On the Folly of ‘Preferred Pronouns’

[Kamaji]

On the Folly of ‘Preferred Pronouns’

You are welcome to your own proper name. But you’re not welcome to your own pronouns, nor to your own language, nor to the objective reality that lies beneath.

By Michael Robillard
June 2, 2022

For some time now I have heard members of both the political Left and Right continually draw a false analogy between pronouns and proper names.

The line of reasoning usually goes something like this: Ellen announces that she now wants to go by the proper name “Elliot.” Given this new knowledge, it would therefore count as disrespectful or perhaps even harmful for me to knowingly and intentionally keep referring to her as “Ellen.”

Analogously, so the argument goes, it would be similarly disrespectful and perhaps harmful of me to refuse to refer to her by her newly stipulated preferred pronoun of choice—he, they, “ze,” etc.—and to instead continue to keep referring to her as “she.”

It is precisely here where this false analogy between pronouns and proper names radically breaks down and where much of the confusion within the present transgender debate occurs.

Indexicals vs. Proper Names
Pronouns, within a given language, are not the same nor do they function the same way within a given language as proper names; not hardly. Rather, pronouns are indexicals. Indexicals are terms within a given language with meanings that are context-dependent. Unlike natural kind terms (like “male,” “female,” “horse,” etc.) or proper names (like “Bob,” “Karen,” “Bruce,” etc.) which always refer to the same object or set of objects in a language-independent of context, indexicals get their meaning from the context in which they are uttered and from the behaviors of the speaker uttering them. Canonical examples of indexicals include terms like “I,” “he,” “she,” “here,” “now,” “this,” and “that.”

Unlike claims like “the sky is blue” or “a bachelor is an unmarried man,” claims with indexicals in them cannot be immediately determined as either true or false without knowing more about the specific context during the time of utterance. Hence, when I say “he is the boss” “this is the dining room” or “the meeting was yesterday,” the truth or falsity of these assertions will depend upon when I was speaking, or to whom or what I might have been gesturing when making such utterances.

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This is all to say that the meanings of indexical terms like “he,” “she” and “they” are publicly determined within an overlapping, integrated, and deeply nested network of shared meanings and concepts that refer both to other shared concepts and meanings as well as to the objective world.

And while, in principle, an individual’s own proper name can logically fall within the purview of one’s own stipulated determination; pronouns, insofar as they are indexicals, count as wholly public goods within a shared network of public meanings and cannot, in principle, be similarly privately or personally stipulated and still remain meaningfully intelligible. Indeed, personally-determined pronouns make about as much sense as personally-determined ze-dollar bills. Language and meaning, much like currency, it turns out, simply don’t logically work that way.

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Problems exacerbate when we consider the further distinction between simply referring to persons by certain terms versus regarding them by those very same terms. Indeed, it is here where the original false analogy mentioned above often compounds severely, as transgender advocates move from a low-stakes request: e.g., “please refer to me by my new proper name” to “refer to me by my new preferred pronoun” to “regard me by my new preferred pronoun in all respects and contexts.” This demand becomes increasingly difficult and eventually logically impossible for all other language users to accommodate, especially when the persons uttering such demands often fail to be the actual thing that these terms publicly refer to in any respect whatsoever.

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Source:  https://amgreatness.com/2022/06/02/on-the-folly-of-preferred-pronouns/