FlashDangerpants wrote: ↑Sat Apr 22, 2023 1:28 pmThe problem with this is that you are not really thinking through the implications of that word counterintuitive.
You really could have just opted for spermy-swimmers versus ova and just said that baby boys and girls belong to gender classes but not sex ones until puberty. But you didn't want to do that because it seems obvious that the babies have both sexes and genders, no? So your gamete definition needs an artifical extension such that an object M is male iff in any possible world it could produce spunkybois and in no possible world could it produce ova. But it only needs that because you know what needs to be rules into the definition of male and what needs to be ruled out before you started. So you apply a Procrustean leg breaking fix to the problem.
Thing is, you went into this gamete thing for a couple of reasons as far as I can see. On the one hand you weren't happy with chromosomes or gonads as definitive, and on the other you really really really want to use a science definition because you have got the notion into your head that being sciency is the same as being officialy true. Your gamete thing has the same basic weakness as the gonad thing, but you happen not to have via science any next step so the gamete thing is the one you chose to clumsily patch. But you have blundered with the science assumption anyway; that sort of move only works if it resolves an ambiguity, whereas you are merely introducing unwarranted new ambiguities.
What we can learn from this is that we choose which sort of definition to use according to circumstances which have very much to do with what sort of conversation we are engaged in. If you keep an eye on these things you will note that they are highly movable over time - they reflect us as much as the object being described.
How many confusingly context-relative concepts of sex do you want to have and use? I'd like to have and use
one absolute, universal concept of it—and fortunately there is one, namely
the biological standard concept:
"By definition, males are the sex that produces small gametes (sperm), and females are the sex that produces large gametes (eggs)."
(Stearns, S. C. "Why Sex Evolved and the Differences It Makes." In The Evolution of Sex and Its Consequences, edited by S. C. Stearns, 15-32. Basel: Birkhäuser/Springer, 1987. p. 17)
(Stearns' statement is not ambiguous! Anyway, ambiguity isn't the same as vagueness.)
Definitions aren't true or false, but
adequate/appropriate or
inadequate/inappropriate. From the scientific perspective, the above definition of sex is
the most adequate/appropriate one, and that's why it has become the standard definition in biology.
"Biological sex reflects two distinct evolutionary strategies to produce offspring: the female strategy is to produce few large gametes and the male strategy is to produce many small (and often motile) gametes. This fundamental definition is valid for all sexually reproducing organisms. Sex-associated genotypes or phenotypes (including sex chromosomes, primary and secondary sexual characteristics and sex hormones), sex roles and sexual differentiation are consequences of the biological sex. Genotypic and phenotypic features, as well as sex roles are often used as operational criteria to define sex, but since these traits differ vastly between sexually reproducing species, they only work for selected species."
(Goymann, Wolfgang, Henrik Brumm, and Peter M. Kappeler. "Biological sex is binary, even though there is a rainbow of sex roles."
BioEssays 45/2 (February 2023):
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10. ... .202200173)
"The chromosomal and phenotypic ‘definitions’ of biological sex that are contested in philosophical discussions of sex are actually operational definitions which track gametic sex more or less effectively in some species or group of species. Neither ‘definition’ can be stated for species in general except by defining them in terms of gametic sex."
(Paul Griffiths,
"What are Sexes?", 2021)
However, the gametic definition as formulated by Stearns is best read as a
generic generalization allowing individual exceptions rather than as a
universally quantified proposition. That is, "Males are sperm-producers, and females are egg-producers" is not synonymous with "
All males are sperm-producers, and
all females are egg-producers," but rather with "Males are
normally/typically sperm-producers, and females are
normally/typically egg-producers."
Generic generalizations aren't entirely free of vagueness—especially when they are interpreted in terms of what is
normal or
typical for an individual member of its kind (species)—, but the problem of semantic vagueness is a general and apparently inevitable one; so it alone gives us no good reason
not to accept the gametic definition as the most adequate/appropriate one.
It may be that "[d]efinitions in biology are never perfectly precise" (
Alex Byrne); but any
non-gametic biological definition and any
non-biological definition of sex isn't perfectly precise either—and is arguably
less precise and
less adequate than the gametic definition.
That said, I cannot help but admit that when it comes to sexually classifying
a given individual (in a certain stage of his life), things can get pretty complicated or, in the worst case, even undecidable.
"The fact that a species has only two biological sexes does not imply that every member of the species is either male, female or hermaphroditic, or that the sex of every individual organism is clear and determinate.
……
Assigning sexes to pre-reproductive life-history stages involves ‘prospective narration’ – classifying the present in terms of its anticipated future. Assigning sexes to adult stages of non-reproductive castes or non-reproductive individuals is a complex matter whose biological meaning differs from case to case.
……
The idea of biological sex when applied to a species is unequivocal - biological sexes are regions of phenotypic space that implement gametic reproductive strategies. But when applied to individual organisms this idea becomes more complex. Individual organisms, and specific life-history stages of those organisms, can stand in various different relations to the gametic reproductive strategies that define sexes. These various relations each provide good, but different, reasons to assign a life history stage of an individual to a sex.
……
We have already met some individuals that it makes no biological sense to assign a sex: embryos in species that switch sex as adults, early embryos in species with environmental sex determination, and individuals who are in the middle of switching from one sex to another.
More generally, in the previous section we saw that once we move away from the core case of individuals who can produce gametes, the sex of an individual is not a simple biological fact but a defensible interpretation of a complex biological reality."
(Paul Griffiths,
"What are Sexes?", 2021)
By the way, Griffiths thinks that
"[t]he idea of biological sex is critical for understanding the diversity of life, but ill-suited to the job of determining the social or legal status of human beings as men or women."
But note that by "the idea of biological sex" he means
the gametic conception; and he mustn't be misunderstood as meaning that when sociologists, psychologists, or philosophers are talking about sex, they should use a different biological conception or a non-biological one reducing sex to socially constructed gender. All he's meaning to say is that it doesn't follow from the biological definition of males and females that all human males/females
must be
socially and legally classified correspondingly as men/women.
