since it is always possible to be happier than we were in the past. And thus pragmatists are concerned with the journey towards continuous improvement of methods to make life better than it was in the past. This outlook aligns with Rorty's sentimental view of moral progress which sees morality not as a set of absolute rules but as a negotiation between conflicting human needs. This view rejects the idea that there is a moment when we stop merely responding to the world and start representing it, and likewise, rejects the idea that there is a point where our interactions with others transcend from mere sentimentality (again, or ‘feelings’) to “morality” or “justice” or “truth”.

Along with other pragmatists, Rorty proposes this post-Darwinian view where there's no absolute division between empirical and non-empirical knowledge, facts and values, feelings and truth, empirical and non-empirical. All forms of inquiry, from nuclear physics to art and ethics, are attempts to enrich our lives and bring us more happiness. And all of these judgments are provisional and susceptible to error. In this context, Rorty promotes the idea of “moral progress” as an expansion of our moral community, embracing more and more diverse people as part of "us." The evolution from Neanderthal communication of grunts and nudges to complex philosophical treatises is as gradual and continuous as the biological evolution from amoebae to anthropoids. Likewise, there's no sharp transition from tribal provincialism to global cosmopolitanism, from specific clan, race, or religious loyalties to universal human rights.

Taken as a whole, pragmatist moral progress is about increasing our sensitivity and response to a broader variety of people and situations which, “we” the moral community, have previously ignored and failed to include as “one of us”. Morality is therefore understood as expanding this circle to include more and more people which were thought of as not us. Pragmatists see moral progress as a shift from a morality of obligation to a morality of love, to increase in feelings and sensitivity to the needs and interests of others. Fortunately, this shift has already taken place and accounts for why today’s younger generations are less likely to harbor prejudices compared to their predecessors. It explains why today’s white males are less likely to hate gays, oppress racial minorities, subordinate women, in comparison to their parents and grandparents. It's not because they have a greater understanding of moral principles or are better at moral calculations, but because they possess a more developed imaginative capacity to empathise with others' suffering. Their moral horizons are broader, and their sense of shared identity is more inclusive.

Addendum: An Historically and Socially Conscious Philosophy

I have argued that we need to stop asking bad questions that assume essentialism and representationalism in matters in which those frameworks are simply unproductive, cruel, and sadistic—such as in our discussions of how to treat transgender people. This means following Wittgenstein in seeing our marks and noises we make as tools and not mediums of representation of the intrinsic nature of reality, or mediums of expression of the intrinsic nature of humanity.

Today’s academic philosophy is still under Plato’s spell. It is still in the habit of dividing cultural practices into ‘natural kinds’ and ‘social kinds’, into the ‘necessary’ and therefore really real, and the ‘contingent’ and therefore merely human. It must stop treating issues such as gender and sex as exercises in conceptual analysis. So, in returning to the discussion in our opening section, philosophy must lead by example in giving up the tantalising search for platonic forms and essences within our cultural practices. It needs to rejoice with its golden boy Wittgenstein that philosophers are interpreters rather than bricklayers of foundations, and that “philosophy simply puts everything before us, and neither explains nor deduces anything”.

To do this is to also abandon the ahistoric and non-social way of ‘doing philosophy’, and to say, with Hegel, that philosophy is its own time encapsulated in thought, that philosophers merely summarise current forms of life. For my reading of Hegel is one where, in the end, the ultimate “self-legislating” spirit is irreducibly social, normative, pragmatic—and not representationalist. This more humbling view of philosophy rejoins with Hegel’s famous warning that

When philosophy paints its grey in grey, then has a shape of life grown old . . . The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk.

That is to say that early Christians were not reflexive of the fact that Christianity was conceived for the purpose of ameliorating much of the suffering of the time through notions like ‘love is the only law’; it was rather taken to be the discovery of Truth. Likewise, Newton did not reflexively take his theories of Newtonian mechanics as a means towards creating our current leisure through modern technology, he was likewise taken to be discovering capital T truths. And so on for all ‘philosophies’. It is only retrospectively that we can see them as tools of moral, social, pragmatic progress; only the generations who arrive afterwards can, in Richard Rorty’s words,

tell the kind of story of progress which those who are actually making progress usually cannot. We can view these people as tool-makers rather than discoverers because we have a clearer idea of what was shaped by the use of those tools. The product is us – our conscience, our culture, our form of life. Those who made us possible could not clearly describe the ends to which their work was a means. But we can.

The new “shape of life” partly describes itself through the language of the old one (as when Enlightenment liberalism borrowed from Christian foundationalism), and only when this new shape of life “has grown old” where newcomers ‘refute’ it using its own language (as when rationalism and foundationalism are contested using Enlightenment scepticism), that it then properly comes into full shape. But by then it is too late, another new shape of life has been created (e.g. mature post-enlightenment liberalism).

In much the same way, the advocacy for transgender rights initially found itself expressing its goals through the established language of biological essentialism, a kind of mind-body dualism in which the issue was a “female/male brain” in a “male/female body”. They engaged with the language that was available to them at the time, and viewed figured that they were expressing some intrinsic nature of humanity. But that initial language of biological essentialism is in the process of “grown old” refuted using its own terms. It is only now that we can look back on these changes and see them not as the unfolding of pre-existing truths, but as tool-making – as the development of ideas, languages, and discourses that facilitate moral, social, and pragmatic progress. The evolution of transgender advocacy - as with all parts of our culture - is thus not as a move from "falsehood" to "truth," but as an ongoing, iterative process that serves to shape our form of life.

There are myriad ways of ‘doing philosophy’ that isn’t hackwork, ways that work towards creating a new “shape of life”. Much of the philosophy I’ve critically reflected on in this essay has been trying to either reach out from under our discursive practices into something transcendental, or has invented an internal language game among practitioners that has no public use, or has maintained reverence to old questions posed by fifth-century Athenians living in fifth-century Athens, for other fifth-century Athenians.

Some of these questions strike me as aesthetic and fun to engage in and do not need justification for posing (e.g., ‘what is free will’ or ‘how do we know what we know?’), just as much as no one asks for a justification of “doing art”. Sometimes I come across beautifully constructed arguments on qualia or on free will or on modal realism etc., and although I often dislike that they retain and conceal epistemological foundations and the old platonic metaphysical dualisms of mind/body, subject/object, fact/value, absolute/relative, appearance/reality, discovered/invented—which I think we are better off abjuring lest it stretch to our general mode of thought—they are nevertheless harmless if we acknowledge them as nothing less than fun little riddles which Wittgenstein and Co. offered us a therapeutical escape away from.

But when they do in fact stretch into our general mode of thought and we start looking for essences in words to justify retaining old language games on the basis that they ‘correspond to Reality’ even when they cause unnecessary suffering to thousands of people, then we need to take a step back, re-evaluate, and start asking socially conscious meta-philosophical questions, such as ‘what is the goal of philosophy?’. I think, at this time, these meta-philosophical questions should be proffered much more frequently.

Philosophers can, and regularly do, go further posing riddles and retaining old language-games. They do so by proposing new ways of talking about current forms of life, demonstrating the possibility of imagining alternative ones, showing us that what we have now is just one option among many other possible options, and defamiliarising us with the present in hopes of a better future. Specifically, the kind of philosophy I am talking about is one that is irreducibly social and historically conscious, the type of philosophy that, as one example, the late-Foucault was nested in.