this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2024
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This is a week analogy.. french only works as a means of communication because it has internal rules that are objective (as in different people understand the same/very similar thing when hearing/seeing a symbol/word).
Singularity of experience is cool, but anything social requires communication/synchronization.
Even though gender is used as a box or definition people are forced to fit into (and this is bad), reducing human experience to a blackbox kind of singularity is a highly individualist take.
You can work on understanding each other without forcing anyone to fit into your definition..
Language isn't objective though. It wasn't handed down from some deity.
Language is a constantly evolving negotiation of new and remixed communications, performed through billions of interactions every single day. It's collaborative and unpredictable and sometimes someone comes up with something cool and the next day everybody is copying them.
In short, language is socially constructed.
I think it's a great analogy for gender in that respect.
Objective and socially constructed isn't a 'hard' contradiction.
Yes of course language evolves and so on, but in a given time(period) it needs to be interpretable more or less independently from the specific actor (a dictionary ensures this, even though it needs to be updated regularly).
In other words yeah sometimes language comes up with new stuff. If it would do it all the time, it wouldn't function
It does change all the time, and dictionaries don't ensure any kind of standard. The linguists who write dictionaries will tell you that their only function is to describe the most popular parts of the language, not to prescribe any particular rules. Telling people how they should speak doesn't actually work.
I could say the phrase "abso-fucking-lutely" and you understand it, even though it's not in the dictionary. That's still language, it's still English.
And I don't know what you mean by a "'hard' contradiction" or why that matters. My point is that both language and gender are forms of communication that rely on socially constructed signifiers and they are both fluid to a similar degree, so the analogy is good. If you want to argue with me, that's the point you should be dealing with.
Well my point is just it's neither fully determined as in ahistoric rule nor random as in "changes all the time" or "everyone has their own singular definitions and concepts". And in between there is the sweet spot of understanding, interpretation and development..
Right, but nobody except grammar nazis and the sith deal in absolutes like that.
Obviously the signifiers have a level of stability otherwise nobody would understand any of it.
This is yet another way in which language and gender are analogous.
People don't know what words mean in English either yet continue trying to force their made up definitions on others.
Language is objective, because a language is an immaterial object. The opposite, subjective, would impy that language itself has an experience of the world as an entity in itself; that it is a subject.
People's understanding of the languages they speak is subjective (the subject is the person), but their use of language is objective, because they create objects (words, sentences) in the air or on a screen. When another person, a subject, reads those objective words, they then have a new subjective understanding of them. But the words, and the language, remain objects.
Words are objects in a sense, although they are abstract, but there is no singular objective language in the same way that there is no objective gender. Both are intersubjective, they are interactions negotiated between subjects. There is no fixed object that you can point to and call "language" independent of a subjective experience of that language.
And your argument could be applied to expressions of gender. A feminine dress is an object, and a beard is an object. These are gender signifiers, but that doesn't make gender itself objective in any way. The analogy to language is very close. They are both sets of signifiers.
Subjective in this sense would mean everyone has their own singular way as opposed to "its the same/similar indepently of the person looking at it".
no
People don't agree what sentences and words mean all the time. Every single linguist on earth disagrees with you
"/similar"
The analogy probably gets used for longer than just one week
Additionally, if "nobody gets to tell anybody else how they experience themselves", then it follows that nobody gets to tell anybody else how they 'experience' you, either. After all, how you describe someone is your interpretation of them, you're not dictating anything to them or forcing anything upon them by doing so.
If you live in Scandinavia, you might consider someone "short" who other people would not consider short, simply because that region of the world has a higher height average than most other places. So maybe in the US, you're not short (re the 5'9" average, iirc) if you're a 5'10" man, but you very well might be, to someone who rarely meets men under 6 feet tall.
So this is basically an argument for 'think of yourself however you like, but I'm going to see you the way I see you, deal with it', which is obviously not the OP's intent, lol.
It'd be more like "ah interesting we have different scales, let's get to the bottom of this"
No, natural languages are not objective, they have semantics, contexts, all that.
Bombastic! I'm definitely and individualist and I don't want to have anything in common with collectivists.
Which is what's individualism all about.