Abstract
The category women is a central analytic category of feminism, but has been very troubled in feminist theory and philosophy. In the background of the troubles with the category women is the metaphoric image of a social category as a set and its exemplars as set members. But the category women cannot be defined as sets are defined, so that is an inappropriate metaphor. A number of feminists and race theorists turn to Wittgenstein, who offers alternative metaphors. This chapter explores the powers and resonances of his metaphors—in the case of “family resemblance,” using the work of cognitive psychologists Rosch and Mervis on categories that have prototype structure.
Some of the views worked out in this chapter were first presented in my 2008 Phi Beta Kappa Romanell Lectures, February 6, 7 and 8, 2008 at Michigan State University.
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Notes
- 1.
Naomi Zack argues for necessary and sufficient conditions that specify a disjunctive set of conditions, one of which is an attribute of the person, one a condition on how one is designated, and one a condition of being an object of the sexual interest of heterosexual men. I find the conditions hard to interpret, but it appears to me that there are individuals who satisfy at least one of the conditions but are not women.
- 2.
This material is fairly old. I am using it to work the imagination, not citing it as the last word in science. I suppose, though, that the empirical data involved are as good as ever.
- 3.
The following discussion of species is taken from my essay, “Categories in Distress.”
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© 2011 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.
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Frye, M. (2011). Metaphors of Being a Φ. In: Witt, C. (eds) Feminist Metaphysics. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-3783-1_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-3783-1_6
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