Evie Willems

Rach Cosker-Rowland argues for a promising view of gender based on “fittingness”; to judge someone to be gender G is to judge it to be fitting to apply the norms for Gs to that person, and to have the gender identity ‘G’ is to take it to be fitting for oneself to be judged according to the norms for Gs. I defend a version of this view against the critique, from Viktoria Knoll, that it makes all assertions of gender out to be normative assertions about how one ought to treat others. I argue that we should recast fittingness as a relation of warrant between the upstream conditions of a language game move and its downstream consequences. This yields a minimalist version of fittingness for gender avowals and attributions that locates normativity not in their semantic content - the thing that worries Knoll - but in the obligations and entitlements taken on by speakers qua language game players (what Robert Brandom calls their “deontic score”). I demonstrate how this allows us to unify the two halves of Cosker-Rowland’s view more neatly than is otherwise possible, thus avoiding issues of circularity that afflict similar identity-first views of gender, and that threaten the fittingness view.

Recent work in the metaphysics of gender mostly focuses on trying to solve the exclusion problem - roughly, the problem of giving a metaphysical account of gender that doesn’t exclude anyone from their appropriate gender category. It is acknowledged that no completely satisfactory answer to the exclusion problem has yet been given in the literature; typically such theories fail to account for the diverse experiences and characteristics of trans people. One response is to adopt an anti-realism about gender properties, such as Heather Logue’s gender fictionalism. I rebut the move to an anti-realism, showing that it relies on assuming a representationalism about gender vocabulary that we need not hold. I put forward a non-representationalist theory of gender properties that analyses gender vocabulary in terms of its inferential profile, rather than its representational features. This theory constitutes a deflationary realism about gender properties; it solves the inclusion problem, and guarantees the first-person epistemic authority of an individual regarding their own gender identity.

Recent analytic metaphysics has seen a resurgence in deflationary approaches following in the footsteps of Rudolf Carnap. However, these views face unanswered questions: W.V.O. Quine is still widely held to have successfully rebutted Carnap’s deflationism in the 1950s by rejecting the analytic/synthetic distinction on which it was based. Both Quineans and Carnapians should accept a deflationary reading of the Quine-Carnap debate, since it turns on the ontological question of how to individuate languages. On this reading, whichever theory provides the best practical resources for individuating and discussing languages-as-entities should be accepted, by the lights of either theorist. I argue that Quine’s ontology of languages is problematic by his own reasoning, and that Carnap’s has better pragmatic utility, so should be preferred. I then sketch a way for the neo-Carnapian to extract analyticity from natural languages.