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Surely the chromosomal and hormonal makeup point to some sort of objective reality too, but this shouldn't even matter. I'm with Scott's The categories were made for man(...) here, taken to what I think is its logical conclusion - my mental categories were made for me, and if I for whatever reason decide that I want to cluster those humans with XY chromosomes plus whatever set of unprincipled exceptions in one category, nobody else should have any more right to force me to redraw my mental boundaries, any more than some snarky time traveller would have the right to force a legendary king to remove whales from the purview of the ministry of fish. Allowing this kind of epistemological violence against adults and even unrelated children seems wholly inconsistent with the rest of the modern human rights package, and more akin to medieval conquerors forcing the subjects of their conquest to convert at swordpoint (and spying on them to make sure they do not secretly retain their old faith).
(I do in fact have little objection to pro-trans policies that do not entail "you must believe and profess that trans X are X", insofar as they are not used to salami-slice their way towards sword-point conversion. If people want to make a mockery of women's sports or women's hiring quotas or whatever, they can duke it out with those that care for those things.)
If I remember right you understand enough math that you should see the difficulty with the distinction between "facts" and "categorisations" hes trying to draw. Have you thought about that more/found a way its not self-undermining?
Can you give me some more detail about the difficulty that you are seeing? I didn't think that it is hard to draw in any way that is particularly relevant to the trans question - the only problem that really pertains to it is that people tend to become very coy about why they want to engage in various aspects of the male-female distinction. The reason people care about facts is that facts determine the action->outcome function they are facing as agents; the reason they create categories is that the (facts \times actions -> outcomes) function is hard to evaluate and has a large domain that you would need to search if you seek to optimise. Lost time and effort also affects the outcome negatively, so all else equal it is better if you can approximately factor the function through a smaller domain (facts -> categories, categories \times actions -> outcomes) without skewing the valuation of each resulting outcome much. If you don't understand what actions you are considering and what outcomes you find desirable, though, this is a hopeless or at least hard undertaking.
Scott's King Solomon gives a whole array of good reasons why he wants to categorise whales with fish, given that his outcomes are valued by "edible biomass captured" and his actions are in the class of "allocate money to biomass-capturing institutions". If you cluster whales and fish and your second factor just gets "dag sighted" as its first parameter, the expected outcomes of each available action ("pay the fishing ministry") are about the same as if you evaluated the full function with every little detail of the whale. His psychiatrist avatar does so as well, given that he evaluates on his patients' subjective wellbeing and has actions consisting of talking and prescribing various FDA-approved drugs. What Scott misses in his discussion is that the characterisations the king and psychiatrist use, too, are grounded in facts - just different ones, which are more relevant to how their available actions affect their valuated outcomes. It is just as much of a fact that whales spend all their time in water, have fins and no particularly flexible limbs or neck, and that the transwoman patient will be unhappy if they are called a man to their face.
Aggregating on these factual criteria is useful for these people - but that doesn't give them any standing to suggest or impose categorisations on other people with completely different goals. King Solomon's fishing goals are irrelevant to the geneticist, and the psychiatrist's patient ratings are not similar to the objectives of almost everyone interacting with trans people on a day to day basis. For example, in my academic environment, my actions are basically talk and sometimes putting the thumb on the scale in some hiring decision, while the outcomes I want are about a peaceful social environment that is conducive to doing research. If trans people cluster with their birth gender as far as these are concerned (topic for another discussion thread), then whatever the mechanism is, that is the fact I would want to build my categories around.
All of this is irrelevant, though, because I think granting a human right to have bizarre and impractical categories if one so wishes is necessary for a society that is worth living in.
The correspondence between sets and predicates as shows up in formal logic. Applied to the example of the whales, this might be something like "What if the tanners guild wants to say whales dont have hairs?". Basically, it is not the case that there are some propositions that are "facts" that you just have to believe, and some that are "categorisations" where you can pick how you want to do them. You face the same basic situation wrt all of them, and obviously theyre not all up to you to decide - because on what basis could you decide, that is not itself a proposition?
I'm afraid I'm only getting more lost - you seem to be referring to some very specific (philosophical?) discussion that you assume I'll recall if you hint about it, but I'm drawing blanks. When you say "correspondence between sets and predicates (...)", this makes me think you are talking about predicates in extension (is-whale := the set of all things that you want to call a whale) vs. predicates in intension (is-whale := <some description of an algorithm to determine if a given thing is a whale>), but I'm not sure how that would relate to the rest of your post.
Do you want to do something like drawing a distinction between predicates that are "more naturally" expressed extensionally vs. intensionally? So you would for example consider a notion of "nice number" that actually amounts to "is a Fibonacci number" as "factual", whereas a notion of "nice number" that amounts to "gives off good vibes to Lykurg" is "arbitrary".
I don't understand what that would have to do with the "tanners' guild" example, though - that sounds more like a setup where two different entities use different categories under the same label and want to push the respective other to adopt theirs (why? to reduce cognitive load for themselves when they are interacting with each other?). For your example, how do you envision the tanners' guild using that assertion of theirs? Is it (1) if someone gives them a piece of whale skin with hair follicles, they will say "whales don't have hairs, so I will pretend these are not there and not smooth out these before tanning it"? (2) if someone gives them a piece of -"-, they will say "this is hairy, so it is not whale skin and I will not put it in the whale processing pipeline"? (3) nothing changes about how they process whale skin with hair follicles, but they will dispatch a guy to argue all day if anyone anywhere claims that whales have hair?
You can define sets in terms of predicates (x \elem Fish \iff: fish(x)) or the other way (fish(x) \iff: x \elem Fish). So while you might intuitively say that x \elem Fish is a categorisation, it has a brother thats intuitively has the form of a fact, and you cant change one without the other.
There is not a logical distinction between intensional and extensional definitions, except
in modal logics, where it exists but depends entirely on details in your semantic setup that are in no way constrained by evidence, or
in model theory, there are intensions and extensions - but still no intensional or extensinal definitions in the underlying.
This is another manifestation of the problem.
I had (1) in mind when making up the example.
No. Its just an example of how one of the things he lists as "facts" might be redefined with just as good a justification as "fish". The problem is that when you decide what the optimal most convenient way to categorise is, you need to have some facts based on which to make that decision. But if theres no difference between facts and categorisations, then you dont.
Calling either of those two a "fact" does not seem right to me - it seems like it's conflating the signifier (the word "fish") with the signified (whatever factual basis is being used for defining the category). Now, if your objection is that we have no way of directly interacting with facts except by making categories that refer to them, whether these categories are complex high-level things like "fish" or more low-level ones like "hair follicles" or "adenine", and we have just arbitrarily elevated some of these categories to being "facts", that objection is philosophically fair - but, I would argue, not relevant in practice: a category/signifier is a better proxy for a fact/signified the more likely every existing and hypothetical human is to agree on its extension, and the great triumph of reductionism is that as categories become lower-level/further removed from day-to-day experience, they empirically become better proxies. Democrats and Republicans might have great disagreements about what is a "woman", and moderns and ancients might have disagreements about what is a "fish", but they will mostly agree about X and Y chromosomes looking different under a microscope, and would acknowledge that a hair is a hair if shown to them.
This is consistent with a model where even though we are cursed with only being able to use "categories" and not "facts", talking about reality is actually easy, and all that gets in the way is motivated reasoning, which can be dealt with by picking "categories" that are weird enough that the monkey brain fails to backpropagate its motivation to them. In such a setting, all we need to do to have access to something that is as good as facts (in the sense of behaving as if it were an aspect of objective reality, so two people with sufficient observation and discussion will always come to agree on its extension) is to pick a rich enough category of such monkey-proof signifiers, and gatekeep it. It doesn't matter if there are some grey-zone categories that are not quite factual in that sense, if we can just treat them as non-facts, and ground all our definitions in the gatekept category of facts.
Well, I'm using a mishmash of mathematical terminology, old and busted analytical philosophy and whatever schlock comes out of my badly trained neural net here, but the most serious logic I've done was in the context of computability theory, where the distinction is made and absolutely matters - people in that subculture like to build their whole notion of ontology around equality testing, and equality in intension and equality in extension are not the same. Going meta, the extension of an "intensional definition" is then all entities that have the same (or equivalent under some notion, if you are a potential mark for the HoTT pyramid scheme) syntactical definition, while the extension of an "extensional definition" is all entities whose definition has the same extension.
Okay, that clarifies it, but why would they do that? Does it help them produce good leather, perhaps because they want to batch-process all stock they get from the fishing guild together? If it actually produces better outcomes, then there shouldn't be a problem with them saying that whales are fish. If they do in fact wind up saying that whales have no hair, that seems like an instance of what I called monkey brain backpropagation of motivations further above. Why would they do that instead of just saying that as far as they are concerned, fish sometimes do have hair, but they are still going to process all fish together? Did someone pressure them to adopt the "fish have no hair" definition?
So, Im not offering a particular theory of language here. I agree that people that people do successfully make up words sometimes, and I agree that we can "understand in practice" how to follow Scotts recipe - my objection is that Scott advances a particular theory of why the observed successful definitions work, and proposes a particular way of generalising them - his recipe - based on that theory. But the theory is false, and the recipe nonsensical when taken literally. This is a problem, not because I cant follow it the non-literal way, but because I now have no reason to. I mean, you yourself go on about how following it in practice requires a gatekept set of predicates that we dont touch - thats nowhere in the instructions, and certainly everyone who didnt like Scott telling them "Your concept is up for grabs" would point their ears there (independently of your points about personal freedom). That wont be the only time you get problems.
Im not really familiar with this, but I dont think its relevant to our case. If I try to transfer that to language, I get extensional and intensional equivalence classes for predicates - but if I have two words, and I tell you that one was defined as intensionally equal to "is a boiled egg", and one was defined as extensionally equal to "is a boiled egg", then I dont think you have any way of figuring out which is which, except for oblique contexts, which bring us back to modal logic.
Why would I need such a problem? Its just supposed the give an example of something Scott cited as a "fact based on which to make categorisations" being open to the kind of dispute he thinks only categorisations are.
Why would the ministry of fishing say that whales are fish, instead of saying that as far as theyre concerned, theyre mammals, but theyll catch them anyway?
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