Next you’re going to try and tell me what is is…

Pappy,

is is sometimes a) a logical copula, and sometimes b) a verb denoting the act of existence.

When a), then what “is” is, is an operation joining a predicate to a subject.

When b), then “is” is equivalent to “is existent”, or “has being”. But in this case to ask what “is” is involves the error of confusing essential with existential predication. Essences have whatnesses, but existence does not.

I find it sort of amusing that “humanity” is being used here to mean “the state of being an adult male human.” Admittedly, there is something of a lexical gap where “manity” should be.

The problem with Ockham’s view here, if I’m understanding it correctly, is that I can recognize a novel sensory stimulus as being a “man”. (Most of the time, I’m right, which is just insanely astonishing if you sit and think about it for a second.) Ockham might argue (or he might not, being dead and all) that recognizing a new “man” is simply a matter of extrapolating based on the set of men you know to be men. But while we are capable of believing someone is a man even if his skin isn’t a color we’ve seen before, we’re not capable of believing he’s a man if his skin happens to be, say, made of metal, especially if he’s also shouting “CRUSH ALL HU-MANS” and vaporizing things.

We can tell dogs from cats even though there are breeds of dog that look more like some breeds of cat than they do like other breeds of dog. I can imagine someone whose internal pattern recognition software worked differently from ours saying, “no, you’re wrong, the things that look more like cats are cats.” Someone like that would base their categories not on what could breed with what (which is a pretty random choice, when you think) but on whether things appear alike. Thus, they may call Chihuahuas “cats”, or lions “bears”. (We do this to some extent: witness the “koala bear”, or the totally unrelated “American robin” and “European robin”.)

I don’t know where I’m going with this at all. What the hell, I’ll post it anyway.

I find it sort of amusing that “humanity” is being used here to mean “the state of being an adult male human.” Admittedly, there is something of a lexical gap where “manity” should be.

Mr Marks,

allow me to suggest that this is why inclusive language is stupid. If you examine my post it should be perfectly clear that “man” here is used in the sense of “anthropos-homo”, and not in the sense of “andros-vir”. In normal English we have the one word “man” for both senses, sometimes meaning the general “member of the human race”, and sometimes meaning “adult male member of the human race”. Which one is meant is generally discernible from the context, as it should be here. Inclusive language only muddies the waters by making people think there’s gender distinction when none is meant, and then reading bias into it. We’re then supposed to scrounge for new ways to say what was perfectly sayable before, resulting in linguistic monstrosities like “him/herself” and so forth. Saying “person” instead of “man” is too general, since “person” doesn’t necessarily mean “human”, being also applicable to God, angels, fairies, aliens, A.I., and so forth, whether or not you grant that any such things exist. “Human being” is awkward and cumbrous; we would never start saying “canine being” instead of “dog” for fear of leaving out the bitches, or “leonine being” instead of “lion” for fear of leaving out the lionesses.

I submit that before the whole gender-neutral fad no intelligent reader would have misconstrued my meaning.

Hm. In that case, aren’t you the one using the inclusive language here?

I don’t think anybody (before or after the gender-neutrality “fad” which predates us both) would use the word man as a sign that referred to a singular woman, regardless of whether man might refer to humankind or men to a group of mixed (or, more typically, unknown) gender. I think that has less to do with “gender-neutral language” and more to do with “the English language”.

But I was merely poking fun. I pray, take no offense.

Of course my language could be called inclusive in one sense, but not in the normal current use of the term.

I don’t think anybody (before or after the gender-neutrality “fad” which predates us both) would use the word man as a sign that referred to a singular woman, regardless of whether man might refer to humankind or men to a group of mixed (or, more typically, unknown) gender.

I disagree; I think even a brief search could turn up many examples of this kind of usage in certain circumstances. For instance, a short while back I read a book called Intention by the (female) English philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe, a disciple of Wittgenstein, written back in the fifties, and was struck by the unselfconscious use of “man” in this sense throughout. She would frequently alternate between the first-person “I” and the third person “a man would think” or something of the sort. It was clear she thought of herself as a “man” in the sense of “member of the human race”. I believe this sort of usage is very common if you read a lot of older English books and keep an eye out for it.

I might point out that “thou” is very common in a lot of older English books. Also the letter þ and velar fricatives. The fact that you were struck by the usage only demonstrates how weird it is. I’m struck by the way E. Nesbit used “it” as a gender-neutral pronoun, as in “each of the children put on its hat”, but I don’t see how that precedent justifies claiming that her usage is the obviously correct one for people in another country a century later - especially since the gender-neutral singular “they” has been around to fill that role since at least the 1400s. (“Human” and “person”, incidentally, have both been around in English since the 13th century.)

Further, I don’t really see how your example is relevant. You were talking about what the word man signifies. I simply don’t believe that if you took anyone, female English philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe included, and showed them pictures of various male and female animals, humans included, then asked them to point to the ones that could be called “a man”, that they would so much as hesitate over the picture of the female human before pointing to the male.

It’s certainly true that “man” has been used to mean “mankind”, which has been used to mean “humankind”. However, you are talking specifically about “individual men”. Women may occasionally be lumped in under the umbrella of “man”, and whether that’s just is a separate discussion, but women are very, very rarely said to be men. And when they are, they usually get quite angry about it.

The fact that you were struck by the usage only demonstrates how weird it is.

Not at all; it’s just that I’m interested in the “inclusive language” issue. Her usage was entirely natural, unconfusing, and unchauvinistic, and in clear and intelligible modern English. What struck me was how unnecessary from a linguistic standpoint the change has been (or is, depending on whether one takes it to be a fait accompli or not). All the change has done has been to take a clear and useful usage and replace it with a bunch of muddy and awkward alternatives for the sake of political correctness.

“Human” and “person”, incidentally, have both been around in English since the 13th century.

Of course they have. But neither has precisely the same meaning as “man” in the inclusive sense, and neither is a very good substitute, for reasons I’ve already mentioned.

You were talking about what the word man signifies. I simply don’t believe that if you took anyone, female English philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe included, and showed them pictures of various male and female animals, humans included, then asked them to point to the ones that could be called “a man”, that they would so much as hesitate over the picture of the female human before pointing to the male.

But this is to take the discussion into an area wholy irrelevant to my post. I very clearly said When I utter the vocal sound “man”, what I mean is the notion in my head to which “man”, “anthropos”, “homo”, and “mensch” all apply. In other contexts I mean something different. Your thought experiment obviously introduces a context in which one’s mind will turn to the “andros-vir” meaning of the word. I just don’t think the language was confusing here until ideologues came in and made it so.

By the way, don’t take my quote in the last comment as endorsing Aquinas’ position on the subject of the post. I identified “man” with the “anthropos” meaning in the Scotistic paragraph as well.

I don’t!

Oh, damn. Forgot to reload and thus missed the last two comments. My previous comment refers to the last sentence of Mr. Marks’s last comment, of course.

Um, just in case someone is confused, I would like to clarify the subject as a female expert: I do believe that I am, in fact, a member of mankind. I know, I know, how shocking.(Yes Mr. Marks, I am intentionally misunderstanding your point, all in good fun.)

However, this is business isn’t satisfying at all…

I just don’t think the language was confusing here until ideologues came in and made it so.

I don’t think anybody claimed this aspect of language was confusing (it wasn’t before, and it often is now). The claim is that it reflects a pervasive sexism — there’s a special-case male word and a special-case female word, and the generic-case word is the same as the male. A much less confusing solution would be a third word for the generic, but that requires a much more audacious position toward the language than is required by the more awkward efforts at being fair.

I myself usually try to avoid the constructions that require such a decision to be made, which is what fluent users of a language do in its cul-de-sacs. I usually try to avoid split infinitives and sentences or clauses than end in prepositions, too. If I can’t find a way out, I do whatever seems least distracting, which with gendered pronouns is usually favoring the generic and supposedly genderless masculine, but I don’t come down against either usage. I won’t fault people for trying to be nice to each other, even if it makes muddy prose.