Three strands in sex/gender concepts

null, null, Francois Schroeter (University of Melbourne), Laura Schroeter (University of Melbourne)

Cognitive, social and developmental psychologists have amassed a wealth of data about the complex patterns of understanding associated with sex/gender terms like ‘woman’ and ‘man’. We focus on three core strands in the conceptual understanding of the term ‘woman’: (1) biological sex, (2) social role, and (3) affiliation (identifying as a member of the class ‘woman’ or ‘man’). In the recent philosophical literature, many theorists have privileged one of these three core strands to argue that ‘woman’ has a univocal reference – a biological kind, a social class, or an affiliative identity kind. We argue against these univocalist approaches and suggest that ordinary sex/gender concepts – and the words used to express them – should be understood as having complex meanings that may be sharpened by context. We contrast our approach with family resemblance interpretations (Stoljar) and standard contextualist proposals (Saul, Diaz-Leon). We draw on the literature on polysemy to show that the complexity of our sex/gender concepts need not lead to confusion or breakdowns in communication.