Philosopher Alex Byrne’s thesis AHF in his words is “S is a woman iff S is an adult human female.” (“Are women adult human females?” Philosophical Studies, 2020)
In my previous post I paraphrased this thesis using his other comments into a clearer formulation:
Necessarily, something is a woman if and only if it is an adult human female.
In this serious of posts I’ll summarize his six arguments for the truth of AHF.
His first argument is that AHF incorporates the standard sort of dictionary definition of the English word “woman.” To take one standard dictionary for North Americans,
(“Person,” I think, in the sense of “human person.”)
Byrne notes that dictionaries don’t merely record word-uses, but also summarize widely available knowledge, here, plausibly, what a what it is to be a woman.
True, normally we can’t settle a philosophical debate by appealing to a dictionary entry, but (in Byrne’s words)
Still, the dictionary entry strongly suggests that “woman” does not pick out a social category . . . If “woman” picks out a social category, then the lexicographers have made a blunder . . . A defender of the view that woman is a social category needs to explain how the lexicographers could have erred so badly, but this issue is never even raised.
In sum, the truth of AHF fits well with and explains these dictionary entries for the word “woman.” They give that meaning for “woman” because woman is a biological concept and not a socially-constructed one. It’s implausible that the dictionary writers have all unaccountably gone down a wrong track, if what a woman really is, is something socially constructed.
He admits that this is hardly a knock-down argument by itself, yet it does seem to be a reason for agreeing with AHF.
