Abstract

This dissertation aims to contribute to two recently burgeoning literatures in philosophy: that surrounding conceptual engineering and that surrounding the metaphysics of gender. It begins with a criticism of the recent conceptual engineering literature, arguing that the idea of rationally warranted conceptual change raises irresolvable puzzles as long as the kind of rationality at work is assumed to be the familiar type of instrumental rationality. I then argue that another kind of rationally warranted conceptual change — one already investigated empirically by developmental psychologists such as Susan Carey — can provide a model for conceptual changes involving non-instrumental modes of reasons-responsiveness. Chapter 2 argues that feminist approaches to the metaphysics of gender and the ethics of gender-ascription would be well served by exploring an anti-representationalist, pragmatist theory of linguistic meaning. The argument here is that such a pragmatist approach posits a constitutive relationship between the truth of a gender-ascription and the normative commitments it expresses. Theory that thinks of itself in this way can regard itself as a kind of immanent critique. Finally, chapter 3 sketches how we might think about the ethics of gender-ascription and — if chapter 2 is correct about the constitutive relationship between these — the metaphysics of gender. It’s argued that the fundamental values of freedom and equality, and the nature of social identity as a call for recognition, militate in favor of respecting transgender identities and disavowing hegemonic conceptions of gender.