Indeed. And is it not also essentialist that definitions (essentialist or not) are necessary and sufficient condition for the use of words? If not, then how are words different from scribbles?Consul wrote: ↑Sat Apr 22, 2023 12:54 amA definition of a concept C is essentialist if and only if it states conditions which are both necessary and sufficient for something's falling under C. (By the way, this is an essentialist definition of the concept essentialist definition.)FlashDangerpants wrote: ↑Sat Apr 22, 2023 12:26 am Really, ok then. Well your definition is essentialist. The thing you said makes it less so is just an imaginary application of the same essence under an idealised imaginary scenario and you should know this already and I shouldn't need to tell you.
Likewise you already know that I gave you the outline of a non essentialist definition so there's no point wondering what it would look like. I don't know why you wrote any of that stuff.
This is why I propose that biological sex is based on a combination of traits:Consul wrote: ↑Sat Apr 22, 2023 12:54 am I concede that the conditions required for a fully adequate essentialist definition of sex in terms of gametes are very hard to come by—unless one is prepared to counterintuitively exclude all those individuals from having a sex which aren't at present in that stage of their life cycle during which they can actually contribute sperm or mature eggs to sexual reproduction, such as pre-pubescent boys/girls and post-menopausal women.
- chromosomes (in humans, XY is male, XX female)
- genitals (penis vs. vagina)
- gonads (testes vs. ovaries)
- hormones (males have higher relative levels of testosterone than women, while women have higher levels of estrogen)
- secondary sex characteristics that aren’t connected with the reproductive system but distinguish the sexes, and usually appear at puberty (breasts, facial hair, size of larynx, subcutaneous fat, etc.)
Using genitals and gonads alone, more than 99.9% of people fall into two non-overlapping classes—male and female—and the other traits almost always occur with these. If you did a principal components analysis using the combination of all five traits, you’d find two widely separated clusters with very few people in between. Those clusters are biological realities, just as horses and donkeys are biological realities, even though they can produce hybrids (sterile mules) that fall morphologically in between. "Male" and "female" refer to those two clusters of human beings.
What the woke trans-lusionals want to do is ignore that 99.9% probability of guessing one's sex using just two traits. That is what makes it useful to use the words "male" and "female". "Male" and "female" are only not useful less than 0.1% of the time, but then we have another essentialist word for that group - intersex - which is essentially dependent upon the existence of the other two to be useful itself.
How is "gender" useful if it does not equate to sex? If there is no essential definition then one's gender can mean something entirely different than someone else's version and we'd be talking past each other - not participating in each other's conversation at the other's conceptual level - as FlashDangerpants likes to put it.
In such a case, no one is wrong, but then we aren't communicating if what one means is different from another's meaning of the word. In this case, the words are useless - nothing more than scribbles because words are only useful in communicating, and if two people are not using the same definition they are doing nothing more than drawing scribbles and making sounds with their mouths.