Sounds to me like you embrace the reductio and preclude the application to people in "different" societies (and you don't explain what these are or how to tell) of descriptions they would not use; you also decree that certain terms mean what YOU say and cannot be qualified by explanation. I'd say that is extreme linguistic relativism. Also quite wrong.
--- Miles Jackson <cqmv at pdx.edu> wrote:
> andie nachgeborenen wrote:
> [snip]
> >
> > Ipso facto: there were no classes before
> capitalism,
> > ranks, etates, maybe, etc. To say that serfs were
> a
> > class is like` saying that a hunter gatherer was a
> > capitalist.
> >
> > Please explain to me, Miles, why these standard
> > objections to the extreme Winch-Wittgenstein
> > linguistic relativism you are advocating don't
> commit
> > you to these reductios, or why they aren't
> reductios.
>
> That's a fair question. I'm not advocating
> "linguistic relativism",
> though; I'm saying that social categories are
> creating though ongoing
> social interactions (not limited to language). I
> still insist my
> analogy is apt: just as the psychological
> characteristics of someone in
> a hunting and gathering society cannot make that
> person a capitalist,
> the sexual desires and preferences of someone in a
> society without the
> stable sexual identity "gay" cannot make a person
> gay. Identities are
> possible because of certain patterns of social
> relations. In my view,
> this is a crucial sociological insight: people do
> not initially have
> identities, which are then
> disrupted/distorted/twisted by social
> influences; rather, social interactions make
> possible the creation of
> individual identities. (--Looking glass self.)
>
> So if you show me a society in which people have
> distinct, stable sexual
> identities, and that norm is clearly enforced and
> passed from generation
> to generation by agents of socialization, I will say
> that gay people
> exist in that society. --And just the contrary for
> societies that do
> not identify people as belonging to distinct, stable
> sexual categories.
> This is an empirical/historical/anthropological
> question, in all cases.
>
> MIles
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