

- So let's substitute the "definition" of woman into Tom's sentence: "A woman is somebody who sincerely identifies as... somebody who identifies as... somebody who identifies as... somebody who identifies as...." Uh oh!https://twitter.com/skepticCanary/status/1042355584748716032 …
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It's just about possible to rescue this sort of thing from circularity by arguing that to be a woman is a pure act of identification (with the class of people who similarly identify).
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Two sources of trouble, though: (a) It does violence to the way that language actually works - a term such as "woman" cannot be sealed off from all the everyday conventions, associations, etc, that determine its meaning and usage; and (b)
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it's entirely possible that the vast majority of the class of people who identify in this way have a whole lot of stuff in common which you don't share with them, and that makes the act of identification in and of itself not enough...
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