Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-rdxmf Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-22T05:34:23.696Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Woman as a Politically Significant Term: A Solution to the Puzzle

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

E. Diaz‐Leon
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

What does woman mean? According to two competing views, it can be seen as a sex term or as a gender term. Recently, Jennifer Saul has put forward a contextualist view, according to which woman can have different meanings in different contexts. The main motivation for this view seems to involve moral and political considerations, namely, that this view can do justice to the claims of trans women. Unfortunately, Saul argues, on further reflection the contextualist view fails to do justice to those moral and political claims that motivated the view in the first place. In this article I argue that there is a version of the contextualist view that can indeed capture those moral and political aims, and in addition, I use this case to illustrate an important and more general claim, namely, that moral and political considerations can be relevant to the descriptive project of finding out what certain politically significant terms actually mean.

Type
Articles
Information
Hypatia , Volume 31 , Issue 2 , Spring 2016 , pp. 245 - 258
Copyright
Copyright © 2016 by Hypatia, Inc.

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Bettcher, Talia Mae. 2009. Trans identities and first‐person authority. In You've changed: Sex reassignment and personal identity, ed. Shrage, Laurie. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Bettcher, Talia Mae. 2013. Trans women and the meaning of “woman.” In The philosophy of sex, ed. Power, Nicholas, Halwani, Raja, and Soble, Alan. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield.Google Scholar
Burgess, Alexis, and Plunkett, David. 2013a. Conceptual ethics I. Philosophy Compass 8 (12): 1091–1101.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Burgess, Alexis, and Plunkett, David. 2013b. Conceptual ethics II. Philosophy Compass 8 (12): 1102–10.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
DeRose, Keith. 1992. Contextualism and knowledge attributions. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 52 (4): 913–29.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
DeRose, Keith. 2009. The case for contextualism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fausto‐Sterling, Anne. 2000. Sexing the body. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Haslanger, Sally. 2000. Gender and race: (What) are they? (What) do we want them to be? Nous 34 (1): 31–55.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Haslanger, Sally. 2006. What good are our intuitions? Philosophical analysis and social kinds. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 80 (1): 89–118.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jenkins, Katharine. 2016. Amelioration and inclusion: Gender identity and the concept of woman. 126 (2): 394–421.Google Scholar
López de Sa, Dan. 2012. A note on woman. Presented at the SWIP‐UK, University of Stirling.Google Scholar
Mikkola, Mari. 2008. Feminist perspectives on sex and gender. In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Zalta, Edward. Fall 2008 edition. http://plato.stanford.edu/ (accessed November 11, 2015).Google Scholar
Plunkett, David, and Sundell, Tim. 2013. Disagreement and the semantics of normative and evaluative terms. Philosophers' Imprint 13 (23): 1–37.Google Scholar
Saul, Jennifer. 2006. Philosophical analysis and social kinds: Gender and race. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 80 (1): 119–43.Google Scholar
Saul, Jennifer. 2012. Politically significant terms and philosophy of language: Methodological issues. In Out from the shadows: Analytical feminist contributions to traditional philosophy, ed. Crasnow, Sharon and Superson, Anita. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Stanley, Jason. 2005. Knowledge and practical interests. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stein, Edward. 1999. The mismeasure of desire: The theory, science and ethics of sexual orientations. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar