Ontology for fantasists.
That’s a general principle then? So if you live your life as a snail you are a snail? If you live your life as a rutabaga you are a rutabaga? A car, a tree, a river, a planet, anything and everything?
Please offer further detail.
Comments
13 responses to “Helping our confusion”
No points. Points deducted for circular definition.
Total: -50/100.
Go on, mate; now define a snoozleblorg.
You will lose further points if you use the word as part of the definition.
“You’re a man if that’s how you live your life”.
If what’s how I live my life? I can’t think of any meaning for this other than ‘you’re a man if you carry out behaviours stereotypically associated with men’. I’m sure she’d dispute that interpretation when put so baldly, but what else could she mean?
Definition for ‘man’:
You’re a man if that’s how you live your life.
You’re a [You’re a man if that’s how you live your life] if that’s how you live your life.
You’re a [You’re a [You’re a man if that’s how you live your life] if that’s how you live your life] if that’s how you live your life.
Ad infinitum.
That explains posthumous transing – you don’t even have to “identify” as a man to be a man – you just have to live your life that way. You could swear you’re a woman, but if someone else thinks you’re living your life in a mannish manner, then you’re trans whether you like it or not. And any woman from the past who lived her life in a way someone else today thinks was mannish was trans whether she knew it or not.
I will refrain from clarifying how I think Ash Sarkar is living her life.
Doesn’t this go against standard trans doctrine, that if you have the strong urge to live your life as a man (whatever that means), that’s simply a sign that you always were a man?
GW,
It’s a big tent. So big, you can’t even see its sides.
And yet somehow you’re outside, and will never be allowed in.
But he can’t be a man ’cause he doesn’t smoke the same cigarettes as me. :P
twiliter #7 wins the internet today :)
Djolaman @ 2 – I think what she means is something to do with sincerity – you’re a man if you really think you are. A version of the Tinkerbell theory of truth.
GW@5, that was my thought as well. If any of us referred to a famous trans man as “back when Famous Trans Man was a woman [or “wasn’t yet a man”],” we’d be pilloried for it.
@10: If we said it about a Trans “Man”, few people would care.
If we said it about a Trans “Women”, we would get death threats.
I’m confused enough already. It’s doing just fine without any help, thanks.
That’s the thing, isn’t it? How can you think yourself a man without a concept of man-ness? What is the content of the thought?
When most of us say, “X is a Y,” what we mean is, “X has features a, b, and c, which are enumerated in the definition of Y.” When I say that the thing I just drew is a triangle, I mean that it is a two dimensional figure considering of three straight lines [and so on]. To think that a shape is a triangle is to think that it is a three sided polygon. But that theory of meaning is incompatible with Ash’s statement. How can I think that a shape is a triangle in the absence of a concept of that which constitutes triangle-ness?
Instead, it looks like what is meant is, “X is the sort of thing that may be called Y,” where permissibility is independent of the meaning of Y itself. It’s sort of a “social license” theory of meaning and thus truth, which is a kind of social constructivism so radical it boggles the mind.