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Tomas,
I see a recent tweet of yours that refers to Paul Griffiths’ “extended sense” of “male” and “female”, and had been wondering what your take on it was:
Apparently that’s a reference to his 2020 Aeon article, but he makes some effort to emphasize that, in particular, “extended sense females” really don’t qualify as such:
So worker bees are ‘female’ in the extended sense that they would develop into fertile females if they weren’t actively prevented from doing so. …. Workers and soldiers are both ‘female’ in an extended sense, but not in the full-blown sense that queen ants are female. There is a human imperative to give everything a sex, as mentioned above, but biology doesn’t share it.
About the most one can get out of “extended sense” is no better than “nominally speaking”, or for reference purposes only:
But, relative to his “human imperative to give everything a sex”, I wonder if you’ve seen his more recent PhilPapers article which emphasizes his view, underwritten by one in the Journal of Molecular Human Reproduction, that many members of many anisogamous species – including the human one – are neither male nor female, that they are in fact sexless:
Griffiths (PhilPapers): "Individual organisms pass in and out of these regions – sexes – one or more times during their lives. Importantly, sexes are life-history stages rather than applying to organisms over their entire lifespan. This fact has been obscured by concentrating on humans, and ignoring species which regularly change sex, as well as those with non-genetic or facultatively genetic sex determination systems."
Which was largely the same position he took in his earlier Aeon article:
"Nothing in the biological definition of sex requires that every organism be a member of one sex or the other. That might seem surprising, but it follows naturally from defining each sex by the ability to do one thing: make eggs or make sperm. Some organisms can do both, while some can't do either [ergo, sexless]."
But it seems a large part of the whole problem with the quite enervating transgender issue is that so many are rather desperately committed to the “idea” that everyone has to have a sex. Part and parcel of the general unwillingness of virtually everyone to define their terms with any degree of consistency and intellectual honesty. As Will Durant put it in commenting on a quip by Voltaire:
Durant: “ 'If you wish to converse with me,' said Voltaire, 'define your terms.' How many a debate would have been deflated into a paragraph if the disputants had dared to define their terms! This is the alpha and omega of logic, the heart and soul of it, that every important term in serious discourse shall be subjected to strictest scrutiny and definition. It is difficult, and ruthlessly tests the mind; but once done it is half of any task. — Will Durant"
