Barnes on Gender and Gender Terms

2024-2 Social Ontology Segment 2

Q) Barnes argues that both social position accounts and identity-based accounts of gender face exclusion problems. Articulate these problems.

According to social position accounts, gender is explained in terms of external factors, i.e., the material social disadvantage or advantage imposed on individuals based on collective norms and assumptions about sexed bodies. Barnes points out that social position accounts face an exclusion problem, in which they fail to classify people we think should count as women as women. Haslanger’s accounts of gender, for instance, exclude some transgender women who are not observed or imagined to have bodily features related to reproduction.

In contrast to social position accounts, internal accounts of gender appeal to internal features to determine gender. The crucial factors that determine one’s gender are how one feels about themselves, how they are inclined to behave, which groups they see themselves as belonging to, etc. Among internal accounts, there are identity-based accounts, according to which gender identity has essential significance. Barnes argues that identity-based accounts fail to classify cognitively disabled women who lack a sense of gender as women.

 

Q) According to Barnes, it is crucial to separate the metaphysics of gender from the application conditions of gender terms. What is this strategy meant to accomplish and do you think it can succeed?                                      

To avoid the exclusion problem, Barnes suggests that the metaphysics of gender does not directly provide specific or illuminating truth conditions for sentences involving natural language gender terms. To support this idea, Barnes compares social metaphysics and gender terms to analytic metaphysics and statements about tables. The truth of ‘There is a table’ is established regardless of its metaphysical structure, even if, ultimately, it consists only of atoms in the void. Similarly, the correct metaphysics of gender does not provide the application conditions for our gender terms. Nor are such conditions determined by our conventions, as the underlying metaphysical reality of gender is quite distant from them.

The concern here is that Barnes presupposes somewhat questionable views on the relationship between concepts and their corresponding metaphysical reality: metaphysical reality does not determine the extension of gender terms while rendering ordinary usage of them incorrect. Explaining how this could be possible, I believe, requires meticulous consideration of what concepts are in the first place. Frege, for example, claims that a concept without a sharp definition is wrongly called a concept. Barnes’ view is expected to show why Frege’s theory of concepts is incorrect―and whether this is a matter of concepts, metaphysical social reality, or both.