Sociology replaces philosophy as when it describes how men and women are asymmetric roles rather than stipulating the necessity of some modifiers on their nouns.
There is a general belief that philosophy and sociology are two separate and independent economic disciplines because they differ in both their subject matters and their methods. Philosophy is concerned with describing being and reaches its conclusions through rigorous reasoning to incontrovertible conclusions. Kant proves the necessity of free will and scholastic philosophers proved the existence of God even though God was supernatural while Hobbes replaced a philosophical notion of the divine right of kings with the sociological observation that a social contract was necessarily so because it was an inevitable exchange of protection for fealty. Sociology, for its part, is a description of social life, even if that subject matter is invisible, by comparing how different concepts like status, class and organization are actually seen to differentially work, and by engaging in quantitative analysis to exhibit facts about social life, such as rates of upward mobility and so follows empirical methods, even if there is philosophical backsliding where John Rawls posits the literally incredible notion that persons in a pre-life could negotiate a social compact. How could they do so if they had no interests?
Pragmatists such as Dewey and Pierce and Nagel argued that philosophy had to be reconstructed by doing away with many of its essential and time tested ideas. There is no need for the ideas of free will or God or necessary government. Moreover, sociology made its own reconstruction as when it replaced the idea of cause with context so that voting behavior is explained by a voter’s attendant attributes, such as social class and religion. Causation means only correlation.This is a very deep matter. The word “cause” can be retained as a metaphor for the relation between context and consequence though abolish the word as an accurate description of what is going on, t6he word is meaningless in that it has no empirical referent, however jusable for some practical purposes as when a lawyer says that a punch in the nose caused the nose to break even though there are attendant t factors or conditions such as a weakened cartilage or the angle of impact but lawyers will. Select the intent of delivering the blow as its cause because lawyers and judges are in the business of finding blame and so ignition is primar
I want to further this program and go further in thinking that philosophical ideas and methods can be reduced to sociological questions and so answerable by consulting evidence by showing that a clearly philosophical problem yields to being a sociological one by showing the philosophical terms are descriptors of empirical reality and those can illuminate a purely sociological question.
The philosophical question is what attributes of an entity are essential for it to be the same entity, which is to say what is essential for an entity rather than somehow circumstantial. How is it that a person is a human being without a limb but not so without consciousness? A more modern version of this philosophical problem about the essence of mental and physical objects is what nouns can take as their adjectives, and what adjectives cannot be taken for a class of nouns. Linguists might quarrel and say the turtles of language are empirical rather than philosophical matters in that they do research through the comparative analysis of actual languages about how nouns and adjectives work, but my farthest reaching claim is that all philosophical questions can be reduced to sociological ones, philosophy just a long stage of human thought from which it has emerged.
Four Modifications
The first of these is that a modifier is not applicable to a noun if it contradicts its noun. A squared circle is an image of contradiction. There can’t be one if it kis the other. So a squared circle is impossible just as is a circular square. It violates geometry. But mathematics found that the axiom that only one line through a point could be parallel to another line was mistaken and so contradictions are historical rather than inevitable. Justice Taney decided that human slaves were not possible because slaves were property rather than people, and what else could Black persons in the United States be other than property? That was the only alternative to being human even if slavery in Africa or the ancient world had regarded slaves as a subjugated people rather than as property.
A more contemporary example of a definition which categorically regards a modification as a contradiction is when pro-abortionists regard themselves as engaging in reproductive rights. That means that the personal body of a woman is her own property and she can do with it what she pleases, though police might intrude if she tried to kill or mutilate herself. The importance of the preposition is that by definition a foetus is not a person and so the foetus has no rights, only the woman having rights, rather than there being the possibility nor the conception of there being a conflict of rights. A body inside the womb is an impossibility, a contradiction. The word “embodied human" does not modify “woman”. On the other hand, an anti-abortionist would hold that it is incorrect to think of a fetus as other than a person and so the term embodied woman is not a contradiction even though antiabortionists had to scamper about to deal with In Vitro Fertilization and decided that a zygote was not yet a foetus because it was external to tube body so as to maintain a traditional distinction concerning conception without its modern developments. That seems a stretch or an exception until such a usage has become acceptable through law or custom. What is contradictory is a social construction and so part of sociology rather than philosophy.
A second form of the relation between a thing and its modifier, whether a gerund or an adjective is metaphorical, which means as if there were an association between the two. Consider the spoken God. What does that mean? It does not mean that God has a larynx. It means that God conveys his message in a burning bush or into the mind of Noah or in the omens or messages spoken by trustworthy voices from God, such as priests or rabbis or imans. Religion is notorious for treating images and metaphors as literal when they are not and some parts of congregations treat them as literal, thinking life has eternal meaning with hands and legs or walking on clouds or meeting one’s loved ones., forgetting all of them to be necessarily metaphorical and therefore comforting. Moreover, if God is everywhere and all powerful the deity is a force of nature rather than a person and so even ascribing god to having will or purpose as would be the case with a human being is also metaphorical, and so the attributes associated with God are allowed as modifiers only as metaphors.
There are also organizations where the meaning of them is also necessarily metaphorical. People speak of “His majesty’s government”, as if the monarch owned or controlled in some sense its population. But everyone in Great Britain knows that its government is elected by voters to its parliament and so the monarch is a representation or metaphor for sovereignty though it would be difficult to say what an exact representation of sovereignty would mean. The Founding Fathers of the United States declared themselves afterwards to hold allegiance to the words of the Constitution but that is tortuous because allegiance is strictly speaking to a person and so an oath to the words of a document do not strictly apply and so the question arises that any collective entity as nationhood relies on its metaphorical meaning to understand it rather than some objective quality which modifies sovereignty. There is no property associated with sovereignty exactly but social philosophers offer some metaphors, such as social contract, some of them, like Hobbes to Rousseau, thinking them more or less historical, and sociologists considering tube powers of government, which can be dealt with as exact modifiers, including how sovereignty itself as a concept c an be treated as an asset by a government.
A third case of the way to relate modifiers to nouns is to treat the modification as a special case of the noun. This makes it neither categorically false or metaphorical but closer to exact as when unilateral triangles are special cases of triangles and so unilateral can be treated as a modifier of triangle but take note that the noun and modifier in the geometry case cannot be reversed so that iot is meaningless to say there is a triangular unilateral though it was also possible to say that God’s voice was voice of God and sovereign king was also king of sovereignty.
The reflexivity is restored in social examples of special cases. Some republics are said to be qualified as democratic so as to emphasize that not all republics are democratic, some theorists insisting that democracy did not come about until a few generations after the United States became a republic and so not as vital to being a republican form of government. Other politically opposed theorists can reverse which is the noun and which is the modifier so as to conceptualize republican democracies whereby only some democracies become republican to the disadvantage of those who do not because they are subject to mob rule, which is what Aristotle worried about. But either way the modification is meaningful rather than nonsensical and so doesn’ violate grammar.
A similar meaningful reversal of noun and modifier is to speak of religious ethnicity, as when Jews are an ethnic group that is identified with a religion, while ethnic religion describes a religion which when adopted by its religion takes on some of its ethnic characteristics, as happens with national churches within Christianity, so there are parishes that use ethnic languages and customs and saints. The break between reversibility is in the idea of evolution in that Christianity has universalism as a goal so that all peoples can be ethnically religious while Jews are not universalistic and can remain religiously ethnic. Whether one or another is a modifier is very weighty.
A fourth and more complex relationship between modifiers and their nouns occurs when there are a set of modifiers that all or sometimes apply to the noun. So all animals engage in all the functions of life. They respirate, digest, eliminate, reproduce, and so on, and plants do the analogous activities. Minerals have most but not all of them for all minerals. They are lustrous and strong but talc is a mineral but is powdery. Ethnic groups are associated with religions but not exclusively, so that Irish and Italian are both Catholic. Members of an ethnic group have differential percentages of wealth and powerful positions but include members who are throughout the range of an attribute. There are poor Jews and there are wealthy Hispanics, however there is a stereotypical view to attribute an ethnic group to be overwhelmingly of one or another value of the attribute.
Analysts try to reduce a community or nation to a universal or at least modal description. So Americans are a people of plenty or as competitive and ingenious, as if all or most were Connecticut Yankees. People from the outside, looking as strangers and visitors to a new society, are likely to append some general attribute to the members of a collectivity simply to make it easier to say what the French or the Russians are like. In similar fashion, occupations are characterized by a blanket set of descriptors, so that medical doctors are objective and non judgmental and capable of dealing with stress when medical specialties also have distinguishing traits, such as gadgets for neurologists and opthalmologists while surgeons cut into bloody flesh, as do butchers, with the doctors having the additional quality of cutting into the flesh of living people.The dicing of categories so as to get an accurate description is endless until a particular person remains who has all the attributes necessary to identify that person unless one thinks it is good enough to qualify down to a set of people similar enough to regard as the same, which violates the ideological thought individualism which is that every person is singular even though it might mean only that every person has a separate subjective consciousness not so very different from other consciousnesses otherwise.
How Men and Women Differ
The above discussion concerns the methods by which a philosopher can address the necessity of a philosophical idea, which, in this case, is essence, or at best to look at the grammatically correct way to use the word “essential”. The philosophical methods are in fact accurate descriptions of things in the real world of nature and social life and how could they be otherwise in that these procedures have to be developed out of the actual world. You can't make ideas out of nothing. Even Plato thought that controversy and the state were real things that were recognized in idealized form.
Now turn these descriptions to a clearly sociological topic which is as old as history since the Old Testament and the Iliad, and remains a lively contemporary discussion: what is the difference between men and women? What makes the topic sociological is the attempt to describe the differences exactly rather than in adages offered over the ages about this mystery, the image and dynamics of which are quite familiar but this not having been described with accuracy. The Book of Genesis makes clear the asymmetric relation between men and women. Eve is the temptor, the adventurer, while Adam is responsible and prudent about conventional obedience. Samson is a reliable warrior while Delilah is a seducer and betrayer and lover of Samson, who had known women before he met Delilah, suggesting that he loved and trusted her, and she then betrayed him, no woman in “Genesis” being fooled by a man, whatever comes later in that men do betray women, though in that book the women understanding what the men ate about..
The sociological question to be addressed is one about a specific and basic aspect of human interaction concerning the difference between a specific pair of central social roles. My hypothesis, based on historical comparisons is that men are regarded as stolid and dutiful and that failing to do so makes men not really any longer men, as would happen if they abandon their children, while women can be any number of things, flirtatious or lascivious or prudish or shy, and all considered women in their varieties even if they are bad women, while bad men, like wife beaters, however common, are considered beneath the pale of being designated as men. So there is a fundamental asymmetry between the coordinated roles of being man and woman. Men are a noun that can only take two modifications, as stolid and loyal, and so provide their essential nature, even if body of a woman is her own property and can be dealt with as she pleases they have additional attributes such as being temperamental or clever, while women are not reduced to a few modifiers but are still recognizable as other than monsters if they engage in a variety of emotions and roles and not lose the designation of being a woman. Or is it that such deficiencies in men are regarded as unmanly merely a rhetorical term of derogation, an emphasis, rather than a recognition of something different in their natures, their essential qualities limited as specified. Yes, men can cry, but that is regarded as womanlike, borrowed from woman, however brave a gesture, rather than resident in men? We will address the question of whether the genders are asymmetrical in their modifications by using the four kinds of modifications as described four aspects for recognizing when a noun takes a modifier or not, the definition the accumulation of overdetermination of the way nouns are welded to some modifiers but not others.
First, the modifiers of gender are seen as self contradictory or not through custom and law, a social event that makes the modifier impossible, as when black slaves could be considered property because they could not be considered human and so had inherent rights. So men are designated as having the essential and necessary qualities of being stolid and reliable while this restriction is not limited in the case of women. Designation is used throughout social life as the way to modify words. The laws of war define which acts of war are legal and illegal. Israelis claim deaths are collateral damage that result from legal acts of war and so are not genocidal while antio-Israelis claim that the carnage is so excessive in suffering to civilians that they look like words having to do with war crimes or genocide to describe the b ut without a legal basis for allowing how to cover these atrocities. Maybe the law of war will be modified to mean excessive carnage but that has not yet been established perhaps because excessive can't be defined.
Second, the relation of the genders are not just attributes but a social system in that men and women (and same sex couples by extension) are tied together because of complex dynamics of attraction and strangeness which is given by the term love to be a shorthand or a metaphor for such complication which is elusive however people can always be jaundiced and see or come to see their shortcomings. Love remains or deepens as an attachment perhaps given over to loyalty or custom or law despite knowing a spouse to be all too human.
A third way to determine that men are characterized as stolid and loyal and their synonyms and emphases such as stubborn and obedient, is to consider men and women as subsets of the other, which leads to considerable friction. The historical view in the modern world was to see women as a subspecies of mankind, and their distinguishing traits as inferior to those of men. Women were, after all, made of Adam ‘s rib and so inferior. Women were considered more frail physically than men because of their attendant reproductive systems and of weaker character as when, in a World War II movie Van Johnson is asked by his superior officer whether his wife had the right stuff, meaning that she could deal with his having war injuries. Men, by definition, are neither squeamish or unwilling to face hard truths, while having to protect women from their flirtatiousness or the other properties in which they can indulge.
Times have changed. Women are recognized to endure pain better than men do and are more clouded by their testosterone than women incapacitated by menstruation. Women do better at school than men do and so need more exercise so as to improve their learning skills. Indeed, some Feminists go so far as to say that they don't need men as companions because women are more companionable with one another while male-female relations are bound to result in strife, however much women may still find men sexually attractive, but that pleasure can be weaned out of women, just as in olden days men in single sex groups like school and military organization were where men could develop and prosper in the manly things however much female companionship, preferably through marriage, allowed men to get on with their real manly pursuits.
urth and reinforcing way of regarding men as stolid and loyal is by applying the general state of nouns taking modifiers by noting that, as with minerals, a number of adjectives can be applied to a noun, and none of them may be considered necessary. That applies to men who, obviously enough, are modified by a great number of characteristics. Some are sullen or sentimental or taciturn or verbose, the whole range of adjectives given to human beings but only metaphorically to animals and not at all to minerals. What happens is that some adjectives, as Locke would say, are primary while others are secondary. Stolidness and loyalty are primary while other qualities applied to men are secondary. Men can cry so long as they remain loyal and stolid and the claim may be that those two qualities are inseparable from their objects
So the asymmetric adjectives of men as opposed to women are definitional, metaphorical, included and primary, which is enough to fix these as perceptions, but not so strong as not to allow people to think otherwise as if language creates reality, as would be true if a totalitarian country had abolished the words for freedom and liberty and that war was peace because the department of war was changed to being the department of defense. Words are not as powerful as concepts that describe reality.Men and women are what they are despite longstanding cultural designations.