Abstract:

Sexes stand accused of many forms of indeterminacy: as used in science, ‘male’ and ‘female’ might have multiple meanings, perhaps in different contexts; they might under-specify other relevant details; their boundaries may be blurry, and so on. In light of this, one stream of philosophical work on sexes has been concerned to achieve, or restore, precision and clarity about their meaning(s) as a scientific concept(s), or to abandon them if this can’t be adequately salvaged. Against this current, however, some philosophers of science hold that conceptual ambiguity can be ineliminable and even a feature, rather than a bug. In this talk I’ll ask (1) which of these arguments apply to sexes, if any, (2) what this means for calls to clarify scientific uses of “sex”, and (3) what we might learn about conceptual indeterminacy in general from careful attention to sexes. One consideration that cuts across these questions is that sexes are what I call “sticky” kinds: kinds for which social and political baggage, and/or a particular logic of research questions (in Elisabeth Lloyd’s 2015 sense), have proven difficult to shed.