A relativist ameliorative approach to gender terms

Abstract

Gender terms play a crucial role in our lives, in that they allow us to categorize ourselves and others as of a certain gender, which in turn has important social, moral and legal implications. In contemporary philosophy of language, the discussion of the meaning of gender terms has been mostly conducted within ameliorative projects (Haslanger (2000)). Roughly, an ameliorative project investigates what the meaning of words should be, in opposition to a descriptive project which investigates how meanings are. The main idea is that philosophy of language should strive to provide accounts of "loaded" terms that are sensitive to social, moral, and political ideals: e.g., avoid discrimination, bring about more justice etc. In this paper, I propose a novel ameliorative account of gender terms. By focusing entirely on the case of trans people (who didn't undergo gender-affirming medical procedures), I show that one of the main views in the semantics of natural language expressions (relativism) can be successfully appealed to in order to yield the ameliorative account sought after. However, since an orthodox version of the view is unsuitable, I propose a flexible version of relativism, one that is independently motivated by various considerations in the literature on perspectival expressions such as predicates of taste, moral and aesthetic terms, epistemic modals (e.g., problematic cases of truth-assessment, data about retraction, etc.). I base the flexibility in question on the general notion of the importance of the asserter's situation, which in application to gender terms is replaced with the notion of the situation of the subject of the gender attribution. With this latter notion in hand, all the problematic cases for the orthodox relativist view (and for the other views on the market) are handled satisfactorily.