Gender Roles

[Jokodo]

... just to not use plain and common English,

The words you're trying to drag kicking and screaming out of my mouth ... are not "plain and common English". They're Newspeak. English doesn't have words for the meaning I meant to convey so I pulled in a language that does. ...

... linguistics is what I have a degree in.

Cool! Let's talk linguistics.

And from a linguistic perspective, it's clear that singular "they" is at least as old as Modern English.

Not so clear...

A bit imprecise. What really seems to be going on is not that there's a homophone of plural "they" that's marked for the singular, but that "they" is underspecified for number. That's an unusual state of affairs, but English number agreement is independently known to be unusual. There's few if any other languages where the 3rd person singular is the only place in the verbal paradigm that usually shows visible concord. The exact opposite is much more common: the 3rd Sg typically has no agreement marker where the other slots in the paradigm do have one, or had the phonologically lightest marker.

What I'm saying is: there probably is no "singular they" in English, in the sense of a separate word that that is marked for singular and happens to sound and spell the same as another word that is marked for plural. There probably isn't a "plural they" either. There is only one "they" which is unspecified for number, gender and specificity. Its usage where it picks up a (grammatically and/or) semantically singular antecedent is restricted by the "Elsewhere principle", or by the convention of using the most restricted whose specifications don't produce a mismatch. A grammatical example would be English verbal inflection: it's not parsimonious to suggest there a five different, lexically distinct, verb endings in the present indicative and another six in the subjunctive that all happen to be homophonous, i.e realised as a null suffix. Its much more plausible that English main verbs really only have two endings, one that's specified for 3rd person singular indicative and one that's fully unspecified. A loose analogue outside of grammar could be how you usually wouldn't say "I'm going to Europe" when the only planned stop is in Paris.

Here's an example from Shakespeare: "
There's not a man I meet but doth salute me
As if I were their well-acquainted friend."

And another from the King James Bible: "Let nothing bee done through strife, or vaine glory, but in lowlinesse of minde let each esteeme other better then themselues."

(Examples via https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=24504, there's more there)

Thanks for injecting some hard data. Let's see what it tells us...

It appears English does have a word for "a person who's sex not known or irrelevant, in the singular", and it's "they" (which just so happens to also be a word for "persons, plural" and for "inanimate objects, plural"),

That's not hard data; that's a theory. I.e., it's a testable hypothesis that's been proposed as an explanation for hard data. Testing it means answering three questions. How well does it predict actual in-the-wild examples of the usage in question? How badly does it falsely predict examples of the usage in question? And how does it compare with competing theories?

For the first question, Shakespeare? Check. Bible? Check.

For the second question, all your examples are usage, so I went browsing for examples of non-usage in the wild. From the Columbia thread:

<expletive deleted> Bibi. He will kill as many people as he can get away with.​

"... the guy running Israel is a moron clinging to the office to keep himself out of jail" FIFY.​

And from the Robert Sapolsky thread:

This was an interesting read, but I disagree completely with his reasoning. ...​

There are statements of his views in one paragraph that I absolutely reject:​

​

There are major implications, he notes: Absent free will, no one should be held responsible for their behavior, good or bad. ...​

​

I suspect that when it comes to his personal life, he would expect anyone who harmed him to be punished for that behavior.​

So Elixir passed up opportunities to write "They will kill as many people as they can get away with." and "clinging to the office to keep themselves out of jail.". The New York Times author passed up an opportunity to write "There are major implications, they note". And Ruth passed up opportunities to write " I disagree completely with their reasoning", "There are statements of their views", and "I suspect that when it comes to their personal life, they would expect anyone who harmed them to be punished". So either Netanyahu's sex and Sapolsky's sex are relevant to Israeli war practices and the free-will debate, respectively, or else your theoretical explanation for the use of the grammatical construction under discussion has a serious over-prediction problem. I submit that Bibi's and Robert's maleness is irrelevant to what was being said about them. If the theory were correct then English-speakers would use "they/them/their" for singular antecedents a lot more than we do.

I refer to my extra-grammatical analogy further up: if you went to Paris for the weekend, you'd tell people "I went to Paris for the weekend", not "I went to Europe for the weekend", even if you weren't planning with following up with anything Paris specific - indeed even if you specifically bring it up to boast how you can still afford transatlantic weekend trips during this economic crisis, or to annoy someone who wants to ban "needless" air travel for ecological reasons, ie if the only relevant aspect of your trip is indeed that you went to Europe. Language expects you to be as specific as you can without being obtuse. When talking about a specific referential entity known to both hearer and speaker to be singular and male, your audience expects you to use "he" - because all the boxes for the use of "he" are ticked, not because "they" would cause a grammatical mismatch.

For the third question, I don't know what competing theories linguists have considered, but the one that occurs to me is that "they" isn't being treated as an honorary singular pronoun after all; rather, the grammatically singular antecedents in these cases are treated as honorary groups.

There's a problem though: English has a precedent for how it treats "honorary groups", and it's behavior is clearly distinguished from that of grammatically singular quantifier phrases picked up by "they". In some dialects of English, mostly British varieties, plural agreement with grammatically singular nouns is readily available. Constructions like "Parliament are discussing topic X tonight" or "the committed continue to be divided" are natural to many speakers and readily encountered in the wild. Clausemate plural verbal agreement is however strictly unavailable for quantifiers.

Let's look at some examples from your link;

​

Samuel Richardson, Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded:​

I beg you will look over my poor matters, and let every one have what belongs to them; for, said I, you know I am resolved to take with me only what I can properly call my own.​

​

Jonathan Edwards, Heaven:​

... everyone will have their distinguishing gift, one after this manner, and another after that,, the perfection of the saints in glory, nothing hindering.​

​

Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography:​

But my giving this account of it here is to show something of the interest I had, everyone of these exerting themselves in recommending business to us.​

​

Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe:​

Hence it is, that a miser, though he pays every body their own, cannot be an honest man, when he does not discharge the good offices that are incumbent on a friendly, kind, and generous person.​

​

Jonathan Swift, Polite Conversation:​

Every fool can do as they're bid.​

​

Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility:​

Each of them was busy in arranging their particular concerns, and endeavouring, by placing around them books and other possessions, to form themselves a home.​

​

Sir Walter Scott, Ivanhoe:​

I return in my grave-clothes, a pledge restored from the very sepulchre, and every one I speak to vanishes as soon as they hear my voice!​

​

Charles Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby:​

Let us give everybody their due.​

​

Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights:​

I thought, though everybody hated and despised each other, they could not avoid loving me.​

​

Charlotte Brontë, Henry Hastings:​

I think I should have spoken to her, but something suggested to me, 'Every body has their own burden to bear. Let her drink the chalice fate commends to her lips.'​

​

Louisa May Alcott, Little Women:​

Everybody sniffed when they came to that part.​

​

Anthony Trollope, The Way We Live Now:​

Everybody doesn't make themselves a part of the family. I have heard of nobody doing it except you.​

​

Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native:​

It is the instinct of everyone to look after their own.​

​

Mark Twain, A Tramp Abroad:​

I always ask everybody what ship they came over in.​

​

Robert Lewis Stevenson, Treasure Island:​

The admirable fellow literally slaved in my interest, and so, I may say, did everyone in Bristol, as soon as they got wind of the port we sailed for.​

​

Winston Churchill, The Story of the Malakand Field Force:​

Every one realised afterwards how obvious this was and wondered they had not thought of it before.​

​

Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland:​

'If everybody minded their own business,' the Duchess said in a hoarse growl, 'the world would go round a deal faster than it does.'​

​

Henry James, An International Episode:​

He thinks everyone clever, and sometimes they are.​

​

I don't think I'm really going out on a limb here when I point out that "everybody" is a group. 19th-century prescriptivists' insistence that "everybody" is grammatically singular notwithstanding, it appears English-speakers have for centuries been taking into account that the constructions "everybody" and "every body" and "everyone" and "every one" and "every fool" and "each of them" in fact refer to more than one person.

Everybody and its kin being grammatically singular is one thing 19th century prescriptivists didn't make up, or copy from Latin. They may be semantically plural, but even that is doubtful. You can tell by the fact that clausemate verb agreement is singular, universally, and always has been. Shakespeare wrote "There's not a man I meet but doth salute me", not "...but do salute me", and people who accept "every student is nervous: they expect their exam result today" as good English don't also accept "every student are nervous...".

Why I'm saying they're probably not semantically plural is this: they allow distributive readings with singular predicates. Most speakers of English accept "every professor had a rebellious phase when they were a student" as a well formed sentence of the language (whether it's true is a different discussion). The analogue is not possible for unambiguously plural subjects: "all professors had a rebellious phase when they were a student" or "the professors..." seems to imply that they were collectively one student before splitting up into multiple professors. So the availability of "they" in "every professor had a rebellious phase when they were a student" does not predict plural-like behaviour in what predicates are available.

​

Shakespeare:​

There's not a man I meet but doth salute me As if I were their well-acquainted friend.​

​

King James Bible​

Let nothing bee done through strife, or vaine glory, but in lowlinesse of minde let each esteeme other better then themselues.​

​

George Eliot, Middlemarch:​

The fact is, I never loved any one well enough to put myself into a noose for them.​

​

Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone:​

It's the ebb now, sir, as anybody may see for themselves.​

​

William Butler Yeats, Ideas of Good and Evil:​

Since I was a boy I have always longed to hear poems spoken to a harp […] Whenever I spoke of my desire to anybody they said I should write for music,​

​

The same goes for these examples. "Not ... but" is a double negative. (Not one doesn't salute me) is equivalent to (every one does salute me).
In "let each esteeme", each what? Well, each of ye, the old plural second-person pronoun -- the preceding verse is "Fulfil ye my joy, that ye be likeminded, having the same love, being of one accord, of one mind.
(Never loved any one well enough) is equivalent to (always loved every one not well enough).
If there's a semantic difference between (anybody may see for themselves) and (everybody may see for themselves), I'm not seeing it for myself.
And "Whenever I spoke of my desire to anybody" is making it pretty clear he did it more than once.

That addresses the bulk of your examples; let's look at the residue.

​

Agatha Christie, The Mysterious Affair at Styles:​

If anyone has seen either of them touching the medicine, they will have forgotten it by that time.​

​

That's a pretty thin reed to hang the theory of "singular they" on. Since the normal use of the construction is on actual groups that are merely grammatically singular, it looks to me like in this case Christie is promoting her hypothetical witness to the status of an honorary group because she's talking about an unknown member of the available pool of people who might have seen who touched the medicine.

So the theory of honorary plurality predicts all the same positive examples that the theory that "they" is a singular pronoun predicts; but it doesn't suffer from the false positives of the latter. People don't call Netanyahu or Sapolsky "they" because Netanyahu and Sapolsky are known individuals, not because their maleness is relevant to what's being said. So it looks to me like your theory doesn't match the hard data of usage as well as mine does.

Finally, consider the competing theories' performance on this data:

​

Sir Walter Scott, Ivanhoe:​

I return in my grave-clothes, a pledge restored from the very sepulchre, and every one I speak to vanishes as soon as they hear my voice!​

​

My theory passes the test on that observation with flying colors.

does it though? Given what we know about semantic agreement being available even for clausemate verbs, your theory seems to predict "every one I speak to vanish as soon as they hear my voice" (interpreted as an indicative, not a subjunctive).

But it seems to me that if "they" were actually a singular pronoun, then Sir Walter would have written:

​

* I return in my grave-clothes, a pledge restored from the very sepulchre, and every one I speak to vanishes as soon as they hears my voice!​

​

That would follow if "hear" carries a [+plural] feature. Given the distribution of "hear" and "hears" in English, that's unlikely to be the case. If "hear" is a default form we jump to whenever the specific conditions that allow the use of "hears" aren't met, this is exactly what we would expect as agreement with a pronoun or noun phrase that is grammatically and/or semantically neither singular nor plural, but unmarked for number.

To recap, when every test for the grammatical and semantical singularity or plurality of the antecedent of "they" shows it to be singular grammatically and at least unmarked for number semantically, and the only test that appears to show it to be plural is the very fact that it can be picked up by ostensibly plural "they" and that "they"'s clausemate verbs fail to show singular agreement, the only sound conclusion is that the "they" test doesn't demonstrate plurality, and that "they" is thus not specifically [+plural]. It still can *suggest* plurality in many constructions where a more specific alternative would be available. Whether such an alternative is available in a specific construction possibly depends more on an individual's mental representation of "he" than that of "they". In fact, "sex unknown or irrelevant" is not a necessary condition for non-plural "they" and may not be its strongest predictor. I can well imagine a jealous husband saying "somebody left their footprints in the snow" in a tone that makes it clear he suspects that somebody to be the wife's male lover, and neither "plural," nor "unknown sex" is implied, nor is his interpretation of "they" likely different from anyone else's. Instead, his representation of "he" strongly implies specificity, which the context doesn't provide so he resorts to the unmarked "they" which requires none of the above without imimplying the opposite.

That said, even as the excuse that English doesn't have a word to express the meaning you intended doesn't really stand, I would have preferred your choice of Estonian pronouns to stay unchallenged. I also would have preferred you to add a footnote explaining what you did and why

Yes, in retrospect it looks like I should have done that; but no, English doesn't have a word to express the meaning I intended. I did not intend to convey that the person I was talking about was a group or an unknown generic person drawn from an available pool.

If you have a corpus of examples of the construction being used on specific known individuals dating back to the beginnings of Modern English, I'm all ears.

Here's a dissertation that talks about all of this in more detail than I ever could. Don't be scared of by the categorisation "applied linguistics" in the cover, at least one of the advisers is a syntactician: https://lingbuzz.net/lingbuzz/006367

 

[Emily Lake]

The contortions, lol, EMILY LAKE - as if that's your legal name - and you DO have a thing about legal names, ma'am! WHY are you obsessed with total strangers' personal lives in such a way that you prefer them dead from suicide and homicide rather than not be wrong? I am not using hyperbole; I am describing transphobia and its effects and outcomes.

You're definitely using hyperbole. If you are unable to engage with me without foisting ridiculously exaggerated views on me based on nothing more than your imagined malice... then kindly don't engage.

 

[Jarhyn]

... just to not use plain and common English,

The words you're trying to drag kicking and screaming out of my mouth ... are not "plain and common English". They're Newspeak. English doesn't have words for the meaning I meant to convey so I pulled in a language that does. ...

... linguistics is what I have a degree in.

Cool! Let's talk linguistics.

And from a linguistic perspective, it's clear that singular "they" is at least as old as Modern English.

Not so clear...

A bit imprecise. What really seems to be going on is not that there's a homophone of plural "they" that's marked for the singular, but that "they" is underspecified for number. That's an unusual state of affairs, but English number agreement is independently known to be unusual. There's few if any other languages where the 3rd person singular is the only place in the verbal paradigm that usually shows visible concord. The exact opposite is much more common: the 3rd Sg typically has no agreement marker where the other slots in the paradigm do have one, or had the phonologically lightest marker.

What I'm saying is: there probably is no "singular they" in English, in the sense of a separate word that that is marked for singular and happens to sound and spell the same as another word that is marked for plural. There probably isn't a "plural they" either. There is only one "they" which is unspecified for number, gender and specificity. Its usage where it picks up a (grammatically and/or) semantically singular antecedent is restricted by the "Elsewhere principle", or by the convention of using the most restricted whose specifications don't produce a mismatch. A grammatical example would be English verbal inflection: it's not parsimonious to suggest there a five different, lexically distinct, verb endings in the present indicative and another six in the subjunctive that all happen to be homophonous, i.e realised as a null suffix. Its much more plausible that English main verbs really only have two endings, one that's specified for 3rd person singular indicative and one that's fully unspecified. A loose analogue outside of grammar could be how you usually wouldn't say "I'm going to Europe" when the only planned stop is in Paris.

Here's an example from Shakespeare: "
There's not a man I meet but doth salute me
As if I were their well-acquainted friend."

And another from the King James Bible: "Let nothing bee done through strife, or vaine glory, but in lowlinesse of minde let each esteeme other better then themselues."

(Examples via https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=24504, there's more there)

Thanks for injecting some hard data. Let's see what it tells us...

It appears English does have a word for "a person who's sex not known or irrelevant, in the singular", and it's "they" (which just so happens to also be a word for "persons, plural" and for "inanimate objects, plural"),

That's not hard data; that's a theory. I.e., it's a testable hypothesis that's been proposed as an explanation for hard data. Testing it means answering three questions. How well does it predict actual in-the-wild examples of the usage in question? How badly does it falsely predict examples of the usage in question? And how does it compare with competing theories?

For the first question, Shakespeare? Check. Bible? Check.

For the second question, all your examples are usage, so I went browsing for examples of non-usage in the wild. From the Columbia thread:

<expletive deleted> Bibi. He will kill as many people as he can get away with.​

"... the guy running Israel is a moron clinging to the office to keep himself out of jail" FIFY.​

And from the Robert Sapolsky thread:

This was an interesting read, but I disagree completely with his reasoning. ...​

There are statements of his views in one paragraph that I absolutely reject:​

​

There are major implications, he notes: Absent free will, no one should be held responsible for their behavior, good or bad. ...​

​

I suspect that when it comes to his personal life, he would expect anyone who harmed him to be punished for that behavior.​

So Elixir passed up opportunities to write "They will kill as many people as they can get away with." and "clinging to the office to keep themselves out of jail.". The New York Times author passed up an opportunity to write "There are major implications, they note". And Ruth passed up opportunities to write " I disagree completely with their reasoning", "There are statements of their views", and "I suspect that when it comes to their personal life, they would expect anyone who harmed them to be punished". So either Netanyahu's sex and Sapolsky's sex are relevant to Israeli war practices and the free-will debate, respectively, or else your theoretical explanation for the use of the grammatical construction under discussion has a serious over-prediction problem. I submit that Bibi's and Robert's maleness is irrelevant to what was being said about them. If the theory were correct then English-speakers would use "they/them/their" for singular antecedents a lot more than we do.

I refer to my extra-grammatical analogy further up: if you went to Paris for the weekend, you'd tell people "I went to Paris for the weekend", not "I went to Europe for the weekend", even if you weren't planning with following up with anything Paris specific - indeed even if you specifically bring it up to boast how you can still afford transatlantic weekend trips during this economic crisis, or to annoy someone who wants to ban "needless" air travel for ecological reasons, ie if the only relevant aspect of your trip is indeed that you went to Europe. Language expects you to be as specific as you can without being obtuse. When talking about a specific referential entity known to both hearer and speaker to be singular and male, your audience expects you to use "he" - because all the boxes for the use of "he" are ticked, not because "they" would cause a grammatical mismatch.

For the third question, I don't know what competing theories linguists have considered, but the one that occurs to me is that "they" isn't being treated as an honorary singular pronoun after all; rather, the grammatically singular antecedents in these cases are treated as honorary groups.

There's a problem though: English has a precedent for how it treats "honorary groups", and it's behavior is clearly distinguished from that of grammatically singular quantifier phrases picked up by "they". In some dialects of English, mostly British varieties, plural agreement with grammatically singular nouns is readily available. Constructions like "Parliament are discussing topic X tonight" or "the committed continue to be divided" are natural to many speakers and readily encountered in the wild. Clausemate plural verbal agreement is however strictly unavailable for quantifiers.

Let's look at some examples from your link;

​

Samuel Richardson, Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded:​

I beg you will look over my poor matters, and let every one have what belongs to them; for, said I, you know I am resolved to take with me only what I can properly call my own.​

​

Jonathan Edwards, Heaven:​

... everyone will have their distinguishing gift, one after this manner, and another after that,, the perfection of the saints in glory, nothing hindering.​

​

Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography:​

But my giving this account of it here is to show something of the interest I had, everyone of these exerting themselves in recommending business to us.​

​

Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe:​

Hence it is, that a miser, though he pays every body their own, cannot be an honest man, when he does not discharge the good offices that are incumbent on a friendly, kind, and generous person.​

​

Jonathan Swift, Polite Conversation:​

Every fool can do as they're bid.​

​

Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility:​

Each of them was busy in arranging their particular concerns, and endeavouring, by placing around them books and other possessions, to form themselves a home.​

​

Sir Walter Scott, Ivanhoe:​

I return in my grave-clothes, a pledge restored from the very sepulchre, and every one I speak to vanishes as soon as they hear my voice!​

​

Charles Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby:​

Let us give everybody their due.​

​

Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights:​

I thought, though everybody hated and despised each other, they could not avoid loving me.​

​

Charlotte Brontë, Henry Hastings:​

I think I should have spoken to her, but something suggested to me, 'Every body has their own burden to bear. Let her drink the chalice fate commends to her lips.'​

​

Louisa May Alcott, Little Women:​

Everybody sniffed when they came to that part.​

​

Anthony Trollope, The Way We Live Now:​

Everybody doesn't make themselves a part of the family. I have heard of nobody doing it except you.​

​

Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native:​

It is the instinct of everyone to look after their own.​

​

Mark Twain, A Tramp Abroad:​

I always ask everybody what ship they came over in.​

​

Robert Lewis Stevenson, Treasure Island:​

The admirable fellow literally slaved in my interest, and so, I may say, did everyone in Bristol, as soon as they got wind of the port we sailed for.​

​

Winston Churchill, The Story of the Malakand Field Force:​

Every one realised afterwards how obvious this was and wondered they had not thought of it before.​

​

Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland:​

'If everybody minded their own business,' the Duchess said in a hoarse growl, 'the world would go round a deal faster than it does.'​

​

Henry James, An International Episode:​

He thinks everyone clever, and sometimes they are.​

​

I don't think I'm really going out on a limb here when I point out that "everybody" is a group. 19th-century prescriptivists' insistence that "everybody" is grammatically singular notwithstanding, it appears English-speakers have for centuries been taking into account that the constructions "everybody" and "every body" and "everyone" and "every one" and "every fool" and "each of them" in fact refer to more than one person.

Everybody and its kin being grammatically singular is one thing 19th century prescriptivists didn't make up, or copy from Latin. They may be semantically plural, but even that is doubtful. You can tell by the fact that clausemate verb agreement is singular, universally, and always has been. Shakespeare wrote "There's not a man I meet but doth salute me", not "...but do salute me", and people who accept "every student is nervous: they expect their exam result today" as good English don't also accept "every student are nervous...".

Why I'm saying they're probably not semantically plural is this: they allow distributive readings with singular predicates. Most speakers of English accept "every professor had a rebellious phase when they were a student" as a well formed sentence of the language (whether it's true is a different discussion). The analogue is not possible for unambiguously plural subjects: "all professors had a rebellious phase when they were a student" or "the professors..." seems to imply that they were collectively one student before splitting up into multiple professors. So the availability of "they" in "every professor had a rebellious phase when they were a student" does not predict plural-like behaviour in what predicates are available.

​

Shakespeare:​

There's not a man I meet but doth salute me As if I were their well-acquainted friend.​

​

King James Bible​

Let nothing bee done through strife, or vaine glory, but in lowlinesse of minde let each esteeme other better then themselues.​

​

George Eliot, Middlemarch:​

The fact is, I never loved any one well enough to put myself into a noose for them.​

​

Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone:​

It's the ebb now, sir, as anybody may see for themselves.​

​

William Butler Yeats, Ideas of Good and Evil:​

Since I was a boy I have always longed to hear poems spoken to a harp […] Whenever I spoke of my desire to anybody they said I should write for music,​

​

The same goes for these examples. "Not ... but" is a double negative. (Not one doesn't salute me) is equivalent to (every one does salute me).
In "let each esteeme", each what? Well, each of ye, the old plural second-person pronoun -- the preceding verse is "Fulfil ye my joy, that ye be likeminded, having the same love, being of one accord, of one mind.
(Never loved any one well enough) is equivalent to (always loved every one not well enough).
If there's a semantic difference between (anybody may see for themselves) and (everybody may see for themselves), I'm not seeing it for myself.
And "Whenever I spoke of my desire to anybody" is making it pretty clear he did it more than once.

That addresses the bulk of your examples; let's look at the residue.

​

Agatha Christie, The Mysterious Affair at Styles:​

If anyone has seen either of them touching the medicine, they will have forgotten it by that time.​

​

That's a pretty thin reed to hang the theory of "singular they" on. Since the normal use of the construction is on actual groups that are merely grammatically singular, it looks to me like in this case Christie is promoting her hypothetical witness to the status of an honorary group because she's talking about an unknown member of the available pool of people who might have seen who touched the medicine.

So the theory of honorary plurality predicts all the same positive examples that the theory that "they" is a singular pronoun predicts; but it doesn't suffer from the false positives of the latter. People don't call Netanyahu or Sapolsky "they" because Netanyahu and Sapolsky are known individuals, not because their maleness is relevant to what's being said. So it looks to me like your theory doesn't match the hard data of usage as well as mine does.

Finally, consider the competing theories' performance on this data:

​

Sir Walter Scott, Ivanhoe:​

I return in my grave-clothes, a pledge restored from the very sepulchre, and every one I speak to vanishes as soon as they hear my voice!​

​

My theory passes the test on that observation with flying colors.

does it though? Given what we know about semantic agreement being available even for clausemate verbs, your theory seems to predict "every one I speak to vanish as soon as they hear my voice" (interpreted as an indicative, not a subjunctive).

But it seems to me that if "they" were actually a singular pronoun, then Sir Walter would have written:

​

* I return in my grave-clothes, a pledge restored from the very sepulchre, and every one I speak to vanishes as soon as they hears my voice!​

​

That would follow if "hear" carries a [+plural] feature. Given the distribution of "hear" and "hears" in English, that's unlikely to be the case. If "hear" is a default form we jump to whenever the specific conditions that allow the use of "hears" aren't met, this is exactly what we would expect as agreement with a pronoun or noun phrase that is grammatically and/or semantically neither singular nor plural, but unmarked for number.

To recap, when every test for the grammatical and semantical singularity or plurality of the antecedent of "they" shows it to be singular grammatically and at least unmarked for number semantically, and the only test that appears to show it to be plural is the very fact that it can be picked up by ostensibly plural "they" and that "they"'s clausemate verbs fail to show singular agreement, the only sound conclusion is that the "they" test doesn't demonstrate plurality, and that "they" is thus not specifically [+plural]. It still can *suggest* plurality in many constructions where a more specific alternative would be available. Whether such an alternative is available in a specific construction possibly depends more on an individual's mental representation of "he" than that of "they". In fact, "sex unknown or irrelevant" is not a necessary condition for non-plural "they" and may not be its strongest predictor. I can well imagine a jealous husband saying "somebody left their footprints in the snow" in a tone that makes it clear he suspects that somebody to be the wife's male lover, and neither "plural," nor "unknown sex" is implied, nor is his interpretation of "they" likely different from anyone else's. Instead, his representation of "he" strongly implies specificity, which the context doesn't provide so he resorts to the unmarked "they" which requires none of the above without imimplying the opposite.

That said, even as the excuse that English doesn't have a word to express the meaning you intended doesn't really stand, I would have preferred your choice of Estonian pronouns to stay unchallenged. I also would have preferred you to add a footnote explaining what you did and why

Yes, in retrospect it looks like I should have done that; but no, English doesn't have a word to express the meaning I intended. I did not intend to convey that the person I was talking about was a group or an unknown generic person drawn from an available pool.

If you have a corpus of examples of the construction being used on specific known individuals dating back to the beginnings of Modern English, I'm all ears.

Here's a dissertation that talks about all of this in more detail than I ever could. Don't be scared of by the categorisation "applied linguistics" in the cover, at least one of the advisers is a syntactician: https://lingbuzz.net/lingbuzz/006367

Not to mention the fact that the plural form is just as appropriate even here.

I still find it hard to believe that he doesn't seem to understand what Newspeak is, though any more than some folks here understand the terms "Gish Gallop" or "word salad".

"Newspeak... is a controlled language of simplified grammar and limited vocabulary designed to limit a person's ability for critical thinking." -wikipedia

They being used as a singular does not do anything of the sort. Rather, the attempt to control language away from such use as a singular strikes me as more fitting to the term. It does not in fact limit the capability of critical thinking to expect context to be used in understanding how a word is being used, and itself is an exercise in critical thought, being able to speak contextually.

It seems rather to be a controlling and limiting action to expect a pure binary with pronoun usage. It strikes me as an effort to make it impossible rather to think critically about the wide range of variations and exceptions that exist in biology, as an attempt to use language to prevent people from thinking about ambiguity and unimportance of genitals or gonads in addressing others.

The attempt to control language in such a way as to collapse sex together with the social construct of gender is pretty transparently more of the same, so as to bar people from thinking critically about the various expressions of humanity. It seems an attempt to limit vocabulary without seeming so obvious about it.

It is, however, an unfortunate reality that people who engage in bad faith attempts to strip away and avoid the nuances of discussions tend towards preemptively accusing others of the things they are doing themselves so as to deflect blame.

 

[Jokodo]

Not to mention the fact that the plural form is just as appropriate even here.I still find it hard to believe that he doesn't seem to understand what Newspeak is (...)

"Newspeak... is a controlled language of simplified grammar and limited vocabulary designed to limit a person's ability for critical thinking." -wikipedia

Im pretty sure he does understand, the disagreement is in whether it applies.

 

[Jarhyn]

Not to mention the fact that the plural form is just as appropriate even here.I still find it hard to believe that he doesn't seem to understand what Newspeak is (...)

"Newspeak... is a controlled language of simplified grammar and limited vocabulary designed to limit a person's ability for critical thinking." -wikipedia

Im pretty sure he does understand, the disagreement is in whether it applies.

I rather think the disagreement is in whether it's appropriate to gaslight and DARVO around the concept.

If he does understand what Newspeak is, then he's being blatantly dishonest.

It certainly seems that Bomb's use in context is more similar to some imagined meaning such as "anything that makes use of language implies that the way I think might be wrong".

I'll note here that only one side here is making any unilateral attempt to restrict language use.

I (and you for that matter) keep pointing to biology and reality and saying "the things gender-deniers apply these words to are more varied and complicated than the gender-deniers are allowing the word use and proposed definitions to account for." And "social concepts aren't grounded in biology even if they are driven by it at times, so it is inappropriate to attempt to drive determinations about people that are grounded in biological realities via such social concepts".

These are arguments based on critical thinking that are shit upon by such attempts to deny the very concept of a usage of They to indicate ambiguity or unimportance of gender, and later critical thought over the appropriateness of letting language move on from primitive binary/essentialist approaches.

 

[Jokodo]

Not to mention the fact that the plural form is just as appropriate even here.I still find it hard to believe that he doesn't seem to understand what Newspeak is (...)

"Newspeak... is a controlled language of simplified grammar and limited vocabulary designed to limit a person's ability for critical thinking." -wikipedia

Im pretty sure he does understand, the disagreement is in whether it applies.

I rather think the disagreement is in whether it's appropriate to gaslight and DARVO around the concept.

Your are assuming bad faith where an inability to recognise one's own prejudices as such is entirely sufficient to explain the observed behaviour.

And that's assuming you (or you and I, in those cases where we agree) are 100% right in terms of the content of the debate.

 

[Jokodo]

... just to not use plain and common English,

The words you're trying to drag kicking and screaming out of my mouth ... are not "plain and common English". They're Newspeak. English doesn't have words for the meaning I meant to convey so I pulled in a language that does. ...

... linguistics is what I have a degree in.

Cool! Let's talk linguistics.

And from a linguistic perspective, it's clear that singular "they" is at least as old as Modern English.

Not so clear...

A bit imprecise. What really seems to be going on is not that there's a homophone of plural "they" that's marked for the singular, but that "they" is underspecified for number. That's an unusual state of affairs, but English number agreement is independently known to be unusual. There's few if any other languages where the 3rd person singular is the only place in the verbal paradigm that usually shows visible concord. The exact opposite is much more common: the 3rd Sg typically has no agreement marker where the other slots in the paradigm do have one, or had the phonologically lightest marker.

What I'm saying is: there probably is no "singular they" in English, in the sense of a separate word that that is marked for singular and happens to sound and spell the same as another word that is marked for plural. There probably isn't a "plural they" either. There is only one "they" which is unspecified for number, gender and specificity. Its usage where it picks up a (grammatically and/or) semantically singular antecedent is restricted by the "Elsewhere principle", or by the convention of using the most restricted whose specifications don't produce a mismatch. A grammatical example would be English verbal inflection: it's not parsimonious to suggest there a five different, lexically distinct, verb endings in the present indicative and another six in the subjunctive that all happen to be homophonous, i.e realised as a null suffix. Its much more plausible that English main verbs really only have two endings, one that's specified for 3rd person singular indicative and one that's fully unspecified. A loose analogue outside of grammar could be how you usually wouldn't say "I'm going to Europe" when the only planned stop is in Paris.

Here's an example from Shakespeare: "
There's not a man I meet but doth salute me
As if I were their well-acquainted friend."

And another from the King James Bible: "Let nothing bee done through strife, or vaine glory, but in lowlinesse of minde let each esteeme other better then themselues."

(Examples via https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=24504, there's more there)

Thanks for injecting some hard data. Let's see what it tells us...

It appears English does have a word for "a person who's sex not known or irrelevant, in the singular", and it's "they" (which just so happens to also be a word for "persons, plural" and for "inanimate objects, plural"),

That's not hard data; that's a theory. I.e., it's a testable hypothesis that's been proposed as an explanation for hard data. Testing it means answering three questions. How well does it predict actual in-the-wild examples of the usage in question? How badly does it falsely predict examples of the usage in question? And how does it compare with competing theories?

For the first question, Shakespeare? Check. Bible? Check.

Well, something we agree upon...

For the second question, all your examples are usage, so I went browsing for examples of non-usage in the wild. (...). I submit that Bibi's and Robert's maleness is irrelevant to what was being said about them. If the theory were correct then English-speakers would use "they/them/their" for singular antecedents a lot more than we do.

I refer to my extra-grammatical analogy further up: if you went to Paris for the weekend, you'd tell people "I went to Paris for the weekend", not "I went to Europe for the weekend", even if you weren't planning with following up with anything Paris specific - indeed even if you specifically bring it up to boast how you can still afford transatlantic weekend trips during this economic crisis, or to annoy someone who wants to ban "needless" air travel for ecological reasons, ie if the only relevant aspect of your trip is indeed that you went to Europe. Language expects you to be as specific as you can without being obtuse.

To add, sticking with the Paris/ Europe analogy: If you want to keep it unknown that it is Paris you went to (because its the Bush Jr years and "French fries" were just renamed and your conversation partner is a staunch Republican), or if you think mentioning it might cause confusion (because you expect them to not know where Paris is located), you're free to say that you "went to Europe". You wouldn't be lying by doing so. At best you'd be an incompletely collaborative communicator.

When talking about a specific referential entity known to both hearer and speaker to be singular and male, your audience expects you to use "he" - because all the boxes for the use of "he" are ticked, not because "they" would cause a grammatical mismatch.

And again, you wouldn't be lying by using "they", even though you might set your audience off searching for a different antecedent.

For the third question, I don't know what competing theories linguists have considered, but the one that occurs to me is that "they" isn't being treated as an honorary singular pronoun after all; rather, the grammatically singular antecedents in these cases are treated as honorary groups.

(...) In some dialects of English, mostly British varieties, plural agreement with grammatically singular nouns is readily available. Constructions like "Parliament are discussing topic X tonight" or "the committed continue to be divided" (...)

You probably guessed this was supposed to read "the committee continue to be divided", but adding it just in case.

(...)
Why I'm saying they're probably not semantically plural is this: they allow distributive readings with singular predicates. Most speakers of English accept "every professor had a rebellious phase when they were a student" as a well formed sentence of the language (whether it's true is a different discussion). The analogue is not possible for unambiguously plural subjects: "all professors had a rebellious phase when they were a student" or "the professors..." seems to imply that they were collectively one student before splitting up into multiple professors. So the availability of "they" in "every professor had a rebellious phase when they were a student" does not predict plural-like behaviour in what predicates are available.

The converse is also true: you don't get collective readings with "each/every". "All (the) striking labourers assembled at the factory doors" is not like "every striking labourer assembled at the factory doors", in that only one of them is English

Here's a dissertation that talks about all of this in more detail than I ever could. Don't be scared of by the categorisation "applied linguistics" in the cover, at least one of the advisers is a syntactician: https://lingbuzz.net/lingbuzz/006367

Probably more of a semanticist, actually, though he's produced quotable work in both fields. I'm talking of Ed Keenan, you'll need to add "linguist" or"UCLA" if you want to Google him, there appears to be a football player by the same name. My impression of a large subset of "applied linguistics" may not be too different from what you think of a certain segment of sociology - I used to say "it's neither applied nor linguistics". My point is this contention doesn't apply to this particular work.

OT/meta: I saw you liked my post but the like seems to have disappeared. Was I dreaming?

 

[Bomb#20]

I meant to write:

How the heck does the existence of made-up cultural concepts that aren't religious doctrines imply that the specific one Jarhyn capitalized isn't a religious doctrine?

No, it seems YOU are making a hasty generalization, simply by implying such a belief is "a religious doctrine". Not all beliefs are religious doctrines, even fervently held ones. I guess all fervently held beliefs an individual has about their personality are "religious doctrines"!

Where the heck do you see me implying that? If you keep reading the post you replied to the first paragraph of, you'll see I listed some additional criteria, including the meme being contagious, the believers adopting loyalty oaths, and their acting like not taking their word for the belief proves you're a bad person. So no, when a guy showing all the classic symptoms of schizophrenia goes off his meds and fervently and sincerely insists he's perfectly sane and the medical establishment is conspiring against him, that is not a religious doctrine. But if a million people who don't know the guy hear about it and start insisting he doesn't have schizophrenia and trying to convince others by telling them if they dispute it then they're probably in on the conspiracy, and another million people join them in order not to be accused of conspiring against him, yeah, that's a religion.

If it weren't religious it wouldn't need to be spread by shouting

Pretty bizarre definition of religion you have there. It's religious if people shout about it? Lol

See above. Shouting is just one symptom among many.​

Sorry I messed up the quoting controls; my bad; that must have made my post very hard to follow. As you should now be able to see, I did not imply expressing frustration on an internet forum or having strong beliefs about something automatically makes you "religious".

TIL expressing frustration, on an internet forum, which is just a regular thing that happens in internet discussions, and many other discussions, because people have emotions and it's a part of human psychology, means someone is religious. Also just having "strong beliefs" about something automatically makes you "religious". You know what's something religious people also tend to lack? The ability to detect nuance, like yourself.

 

[Bomb#20]

I rather think the disagreement is in whether it's appropriate to gaslight and DARVO around the concept.

Your are assuming bad faith where an inability to recognise one's own prejudices as such is entirely sufficient to explain the observed behaviour.

And that's assuming you (or you and I, in those cases where we agree) are 100% right in terms of the content of the debate.

Quite so. And it's also assuming that you two have 100% supported the contentions you are 100% right about in terms of the content of the debate, and an inability to be persuaded by unsound arguments is not entirely sufficient to explain the observed behavior.

 

[Bomb#20]

OT/meta: I saw you liked my post but the like seems to have disappeared. Was I dreaming?

You were not. That was a good post; it will take closer study than I have time for right away, and I'll need to read the dissertation you linked. I don't know why my "Like" disappeared, but it's not the first time. Perhaps the internet gods feel my opinions are not worth noting.

 

[Jarhyn]

Not to mention the fact that the plural form is just as appropriate even here.I still find it hard to believe that he doesn't seem to understand what Newspeak is (...)

"Newspeak... is a controlled language of simplified grammar and limited vocabulary designed to limit a person's ability for critical thinking." -wikipedia

Im pretty sure he does understand, the disagreement is in whether it applies.

I rather think the disagreement is in whether it's appropriate to gaslight and DARVO around the concept.

Your are assuming bad faith where an inability to recognise one's own prejudices as such is entirely sufficient to explain the observed behaviour.

And that's assuming you (or you and I, in those cases where we agree) are 100% right in terms of the content of the debate.

True, they could be incapable of recognizing their prejudices just as much.

If you would like to explore how it could be resulting from my own prejudices, I'm open to that (with you, not them).

Maybe we can discover then where the error lies?

I would like to think that none of my use of language is particularly biased against the idea that under common (and imprecise) usage, for instance, male and female are good enough to handle most instances. The terms are usually 'good enough', excepting when they are not and where more precise thinking (and language) is necessary... Though it strikes me as a very rare case, especially outside conversations such as this one, where that is necessary.

My real point of contention was always over whether they are good enough to make such statements as "there are only two sexes" or "being male means someone isn't female", especially as handles the edge cases wherein some meaningful disparity exists across the whole system, most commonly between some subset of genitals/gonads/brain or some finer division than these (such as even between parts of those).

The other thing we might contend with is whether it is "controlling language so as to bar critical thinking" when some party insists that "man == male; woman == female. Always", and especially with such ridiculous claims as "a brain is male if it is attached to a male body", which rather begs the question of what a "male" brain is.

To me it seems a pretty apparent attempt to bar critical thinking, WRT the doubt of whether that's true or not.

Likewise as discussed use of the to refer to a single person wherein sex/gender is unknown or unimportant, it seems to be an attempt to exclude from common language any ability to make an expression of when a specific person has an unknown, ambiguous, or unimportant configuration of sex or gender.

Admittedly, I am not a fan of "neo-pronouns" regardless of their origin, and would lean towards the selection of a neutral and common term rather than to deal with what would be an ever-expanding distribution of outliers. I don't expect that it eliminates critical thought about outliers, but I would be open to discussing it with someone for whom there is little ambiguity over whether they may be speaking in bad faith

This may indeed encompass something approaching Newspeak insofar as I simply don't want to handle memorizing all such terms (not to mention they don't exactly roll off the tongue very well). Having an available catch-all for "everyone else" at least seems a workable solution, so this informs my current position.

To start with, however, perhaps we could discuss the case of "they" and it's use as a singular gender-ambiguous pronoun (you have already handled its historic usage as such, however you have not in what I have read so far addressed whether this constrains critical thought or encompasses inappropriate control of language) and then perhaps roll into a conversation about the other aspects such as the treatment of man/woman/other and male/female/other as separate concepts?

 

[Jokodo]

OT/meta: I saw you liked my post but the like seems to have disappeared. Was I dreaming?

You were not. That was a good post; it will take closer study than I have time for right away, and I'll need to read the dissertation you linked. I don't know why my "Like" disappeared, but it's not the first time. Perhaps the internet gods feel my opinions are not worth noting.

Or the forum's AI classified your like as likely accidental on the basis that we've been holding divergent positions in the debate...

 

[GenesisNemesis]

I meant to write:

​

How the heck does the existence of made-up cultural concepts that aren't religious doctrines imply that the specific one Jarhyn capitalized isn't a religious doctrine?

​

No, it seems YOU are making a hasty generalization, simply by implying such a belief is "a religious doctrine". Not all beliefs are religious doctrines, even fervently held ones. I guess all fervently held beliefs an individual has about their personality are "religious doctrines"!​

Where the heck do you see me implying that? If you keep reading the post you replied to the first paragraph of, you'll see I listed some additional criteria, including the meme being contagious, the believers adopting loyalty oaths, and their acting like not taking their word for the belief proves you're a bad person. So no, when a guy showing all the classic symptoms of schizophrenia goes off his meds and fervently and sincerely insists he's perfectly sane and the medical establishment is conspiring against him, that is not a religious doctrine. But if a million people who don't know the guy hear about it and start insisting he doesn't have schizophrenia and trying to convince others by telling them if they dispute it then they're probably in on the conspiracy, and another million people join them in order not to be accused of conspiring against him, yeah, that's a religion.​

So you claim you've been "laser-focused" on the logic behind the arguments, not peoples' reasons for what they believe. Now you're making arguments that a particular belief is religious in nature. What gives?

 

[Bomb#20]

I meant to write:

Where the heck do you see me implying that? If you keep reading the post you replied to the first paragraph of, you'll see I listed some additional criteria, including the meme being contagious, the believers adopting loyalty oaths, and their acting like not taking their word for the belief proves you're a bad person. So no, when a guy showing all the classic symptoms of schizophrenia goes off his meds and fervently and sincerely insists he's perfectly sane and the medical establishment is conspiring against him, that is not a religious doctrine. But if a million people who don't know the guy hear about it and start insisting he doesn't have schizophrenia and trying to convince others by telling them if they dispute it then they're probably in on the conspiracy, and another million people join them in order not to be accused of conspiring against him, yeah, that's a religion.​

So you claim you've been "laser-focused" on the logic behind the arguments, not peoples' reasons for what they believe. Now you're making arguments that a particular belief is religious in nature. What gives?

And you say I lack the ability to detect nuance.

I didn't say reasons for belief in general are irrelevant. The arguments whose logic I said I was laser-focused on were the specific arguments invalidly inferring support for racial discrimination and for baby-killing from opposition to prohibition. Reasons for the support and opposition were irrelevant in those cases because the inference was invalid -- no amount of good reasons can magically turn an illogical argument logical. Besides which, racism and abortion aren't the topic of this thread. Gender is. People's reasons for their beliefs about gender are what we're talking about here. But hey, you potentially make a good point. If you can identify a gaping logic error in so-called "trans-allies"' inferences to and from "transwomen are women", I could laser-focus on that, and then I wouldn't need to focus on why their reasons for believing it aren't very good reasons.

 

[GenesisNemesis]

I meant to write:

Where the heck do you see me implying that? If you keep reading the post you replied to the first paragraph of, you'll see I listed some additional criteria, including the meme being contagious, the believers adopting loyalty oaths, and their acting like not taking their word for the belief proves you're a bad person. So no, when a guy showing all the classic symptoms of schizophrenia goes off his meds and fervently and sincerely insists he's perfectly sane and the medical establishment is conspiring against him, that is not a religious doctrine. But if a million people who don't know the guy hear about it and start insisting he doesn't have schizophrenia and trying to convince others by telling them if they dispute it then they're probably in on the conspiracy, and another million people join them in order not to be accused of conspiring against him, yeah, that's a religion.​

So you claim you've been "laser-focused" on the logic behind the arguments, not peoples' reasons for what they believe. Now you're making arguments that a particular belief is religious in nature. What gives?

And you say I lack the ability to detect nuance.

I didn't say reasons for belief in general are irrelevant. The arguments whose logic I said I was laser-focused on were the specific arguments invalidly inferring support for racial discrimination and for baby-killing from opposition to prohibition. Reasons for the support and opposition were irrelevant in those cases because the inference was invalid -- no amount of good reasons can magically turn an illogical argument logical. Besides which, racism and abortion aren't the topic of this thread. Gender is. People's reasons for their beliefs about gender are what we're talking about here. But hey, you potentially make a good point. If you can identify a gaping logic error in so-called "trans-allies"' inferences to and from "transwomen are women", I could laser-focus on that, and then I wouldn't need to focus on why their reasons for believing it aren't very good reasons.

Except all you did was pull a very basic straw man argument and ignored where I qualified my argument with "racism is specifically used to harm people". Nowhere did I say just to ban something because it's not self-defense. I do not believe smoking is specifically used to harm people, so no I don't think smoking should be banned. See how easy that was?

 

[Jarhyn]

I meant to write:

Where the heck do you see me implying that? If you keep reading the post you replied to the first paragraph of, you'll see I listed some additional criteria, including the meme being contagious, the believers adopting loyalty oaths, and their acting like not taking their word for the belief proves you're a bad person. So no, when a guy showing all the classic symptoms of schizophrenia goes off his meds and fervently and sincerely insists he's perfectly sane and the medical establishment is conspiring against him, that is not a religious doctrine. But if a million people who don't know the guy hear about it and start insisting he doesn't have schizophrenia and trying to convince others by telling them if they dispute it then they're probably in on the conspiracy, and another million people join them in order not to be accused of conspiring against him, yeah, that's a religion.​

So you claim you've been "laser-focused" on the logic behind the arguments, not peoples' reasons for what they believe. Now you're making arguments that a particular belief is religious in nature. What gives?

And you say I lack the ability to detect nuance.

I didn't say reasons for belief in general are irrelevant. The arguments whose logic I said I was laser-focused on were the specific arguments invalidly inferring support for racial discrimination and for baby-killing from opposition to prohibition. Reasons for the support and opposition were irrelevant in those cases because the inference was invalid -- no amount of good reasons can magically turn an illogical argument logical. Besides which, racism and abortion aren't the topic of this thread. Gender is. People's reasons for their beliefs about gender are what we're talking about here. But hey, you potentially make a good point. If you can identify a gaping logic error in so-called "trans-allies"' inferences to and from "transwomen are women", I could laser-focus on that, and then I wouldn't need to focus on why their reasons for believing it aren't very good reasons.

Except all you did was pull a very basic straw man argument and ignored where I qualified my argument with "racism is specifically used to harm people". Nowhere did I say just to ban something because it's not self-defense. I do not believe smoking is specifically used to harm people, so no I don't think smoking should be banned. See how easy that was?

To be fair, smoking is not intended to harm people,

Spoiler: Off topic

but sometimes smoking harms people who are caught captive to some secondary interest. In those cases I would argue smoking should be banned regardless of intent.

As these do not fully account for all contexts of smoking, such a ban would have to be narrowly targeted to such contexts where they do.

As such, indoor smoking bans on public businesses make some sense, except when confined to a dedicated smoking area.

 

[Bomb#20]

I am puzzled as to what it is you two think determines the voluntary behavior of sentient animals, if not cognition. ... On its face you two appear to be disputing that this is a cause-and-effect universe. Or perhaps you two mean something different by "cognition" from what I mean.

I'm struggling for the terminology to get this out, so bear with me.

There's a difference between cognition and behavior, and you reference it somewhat. Cognition is the process by which we acquire and expand knowledge; behavior is the mechanism of response to our environment. Several of those terms in there are being used very broadly, but to narrow the scope would require pages and a degree I don't hold.

You ask whether a lioness's decisions are based purely on them not being as heavy as lions. To this, I would ask how much of a lioness's observed actions do you believe are decisions consciously made, as opposed to behaviors subconsciously acted upon? Do you think a lioness hides her cups because she's consciously considering the likelihood that the pride lion might kill them? Or do you think she hides them because her innate instincts developed over millennia drive her to that behavior?

Behavior is how we respond, and the majority of it is not conscious. ...

Thanks for the detailed explanation. It sounds like our disagreement is mainly terminological. I'd include pretty much everything the brain does as cognition apart from autonomic controls; instincts count. My guess is that no, she isn't consciously considering likelihood, but that isn't the question that matters. I think she hides her cubs because she's afraid for them. And the fear caused by seeing a male lion near them is instinctual as you say and isn't consciously reasoned -- fear generally isn't -- but nonetheless, she is very aware of it. A gazelle doesn't run from a cheetah because he's afraid of dying, but he also doesn't run because his autonomic adrenal controls got triggered. He runs because he's afraid of cheetahs. (And I know based on my extensive experience with being a gazelle.)

As far as "females form thoughts through a different mechanism than that used by males" goes, yes, of course they do. Everybody forms thoughts through a different mechanism from that used by everybody else. ...

This is splitting hairs. Sure, nobody's brains are alike... but neither is anybody's knee joint exactly the same as someone else's. And yet, all of our knees function by the same mechanics (assuming they function, of course). Some people can run and jump and their knees have no complaints. Other people's knees are just not as cooperative when it comes to athletics. Some people have high manual dexterity and can play piano beautifully, other people have low manual dexterity and struggle to feed themselves with a fork - but all of those hands have the same mechanics involved.

Sure, but they don't have the same neural circuitry generating the same control signals. "How do I get to Carnegie Hall?" runs the old joke. "Practice". It isn't chiefly the hand mechanics that practicing changes.

Similarly, the processes by which we think and learn are largely the same. No two people's brains are identical, but the mechanisms by which our brains function are the same. We all have an occipital and a temporal lobe, we all have frontal cortexes, and those sections perform the same processes. The outcomes will differ for each person, sure. And some may have better executive function where others struggle to prioritize the simplest tasks.

So with that in mind... are you and jokodo of the opinion that the brains of female humans function in a different manner than the brains of male humans? Do you think our brains have vastly different structures, or that the process by which we acquire and expand our knowledge is fundamentally different?

This makes it sound like you are reserving the word "different" to apply only to big differences, and calling subtle differences "the same", whereas Jokodo and I don't do that. As I said, the disagreement appears to be terminological.

When you and jokodo opine that men and women have different cognitive processes, to me you're not saying that men and women have different behavioral tendencies. You're not even saying that we have different mental strengths and weaknesses on average. To me, you're claiming that the functional processes of our brains are fundamentally different from one another. And I don't think that view is supported.

So I'll circle back around to my first comment in there: Explain what you mean by "biologically female cognition".

I am skeptical that the distinction you draw between "different behavioral tendencies" and "fundamentally different" has any objective support to it, any more than the distinctions between phyla and classes and orders and families and genera had, back in the days when taxonomists still argued over those, any more than there's a hard-and-fast line between overweight and fat. But for present purposes it doesn't matter. I'll just stop using the word "cognition".

You're granting that men and women have different behavioral tendencies and that we have different mental strengths and weaknesses on average, yes? Well, since this is a cause-and-effect universe, there must on average be some subtle differences in brain wiring and/or brain chemistry between men and women to account for those behavioral differences and mental strengths and weaknesses, yes? Well, those subtle brain differences are what I was talking about.

I said that, to the extent that "biologically female cognition" is a meaningful concept, which I find a highly debatable notion,

... "Biologically female cognition" is a perfectly meaningful concept in lions, in ducks, in alligators, in lemurs, in baboons, in gorillas. Why the heck would it suddenly stop being meaningful in humans? The opinion that it isn't meaningful in humans appears to be a politically motivated meme.

Until either you or Jokodo can be bothered to actually explain what you think "biologically female cognition" means in the context of humans, and in what way it's applicable to this topic... I reject the premise as being relevant.

In case there's any particular confusion on this, I reject it because the unexamined assumption here is that it is somehow possible for a human with an entirely typical male phenotype to have a female cognition in the first place... and the subsequent assumption that this hypothetical female cognition which is occurring within a male of the human species is biological in nature.

I would go further and argue that the language being used is misleading and obfuscating. By using the term "cognition" here, the implication is that females form thoughts through a different mechanism than that used by males - and I do not believe there is any evidence to support that. If you wish to discuss behavioral tendencies that generally differ on the basis of sex, that's something else altogether. Behavioral tendencies do exist as part of our evolution, and those tendencies do vary by sex. But that's something entirely different from cognition.

To my mind, a "male brain" means a brain having most of those subtle chemical and wiring characteristics typical of the brains of males that cause sex-varying behavioral and mental tendencies, and likewise a "female brain". When Jokodo said it was biologically possible for an otherwise male individual to have "biologically female cognition", I took him to be claiming a man can have a female brain in that sense. And it seems to me he's perfectly correct about that -- I don't see anything about that scenario any more contradictory to the rules of embryology than a woman having testes, something we know can happen in the case of complete androgen insensitivity syndrome. What Jokodo is postulating here appears to me to be just yet another entry in the already extensive zoo of intersex conditions or DSDs or whatever you want to call them.

My disagreement with Jokodo on this matter is that he appears to think this bare biological possibility actually accounts for a substantial fraction of the people with gender dysphoria. That supposition appears to me to be wildly implausible. I'm skeptical that the condition he postulates has ever actually occurred in anyone; and if it happens at all I expect it's rare like CAIS. So while I'm not going to rule out any particular trans person having the brain of the other sex a priori, neither am I going to believe it's true in his or her case without solid empirical evidence for it.

So take all this as a "concurring opinion". I'm actually agreeing with you -- I likewise reject the whole premise as relevant. But not because it's incoherent or illogical or impossible. But rather, because it's just another example of something else you've frequently criticized: "trans allies" trying to make hay by appropriating for their own political purposes the separate medical issues of people with DSDs.

 

[GenesisNemesis]

I meant to write:

Where the heck do you see me implying that? If you keep reading the post you replied to the first paragraph of, you'll see I listed some additional criteria, including the meme being contagious, the believers adopting loyalty oaths, and their acting like not taking their word for the belief proves you're a bad person. So no, when a guy showing all the classic symptoms of schizophrenia goes off his meds and fervently and sincerely insists he's perfectly sane and the medical establishment is conspiring against him, that is not a religious doctrine. But if a million people who don't know the guy hear about it and start insisting he doesn't have schizophrenia and trying to convince others by telling them if they dispute it then they're probably in on the conspiracy, and another million people join them in order not to be accused of conspiring against him, yeah, that's a religion.​

So you claim you've been "laser-focused" on the logic behind the arguments, not peoples' reasons for what they believe. Now you're making arguments that a particular belief is religious in nature. What gives?

And you say I lack the ability to detect nuance.

I didn't say reasons for belief in general are irrelevant. The arguments whose logic I said I was laser-focused on were the specific arguments invalidly inferring support for racial discrimination and for baby-killing from opposition to prohibition. Reasons for the support and opposition were irrelevant in those cases because the inference was invalid -- no amount of good reasons can magically turn an illogical argument logical. Besides which, racism and abortion aren't the topic of this thread. Gender is. People's reasons for their beliefs about gender are what we're talking about here. But hey, you potentially make a good point. If you can identify a gaping logic error in so-called "trans-allies"' inferences to and from "transwomen are women", I could laser-focus on that, and then I wouldn't need to focus on why their reasons for believing it aren't very good reasons.

Except all you did was pull a very basic straw man argument and ignored where I qualified my argument with "racism is specifically used to harm people". Nowhere did I say just to ban something because it's not self-defense. I do not believe smoking is specifically used to harm people, so no I don't think smoking should be banned. See how easy that was?

To be fair, smoking is not intended to harm people,

Spoiler: Off topic

but sometimes smoking harms people who are caught captive to some secondary interest. In those cases I would argue smoking should be banned regardless of intent.

As these do not fully account for all contexts of smoking, such a ban would have to be narrowly targeted to such contexts where they do.

As such, indoor smoking bans on public businesses make some sense, except when confined to a dedicated smoking area.

And I should also add there are some things that don't intend to harm us that we still defend against, just to avoid possible confusion where it might be assumed I'm saying a fetus intends to attack someone, which I obviously don't believe. The intent to harm is relevant to racism however.

 

[Politesse]

So take all this as a "concurring opinion". I'm actually agreeing with you -- I likewise reject the whole premise as relevant. But not because it's incoherent or illogical or impossible. But rather, because it's just another example of something else you've frequently criticized: "trans allies" trying to make hay by appropriating for their own political purposes the separate medical issues of people with DSDs.

The LGBTQIA alliance doesn't exist because the people in it don't understand that there are differences between the Is and the Ts (or any of the other letters) but because the same Christian theocrats shitbags and their white nationalist cronies are trying to legislate all of us out of our rights, and we're better off standing together against them than getting individually hunted down and neutralized in silence. Yes, our unity is accomplished for "political purposes". It always was. And we have as much right to form a political coalition as does anyone else.

 

[Bomb#20]

The LGBTQIA alliance doesn't exist because the people in it don't understand that there are differences between the Is and the Ts (or any of the other letters) but because the same Christian theocrats ... and their white nationalist cronies are trying to legislate all of us out of our rights, and we're better off standing together against them than getting individually hunted down and neutralized in silence. Yes, our unity is accomplished for "political purposes". It always was. And we have as much right to form a political coalition as does anyone else.

Indeed. You have every right to approach all this from a political point of view, just as the rest of us have every right to notice that the circumstance of you thinking you have sound political reasons for making the claims you make does not make those claims any more likely to be true.