Research Group
in Analytic Philosophy

Abstract

What does 'woman' mean? There has been a longstanding debate as to whether 'woman' is a "sex-term" referring to a biological, natural (enough) kind, or a "gender-term" referring to a cultural, (somehow) socially constructed kind. After critically examining these families of accounts, Saul (forthcoming) advances a contextualist proposal, according to which ‘woman'  (in a context) picks out those relevantly similar (according to the standards at work in the context) to most of those possessing all of the biological markers of female sex. In this note, I contrast this to the view that ‘woman' is a paradigm-based concept, like ‘tree' or ‘chair', picking out those that share enough relevant features with the paradigms. The two accounts agree in a most central cases (in most contexts), but arguably disagree in some politically significant ones, like perhaps the cases of some transwomen prior toundergoing any surgical treatment or drug therapy who self-identify as women. My conjecture is that with respect to these my account fares better, on the assumption that the type of inquiry one is engaged in is "conceptual-descriptive", attempting to arrive to an elucidation of our current concept, as opposed to "ameliorative", attempting to arrive to an elucidation of the "target" concept that best serves our legitimate purposes, see Haslanger 2006. In the last part of the paper I explore to what extent Saul (2006)'s reasons against ameliorative revisionism are applicable to an ameliorative interpretation of the project in Saul (forthcoming).

References
Haslanger, S. (2006): ‘Philosophical Analysis and Social Kinds: What Good are Our Intuitions? ' Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume 80, pp. 89-118
Saul, J. (2006): ‘Philosophical Analysis and Social Kinds: Gender and Race ', Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume 80, 2006, 119-144
Saul, J. (forthcoming): 'Politically Significant Terms and Philosophy of Language: Methodological Issues', forthcoming in Superson and Crasnow,Analytic Feminist Contributions to Traditional Philosophy.