Maybe the hypothetical doesn't have to be that extreme. Could I buy a car by offering the dealer a banana and saying, "I would like this to be put in the '$20,000 bill' category now"? What would happen to the economy if everyone did that? and it's not easy to imagine how it could be applied (a prerequisite to figuring out if perhaps it would improve things if it were). Right now, this criterion is not broadly applied. But perhaps it would improve things if it were.įollowing the money analogy, we could imagine someone arguing that our money should be fully consensual: that is, if a person says, "I would like this to be put in the 'dollar' category now," you do that. Right now, this criterion is not broadly applied: a trans person's social gender generally depends on their presentation, their secondary sexual characteristics, and how much the cis people around them are paying attention. It states that our social genders should be fully consensual: that is, if a person says "I would like to be put in the 'woman' category now," you do that. It is a criterion for who should be a woman. Similarly, "you're a woman if you identify as a woman!" is not a definition of womanhood. 2īecause of these constraints, I don't think the money/social-gender analogy can do the work Ozy seems to expect of it. I really like this analogy! An important thing to note here is that while the form of money can vary widely across sociocultural contexts (from shell beads, to silver coins, to fiat paper currency, to database entries in a bank), not just any form will suffice to serve the functions of money: perishable goods like cheese can't function as a long-term store of value non-fungible items that vary in quality in hard-to-measure ways can't function as a unit of account. This isn't a circular definition (in the way that "money is whatever we agree is money" would be uninformative to an alien who didn't already have a referent for the word money), and people advocating for a different money regime (like late-19th century American bimetalists or contemporary cryptocurrency advocates) aren't making an epistemic mistake.
1 What constitutes money in a given social context is determined by collective agreement: money is whatever you can reliably expect everyone else to accept as payment. Rudyard Kipling, "The Gods of the Copybook Headings" (paraphrased)Īt the end of their reply to my reply to the immortal Scott Alexander on gender categorization, friend of the blog Ozymandias makes an analogy between social gender and money. They denied that a Pig could be stipulated to have Wings They denied that Wishes should be categorized as Horses
They denied that the Moon could be defined to be Stilton With the Hopes that our World is built on Tagged categorization, epistemology, Ozy, sociology
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