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Ellen 🌊
@pastasnack_e
I think this suffers from a confusion between description and definition. "Has four legs and meows" clearly doesn't *define* a cat, it *describes* their usual features. Cats are a species defined by descent from a common ancestor; if you're in the cat lineage you're a cat. >>>
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Aella
@Aella_Girl
i wrote this thing about transness in which i think both sides are wrong aella.substack.com/p/what-a-woman
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Ellen 🌊
@pastasnack_e
> in this example, there's a reason we don't see cat-tree intermediates in nature, and it's not just statistical luck that cat traits tend to be found on cats and tree traits on trees. The lineages of cats and trees diverged 1.5 billion years ago. They are separate things >
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Ellen 🌊
@pastasnack_e
Similarly, this is not a definition of "woman". It's a list of traits that women commonly, but not always, have. Not the same thing. >
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Ellen 🌊
@pastasnack_e
Leaving aside that many would consider this pretty homophobic. There is a fundamental difference between Martha and Nikki in this example. We *all know* what it is that would mean Martha is a woman and Nikki is (technically, in a biological sense, whatever) not. >
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Ellen 🌊
@pastasnack_e
Just as 'cat' is *defined* as an animals in the cat lineage, 'woman' is *defined* as an adult in the Homo sapiens lineage, of the female reproductive phenotype. Any additional features women may or may not have in common with each other are incidental to that definition.
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Aella
@Aella_Girl
Replying to
@pastasnack_e
You can pick a thing to use as your definition, which seems kinda reasonable, but this doesn't feel intuitive to the way concepts are used? Like, if an exact clone of me spawned out of the earth, it feels weird to call that "not human"
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Ellen 🌊
@pastasnack_e
Replying to
@Aella_Girl
Yes, except the thing that defines a concept isn't an arbitrarily chosen quality after eg feeding a large sample into an AI (which might give you 4 legs etc for a cat). Would have to think about what it is exactly that makes definition go deeper, but >
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Ellen 🌊
@pastasnack_e
Replying to
@pastasnack_e
and
@Aella_Girl
I think definitions have to consider function or how/why the thing exists. For biological concepts such as cat/tree/female/male, those would be seriously challenged by things that don't actually occur within life on earth, like a mud clone
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