People do not say that a barometer "knows'' when it is going to rain; but I doubt if there is any essential difference in this respect between the barometer and the meteorologist who observes it.--Bertrand Russell (1923) "Vagueness"
"[Gender] identity is performatively constituted by the very "expressions" that are said to be its results"--Judith Butler Gender Trouble. (33)
In my spare time I am reading Tim Maudlin's (2007) The Metaphysics Within Physics (recall this) and Judith Butler's (1999 [1990]--I have used the 1999 edition which has an additional, fascinating preface]) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity in seperate, ongoing reading groups. This has led me to notice some surprising similarities. For example, they are both unabashedly concerned with metaphysics, and while they differ in lots of ways, they have a shared target: the idea that metaphysics ought to be articulated in terms of substance(s) with properties (or attributes/accidents); they both dislike universals. Both attribute the metaphysics of substance to an illegitimate "projection of the structure of language onto the world." (Maudlin, 79; compare that with Butler pp. 25-28 [where she summarizes others] & p. 33 [where she speaks in her own voice]). Maudlin aligns his view with Bertrand Russell's position in "Vagueness" (79-80), while Butler traces (33) her criticism back to Nietzsche's famous passage in which he explains how in our metaphysics we are "a dupe of the tricks of language." Russell, who knew his Nietzsche, may well have gotten this line of argument from him (I'll leave that to the scholars). The idea that our inherited metaphysical categories may be a projection arguably goes back to Spinoza and his famous argument against final causes in the Appendix to Ethics 1. (Perhaps, it is better to say that Protagoras is the grandfather of this whole line of argument?)
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