Not the social kind: anti-naturalist mistakes in the

philosophical history of womanhood

DRAFT. NOT FOR CITATION.

Version: 24th February 2020

Kathleen Stock, University of Sussex

1. Introduction

Imagine that an English-speaking alien descends from the skies, wishing to acquaint itself
with the kinds of thing called “men” and “women” in English-speaking countries on Earth.
The alien opens a dictionary, reading that a man is an adult human male, and a woman an
adult human female, and coming to understand that the two entities are supposed to be, in
some sense, taxonomically parallel. It then picks up some philosophy articles and discovers
that this view is now considered thoroughly discredited. Depending on who you ask, to be a
woman is: to occupy a particular kind of social role (Oakley 1972; Rubin 1975; MacKinnon
1987, 1989; Butler 1990; Alcoff 2006; Ásta 2013, 2018); to be a member of a particular
series (Young 1994); to resemble a particular paradigm sufficiently closely (Stoljar 1995;
Heyes 2000); to have a certain complex behavioural disposition (McKitrick 2015); to have a
certain internally constituted identity (Bettcher 2009, 2013; Jenkins 2016); or to exist as
such only relative to some contexts but not others (Moi 1999:35; Barnes 2019; Ásta 2013,
2018). The alien even learns that, after reflection, some philosophers have concluded that
there is no such thing as a woman (Derrida 1978; Spelman 1988). Another philosopher has
recently concluded that we don’t need a theory of a woman after all, but can rely for all
important purposes on our “reference fixing extensional intuitions”, which are “pre-
doxastic” and “should not be taken to inform us about some underlying concept that our
language use supposedly expresses” (Mikkola 2016: 106-110).

Feeling confused and overloaded, our alien takes a break, turning instead to the question of
what a man is. Despite searching, it fails to find anything like as sustained a rejection of the
original dictionary definition or analogous controversy. What exactly, it wonders, accounts
for this difference?

It seems to me that to answer this question properly – that is, to explain why theories of
womanhood have become so complicated and vexed, while at the same time theories of
manhood remain mostly unquestioned, at least directly - would require, not just
philosophers, but also sociologists and psychologists. I’m only able to address the
philosophical aspect here. I’ll trace a potted history of the philosophical debate about
womanhood and identify two crucial points at which things went wrong. The first was
where when it was agreed that the concept WOMAN must identify something social not
biological. The second was where it was decided by nearly everyone that the concept
WOMAN faces a legitimate challenge of being insufficiently “inclusive”, cashed out in a
certain way. I’ll argue that both of these moves are only intelligible, if they are at all, in the
context of a general anti-naturalist picture drawn from either post-structuralism or radical
feminism. They become incoherent when adopted by methodological naturalists.
Methodological naturalists – and especially those concerned about tracking oppression and
discrimination – have no good reason to deny that WOMAN refers to a pre-given, biological
kind.

2. Background naturalist commitments

Here are some general commitments, stated up front. They won’t be shared by everyone,
and in particular those influenced by post-structuralist and radical feminist thought will
reject them. Significantly though, another group of antagonists will, I suspect, share many of
them. (And even if that turns out to be false, a lot of neutral readers will do so.)

My general stance is a broadly methodologically naturalist one, insofar as I assume that

philosophy and science can work together to explain the world in complementary fashion
(cf. Papineau 2016). I understand concepts to be, roughly, components of thoughts.
Possession of a concept enables a thinker to have thoughts involving that concept (Burgess
and Plunkett 2003a: 1095). Generally speaking, in their optimal form, concepts pick out
distinctive kinds of thing in the world in a way that helps us better negotiate the world, in a
broad sense of “better” meaning that they both reflect the world and are in line with
various purposes we have. Recognisable purposes served by a concept might include:
contribution to true representation; clarity; honesty; consistency; ideological parsimony; the
facilitation of justified belief; and computational tractability (Burgess and Plunkett 2013b:
1104-1105.) A particularly important purpose of concepts is causal explanation and
prediction (ibid.). Baldly put, we need adequate concepts to help us explain why certain
things tend to happen to certain kind of entities, in virtue of properties those entities have;
to predict if and when those things are going to happen in future, and under what
circumstances; and if necessary, to try to stop those things happening, or make them
happen more.

As this perhaps suggests, concepts also serve various “individual projects, interests, and
aims” (ibid), though often enough, interests aren’t idiosyncratic but widely shared amongst
language-users. Some concepts pick out distinctive kinds of thing in the world, in at least
some sense, but kinds in which there is no genuine interest or connection to any
recognisable widespread purpose. For instance, we tend to be much more interested in
preserving the concepts GREEN and BLUE rather than the gerrymandered GRUE and BLEEN,
and this isn’t a coincidence: the former concepts are more useful for negotiating the world
than the latter1. It’s not a coincidence that most languages tend to have many more
colloquial ways of discriminating vertebrate organisms than invertebrate, for this fact is
indicative of our relative lack of interest in the latter and our great number of interests in
the former, from a variety of perspectives (Dupré 1993: 19).

1
An object is grue if and only if It’s observed before t and is green, or else is not so observed
and is blue. An object is bleen if and only if it’s observed before t and is blue, or else is not
so observed and is green (Goodman 1954: 74-75; discussed by Burgess and Plunkett 2013a:
1093).
I understand some but not all concepts to have positive or negative normative implications.
Those that do include thick concepts, which involve both evaluation and description, and
also slurs and pejoratives (Värynyn 2019a; 2019b). Those that don’t include purely
descriptive concepts, implying no evaluation. This isn’t to say that descriptive concepts
don’t often contingently have evaluative connotations, but these are detachable in
principle. If it turns out that, in some sense, all meaning is “normative” (see Burgess and
Plunkett 2013a: 1095) then room had still better be left for this distinction, fundamental to
any kind of naturalism.

I take a realist position on both natural and social kinds (and perhaps evaluative kinds too,
depending on the background theory). When it works well, conceptual classification reflects
pre-existent aspects of the world. However, this doesn’t imply a particular heavily
committed realism. It’s in line with a pluralist or “promiscuous” realism, according to which
the material world may be representationally carved up via many different and equally
empirically acceptable conceptual schema, sometimes cross-cutting one another, and
depending on the interest we have in it. Equally, a realist view such as this one need not be
committed to thinking of concepts as having clean edges. It can easily admit that boundaries
are vague and contain many hard or indeterminate cases (Dupré 1993; Ludlow 2014: 65).

Meanwhile, I follow Peter Ludlow (2014: 62-64) in holding that any investigation into the
world, and in how to classify the things in the world, is simultaneously an investigation into
the best concepts to use to identify those things, so that in a non-trivial way, all such
investigations are metalinguistic. Also following Ludlow (2014) I take analysing or “litigating”
of concepts to be essentially dynamic, a point whose relevance will emerge in a later
section.

Moving away from generalities, a further explicit commitment is this. In nearly every
culture, there are two different sets of social norms - stereotypes, expectations, and
assumed roles - contingently associated with being female and male, respectively: what we
might call “femininity” and “masculinity” for that culture, and call “gender” collectively. The
norms of femininity and masculinity, when culturally imposed upon females and males and
then internalised, tend to produce two sets of socially-inflected behaviours and
psychological traits2. The target of my argument depends on these assumptions too but
goes much further. It essentially associates this social aspect with womanhood, in what I’ll
argue is an unmotivated and implausible way.

3. The Socialites

Here’s a quick history of two significant stages in the concept of WOMAN; broad-brush, no
doubt, but capturing an important intellectual trajectory for my purposes. Until at least the
mid-20th Century, the English-language concept WOMAN was near-universally used to
identify the property of BEING AN ADULT HUMAN FEMALE, so that the two concepts were
synonymous or nearly. Many people still use it that way (as noted by Bettcher 2013: 236).

2
This isn’t the very strong claim that no apparently gendered behaviour is biologically determined, but only
that at least some aren’t.
However, from the late 1960s onwards, it was decided by several philosophers that the
concept WOMAN properly referred, as such, to membership of a social kind.

Typically, the latter thesis isn’t put by its holders as a claim about a concept. Instead it’s
presented as a metaphysical claim about the world, and about what a woman essentially is.
Nonetheless, given my prior commitment to construing metaphysical investigations into
things in the worlds as involving the active litigation of concepts, and vice versa, I’ll treat
these two as equivalent activities in what follows.

I’ll call the people who think that WOMAN refers to a social kind, “the Socialites”. Broadly
speaking – and of course glossing over many important theoretical nuances and differences
between these authors - notable Socialites include Anne Oakley (1972); Gayle Rubin (1975);
Catharine MacKinnon (1987, 1989); Judith Butler (1990); Linda Alcoff (2006); and Ásta
(2018). I’ll also personify the position that Socialites reject, as a “Biologist”. A Biologist
thinks that the concept WOMAN properly refers to all and only adult human females. As will
become clear, I’m a Biologist.

Amongst Socialites, there are two importantly distinct sub-groups. The first, I’ll call “anti-
naturalist Socialites”3. This group is distinguished by its presumed discovery that there is no
such thing as natural biological sex or being female or male in a pre-given sense. Sex is
wholly socially constructed. For this group, then, WOMAN identifies a social kind because
WOMAN identifies the property of being female, and (it turns out) BEING FEMALE identifies
membership of a wholly social kind.

The second group of Socialites are methodologically naturalist. That is, like me, they see
philosophy, broadly speaking, as potentially a continuous project with science, seeking the
same kinds of ultimate ends by different means. Naturalist Socialites accept there is
something pre-given and natural, called biological sex, or being female or male. Equally,
though, they deny that the concept WOMAN refers, as such, to it.

I’ll now look at each of these positions more closely. I’ll argue that, while being an anti-
naturalist Socialite may well turn out to be untenable on the basis of the implausible general
intellectual positions in which it’s grounded, being a naturalist Socialite is incoherent, not as
a result of its own background but in spite of it.

First though, I anticipate an objection. It might be argued that there are, in practice, no
naturalist Socialites. It’s true that authors don’t always make their background
methodological commitments particularly clear, and some of the ones I might put in this
group seem at least partly influenced by anti-realist traditions (e.g. Ásta 2018). However,
even so, I’ll still have shown something important if I’m right. Namely: that there is no
coherent methodologically naturalist position, according to which WOMAN refers to a social
kind and not to a biological kind. That’s surely an interesting result in itself.

4. Anti-naturalist Socialites

3
“Antinaturalistic” theories of womanhood are illuminatingly discussed in Alcoff 2016: Ch. 5 and especially 6.
Broadly speaking, there are two main intellectual routes which lead to being an anti-
naturalist Socialite. The first is post-structuralism. Take, for instance, probably the most
famous example, Judith Butler. Butler concludes that WOMAN refers to a kind of calcified
but wholly contingent social role, performed repeatedly over time, and identified as
“womanly” only in terms of its correspondence with certain cultural norms (1990). An
important premise involves rejecting the idea of a pre-given biological sex. WOMAN refers
to being female; yet being female is just as constructed as being a woman. Hence, by
transitivity, WOMAN refers to membership of a social kind. Butler writes:

“perhaps this construct called “sex” is as culturally constructed as gender; indeed,

perhaps it was always already gender, with the consequence that the distinction
between sex and gender turns out to be no distinction at all….” (Butler 1990: 9-10).

It’s important for later argument to note Butler’s general background commitments here.
It’s true that she discusses some relatively realist-sounding conclusions about intersex
people to support her view (e.g. 1990: 145-50 et passim). However on their own these
considerations would scarcely be convincing; for “true” intersexuality is exceptionally rare
(Sax 2002), and more to the point, from a naturalistic perspective some degree of variation
is predicted in every biological system without being taken to threaten the integrity of real
and stable biological categories (Dupré 1993: 54-5). Rather, Butler’s view gets what
purchase it does from being scaffolded by a particular metaphysical and linguistic worldview
(Alcoff 2006: 139-144). Words gets meaning only in relation to other words, placed in
hierarchies (Derrida 1982; Butler 1990: 160). There are no stable metaphysical kind-
essences, to be discovered via philosophical analysis; concepts of a stable, unified self, or of
human nature, or of any pre-existing persistent substrata to humanity are fictions (Foucault
1966). Language and categorization are means of creating contingent, normative hierarchies
of dominance and subordination, rather than producing cognitive tools with which to better
negotiate a pre-existing world (Foucault 1977; Butler 1990: xxxi et passim). In that context,
it’s unsurprising that neither WOMAN nor FEMALE is taken to denote anything stable or
pre-given, and that both are interpreted only as contingently imposed Western taxonomical
schema, applied in the service of covert power relations.

A different route to becoming an anti-naturalist Socialite is via a version of radical feminism

which says that many binary concepts, including concepts such as FEMALE and MALE, are
articulations of patriarchal power rather than neutral reflections of a prior natural binary.
On this view biological sex is constructed as a product of male dominance. For instance:

“The category of sex does not exist a priori, before all society. And as a category of
dominance it cannot be a product of natural dominance but of the social dominance of
women by men, for there is but social dominance.” (Wittig 1982: 66. See also Frye 1983:
25; MacKinnon 1987:3; 1989: 113; Gatens 1996: Ch.1).

Here too then, WOMAN refers to a social kind because it refers to being female, and BEING
FEMALE refers only to membership of a social kind (Gatens 1996: Ch.1). As with the post-
structuralist version, this conclusion emerges largely as a function of a more general
metaphysical and linguistic picture, involving the influence of patriarchy on our fundamental
categories. We can attack the general pictures, and many have. But there doesn’t seem to
be any obvious mismatch here between background and foreground. This point will form a
stark contrast with the next position I look at.

Equally - though doubtless they wouldn’t put it this way themselves - being an anti-
naturalist Socialite fits with familiar naturalistic models of conceptual improvement. On one
such model, various properties exist in the world (in this case: being female; being male;
being a woman; being a man). We already have concepts to identify these properties,
though we may not yet properly understand them. Next, theorists propose a new
understanding of these properties. As indicated, they argue that HAVING A SEX/BEING
FEMALE /BEING MALE /BEING A WOMAN /BEING A MAN all identify the same socially
constructed properties, not naturally pre-given properties. Though about kinds rather than
individuals, this looks roughly like finding out that Hesperus is the same thing as Phosphorus
(Kripke 1990). Even radical changes to the initial concepts can perhaps be coherently
understood as “talking about the same thing” as before, so long as the function of the
original concepts is preserved by the new amended versions (Nado 2019).

An alternative account of the same process might have it that the original concepts turned
out to be so deficient that it became clear they should be eliminated and replaced with
something better4. Applied to the views just quoted, we might then say that the views
suggest that there is nothing to which the concept of HAVING A BIOLOGICAL SEX or BEING
FEMALE (etc.) refers, so we should eliminate and replace those concepts with something
purely social (e.g. HAVING A GENDER; BEING A WOMAN; BEING A MAN). Either way, this is
relatively familiar methodological terrain. Again, this will form an instructive contrast with
the next view to be examined.

5. Naturalist Socialites

The naturalist Socialite position is very different. It’s not particularly influenced either by
post-structuralism or radical feminism, or not consciously anyway. I’m going to assume it’s
signed up to many of the background naturalistic commitments I articulated for myself
earlier. It accepts there is something pre-given and natural, called biological sex, or being
female or male, even if It’s sometimes fuzzy round the edges. Equally, though, it denies that
the concept WOMAN identifies or should identify beings in that biological state.

Here are two descriptions of this view, each indicating its historical prevalence:

“Many feminists take it that what It’s to be a woman is to be a member of the

feminine gender.. On this view, an individual is a woman if she satisfies social
expectations about femininity. Being a woman, then, is different from being
biologically female” (Stone 2007: 141).

“[M]any [feminists] have historically endorsed a sex/gender distinction. Its standard

formulation holds that ‘sex’ denotes human females and males, and depends on
biological features (chromosomes, sex organs, hormones, other physical features).

4
See Haslanger (2006a: 90) for a distinction between “social constructionists” and “error theorists” or
“eliminativists”, which corresponds roughly to the distinction I’m making here.
 Then again, ‘gender’ denotes women and men and depends on social factors (social
roles, positions, behavior, self-ascription).’ (Mikkola 2016: 21. See also Saul 2003: 19;
Oakley 1972: 115)

It’s important to note that authors who I’m counting as “naturalist Socialites” wouldn’t
necessarily describe themselves as naturalists. Often that’s because what they mean by
“naturalist”, in their specific contexts of argument, involves a commitment to what I’m
calling being a “Biologist” – that is, thinking of WOMAN as identifying all and only adult
human females. For instance, as will be clear later, I would count Sally Haslanger as a
naturalist Socialite, though she explicitly denies that she is a naturalist (2006). Nonetheless,
she retains explicit commitment to at least some of the methodologically naturalist and
realist commitments I articulated in an earlier section: for instance, that there are pre-
existing properties in the world, prior to our identifying thoughts of them, and that we need
to develop concepts responsive to them, especially when it comes to providing causal
explanations (2000b: 123; 2006: 90).

In contrast to anti-naturalists discussed in the previous section, the naturalist Socialite

position apparently promotes what looks like an unusual methodological move. To be clear:
this isn’t the unobjectionable stance that there are a) biological females and b) clusters of
culturally contingent social norms, roles, and expectations directed towards females in
virtue of being female, and towards males in virtue of being male, which we might
collectively call “gender”. Rather, It’s the claim that the concept WOMAN properly refers to
b), or to something related to b); and not to a). That is, the naturalist Socialite position
promotes accepting that there always was, and still are, the properties in the world of
possessing a biological sex, and being female, and that these are in most important respects
exactly as we always understood them to be. It accepts that until the mid-20th Century, the
English-language concept WOMAN was taken to be synonymous with BEING FEMALE.
Nonetheless, it insists, WOMAN does not properly identify being female, but something
completely different: “gender” understood as membership of a social kind. Equally - though
it’s barely discussed - MAN properly refers not to being male, but to membership of a
different social kind. So, returning to women, the proposal seems to be that we take an
existing concept, formerly mapping onto biological females (WOMAN), and understand it to
have changed its proper target so it now maps on to something social. Yet at the same time,
we don’t eliminate our concept of BEING FEMALE. I assume that this proposed semantic
shift isn’t supposed to be a merely trivial swapping of lexical items.

Effectively, I think this makes all naturalist Socialites committed to a fairly radical
“conceptual engineering” of WOMAN. At the very least, they must concede, the extant term
is ambiguous between two different things. Their aim seems to be definitively shift the
extension of WOMAN more thoroughly towards a social kind and away from a biological
one.

At this point the surely arises: why would we, as language-users, try to do this? Why not
simply leave the concept GENDER to cover whatever social kind is proposed as important to
identify, and leave WOMAN to refer to biological sex?
Ludlow (2014) describes how collaborative conceptual modulation often follows the
recognition that ‘we need to sharpen a word meaning if we are successfully to resolve some
problem or make a decision and take action on it’ (2014: 40). Established norms for this
process include ‘Modulations should take undisputed cases and argue analogically for new
cases (of against familiar cases)’; ‘Modulations should respect the bulk of canonical cases’;
‘Modulations should track (not cross-cut) important properties’; and ‘Modulations should
not be too taxonomically disruptive’ ((2014: 45-48). Yet none of these norms seem to be
observed in the proposed shift of WOMAN to gender. In particular, this does not respect the
bulk of existing canonical cases, making ensuing communication breakdown predictable. In
fact, I think this is what we frequently see: without the majority of the non-Humanities-
educated public on board with the proposed change, we are left with (at least) two sets of
conversations about “women”, talking past one another, often to toxic effect.

The proposed change also invites taxonomical disruption elsewhere. For instance, it disrupts
the established modulation of the related concept of LESBIAN. LESBIAN used to securely
identify a biological female attracted to other biological females: a useful category to have
for many explanatory purposes. Yet others now take LESBIAN to identify someone who
occupies a given social role (that is, the role allegedly inhabited by WOMAN as such) and
who is attracted to others occupying that same social role. On this rival usage, both males,
and females exclusively attracted to males, count as lesbians, as long as they and their
prospective partners both occupy the same social role (Stock 2019). This is another massive
and unhelpful shift, effectively putting two kinds of entity in which we have an interest
under one categorical umbrella, and leaving us with no easy way of identifying the original5.

With such considerations working against it, it will take a strong case to accept what the
naturalist Socialite proposes. In the next two sections, I’ll examine what reasons have been
offered, and conclude that the case isn’t strong enough.

6. Naturalist Socialites and mistaken appeals from ordinary language

One apparent reason to be a naturalist Socialite comes via some sort of appeal to ordinary
language. See for instance this from Alison Stone:

“Consider that in everyday language, ‘woman’ not only suggest a female human
being. It also suggests someone who occupies a specific social role, as in the phrase
“a woman’s place is in the kitchen” and it suggests someone with a specific set of
psychological traits such as being liable to cry (hence the phrase ‘boys don’t cry’). In
short the word woman is ambiguous between sex and gender.” (Alison Stone,
Feminist Philosophy, p.141)

Yet this is unconvincing as grounds for thinking that WOMAN identifies a social kind, even
ambiguously. Claims like “a woman’s place is in the kitchen” and “boys don’t cry” can easily
be taken, and I think should obviously be taken, as synthetic claims not analytic one. They
either function to describe general empirical tendencies in the behaviour of women and

5
“Trans lesbian” and “cis lesbian” won’t do, because it doesn’t include trans men, many of whom count as
lesbians (same-sex attracted females) according to the original classification.
boys, or to place normative expectations on those groups, or they do both. Either way, it
would be bizarre to take these as analytic claims about what it is, necessarily, to be a
woman or boy; just as it would be bizarre to take the claim that “pine tables in kitchens look
cheap and outdated’ to mean that if something doesn’t look cheap and outdated, it
necessarily can’t be a pine table.

Another unconvincing appeal to ordinary language is made by Talia Bettcher who argues
that

adjectives such as "womanly," "manly," "girly," and the like.. have cultural traits
packed right into their meaning. When somebody says, "Well, no. That's a bit too
girly for me, I'm afraid," we shouldn't expect them to be complaining about having to
dig ditches. ..So it again seems that cultural roles assigned on the basis of sex are
part of the semantic content.” (2009: 104).

Though I agree that a stereotyped set of characteristics is typically built into the meaning of
WOMANLY, it’s unclear what relevance this has to the meaning of WOMAN, which is
obviously a separate concept, though etymologically related. It’s easy to find analogous
cases of adjectives, identifying some restricted set of attributes, which even so don’t
retrospectively alter either the intension or extension of the noun to which they are
etymologically related either way. CHILDISH and SPINSTERISH are two of them. Just as not
all women are womanly, not all children are childish, or spinsters spinsterish. (For a
different objection, see Bogardus 2019b).

In a different appeal from ordinary language, certain claims of Simone De Beauvoir are
sometimes taken to show that WOMAN identifies something social and not something
biological. On the first page of The Second Sex De Beauvoir suggestively writes that:

‘are there even women? True, the theory of the eternal feminine still has its
followers; they whisper, even in Russia, “women are still very much women” (2011:
3)

‘speaking of certain women, the experts proclaim “They are not women” even
though they have a uterus like the others’. (ibid).

‘everyone agrees there are females in the human species; today, as in the past, they
make about half of humanity; and yet we are .. urged, “Be Women, stay women,
become woman.” (ibid).

An assumption frequently made seems to be that De Beauvoir must be pointing out that the
concept WOMAN refers to something normative: a set of cultural stereotypes about what
count as a “good” or “ideal” woman, rather than to a biological female (see for instance,
Butler 1990: 11; Haraway 1991: 243, footnote 9; Wittig 1992; McKitrick 2015; 2576).
Actually, it seems clear on further analysis that De Beauvoir did not mean to imply that
WOMAN refers to something detachable from sex (Moi 1999: 73-84 et passim). But in any
case, leaving aside textual interpretation, we can still ask whether the points sometimes
mistakenly attributed to De Beauvoir give any succour to naturalist Socialites. Specifically,
we can ask whether the fact that language-users sometimes talk about “real women” or
those who are “very much women” (etc.) has any bearing on whether WOMAN refers to a
social kind.

I think that it doesn’t, unless it shows something about any concept subject to similar
constructions – which is many of them. As was pointed out by J.L. Austin (1962: 70; see also
Hall 1959), whether something is counted as a “real” or not often depends on what is
effectively being excluded as uninteresting, by way of the contrast, in the current
conversational context. Take for instance, the concept of DIAMOND. A jeweller might well
say of a huge, particularly sparkly diamond “now, that’s a real diamond!”. The point applies
to potentially many discussions about diamonds, whether or not “real” is actually used in
speech. For instance, the jeweller might say to a seller of a small, scrappy piece of double-
bonded carbon “Call that a diamond? That’s not a diamond”, though both jeweller and
seller both know that It’s a diamond. Similar moves can be made for almost any concept
which identifies a kind of entity in which we have a specific, sometimes even temporary,
interest, in terms of a few limited properties. In other words, as competent speakers, we
can easily adapt, and understand others’ adaption of, our use of noun concepts on the fly,
to communicate the fact that an entity, understood by all parties as unproblematically
falling under a noun concept, exemplifies a certain set of contingent social or other
expectations of that sort of thing really well - or doesn’t.

To support this, we might add that, as described by Ludlow (2014), in conversational

contexts or “microlanguages” speakers can relatively easily temporarily invent or adapt
concepts to suit present conversational purposes. Often this happens unreflectively, via a
process of synchronizing, as speakers adjust understandings of a concept for present
purposes to match their interlocutors, racing to catch up if they haven’t heard a word
before or don’t understand it. To do this they might employ processes such as ‘turn-taking,
ample repair and self-repair, challenges, and requests for clarification’ (Ludlow 2014: 28).
Sometimes, when a speaker disagrees with a given present modulation of a concept by
someone else, on grounds of inaccuracy or for any other reason, and the stakes are high
enough, she may be willing to make a stand and get involved in actively litigating the
concept in question. At other times, however, it can be well understood that the
modulation is temporary, and that its purpose isn’t to say anything fundamental about the
entity, in a way that makes an important practical difference. This is what I think is
happening in the case of claims about who is “still very much a woman” or what is “not a
(real) diamond” (etc.). There is what we might call a “temporary escalation” of a concept,
whereby concepts, plus attributive qualifiers such as “real”, “not real” (etc.) and/or certain
emphases and tones of voice, are used by speakers to draw attention to particular
contingent properties of objects, currently of interest, or the lack of them. Normally, in such
uses, it’s well-understood by both speaker and hearers that there is no genuine claim being
made about general conditions of qualification or disqualification to the named category.

The same point, I think, applies to many modern feminist interpretations of Sojourner
Truth’s famous 1851 speech “Ain’t I a Woman?”. Truth reasonably points out that the white
and middle-class stereotypes that ‘women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over
ditches, and to have the best place everywhere’ don’t apply to her, as a former slave; yet
she is still a woman (Brezina 2005). This insight is sometimes thought to support the idea
that WOMAN refers to something social not biological. Yet, I would argue, historical claims
that women like Sojourner Truth weren’t women, or real woman, were temporarily
escalated uses of WOMAN; in other contexts, I submit, the same people who made them
would unproblematically acknowledge that Truth was a woman. To make this point is in no
way to denigrate the valuable observation that language users will tend prejudicially and
culpably to withhold temporarily escalated uses of WOMAN to certain kinds of women they
don’t value: e.g. black women, as pointed out by Truth, and lesbians (Wittig 1992).
Analogously, jewellers may temporarily withhold the word DIAMOND from diamonds that
they don’t value, in terms of their commercial interests in them. But this doesn’t establish
that DIAMOND should mean something other than double-bonded carbon. And a fortiori
nor does it establish that DIAMOND should refer only to the socially-valued properties of
double-bonded carbon, such as being clear, sparkly, and big.

7. Naturalist Socialites and mistaken appeals from “anti-essentialism”

A second reason which historically has tended to be offered in support of the naturalist
Socialite view says that the attempt to define WOMAN in terms of biology – that is, what I
earlier called the Biologist position - is perniciously “essentialist” in a way that the Socialite
position commendably isn’t. This accusation tends to take various confused forms.

Sometimes an accusation of essentialism towards the Biologist seems effectively to be the

assumption that any account of the concepts of WOMAN and MAN, cashed out in terms of a
biological binary, cannot cope with the empirical fact of biological variation, in the form of
intersex people (though they don’t mention “essentialism” here as such, this charge is made
by e.g. Bach 2012: 247; Jenkins 2016: 410, ff. 39; Ásta 2018: 72; Barnes 2019: 16 ). But this is
to saddle the Biologist with a commitment to neatness which of course she need not have..
A “binary” in biology always comes with the expectation of small amounts of variation (see
Byrne 2019 and Bogardus 2019b for related discussion). It’s also arguable that all concepts
are indeterminate when it comes to peripheral hard cases (Ludlow 2014: Ch. 4).

Sometime the charge of essentialism is effectively that of “biological reductionism”: that

effectively, the Biologist must be saying that what is important about, the identity of
individual women, as persons, is their biology, so that a woman is “reduced” to some set of
privileged biological traits. Yet, as is convincingly pointed out by Natalie Stoljar, this isn’t the
case; for characterising what is essential to membership of a kind, to be classified as such,
need have no consequences for what counts as essential to the identity of individual
members of that kind (1995).

A third popular case sometimes made against the supposed pernicious “essentialism” of the
Biologist and in favour of the Socialite effectively amounts to a rejection of “biological
determinism” – that is, a rejection of the view that women’s behaviour and psychology are
significantly determined by their biology. That is, it seems to be assumed by some that the
Biologist’s position on classification somehow leads, intellectually speaking, to biological
determinism (see e.g. Bach 2012: 4; Mikkola 2016: 21; and criticism by Alcoff 2006: 153-175;
Bogardus 2019b)
Yet on most theories of reference that aren’t post-structuralist or influenced by radical
feminism, litigating a concept such as WOMAN so that it tracked only a biological kind could
have no detailed and contested empirical consequences like this, automatically flowing from
the classification as such. Equally, if biological determinism did turn out to be true, choosing
to avoid a concept of WOMAN cashed out in terms of biology wouldn’t save us from it.

Why have naturalist Socialites tended to make such mistakes? Part of the reason seems to
be that dialectically, many are rejecting prominent anti-naturalist conclusions, while
unnecessarily ceding many anti-naturalist premises in their responses. For instance, as we
have seen, post-structuralists such as Butler hold that whenever a concept such as FEMALE
is constructed, it sets up a hierarchy of power. It’s unsurprising that, on this sort of view,
classifying WOMAN as essentially female is taken to reduce womanhood to biology in a
normative way. Equally, at least around the time of the Second Wave, naturalist Socialites
were often responding defensively to prominent radical feminist account of womanhood.
The latter sought to recover some non-patriarchal symbolic account of the experience of
womanhood. This was often put in symbolic terms relating to biological “essence” (Alcoff
2006: 135-8). Yet there is no need for naturalist Feminists to get involved in either fight on
such terms.

8. Naturalist Socialites and appealing to the point of a concept

As indicated earlier, I take Haslanger to be offering a naturalist Socialite account. As is well-

known, she presents her account as “ameliorative”, which is to say it concerns the concept
of WOMAN we should have, rather than the one we do have. However, in practice, I take it
that this doesn’t distinguish her project in kind from that of other naturalist Socialites, who,
as I’ve defined them, also argue for a thorough-going reorientation of the concept of
WOMAN. It seems reasonable to think that they too start with the question ‘what is the
point of the concept in question?’ and assume their proposed reorientation will enhance
‘our conceptual resources to serve our (critically examined) purposes’; two features that
Haslanger takes to be definitive of the amelioriative approach in general (2006: 95-6).

Haslanger thinks that the point of the concept WOMAN should be relative to four broad
purposes: i) to explain inequality between females and males; ii) to be sensitive to
differences between females and males; iii) to track how “gender” is “implicated in a broad
range of social phenomena” and iv) to take seriously the agency of women (2000a: 36). The
account she comes up with in response to these purposes says (roughly) that W is a woman
iff W is perceived to be biologically female; that perception marks W within a given culture
as someone who ought to be socially subordinated; and W is in fact socially subordinated on
this basis (2000a: 42).

Haslanger sometimes suggests she isn’t changing the subject about WOMAN by this
account, but “better revealing what we mean” (2006: 110). If this were really true, it would
make her immune to some of the considerations I gave in Section 5 above. That is, it would
make her more like the person who discovers that Hespherus is in fact Phosphorus, than a
person who argues that HESPERUS shouldn’t refer to an astral body at all, whilst continuing
to acknowledge the existence of the original astral body, as originally understood. Yet this
seems implausible. It’s clear that not even that long ago, what everyone meant by WOMAN
was being female, and that many of us still do; while Haslanger’s proposed new target
concept is something completely social; and yet her concept of BEING FEMALE as something
non-social remains intact (2000a: 49). This counts as a radical reorientation, or nothing
does. (See Saul 2006; Bogardus 2019a).

My main criticism to Haslanger’s account can be made succinctly. Three out of four of the
purposes she identifies (i) iii) and iv) just listed) were never the point of the concept WOMAN
and can be achieved by other conceptual means. That isn’t to say that we don’t have such
purposes, but that they aren’t best served by a concept of WOMAN. What Haslanger has
done, unquestionably, is to identify an existent social phenomenon (roughly, that of people
– usually but not always, actual females - being systematically socially subordinated on the
basis of being perceived to be female). If we are interested in social justice, as we should be,
then we should have a concept that refers to this phenomenon, which is real, and has causal
implications we need to track. What I reject, is that this phenomenon is what WOMAN,
either actually or ideally, identifies (Saul 2006: 136). At this point the considerations of
earlier sections kick back in – a lack of fit with canonical cases, the ensuing taxonomical
disruption, and a lack of grounding in any convincing reasons taken from either ordinary
language or anti-essentialism.

A related point to the one about taxonomical disruption is this, extending also to other
naturalist Socialite accounts. As indicated earlier, I take it that part of the point of the
concept of WOMAN is to explain and predict what sorts of things happen to women, and
why. In some cases we will properly want to stop those things happening; in others we will
want to promote them. To switch the topic of WOMAN to that of a social kind, subordinated
or otherwise, rather than a biological one, disconnects the concept of WOMAN from
hundreds of other causal-explanatory discourses in which it was once unproblematically and
fruitfully located. For instance, discussions about women’s distinctive medical needs (an
enormous topic about which we still know very little comparatively); women’s economic
situation as related to their reproductive capacity; women’s susceptibility to distinct forms
of oppression to do with actual not perceived biology such as vaginal rape, heterosexual
prostitution, and surrogacy; and other such “women’s” issues, can no longer be had as such.
Though it isn’t always clear, we are presumably supposed to talk about those things in terms
of “female” issues and to stop talking of them as “women’s” issues: for women’s issues now
are supposed to have a rather different extension. We also presumably want to know why
women are socially subordinated on the basis of perception of being female. But on
Haslanger’s view, the answer is a trivial one: because they are stipulatively defined that way
(see Bogardus 2019a for a related point)6. If it turns out, on empirical investigation, that
certain behaviours are sexed across the population of women and men - especially socially
important ones like sexual aggression - we want to be able to track them too. Meanwhile,
we also want to be able to talk about particular women, actual or potential, present or
future, who aren’t subordinated; yet on Haslanger’s account, we cannot (Saul 2006: 137). In
short, the explanatory losses are large, while the proposed gains could as easily been
achieved by developing separate concepts to cover whatever social phenomena it’s
important to identify.

6
Hence I disagree with Barnes (2019: 14) that Haslanger can give an informative answer to such questions.
 9. Naturalist Socialites and the “Inclusion” problem

I turn now to another significant moment in the history of feminist philosophy of sex and
gender: one where, again, mistakes were made.

After the Biologist position came to be thought of, almost universally, as debunked via
considerations such as those just rehearsed, critical attention then turned to the Socialite
positions proposed by many as replacing it. Two central challenges emerged. The first is
usually called the Commonality Challenge: Do women share any social property or
properties which could serve to constitute their womanhood, as such? The second is called
the Normativity Challenge. It predicts that, in articulating which social properties women as
such have in common, a theorist inevitably privileges a narrow set of social properties, and
so politically marginalizes women who in fact don’t share those properties. The many
authors who have taken both challenges seriously include Spelman (1988); Young (1994);
Alcoff (2006: 153); Haslanger (2000a); Bach (2012); Mikkola (2016: Chapter 2 and 5).
Sometimes, as in the case of Spelman and Mikkola, the two challenges have been taken as
partly indicating the futility of trying to offer a coherent concept of WOMAN at all.

The main thing to note here is that these challenges don’t apply to the Biologist position.
The challenges are (supposedly) generated out of the Socialite response to the Biologist,
and not to the Biologist position directly. There’s no Commonality problem for the
Biologist: the shared property proposed as identifying womanhood is being female, and not,
say, the experience of being female, cashed out in some particular way. There’s no
Normativity problem either, or at least not against a methodologically naturalist
background. Concepts like WOMAN aren’t automatically normative or “marginalising” in a
politically pernicious way that invalidates them7. Rather, they help humans non-evaluatively
categorise things in the world into important groups for the purposes of explanation and
prediction across multiple discourses, among other things.

Though I’m generally critical of naturalist Socialite accounts, in any case there’s no reason to
think that the Commonality and Normativity challenges are particularly threatening to
naturalist Socialites, even prima facie, despite the ink often spilt in attempting to deal with
them. As Gunnarson (2011) notes in a different context, naturalist Socialites can easily go
abstract and relational in their account of the relevant social kind - as for instance Haslanger
explicitly does (2000a, 39) - thereby avoiding any counterintuitive concrete specificity in
articulation of the kind in question. Equally, as methodological naturalists, just as for
Biologists, naturalist Socialites never seriously faced the Normativity challenge in the first
place, which clearly derives from post-structuralist and/or radical feminist presuppositions.
For instance Young (1994) makes clear that her worries about the Normativity challenge
stems from thinking that an account of womanhood must be an account of subjectivity,
couched in terms of a membership of “a single group with common experiences, attributes,
or oppressions” (1994: 715). Yet for a naturalist, this places a weight on the concept of
WOMAN which it could not be properly expected to bear.

7
They may be normative in a more commonplace way: see Bogardus 2019b.
In recent times, the Commonality and Normativity problems have morphed into what is
called by Katharine Jenkins (2016: 394-5) the Inclusion problem, presented explicitly as the
challenge of accommodating anyone, male or female, of any social presentation or role,
who identifies as a woman in terms of inner psychologicaly state or “gender identity”. (See
also Bettcher 2013: 237; McKitrick 2015: 2577; Barnes 2019: 5). Responding to this
supposedly legitimate conceptual goal, Jenkins presents her own proposed account of
WOMAN in terms of a psychological state. The details are unimportant: my general
objection here pertains to all accounts of WOMAN in terms of psychological states,
conceptually detached from either biology or social presentation. Namely, it’s profoundly
anti-naturalist to think that the main goal of a concept like WOMAN could be to capture a
psychological state. This positively undermines nearly all of the important causal-
explanatory interests we have in articulating that concept. No longer does WOMAN track
females, or even people socially treated in certain ways on the basis of perception of being
female, for WOMAN now leaves lots of these out (since they don’t have the right sort of
psychological state). Meanwhile WOMAN now includes people whose causal roles, across a
range of dimensions, tend to diverge significantly both from those roles characteristic to
females and to people perceived wrongly as females8.

The payoff for Jenkins, and those like her who explicitly set out to accommodate gender
identity, is supposed to be that her account of WOMAN avoids a serious harm – that of
‘failure to respect the gender identifications of trans people’ - which is ‘conceptually linked
to forms of transphobic oppression and even violence’ (Jenkins 2016: 396. See also
McKitrick 2015; Barnes 2019). Yet a methodologically naturalist account will have a hard
time explaining how failing to categorise people who self-identify as women, as women,
either is itself a form of oppression and violence or causes those things. On the contrary, in
itself it’s a form of accurate descriptive categorization. One might, I suppose, argue in
Foucauldian vein that, since concepts construct reality in a hierarchical way, if we change
the concepts we can remove the hierarchies (see Taylor 2009 for an example of this
approach). But once again, this is hardly a naturalist strategy.

Oddly, Jenkins presents her identity view as somehow in a continuum with Haslanger’s
ameliorative account, in that both are concerned with changing concepts to reduce ‘gender
injustice’ (2016: 395). Yet it’s clear that the projects are very different. Haslanger’s interest
was in developing concepts to be responsive to existing social kinds in the world implicated
in injustice; whereas Jenkins presents it as a matter of justice directly to include into the
category of WOMEN, anyone in the right psychological state. Haslanger is clear that:

It’s important to know what sets are fundamental, e.g., what properties are causally
significant, in order to effectively interact with or understand the world. (Haslanger
2000b, 123).

Meanwhile, Jenkins offers no convincing account of how a potentially imperceptible inner

state could be of sufficient causal-explanatory interest generally to force the radical revision

8
For other problems, see Bogardus 2019a.
of taxonomy which she defends9. If the Socialite position was taxonomically destructive,
psychological accounts of WOMAN are a wrecking ball (Duck-Chong 2018; Andersson 2019;
Byrne 2019). The explanatory loss is severe and widespread: but perhaps most perversely,
psychological accounts of WOMAN leave us unable to track across counterfactual contexts
the very thing that Socialite accounts were first designed to supposedly capture: the social
subordination of people perceived to be female (Risman, Myers, and Sin 2018).

Conclusion

When, about 50 years ago, feminists started to talk of womanhood in terms of a social role
instead of a biological state, they unwittingly initiated a chain of destruction which left us
with present day ruins. Many converts paid insufficient attention to the background
philosophical commitments of proselytizers, failing to notice that each were signed up to
very different metaphysical backgrounds. The Socialite view was never well-grounded from
a methodological naturalist perspective. Worse, more recent attempts to modify or replace
the Socialite view, again implicitly guided by anti-naturalist commitments in an
unarticulated way, propose that the concept of WOMAN function as a self-validating label
for all-comers, rather than a helpful cognitive tool, thereby rendering unfit for its original
purposes. Against a methodologically naturalist background, properly maintained, there
was never anything wrong with the Biologist position. Even if, in response to this
presumably provocative conclusion, all feminist philosophers working today publicly
disavow methodological naturalism, the result is still of significant interest to the rest of us.

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