ABSTRACT

There is one last set of problems that needs to be addressed. It is possible that Quine and poststructuralists and constructivists using similar arguments could agree with almost everything I asserted in the previous chapter. Recall that Quine dissented from the nominalist thesis that similarity is everywhere and hence nowhere, and conceded that it was only natural that humans would share innate perceptual categories. A post-structuralist or constructivist might similarly entertain the prospect that there are biological sex differences and similarities. But the realist carpet is immediately pulled from under this naturalist thesis. With the introduction of language – which Quine argues occurs at the same instant as conceptual thought – humans are whisked light years away from the humble origins of sensory data and innate evolved commonalities. A culture can indeed establish a more or less coherent perspective on the world in the form of, say, a natural science. All the same, a fact in such a natural science is always relativized against the backdrop of an overarching theory, or yet more words. Quine’s observations pertaining to innate perceptual categories are thus relative to an overarching theory of evolution, which he insists is not true in any absolute sense. Foucault and Butler comparably argued that observations of biological sex are always derivative of a specific understanding of gender. Male or female traits are contextualized within an overarching theory of the relationship between male and female, a relationship that can only be established conceptually, or equivalently, in words.