WiP - Nick Laskowski / How not to argue that ‘woman’ is monosemous
WiP - Nick Laskowski / How not to argue that ‘woman’ is monosemous
November 4, kick off the cooler days of November with a Work-in-Progress led by Nick, abstracted below, on "How not to argue that ‘woman’ Is monosemous."
Recently, N. G. Laskowski, Sarah-Jane Leslie, and Jake Quilty-Dunn argue that terms like 'woman', 'man', 'female, 'male', and the like are ambiguous in the sense of being polysemous - they have more than one meaning that are all related in some way. More recently, Kathleen Stock and Tomas Bogardus argue that such terms fail linguistic tests for ambiguity and conclude that the terms are monosemous. I point out that the tests are, at best, tools for detecting when terms are ambiguous in the sense of being homonymous or having several unrelated meanings, and conclude that Stock and Bogardus have provided no new reasons to doubt the view that terms like 'woman' are polysemous. I then argue that if one of the meanings of 'woman' is social, then applied philosophers of language have, contra Elizabeth Barnes' recent suggestion, given social ontologists new tools to draw some interesting conclusions about the metaphysics of womanhood.