Inclusive language

Some feminists have long considered it a problem that English uses the masculine pronoun for persons of indeterminate gender.  Various solutions have been proposed to this, and some have been adopted to varying degrees.  I often use the "he or she" or "his or her" approach myself, feeling that a few extra syllables never hurt anyone, and being, perhaps uncharacteristically, conservative about introducing entirely new words.

Clearly connected with this issue, there seems to be a convention which has arisen among my fellow philosophers, or at least the younger generation thereof, of making the generic people of our philosophical examples always female.  Being the hopeless slave of fashion that I am, I have also tended to follow this trend.  Certainly in philosophy I can see where this would be thought to have the sort of desirable effects inclusive language is supposed to produce.  Philosophers are mostly science groupies, and almost without exception self-obsessed, so the characters in philosophical examples are disproportionately scientists and philosophers.  Certainly it is healthy to remind ourselves that it's perfectly possible for women to be in either of those categories.

Sometimes it feels a little weird.  If I am speaking of the typical reductionist realist, and I have occasion to say that she believes X, I feel some resistance, because when thinking of the typical reductionist realist, I'm pretty much thinking of David Armstrong.  Probably, though, it's healthy to encounter this resistance; I mean to be writing of what I'm assuming are the many people like Armstrong, and it's useful to stop and make sure that there are indeed a significant number of other philosophers who are on the same page with Armstrong on the issue I'm considering, as otherwise I'm not really speaking of any kind of typical category of philosophers.

In any event, I tend to feel like on this issue I have been nothing more than a follower of emerging trends.  As I've said, I think some of the emerging trends are good, but I would welcome closer examination of them.  Are there problems with how we've been doing things?  Are there ways to do better?  Any thoughts are welcome.

Comments

[Patrick O'Neill]

Aaron,

The use of singular "they" as singular third person pronoun for referents of indeterminate gender enjoys two advantages over other proposed alternatives to "he" for same. Firstly, it's organic (cf. Spivak), and parallels similar shifts in pronoun usage in a number of other natural language. I can't think of any human language whose speakers unselfconsciously employ a construction signifying {he|she} for the third person. Secondly, it's already produced spontaneously by native speaker-hearers.

The second argument, I think, is the most telling. If we accept that the course of language change may be influenced by liminal social and political forces (e.g. history of Italian pronouns), we might conclude that the problem of gender specific pronouns is one that has corrected itself in the first few generations of native speakers born into a climate of increasing social equality. For a point of anecdotal data, as a resident of a mid-Atlantic state born in 1986, gender-indeterminate "he" sounds absolutely bizarre, and the notion that, in the recent past, whether "he" actually meant "he" or "he or she" was context-dependent strains my imagination. I also remember that the English class prescription about "he" was met with some resistance among my classmates; any rule of English grammar that isn't absorbed by neurologically healthy native speakers is probably not a rule at all.

[Protagoras]

I clearly don't spend enough time on these posts. Of course, the use of the plural as generic has a long and respectable history, and I often use that approach as well.