Yes and it really can be made sense of, exactly despite it’s overall messiness it isn’t actually a perfectly uniformly blending sludge of amorphous shape and colors bleeding into each other with no discernible boundaries or areas of greater and lesser dominane or privelege.
On the contrary most things seem to have some rather distinct and recognizable shape and color to them that are the very things that make us able to tell them apart. There are exceptions to probably all of them, but they are exceptions. Something rare enough that through their rarity they in effect prove the rule, as they say.
I totally agree that none of those have to correspond to some sort of essence, or platonic ideal. I don’t think they imply such a thing and I don’t think we need to think of then in terms of essences to make sense of or communicate about them.
But nevertheless that is how the shapes, colors, and what have you are distributed in real objects. Not completely equally on an infinitely finely graded continuum. We can conceive of such spaces, but the real world usually has a more coarse-grained quality to it. I can pretty well tell that there is some boundary where the outer surface of an object lies and where the surrounding air begins. My table doesn’t appear to me to cross blendingly into some misty haze of the surrounding air with no way to tell where air stops and table begins. And it isn’t all possible colors in equal amounts of brightness and intensity.
Sure, but many things really seem to only have 1 overall color, with patches of surface that are in shade and that aren’t, or have relatively sharp boundaries where 2 or 3 of them meet. So even though the colors all correspond to “positions” somewhere on a continuum, a sort of space of all colors, individual colored objects in our surroundings for the most part are more uniformly colored with some being way more pronounced than others.
So again I think there are pretty good physical explanations for why language has developed the way it has where we have a handful of color categories, despite each of these in principle blend into each other over infinitely many fine gradations. And it seems to me it’s at least partly because language reflects something about the reality we inhabit, about the distributions of attributes we find around us. So the language categories evolved because they were useful, and they were useful because they communicate something real about physical reality, about how the traits those categories describe are probably distributed.
That isn’t my contention at all (I don’t believe there is some sort of ideal version of some organism), and I don’t think that follows from anything I’ve said. I do believe however there are evolutionary and developmental reasons why anatomical and physiological traits of humans are distributed how they are. Not because there is some sort of platonic ideal, though I’m pretty sure it has at least something to do with natural selection.
Cladistically, yes. But there are other ways to understand that word than in a cladistic sense, as having a particular set of shared derived characteristics. I also think the word fish as it finds use in everyday speech refers to something physically real, and that unless we are talking in a cladistic sense (which we can, but we have to specify that this is what we mean), we can meaningfully talk about fish as being distinct from human beings. In all sorts of ways. And yes that is despite us knowing that we have passed through literally billions of gradations since our ancestors roamed the oceans. But those ancestors no longer exist, leaving us with a considerable gap in terms of characteristics that make everyone able to easily and reliably tell the difference.
True, but that doesn’t mean there is no such thing as male or female. The term refers to something real that really does exist I assume we agree, even if we can imagine infinitely many gradations between two “ends” of such a continuum. And the reason the language categories have found use in the first place is probably mostly because of the strongly bimodal distribution of traits they refer to in both our own and so many other species.
There aren’t infinitely many people in the world, and the different traits are not distributed in equal amounts all over that spectrum. And that probably does reflect something about evolutionary history, natural selection, and development, and the “functions” of the sexes in terms of reproduction. Oh and with that last part, I’m not saying that to argue that because natural selection has probably favored such a distribution, people who seem to fall in between the two major categories are somehow wrong, sick, or defective. I have railed against the naturalistic fallacy before on other topics, and I will do so here too should anyone get confused.
Just to (hopefully) stave off any concern. I am not saying these things to in any way argue that people who really do seem to fall somewhere on the “outside” or “between” the two intuitive categories of the sexes somehow aren’t real, or are mentally insane, or that their life experiences or existence is invalid, or defective, or anything of the sort. It is my view that everyone who feels like they somehow don’t conform neatly to either category in whatever way or degree should have the exact same freedom to be the person they feel they are as everyone else has, in pretty much any imaginable respect. Be that law, marriage, healthcare, etc.