Contextualism and the Semantics of "Woman"

Abstract

Contextualist accounts of “woman,” including Saul (2012), Diaz-Leon (2016), and Ichikawa (2020), aim to capture the variability of the meaning of the term, and do justice to the rights of trans women. I argue that (i) there is an internal tension between a contextualist stance and the commitment to trans-inclusive language, and that (ii) we should recognize and tackle the broader and deeper theoretical and practical difficulties implicit in the semantic debates, rather than collapsing them all into semantics. Moving on, I sketch three strategies to help us advance feminist philosophical endeavors, including how attending to contextual matters can lead us to further reflect on the meta-contextual, such as our role in shaping contexts and whether the working of language is indicative of a larger oppressive social structure.

How to Do Things with Gendered Words

“…A number of philosophers, including Bettcher (2017), Laskowski (2020), and Chen (2021), argue that Díaz-León's (2016) contextualism is actually a form of invariantism where the definition does not actually shift from context to context. As Hsiang-Yun Chen (2021) puts it, "one might claim that misgendering can never be accepted in any context and 2 Díaz-León's revised contextualist analysis is: ""X is a woman" is true iff X is human and relevantly similar to most females, where what counts as relevantly similar to most females depends on "objective" features of X's context, including instrumental, moral, and political considerations having to do with how X should be treated (regardless of who utters the sentence or what their beliefs are)" (2016,251).…”

“…The problem of politically significant terms has spawned answers that both recognize the underlying issue and attempt to resolve it (Díaz-León, 2016;Ichikawa, 2020), while other answers try to draw our attention to how questions of political significance are separable from questions of semantics (Laskowski, 2020;Chen, 2021). There are also views that use the articulation of the problem to provide an account of gendered language that sidesteps or dissolves the problem (Bettcher, 2013a;Kukla and Lance, forthcoming).…”

“Philosophers care about the truth”: Descriptive/normative generics

“…For this view, see Saul (2012) and Diaz-Leon (2016). For discussion of this contextualist view, see Chen (2021).…”