Thus provided, thus confident and inquiring,
I set out in the pursuit of truth.
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own.

1.    Preliminaries

To begin, the points of departure. First, the theoretical. As a motivation for her inquiry, Sally Haslanger (2000b) uses an epigraph from Simone de Beauvoir to ask: what is a woman? According to this epigraph, this is a question that we have to face if we admit that there are women. Beauvoir (1987 [1949]) begins the original text by noting how irritating the theme of “the woman” is, especially if we take into account the confusions and disagreements about what it means to be a woman. In this initial part of her text, Beauvoir emphasizes how complicated the question of what it means to be a woman is. Implicitly appealing to common sense and everyday language, Beauvoir notes how problematic it is, on the one hand, to suggest that (in the mid-twentieth century) there are no longer women and, on the other, to demand of women (also in the mid-twentieth century) that they “be women, remain women, become women” (Beauvoir: 9).[1] The implicit suggestion in common sense, which Beauvoir illustrates by referring to the way people speak, is that not all human beings of the female sex are necessarily women. This is a statement of the problem generating the discussion that will be presented here. What is said and done about “woman” suggests a distinction between being a female human being and being a woman. This is Haslanger’s point of departure (2000a, 2000b, 2005) and it is this point of departure that generates current discussions about the metaphysics of gender and the meaning of expressions such as “being a woman.”

Now, the ideological point of departure. In this article, it is assumed from the outset that what is called feminist philosophy has a normative component (political, ethical). Feminist philosophy is not neutral. As Mari Mikkola notes, feminist philosophy is activist insofar as it advocates “public support for a cause and speaking on behalf of some group” (Mikkola 2021:213). Esa Díaz-León (2017) and Katharine Jenkins (2016) present feminism in philosophy as a political and intellectual movement that aims to describe and resist the oppression of women. Jennifer Saul (2012) notes that the term “woman” has political significance. Thinking along the same sort of lines, Haslanger (2000a, 2000b, 2005) defends a feminist metaphysics as a source of reasons for opposition to social and political regimes that oppress and subordinate women, taking into consideration that the philosophical project of developing the concept of gender in this context allows us to obtain effective instruments against injustices against women.[2]

Finally, the methodological point of departure. As Mikkola also notes (2021), given this political and social motivation, feminist philosophy aims to make explicit whether and how gender affects philosophical inquiry. Louise Antony (2012) rejects one way of doing this. According to her, a feminist motivation does not have to result in a project of rejection of classical or traditional philosophy, delegitimizing its concepts and theories and replacing them with concepts and theories that are not “malestream.”[3] Antony’s (2012) point is raised in opposition to Jennifer Hornsby (2000) and her feminist philosophy of language project, which will not be addressed here.[4] What is being highlighted here is that Antony argues that a feminist spirit can and should manifest itself in philosophy as a critical or practical project. The critical feminist project consists in manifesting this feminist spirit in making explicit and analysing the sexist, or masculine, biases that may underlie philosophical conceptions and notions. The practical feminist project consists in addressing philosophical issues that directly concern women. In opposition to Hornsby’s replacement project, Antony argues that neither project, critical nor practical, requires the rejection of earlier philosophical concepts and theories. On the contrary, she proposes that both can freely use these concepts and theories to advance the feminist spirit in philosophy. This establishes the agenda for feminist philosophy: to use the concepts and theories available in philosophy to, on the one hand, criticise possible masculine biases and, on the other hand, apply these concepts and theories to pressing women’s issues. The two projects, critical and practical, can be simultaneous. This is precisely what happens in the debates that will be addressed here.

The three points of departure that I have mentioned are also interconnected. Responding to the question of what a woman is is a philosophical inquiry, motivated by the oppression or social injustice to which women are subject, and that response must critically consider the concepts and theories available in philosophy that have application in social reality. My starting point is, therefore, that even if one rejects the claim that doing feminist philosophy involves replacing (supposedly) malestream concepts and theories with (supposedly) feminist concepts and theories, to do philosophy with a feminist spirit is to defend activism and to support gender justice with theory. If (gender) justice is the aim of feminist philosophy, or that of the various projects involved in feminist philosophy, then the very notion of gender and, therefore, also the very concept of a woman must be at the starting point.

2.    Joints

In the same year that Beauvoir was faced with the obligation of writing The Second Sex, to clarify the pressing and seemingly confusing questions about what it means to be a woman, Willard van Orman Quine wrote and published his famous article “On What There Is.”[5] What is there? He starts by asking. An immediate and obvious response would be to answer: everything. But, as Quine notes, answering like that would be the same as saying that there is what there is. However, Quine further notes, the various attempts available in the history of philosophy to answer the question of what there is in a less obvious and more interesting way lead to insurmountable philosophical difficulties or untenable philosophical positions. His solution is to carry out metaphysical inquiry through an investigation of language. With support from Bertrand Russell’s theory of descriptions,[6] and without forgetting the distinction between sense and reference established by Gottlob Frege,[7] Quine proposes that an ontological commitment is established only where a value is ascribed to a variable in a sentence or a theory. An entity can then be assumed to exist―and thus join the list of all there is―only if it is the object mapped by a concept to truth. Quine thus argues that a debate about what there is has to be conducted on the semantic plane: it has to be about the sentences and theories we use to assert the existence and relationships of the relevant entities. The proposal is then that an ontology is determined by our conceptual schemes: talking about phrases or texts that describe reality is the only acceptable way to do metaphysics. An idea is thus established: a metaphysical inquiry is, in the first instance, a linguistic enquiry. But another idea is suggested: if what we are committed to accepting as existing depends on our conceptual schemes, then our commitment to the existence of women depends on the conceptual schemes that we have at our disposal and, in particular, those which are expressed in our use of language.

The feminist metaphysics launched by Sally Haslanger (2000a, 2000b) and promoted by Esa Díaz-León (2017, 2016) shares this idea. Perhaps more importantly, I suggest, feminist metaphysics needs this idea. As noted by Haslanger (2000a), the emergence of feminist metaphysics was controversial, both within metaphysics and feminism. The apparent incompatibility arises from the presupposition that what exists is independent of minds, in a relevant way that will be explained below. The idea is that if what there is is independent of minds, a normative and activist feminist project cannot be compatible with a metaphysical enquiry, which must be socially and politically neutral. An example widely cited in the literature is the metaphysical project of Ted Sider (2016, 2011), according to which metaphysics must describe the most fundamental level of the structure of reality using terms that carve reality at its joints.[8] This project assumes ontological realism: the thesis that reality exists and is as it is independent of minds.  For Sider (2011), metaphysics deals with descriptions of the most fundamental level of reality and all other descriptions must ultimately refer back to these more fundamental descriptions. Díaz-León (2017) points out that Sider admits that we have and need descriptions of non-fundamental levels of nature. However, he rejects the idea that they should be given by metaphysics. As some feminists note, from this perspective there seems to be no place for a feminist metaphysics, where gender, as distinct from sex, is the crucial notion.[9] But Sider (2016)  has replied by holding that gender might have a place in metaphysics so long as the description of the phenomena in question is the one, amongst different alternatives, the terms of which are the closest to the terms used in carving nature by its joints.     

With an ontological realist basis, metaphysics is expected to describe reality objectively. As Mikkola (2021) points out, if it is supposed that metaphysics is a merely descriptive project, which deals exclusively with what exists independently of minds,  then normative issues, such as those that motivate feminism, have no place in it. In particular, metaphysics considered in this light seems to leave out crucial notions for feminists: the concept of gender and the concept of women. Traditional metaphysics offers a natural category as an answer to the question “What is a woman?” For example, a human being of the female sex. But, as Beauvoir rightly observed, it is not immediately obvious that all humans of the female sex belong to the gender woman, just as it may not be immediately obvious that all individuals who belong to the gender woman are humans of the female sex. From the point of view of feminist philosophy, no natural category captures the category of being a woman. However, feminists want to insist that there are women in reality.[10] Being a woman, they argue, is a real category that groups together humans according to certain characteristics. At issue for feminists is the social character of this category, and that this leads to the exclusion, oppression and social injustice that fall on women. The underlying idea is that the social character of gender has to be distinguished from the natural character of sex. But again, properties and social relations are not species of things that can be described in a socially and politically neutral metaphysics. Feminist philosophy thus requires of traditional metaphysics that it admits that certain properties and relations previously regarded as natural are, after all, social.[11]

According to Haslanger (2000a), the idea that metaphysics and feminist philosophy are incompatible can be dismantled by considering, on the one hand, what the repercussions of metaphysical inquiry might be for the feminist project and, on the other hand, the new concepts and approaches that feminist philosophy can contribute to the treatment of old metaphysical problems. Among these problems, the distinction between what, in the world, is dependent on or independent of minds stands out for its relevance to feminist philosophy. What is it (for any entity) to be independent of or dependent on minds? Haslanger (2000a) responds by tracing the more recent history of contemporary metaphysics from Quine’s (1961a, 1961b) proposals for epistemology. According to her, contemporary metaphysics has been influenced by the rejection of foundationalism, triggered by Quine in the mid-twentieth century. Like epistemology after Quine, metaphysics will have to come to accept that no indubitable certainty or any direct access to reality can be the basis of an inquiry about what exists. Influenced by epistemology, metaphysics would assume that this inquiry about what there is must be done by looking at ordinary language and, in particular, at the way it expresses or refers to concepts.

According to Haslanger (2000a), with this change in methodological paradigm, post-Quinean metaphysics became immanent, holistic, and fallibilist. In place of starting with indubitable and self-evident truths, external to our practices and reflections as a foundation, metaphysical inquiry is to be motivated by these very practices and reflections. In this way, it follows holist and fallibilist precepts, according to which the acceptability of a belief as justified ultimately depends on maintaining coherence between the totality of beliefs and it is permissible for a belief to be revised or deemed false, as long as coherence is maintained among the totality of beliefs in the system. This sort of metaphysical inquiry does not require direct access to the world for the formation of justified beliefs nor does it demand authority over other forms of philosophical inquiry. On the contrary, the suggestion is that access to reality has to go through language and the conceptual schemes that are expressed in it. Haslanger suggests that, by assuming that metaphysical inquiry is in the first instance semantic, post-Quinean metaphysics becomes permeable in such a way that social entities can be introduced to the list of everything that exists. Thus, the proposal will be that, since our ontological commitments depend on the conceptual schemes we adopt and determine the kind of things we accept as existing, then entities of a social nature will not be excluded from metaphysical inquiry. Gender and woman then become fully-fledged notions in metaphysics. The relationship between feminist philosophy and metaphysics is therefore one of mutual enrichment. Likewise, Díaz-León (2017) suggests that feminist metaphysics is closely linked, not only to political or practical philosophy but also to the philosophy of language and specifically to the contemporary project of conceptual engineering and ethics. Her proposal will be presented later, after Haslanger’s.

3.    Constructions

Applied to feminist metaphysics, the general question of metaphysics―the extent to which what exists is or is not independent of minds―translates into the question of the extent to which the mind is involved in the construction of the world. The question arises in the confrontation between ontological realism and feminist philosophy: if the biological distinction between the female and male sexes does not capture the category of being a woman, then describing the fundamental level of the structure of reality in terms of its most basic joints does not serve a feminist metaphysics. It is necessary to consider other levels of description of what exists. According to Haslanger feminists would reject traditional metaphysics because it involves the notion of a natural kind. Traditional metaphysics, she says, assumes that we distinguish natural kinds by looking at the world. But metaphysics after Quine precludes this procedure and requires that we look first to the linguistic terms and conceptual schemes with which we describe reality. Fulfilling Quine’s program, looking at our linguistic terms and conceptual schemes, reveals that the notion of a natural kind is used in two ways: sometimes to talk about kinds and sometimes to talk about types. Usually, Haslanger says, we use “kinds” to classify substances (almost always physical objects) according to their manifest properties and we use the term “essence” to refer to the set of these common manifest properties. But “natural kind” does not always serve this purpose for us. Sometimes, Haslanger stresses, we use this term to link objects that, precisely, do not have manifest properties in common. In these cases, she suggests, we are not talking about a kind defined by an essence, but a type, which she characterizes as a unit of things (substances or not) connected by something other than a set of shared manifest properties.

Haslanger proposes that the distinction between kind and type introduces ontological variety into the traditional notion of a natural kind: it shows that not all natural kinds have to be understood as a set of objects that share an essence. The question now is to know what these units are in which we link entities into classes that do not necessarily have the same manifest properties. For Haslanger, answers to this question are divided in accordance with the question about the independence or dependence on minds of what exists. While realism assumes that types are objective, and therefore independent of minds, anti-realism rejects this assumption, either because it rejects the claim that we can know whether these units are objective types (scepticism), or because it rejects the claim that these types are objective (nominalism). Thus, Haslanger sums up, for the realist, there are types which are objective and we can have knowledge of. But the antirealist questions either the existence or the objectivity of these types. For the antirealist (sceptical or nominalist), types are social constructions: they are dependent on social and political factors and, therefore, dependent on minds.

Díaz-León (2017) distinguishes social constructionism from what she calls global antirealism or global constructionism as an upshot of an issue that she considers to be at the intersection of metaphysics and the philosophy of language. Díaz-León suggests that, within the philosophy of language, it is assumed that to represent reality one must combine concepts into thoughts and to express thoughts one must combine words into phrases with meaning. Díaz-León understands that this is an idea common to the philosophy of language and contemporary metaphysics. From this intersection, Díaz-León sketches three possibilities for metaphysics. The first is ontological realism, which, as we have seen, assumes that it is up to metaphysics to provide descriptions of the most fundamental level of reality, using terms that cut reality at the joints of its most basic structure. For ontological realism, this most basic structure of reality exists and is as it is independently of minds. Díaz-León presents us with two responses to ontological realism. Ontological antirealism, despite accepting that we should choose the terms closest to those which cut reality at its joints, rejects the claim that this choice is independent of minds, more specifically, of the interests that motivate metaphysical inquiry. Global antirealism or global constructionism understands that metaphysics does not deal with the description of reality as it is independently of our minds, but rather looks for the most useful conceptual schemes for our purposes. From this perspective, more than representing it, our conceptual schemes construct reality. Global antirealism or global constructionism rejects both ontological realism and ontological antirealism, insofar as it rejects both the claim that reality is independent of minds and the claim that our criteria for determining what is most fundamental is independent of minds. From this perspective, the terms and concepts we choose to describe reality are also what construct it.

Social constructionism emerges amongst Díaz-León’s proposals in contrast to antirealism or global constructionism. Díaz-León wants to offer an alternative to antirealism or global constructionism, arising out of the intersection between metaphysics and philosophy of language. The alternative intends to preserve a thesis that is compatible with both ontological realism and ontological antirealism, which she calls global realism or minimal realism. According to global or minimal realism, our thoughts and sentences are true when they correspond to reality and false otherwise. Global realism or minimal realism also agrees with ontological realism with regard to the existence of a fundamental structure of reality that is independent of minds and, therefore, of our interests. However, it rejects the claim that the selection criterion between descriptions of reality is the coincidence of terms with the articulations of the most fundamental structure of reality. The proposal of global or minimal realism is that, at least in some contexts, the criteria for selecting descriptions of reality are social and political. Díaz-León notes how Haslanger’s (2000a) proposals can be inserted here, but Haslanger’s (2016) are closer to ontological anti-realism.

In fact, Haslanger (2000a) takes a stand against antirealism and the social constructionism it entails in terms of types. In her view, many feminists have embraced type-antirealism as they see it as feminism’s best move in opposing traditional metaphysics―and what we have called ontological realism here. The reason, as Haslanger sees it, why feminists feel supported by antirealism in opposition to tradition is that they assume that the oppression and social injustice to which women are subject is based on the metaphysical distribution of all individuals in the natural kind woman or the natural kind man. For these feminists, the idea that the distinction between women and men is natural and objective, that is, independent of minds or social and political purposes, is what motivates the subordination of the former to the latter. Feminism’s counterproposal is that the aggregation of individual characteristics such as body, gender, and sexuality into female and male kinds or types is not founded in nature, but socially constructed. To this, it can be added that not only gender but also sex is a social construction.[12] As a result, gender, and possibly also sex, are social types.

Haslanger proposes to counter this with what she calls moderate realism. This position is realist because it assumes that objective types are conceptual resources that result from real natural differences between individuals, but it is moderate because it accepts that, from Quine onwards, those same conceptual resources are also influenced by social and political factors. Since it is informed by post-Quinean epistemology, moderate realism is precluded from concluding, about the influence that social and political factors can have on our conceptual resources, that what these give us access to is also mind-dependent.[13] The moderate realism proposed by Haslanger allows us to choose the objective types with which we can carve the world, according to our social and political purposes, interests or concerns. Starting from a moderate realism, one can then claim the same social and political change demanded by the antirealists. Antirealists and moderate realists agree that there is a mutually determining relationship between the conceptual schemes by which we classify things in the world and our social and political interests and concerns. From here, moderate realists can then join the feminist project to stand up for the social change needed to end the oppression and social injustice faced by women: while we cannot change what is there independently of our minds or actions, we can reflect and act upon the conceptual resources according to which we divide what exists into different kinds or types.

As in the case of sceptical or nominalist antirealism that Haslanger talks about, the problem with the global antirealism or global constructionism that Díaz-León writes about is that it is based on a thesis contrary to global or minimal realism, according to which, once we can make sense of a notion of the external world only as our representation, the truth or falsehood of a sentence is no longer dependent on any correspondence with a mind-independent reality. According to Díaz-León, for global antirealism or global constructionism, reality is constructed by our beliefs and theories about it. Understood as a thesis about the nature of reality, this is a thesis that Díaz-León classifies as implausible. However, Díaz-León argues that antirealism or global constructionism can become (more) plausible if what is being affirmed or constructed by our beliefs and theories is not the nature of reality, but the nature of our representations and, more relevantly, the nature of our concepts. Díaz-León’s point here is that social constructionism (about our concepts) does not necessarily lead to global antirealism. The ontological commitment of social constructionism is to the social (and political) nature of our concepts, to the entities or phenomena our concepts classify. Another position to distinguish from global antirealism or global constructionism, and which Díaz-León seems to favour, is partial constructionism. According to partial constructionism, some real entities and phenomena are socially constructed. This will be the case for gender. As Díaz-León explains, partial constructionism allows one to assert, as Haslanger (2000a, 2016) does, that what determines whether an individual is female or male is the place of privilege or submission that he or she occupies socially (or economically), and not any biological property or set of biological properties. For Díaz-León, claiming that some entities or phenomena are socially constructed is then plausible if stated within the framework of a partial constructionism—not a global one.[14] Note that for an entity or a phenomenon to be socially constructed is the relevant meaning we wish to give to Haslanger’s initial idea of something being dependent on minds. Díaz-León’s aim is to argue that social and political factors play a crucial role in choosing the descriptions that we want to make of reality, maintaining global or minimal realism. The problem, as we will see, is that Díaz-León bases her proposals on a mentalist conception of concepts.

4.    Concepts

Haslanger (2000b, 2005) outlines a project for feminist metaphysics that she characterizes as ameliorative. Haslanger (2000b) had previously called this project “analytical.”[15] In feminist metaphysics, the aim of the ameliorative project is to confront the important notion of gender.[16] As we have seen, type-antirealist feminists argue that gender is a social construction: a linking of diverse things into a single class that is not objective and therefore independent of minds or of social and political factors. Based on her moderate realism, Haslanger’s ameliorative project allows feminist metaphysics to look for gender not as the essence of a natural kind (a set of common manifest properties) but as an objective unit that aggregates different individuals into a class: a concept. Haslanger distinguishes an ameliorative project from a descriptive project and a conceptual project. While a descriptive project looks at what a concept is in the world and a conceptual project looks at the concept as such, an ameliorative project looks at the tasks the concept fulfils in our practical and theoretical lives. Therefore, unlike descriptive and conceptual projects, an ameliorative project is normative: it seeks the best way to understand the concept under investigation, i.e. the target concept, assessing whether the terms used in ordinary language adequately mediate our access to the part of reality that we want to describe. Therefore, an ameliorative project is also stipulative: it requires us to decide what we want to do with a concept. In the case of feminist metaphysics, what we want to do with the concept of gender is to investigate how it contributes to the maintenance of women’s social and political subordination, but also how it can contribute to ending this subordination.

Haslanger (2000b) understands that the concept of gender must fulfil four tasks in feminist metaphysics. Put briefly, these tasks are: to identify and explain inequalities between women and men; to determine similarities and differences between them; to reveal how it intertwines with social and political phenomena; and to explain women’s agency. For Haslanger, the descriptive project and the conceptual project are not sufficient to allow the concept of gender to fulfil these tasks. Her proposal is that only an ameliorative project can reveal that the concept of gender links a diversity of social and political phenomena to a core phenomenon: being a female (or male) human being. An evaluation of the concept of gender, Haslanger proposes, shows that biological sex determines a pattern of social and political relations available to individuals who fall under the concept woman (and those who fall under the concept man). It is this pattern of relationships made available to female (and male) individuals that distinguishes the class of women (and the class of men), that is, gender. More important still, the pattern of relationships available to women (and men) determines that they are socially and politically subordinate to individuals who have access to the pattern of relationships available to those born male. Sex is then a physical marker of the distinction between two classes of individuals who are distinguished by a relationship of social and political subordination to the detriment of those who belong to the class women and with privilege for those who belong to the class men. So, it has been verified that the concept of gender occupies a central place in a conceptual network that defines the social and political relations available to each individual according to the sex into which they are born. Gender can then be recognised as a social class.

Haslanger’s proposal faces criticism.  One of them is presented via a jigsaw puzzle put together by Jennifer Saul (2012), which Díaz-León (2016) explains as follows: if we use “woman” as a term for the female sex, to distinguish it from “man” used as a term for the male sex, then some individuals whom we want to call women are either outside both (transsexual people) or are within both (intersexual people); but if we use “woman” as a term for gender, as a social class, as Haslanger proposes, then it is not possible to have explicit criteria to determine who fits and who does not fit in this class, given the complexity of social and political relations in which the individuals who belong to the class of women meet. For Saul, contextualism offers the following solution to the puzzle: “woman” is sometimes used as a term for sex and sometimes as a term for gender, depending on the context of enunciation. But such a solution would be unsatisfactory for feminism as it would allow, in some contexts, the oppression and social injustice faced by women, to be acceptable. Díaz-León proposes that this dissatisfaction be overcome by considering contextualism through a descriptive approach to the term “woman.” The proposal is that a descriptive investigation of the concept woman reveals that the context of choosing between concepts to describe parts of reality (as occurs with the concept of sex and the concept of gender) extends to the social and political factors involved in the constitution of the concept itself―and not just the reasons for choosing it to describe the same parts of reality as in Haslanger’s project.

From the intersection of metaphysics and the philosophy of language, Díaz-León wants to defend a moderate realist position about truth and reality. Her position is realist because she assumes global or minimal realism, according to which the truth (or falsity) of thoughts and sentences depends on their correspondence with reality. For global or minimal realism, ontological realism is true: the reality that determines the truth of our thoughts and sentences is independent of us. But unlike ontological realism, global or minimal realism rejects the claim that the best (or only) description of reality is the one that comes closest to the joints in the structure of reality. For global or minimal realism, social and political factors count in choosing the concepts and terms with which we want to describe reality. But Díaz-León’s position is moderate because it takes on board a certain antirealist idea: that at least some parts of reality are themselves socially constructed. For Díaz-León, some entities and some real phenomena are socially constructed, one of which is gender.

The position Díaz-León defends importantly differs from social constructionism. The proposal of social constructionism is that, although the social schemes with which we choose to frame reality are dependent on social and political factors, reality is independent of minds. Díaz-León wants to go further and propose that not only the choice of concepts, but the concepts themselves are dependent on our social and political interests. This is where the problem starts.

Díaz-León illustrates this possibility by considering thick concepts. A description of these concepts reveals that, as ways of conceptualizing phenomena, they have both descriptive elements and normative elements. Contrary to what is descriptive, that which is normative involves an evaluation, which concerns positive or negative values.[17] Our concepts can be purely descriptive or purely normative. But they can also be thick concepts, that is, they can contain both descriptive and normative elements. The normative charge of thick concepts depends on the context in which they are used. Terms that have a positive charge in one context might have a negative charge in others. Starting from this distinction between thin concepts (purely descriptive or purely normative) and thick concepts (with descriptive and normative elements), Díaz-León suggests that a choice between different concepts to describe the same reality does not, therefore, have to depend on the greater or lesser degree to which a description matches reality. After all, different thin or thick concepts can correctly describe reality. The suggestion then is that the choice of the best concepts to apply to a description of reality may depend on the descriptive or normative context in which we want to apply the concept. A concept then emerges as a conceptualization of experiences that, in addition to being entwined in a network of social and political elements, can contain normative elements in itself.

5.    Ramifications

Díaz-León thinks that there is a fundamental connection between the central question of the philosophy of language, of knowing how sentences represent the world (and thereby have meaning), and the general project of metaphysics, of providing descriptions of reality. Her proposal is based on the idea that thoughts are mental states that represent the world and are constituted by the ordering of previously acquired concepts.[18] According to Díaz-León’s proposal, the conceptual schemes that guarantee a place for social categories in metaphysics, and especially the categories gender and woman in a feminist metaphysics, appear as entities of a mental nature. Now, this proposal is in conflict with both the philosophy of language and feminist metaphysics. But more importantly, it seems to be at odds with Díaz-León’s own proposal.

In 1884, Frege stated that:

We suppose … that concepts sprout in the individual mind like leaves on a tree, and we think to discover their nature by studying their birth: we seek to define them psychologically, in terms of the nature of the human mind. But this account makes everything subjective and . . . does away with truth. (Frege 1980 [1884]: vii)

For Frege, who inaugurated contemporary philosophy of language, the question of truth cannot be raised where there are only mental representations. A truth-bearer is a thought, which is expressed in a sentence as its meaning. Frege’s aim in the Foundations of Arithmetic is to demonstrate logicism.[19] To conclude that the principles of arithmetic are, ultimately, logical principles, Frege begins by moving psychology away from a (metaphysical) investigation into what a number is, and in particular what the number one is. Removing from a concept all the psychological baggage it carries when it presents itself in the “clothing” of natural language is an essential step in pursuing the logicist programme. The “denim” that covers our concepts is a tangle of mental representations associated with the use of language, in which concepts are expressed. A representation (Vorstellung) is by definition a mental entity, to which only its bearer has access. Thus, sense impressions, sensations, inner images, retinal images, and other mental formations (to use his own examples) are representations. Since everyone who commands a language can apprehend concepts, and, therefore, many speakers of the same language can understand the same concept in a linguistic interaction, concepts cannot be representations. In contemporary philosophy of language, inherited from Frege, neither concepts nor thoughts are mental representations.

But Frege further argues that concepts are not constituents of thoughts, as Díaz-León thinks. For Frege, a conceptual analysis starts with the decomposition of a thought. Concepts are not conceptualizations that are acquired in experiences; rather, they are discovered in the (logical) analysis of a thought. The relation of thoughts to language is not a structuring relation. There is nothing linguistic in a thought. The only connection of a thought to a sentence is its meaning, and this is why sentences can be made to correspond to truth values. The thoughts expressed in sentences are the bearers of truth. The relationship of thoughts or sentences to reality is not one of direct correspondence. Díaz-León wants to adopt partial constructionism as the basis of her proposal according to which gender will be a part of reality that is socially constructed. Partial constructionism differs from global antirealism or global constructionism in that it preserves global realism or minimal realism. But if concepts and thoughts are understood as being mental representations, then the global or minimal realism that Díaz-León wants to preserve in her partial constructivist proposal is at risk. Díaz-León cannot avoid the global antirealism or constructionism against which she takes a stand.

6.    Conclusion

The first objective of the feminist metaphysics initiated by Haslanger is to integrate the social categories that feminism needs to identify and eliminate the oppression of women and the social injustices to which they are subjected into the inquiry into what exists. Haslanger advocates a form of realism that attributes a mind-independent nature not only to reality but also to the concepts (the objective types) with which we categorize entities and events. For Haslanger, dependence on minds, as dependence on what is social and political, is restricted to the interconnection of the concepts that we use to describe reality, such as “woman,” and our theories and practices. In her view, the concepts that we use are intertwined in our theoretical and practical lives, and it is in this sense that they determine our metaphysical descriptions. What we are willing to accept as what there is thus depends on a complex network of interconnections between conceptual schemes and forms of life. By accepting partial constructionism, to accommodate her extension of contextualism to the concepts themselves while enclosing them in a mental world, Díaz-León seems to impede the course of feminist metaphysics. If the concept of gender is a mental representation, there is no way to determine what social or political reality it describes in a metaphysical description. The women, whose existence Simone de Beauvoir would like to affirm as real, become mere social ideas.

[1] The Second Sex was written between 1948 and 1949, as Haslanger herself points out. 

[2] Haslanger (2000a) also talks about racism and racialization. For reasons of relevance in the context of this article, only sexism and women are considered here.

[3] This is Hornsby’s (2000) term, combining the words “male” and “mainstream.” In the original Portuguese version of this article Manuela Teles has used a similar expression: “masculinantes,” which combines the words “masculina” (male) and “dominante” (meaning “dominant” or “ruling” or “mainstream”).

[4] Antony (2012) is concerned with refuting the feminist proposal of Jennifer Hornsby (2000), according to which philosophy of language (classical, traditional) is sexist or masculinizing because, by not contemplating a notion of communicational acts in a theory of speech acts, it rules out the possibility of analyzing women’s discourse.

[5] Cf. Quine 1953.

[6] Cf. Russell 1905.

[7] Cf. Frege 1960 [1892].

[8] This is an expression that is currently often used in debates about metaphysics, but it is also found in a passage from Plato’s Phaedrus (265e) which reads: “The second principle [for considering what something is] is that of division into species according to the natural formation, where the joint is, not breaking any part as a bad carver might” (Plato 2008).

[9] Cf. Barnes (2014) and Mikkola (2016).

[10] Think again of Simone de Beauvoir or Virginia Woolf.

[11] Cf. Mikkola 2021; Hall and Ásta 2021; Haslanger 2005, 2000b, 2000a; Haslanger and Ásta 2011.

[12] Haslanger presents Judith Butler as a proponent of antirealism by arguing that both sex and gender are social constructions and, therefore, that there are no objective facts about either of them.

[13] As Haslanger suggests, we cannot conclude from the mediation of the senses in perception that what we see are sensory impressions.

[14] Díaz-León distinguishes two ways of considering whether something is socially constructed: the causal and constitutive ways. Something is socially constructed in a causal way when its existence depends causally on social structures and practices, and in a constitutive way when its existence necessarily depends on the beliefs and attitudes of certain agents.

[15] One reads in Haslanger (2005: 23-24, footnote 1) that “ameliorative” best captures the kind of project that Quine (1951) has in mind when he distinguishes the “explanatory” form of definition as the most philosophical, in the sense in which an explanatory definition is intended to increase―improve or ameliorate―the understanding of what is being defined by providing refinements or supplements to the meaning of the term that refers to it.

[16] Once again, Haslanger addresses this question in conjunction with the question of what race is. Since our aim is to deal with the notion of gender, we omit Haslanger’s references to the notion of race.

[17] Based on Díaz-León’s own examples, we can think of beautiful/ugly, correct/incorrect, courageous/cowardly.

[18] Cf. Díaz-León 2017: 252-254.

[19] Cf. Frege 1980 [1884].

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