Abstract
This chapter first introduces and argues for a constraint on metasemantic theorizing called General Metasemantic Adequacy, which says that any acceptable metasemantic theory must comport with our strongest first-order commitments, including our strongest first-order political commitments. Then, by taking this general principle together with the theory of intersectionality described in Chap. 8, I argue for another more specific constraint on metasemantic theorizing, Intersectional Metasemantic Adequacy. This constraint says that any acceptable metasemantics must comport with first-order truths about intersectionality, including most crucially facts about misinformation, misrepresentation, and the spread of false beliefs that undergird the matrix of domination.
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Notes
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- 2.
For extensive discussions about what metasemantics is, see the edited collection Burgess and Sherman (2014).
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Note that this is a constraint even for error theorists and non-cognitivists, insofar as they must do work to explain away or incorporate the strong prima facie semantic evidence that these statements have straightforward truth-conditions and, moreover, that they appear to be straightforwardly true. It is also true for deflationists.
- 5.
See Code’s (2012) discussion of ‘we-saying,’ which highlights the political nature of asserting what ‘our’ views are.
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For a thorough discussion of disquotational schemas, including a thorough discussion of the difficulties of making a fully disquotational semantic theory, see David (1994). I am not proposing that the semantics for English is exhausted by disquotational principles. My semantics is not deflationary, it’s model-theoretic. My point is that any semantics for English must satisfy the disquotational schemas in straightforward cases. It must entail, for example, that “Trans women are women” is true if and only if trans women are women. But unlike a deflationary disquotational semantics, I am not saying this biconditional exhaustively specifies the semantics of that sentence.
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To give Bettcher (2013) the full attention her work deserves, I should emphasize that my view fails to come to terms with certain elements of her view. Her theory is one on which the metaphysical construction of gender is done differently within different cultures, and so there is an attendant metaphysical difference between the way gender is constructed within the mainstream culture as opposed to the way it is constructed within trans-friendlier communities. The meaning conflict, the struggle between the two ways of using the word “woman,” is part of this larger conflict between two ways of constructing gender. Bettcher draws on Lugones (1987) in describing different worlds of sense in which we can find ourselves, some trans friendly and some transphobic. It is part of the trans person’s struggle that the world of sense in which they have the gender they identify as is constantly antagonized and sometimes destroyed by enforcers whose role is to impose the cis-normative world of sense on everyone. For Bettcher, conflicting meanings are part of this larger conflict between different cultures.
I am not arguing against this picture of the struggle for trans inclusion within mainstream consciousness. I do believe there are different cultures that are in a sense at war with one another, that transforming the mainstream culture to accommodate trans friendly worldviews is crucial for the survival and flourishing of trans folks, and that trans gender identities can be delegitimated or even metaphysically destabilized by hostile enforcers who are wielding the power of a cis-supremacist matrix of domination. I want to disentangle these phenomena from a theory of metasemantics in the following way. I don’t think we must see this process as one in which the enforcers speak truly when they claim that trans women are men. We can see such linguistic violence as an attack on the metaphysical underpinnings of trans women’s identities while interpreting the shared public language in such a way as to recognize their statements as false, as ideological misinformation about gender that spreads ignorance and misunderstanding about gender and its relation to biology. A grocery store clerk acting as a cis enforcer might destabilize a trans woman’s gender in that context by calling her a “man,” even if what the clerk says is (unbeknownst to her) false.
- 9.
For an extensive discussion of this idea, see Dotson (2013).
- 10.
This reply owes its form in rough outline to Annas (2008) in her reply to an analogous objection to virtue ethics.
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Anderson, D.E. (2021). Intersectional Metasemantic Adequacy. In: Metasemantics and Intersectionality in the Misinformation Age. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73339-1_9
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