I

If one is to see the transformative metaphilosophical potential of Judith Butler's position about gender categories in terms of prioritizing poststructuralist feminist resources over purely analytical ones, one first needs to have Wilfrid Sellars's reflections on conceptual analysis of knowledge in view. In Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, Sellars aimed to radically revise the project of normative epistemology. Central to his Kantian commitment to the conceptual irreducibility of normativity and intentionality is his rejection of an analysis of knowledge:

Rather than conceive of knowledge in terms of justified true belief, Footnote ¹ or even in terms of that model's Nozickean modificationsFootnote ² Sellars abandons any talk about knowledge that frames it as something to be analyzed.Footnote ³ The concern about analysis here from the (left-wingFootnote ⁴) Sellarsian perspective,Footnote ⁵ which differs importantly from Timothy Williamson's arguments for the category of knowledge as fundamental and therefore unanalyzable (see Williamson Reference Williamson2000), is that conceptual analysis of knowledge fails to do justice to the normative, pragmatic dimensions of epistemic practice (cf. Rouse Reference Rouse1987; Tanesini Reference Tanesini1999). As Sellars writes:

In perceptual experience, for Sellars, human beings do not just produce responses to causally affecting stimuli by means of verbal mechanisms, whether these are just atomic or complex propositions. Rather, in responding to stimuli in this linguistic way, human beings are articulating the representational content of perception in such a way as to enable reflection on it. Because we reflect on the content of our experience, we see ourselves, to use an expression from John McDowell, as “having the world in view,” and, as such, rationally constrained by and answerable to the world. For us to be in this phenomenological position, the content of our experience must be brought under concepts, because reflection is impossible without concepts. Sellars, in opposing the Myth of the Given,Footnote ⁶ allies with Kant, who is one of the forbears of inferentialism, because Kant's claim that intuitions without concepts are blind underpins the idea that nothing can count as a legitimate component of experience (or phenomenological state) if it is not subject to concepts whose function is to structure content in such a manner as to make contents inferentially relevant. In other words, perception is epistemically valuable if and only if it is inferentially relevant. Inferential relevance is determined by how perceptual contents are structured so that they can figure as elements of conceptually articulated judgments, as being involved in either premise or conclusion; to put this more clearly, concepts, as the logical functions of judgment, are used in the formation of judgments, and the form of judgment articulates experiential states. In articulating experiential states qua the form of judgment, experiential states become inferentially significant and relevant, because these states now figure in the space of reasons. Therefore, concepts play a crucial role in the inferential articulation of experiential states, given the relationship between concepts and judgment.

Focusing on the production and reproduction of epistemic norms and knowledge-attributions that undercut the Myth of the Given necessarily involves articulating knowledge as a particular kind of language-game—where this epistemic practice is inherently normative, insofar as one is, to use Robert Brandom's well-known left-wing Sellarsian expression, playing the game of giving and asking for reasons. To put this another way, the idea of framing questions about knowledge in this manner views such an epistemic kind as something one cannot intelligibly grasp independently of a deliberative public sphere. Since Sellars construes human beings as persons—that is, intentional, linguistic, discursive, agentive beings—the normative space of reasons clearly contrasts with the descriptive space of nature.Footnote ⁷ As Sellars puts it:

In Hegelian fashion, Sellars insists that what individuates persons is not just a description of their practices, but also an account of how those practices convey persons’ sensitivity to a normative community; the ways in which persons are sensitive to fellow language-using agents. For Quill Kukla (writing as Rebecca Kukla) and Mark Lance, “Sellars is getting at the point that recognizing someone as a person is not merely an observative act, but also a practical act of the second kind. . . . We become and remain the types of beings that have specific, agent-relative engagements with others through an ongoing network of hails and acknowledgments . . .” (Kukla and Lance Reference Kukla and Lance2009, 180–81). Equally, epistemic kinds are not discrete, purely representational kinds that can be broken down into primitives, to the extent that epistemic kinds are articulated asocially.Footnote ⁸ Speech-acts involved in playing the game of giving and asking for reasons “are the acts they are in virtue of being planted within and constituted by a rich social and institutional context” (Kukla and Lance Reference Kukla, Lance and O'Shea2016, 86). Any commitment to the social dimension of knowledge-attribution must involve a commitment to viewing the fixation of belief, to use Peirce's term, as something that cannot be achieved independently of practices of inquiry.Footnote ⁹ Since knowledge-attribution is a normative practice through-and-through, it is necessarily social, as norms can be meaningfully established only through deliberative discourse in order to be deemed authoritative, legitimate, and valid for those engaging in such discourse.

According to Sellars, because norms are “social achievements” (Brandom Reference Brandom2002, 216) established by the intersubjective epistemic practices between agents, norms get their normative purchase—that is, their rational bindingness—by virtue of being assented to and acknowledged by a community of discursive agents.Footnote ¹⁰ To quote Steven Levine here, “[n]orms have no existence outside of their being taken as correct or incorrect—as being authoritative or not—by a community of persons” (Levine Reference Levine and Giladi2019, 253). Crucially, though, the practice of assenting to and acknowledging normative constraints and normative entitlements (see Haugeland Reference Haugeland1997) comprises determining the content of norms “through a ‘process of negotiation’ involving ourselves and those who attribute norms to us” (Houlgate Reference Houlgate and Hammer2007, 139). By virtue of being a process of negotiation, norms and identities are never fixed but always subject to “further assessment, challenge, defence, and correction” (Brandom Reference Brandom1994, 647). As such, for Sellars, one replaces the model of conceptual analysis with a normative pragmatic framework: knowing is a recognizable standing in the normative space of reasons.

A crucial motivation for Sellars's move here is not simply his Kantianism-Hegelianism about normativity and meaning.Footnote ¹¹ His pragmatic abandonment of the framework of analysis about knowledge in 1956 also seems to spring from a prophetic concern with an apparently ossified noetic state of play: mainstream analytic epistemology's apparent inability to get over Gettier-style problematics since 1963 led to discursive banality in talk about knowledge. One either had to find a counterexample to Gettier cases that safely secured the third necessary and sufficient condition for knowledge; or, one had to put forward a fourth necessary and sufficient condition for knowledge, having recognized the hopelessness of the tripartite model. Since Sellars aligned himself in complex ways with the pragmatist tradition, one has good reason to suppose his critique of the project of analysis about knowledge is, in part, a William James-inspired worry, insofar as normative epistemology was talking about normative matters in the wrong way. Overcoming the rigidity of conceptual analysis in this context would involve broadening one's sense-making vocabulary.

Thus far, I have reconstructed Sellars's critique of the analytical project geared toward providing definitions of knowledge. In what follows, I argue that Butler's critique of feminist identity should be understood as comparable to the Sellarsian critique of conceptual analysis here: definitional practices tend to oversimplify and exclude other equally cogent and rich sense-making enterprises in favor of a nonpluralistic explanatory scheme. Moving away from definitions of woman to what one may call poststructuralist sites of woman concerning performativity and social constitution parallels moving away from a definition of knowledge to a pragmatic account of “knowledge” as a recognizable standing in the normative space of reasons.Footnote ¹² The important similarities between Butler's poststructuralist position on gender and Sellars's normative pragmatism about knowledge enable one to think of her poststructuralist feminism as mapping out pragmatic cognitive strategies and visions for doing philosophy.

II

For Butler, the emancipatory function of feminism should not be predicated on any attempt to define woman. As she writes:

Under Butler's account, feminist identity politics,Footnote ¹³ since it is grounded on an analysis of woman, risks presupposing gender essentialism insofar as feminist identity politics is said to be organized around women as a unitary collective. Group membership is fixed by some “golden nugget of womanness” (Spelman Reference Spelman1988, 159), a set of natural conditions, experiences, practices, or features that women qua women supposedly share and that are necessary and sufficient for their gender: for example, a human being who (i) has an XX chromosome, female physical features and sex organs, (ii) female somatic phenomenology, and (iii) the social phenomenological features traditionally associated with the term woman. As K. Anthony Appiah notes on the logic of identity politics tout court, “[c]ollective identities, in short, provide what we might call scripts: narratives that people can use in shaping their life plans and in telling their life stories” (Appiah Reference Appiah and Gutmann1994, 159–60). For Butler, the danger of defining woman lies in how the definitional practice (a) oversimplifies; and (b) is itself ideological and risks deeming some women as inauthentic.

Regarding (a), unitary gender notions narrow the conceptual field and fail to take differences among women into account, thus failing to recognize “the multiplicity of cultural, social, and political intersections in which the concrete array of ‘women’ are constructed” (Butler Reference Butler1999, 19–20).Footnote ¹⁴ Blindness to plurality is the result of a conceptual lacuna in which the vocabulary and discursive matrix for coordinating discourse about identity is overly restricted. As Susan Strickland phrases it:

From this perspective, then, I would argue that whatever deficiencies there are in making sense of “women” are instantiations of a more general and structural conceptual failure that is part and parcel of identity politics eo ipso. To quote Appiah here:

Though one could argue that definitional practice is politically useful for mobilizing attention, a powerful left-wing worry about contemporary identity-talk is that its propensity for construing groups as monolithic blocs risks articulating identities in Parmenidean ways. Using a turn of phrase from Andrew Pringle-Pattison, an overly simple and unsubtle discursive framework about groups sees individuals “devoured, like clouds before the sun, in the white light of the unica substantia” (Pringle-Pattison Reference Pringle-Pattison1897, 173). As if failing to make substantive room for differences within groups is not problematic enough, the Parmenidean articulation of identity would also render inquirers conceptually blind to the genealogical backdrop for developing an approach to identity as what one might call a “hermeneutic sphere.” Conceptualizing identity through a narrow prism that does not refer to historical, sociological, cultural, psychological, psychoanalytic, and anthropological backdrops, serving as the crucible in which identities are formed, reformed, molded, developed, redeveloped, and contested would seem a rather impoverished way of making sense of things (see Butler Reference Butler1999, 7).

Regarding (b), in the attempt to undercut phallogocentric ways of conceptualizing the feminine subject, feminist identity politics created a new form of ideology.Footnote ¹⁵ The definition of woman invariably reifies gender,Footnote ¹⁶ which, as Linda Nicholson argues, “operates as a policing force which generates and legitimizes certain conditions, experiences, practices, experiences, etc., and curtails and delegitimizes others” (Nicholson Reference Nicholson, Jaggar and Young1998, 293). However, one should not lose sight of how the ideological-reificatory features of gender definitions spring from the ideological-reificatory features built into identity definitions eo ipso, since “[i]dentity categories are never merely descriptive, but always normative, and as such, exclusionary” (Butler Reference Butler1991, 160). As William Connolly writes:

The significant problem with feminist identity politics is that if one does not satisfy the definition of “woman,” the implication is that one is not truly a woman; one is not authentically a woman; one is not really a woman. And, extending this to the political sphere, if one is not truly a woman, if one is not authentically a woman, if one is not really a woman, then one is highly unlikely to receive feminist representation at any level of concerted resistance to androcentric environments. In other words, feminist identity politics involves symbolic violence with material effects, insofar as woman can never be defined in a way that does not suggest—either implicitly or explicitly—some “unspoken normative requirements” (Butler Reference Butler1999, 9) to which women should conform, so as to be deemed real women. As Appiah writes, “[i]t is at this point that someone who takes autonomy seriously will ask whether we have not replaced one kind of tyranny with another” (Appiah Reference Appiah and Gutmann1994, 162–63).

I agree with Appiah about how the dialectic shifts to intra-group struggles—however, there is room to substantiate the particular notion of tyranny here and explicate in more detail what exactly is so dangerous about this type of tyranny: mobilizing discourse and praxis around unitary collective identity invariably means that membership in that collective turns on how pure one's identity claims are judged.Footnote ¹⁷ This, as Christopher Zurn rightly phrases it, “fosters illiberal pressures toward conformity against supposedly ‘inauthentic’ members; it perpetuates subordinating intra-group hierarchies whereby only some have the privilege of defining and speaking for the group's collective identity” (Zurn Reference Zurn2015, 88). For example, consider the following table, which illustrates how a first-person question about inclusion in a relevant social group can often be met with a gatekeeping response concerning the “purity” and “legitimacy” of that individual's claim for inclusion in that particular social group:

This powerful quote makes all these worries about intra-group hierarchies clear:

Furthermore, bell hooks importantly reminds her readers that in this example of the Georgia Women's Press Club:

In their respective ways, both Rayford Logan and hooks portray systemic testimonial as well as hermeneutic injustice in these contexts, to the extent that these socio-epistemic pathologies are revealed as the workings of an epistemic hierarchy: white women claimed to understand black women better than black women understood themselves. According to the white feminists here, black women lacked the discursive architecture to produce knowledge; as such, the white feminists epistemically and politically managed the black women as they defined them.

Tragically, the irony is that movements that are deemed progressive and hallmarks of the New Left contain fascistic features with the concern for purity and authenticity,Footnote ¹⁸ to the extent that oppressive and marginalizing power relations are being ideologically reproduced rather than being systematically eroded. To quote Butler here:

As such, the mistake of feminist identity politics was not that they gave a bad definition of woman, but that feminist identity politics aimed to define woman. Footnote ¹⁹ The definitional practice operates juridically, since “the subjects regulated by such structures are, by virtue of being subjected to them, formed, defined, and reproduced in accordance with the requirements of those structures” (Butler Reference Butler1999, 4). In order to overcome the limitations of such a way of theorizing about gender and its corresponding story of political representation and participation, Butler argues one ought to adopt a performativity thesis. A performativity thesis necessarily involves understanding woman as “a term in process, a becoming, a constructing that cannot rightfully be said to originate or to end. As an ongoing discursive practice, it is open to intervention and resignification” (43).Footnote ²⁰

Genders and gendered traits (like being nurturing or ambitious) are the “intended or unintended product[s] of a social practice” (Haslanger Reference Haslanger1995, 97). Females become women through a process whereby they acquire “womanly” traits and learn “womanly” conduct (Beauvoir Reference Beauvoir and Parshley1949/1984, 273). Children are often dressed in gender-specific clothes and colors, and parents tend to buy their children gender-specific toys and games. Parents also (regardless of intentions) tend to reaffirm certain “appropriate” gender-specific behaviors: girls qua “girls” are often discouraged from playing sports like rugby; boys qua “boys” are often told not to cry. For Butler, then, gender is not “a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts follow; rather, gender is . . . instituted . . . through a stylized repetition of [habitual] acts” (Butler Reference Butler1999, 179). These acts include wearing certain clothing that marks one's gender, moving and positioning one's body that marks one's gender, and so on. Understood in such a manner, performativity and its new vocabulary involves pragmatic constitution: gender is not something one is, it is something one does; it is a sequence of acts, a doing rather than a being. “Gender only comes into being through these gendering acts” (Mikkola Reference Mikkola and Zalta2019). Repetition and institutionalization of these performative acts—speech, behavioral, and so on—crystallizes gender, and, in doing so, invariably encourages people to think of gender as a natural kind. The critical perspective on gender provided by performative theory and its conceptual allies, therefore, aims at the progressive transformation of society from one structured in accordance with reified and oppressive gender norms.

The epistemic advantages of performative theory are that, unlike definitional practices, performativity is better equipped to make sense of gender: it recognizes how gender is a “messy” concept and therefore requires a discursive matrix that can sensitively coordinate and capture the complex phenomenological and hermeneutic textures indicative of gendered bodies and gendered experiences.Footnote ²¹ Both Natalie Stoljar and Mari Mikkola, to varying extents, write in a supportive manner on the subject of acknowledging just how complex and multidimensional gender is:

I would argue that applying definitional practices to such a domain of inquiry is a category error insofar as definitions are “too buttoned-up and white-chokered and clean-shaven a thing” (James Reference James1906/2003, 146) to adequately make sense of not only messy and contested bodies and experiences, but also the norms and power dynamics governing gender-attribution. In this way, one increasingly moves away from definitions of woman to what one may call poststructuralist sites of woman.Footnote ²² From this perspective, then, the following pragmatist critique of early modern rationalism by James is particularly relevant to Butler's poststructuralism here:

However, a crucial set of points must be made before directly returning to the proposed Sellars–Butler conversation, as the stakes are philosophically and politically high here. Analytic feminists, of course, are not blind to the complex phenomenological and hermeneutic textures indicative of gendered bodies and gendered experiences. Indeed, Katherine Ritchie has recently argued that talk about racial, gender, disabled, and sexual orientation groups needs greater nuance, helpfully distinguishing between Organized Social Groups and Feature Social Groups (Ritchie Reference Ritchie2015; Reference Ritchie, Hess, Isaacs and Igneski2018).

For Ritchie, Organized Social Groups are groups like sports teams, committees, and clubs, typified by a formal structure. Feature Social Groups are racial groups, gender groups, disabled groups, and sexual-orientation groups constituted by a shared feature. “Social groups of this sort are not simply collections of people, for they are more fundamentally intertwined with the identities of the people described as belonging to them. They are a specific kind of collectivity, with specific consequences for how people understand one another and themselves” (Young Reference Young1990, 43). Ritchie, crucially, notes that “sharing a feature” must not be interpreted in such a way that involves a commitment to essentialism about gender or race or disability or sexuality: “[o]ne might argue that the view that social kinds are property clusters rather than properties is preferable, as taking there to be a property womanness or Blackness is to essentialise.Footnote ²³ One might argue that not all women or all Black people have a shared (even socially constructed) feature; one should be anti-essentialist” (Ritchie Reference Ritchie, Hess, Isaacs and Igneski2018, 30, n. 27).

Ritchie stays neutral on the subject of whether the shared feature emblematic of racial groups, gender groups, disabled groups, and sexual-orientation groups is a natural property or a socially constructed property or some combination of natural and socially constructed property.Footnote ²⁴ However, though this quasi-Lockean position on the metaphysics of Feature Social Groups could be construed as dissatisfying, insofar as one is none the wiser about the positive nature of the shared feature, Ritchie's position should not be dismissed. This is because her commitment to anti-essentialism in conjunction with her notion of a cluster concept at least seems to explicitly resist the urge to reduce gender and so on in “an all or nothing way as a simple idea” (Armstrong Reference Armstrong1978, 54). To quote Brian Epstein, “[the aim here is] to challenge the idea that they have simple answers. There seems to be a powerful drive among theorists to unify and simplify the endless diversity and variation among kinds of groups” (Epstein Reference Epstein2019, 2).

My concern about Ritchie's position, though, is that she appears to deploy investigations into social ontology in a manner that creates insufficient scope for critical social ontology. Ritchie claims that her articulation of the metaphysics of social groups is in service of “better understand[ing] our world and ourselves” (Ritchie Reference Ritchie, Hess, Isaacs and Igneski2018, 17). However, following Marx, the task for philosophy is not merely to interpret the world, but to change it. Therefore, with regard to the project of social ontology, it is not sufficient to better carve the social at its joints; one must also have in view whether the metaphysical categories we use to make sense of gender, race, disabled (see Barnes Reference Barnes2016), and sexual-orientation groups are themselves prone to ideological distortion and vitiation. In other words, one must prepare to not only recognize that our vocabulary for talking about gender and the like is not fit for the purpose, but also prepare to transform that very vocabulary for the emancipatory purpose of ending oppression, domination, and marginalization. This is why, as Sally Haslanger writes, “[a]t the most general level, the task is to develop accounts of gender and race that will be effective in the fight against injustice” (Haslanger Reference Haslanger2012, 226).

It is worth stating that there seems to be some degree of tension between Haslanger's claim here and her own ameliorative definition of woman.Footnote ²⁵ The tension seems to lie in how it would appear that, although Haslanger's definition of woman clearly designates those under the oppressive forces of patriarchal misogyny and sexism, it seems to exclude those who identify as women who do not genuinely find themselves systematically subordinated in some dimension and who are not marked in marginalizing ways.Footnote ²⁶ The problem is that if one does not satisfy the ameliorative definition of woman, the implication is that one is not truly a woman; one is not authentically a woman; one is not really a woman. Woman can never be defined amelioratively in a way that does not suggest—either implicitly or explicitly—some unspoken normative requirements to which women should conform, so as to be deemed real women: the ameliorative definition of woman, regardless of its critical dispositionality, remains a definition, and therefore operates under juridical logic.Footnote ²⁷ As Kukla and Lance express a similar point:

III

The question now concerns the ways in which Sellars's critique of analysis and Butler's critique of feminist identity politics bear on each other: both Butler and Sellars, in their respective ways, object to discursive matrixes that narrow the conceptual field. For example, as I have argued, Butler worries that unitary categories of gender and identity are cognitively and politically destabilizing, since they are inherently exclusionary and reifying;Footnote ²⁸ Sellars worries that analyzing knowledge instead of construing such an epistemic kind pragmatically renders inquirers unable to make sense of playing the game of giving and asking for reasons.

(i) Sellars's critique of analysis is decidedly uninterested in finding any features or states or properties serving as conditions of knowledge. Rather, knowledge is conceptualized in terms of a recognizable standing in the logical space of reasons, the “network of discursive holdings” (Kukla and Lance Reference Kukla and Lance2009, 192) comprising the norm-constituting practices of language-using discursive agents. Crucially, the act of playing the game of giving and asking for reasons is relational. Importantly, those “relationally defined activities sustained by mutual recognition” (183) are complex through and through, to the extent that the practices occurring in the logical space of reasons are articulated in processist terms. The processist inflections of the game of giving and asking for reasons reveal that certain normative functions can be performed only by relational, as opposed to substantival, categories. The idea that epistemic norms are formed, molded, and developed implies that ordinary analytical vocabulary is subject to an error theory. Understood in such a manner, normative pragmatism about knowledge illustrates how conceptual analyses of knowledge rest on construing epistemic norms as substantival, rather than as relational; how conceptual analyses of knowledge mistakenly rest on reifying epistemic norms and kinds; how conceptual analyses of knowledge mistakenly rest on the ““Platonic scorecard” vision of normative space as an abstract network” (193).

The normative space of reasons’ clear contrast with the descriptive space of nature means that one cannot apply conceptual analysis, a strategy best conducive for making sense of natural kinds (for example, water), to the social space of reasons. Knowing is to be baptized in a deliberative public sphere of fallible discursive transactions; knowing is to move sufficiently well in the normative space of reasons through sensitivity to reasons. For Sellars, since personhood and knowledge are “equiprimordial [normative] phenomena” (189), persons and knowledge are irreducible to the ideal scientific image, not because they are “emergent” kinds over and above the descriptive-explanatory categories of science, but because personhood and knowledge are not in the business of describing and explaining in the first place.

(ii) Butler's critique of definitional practice is decidedly uninterested in finding any features or states or properties serving as conditions of “woman.” Rather, gender is articulated as involving repetitive and stylized performative acts. Crucially, those performative acts constituting the norms governing gender attribution and the like are relational. Importantly, the relationally defined performative activities sustained by recognition are complex through and through, to the extent that repetitive and performative stylized acts can be understood in processist terms. The processist inflections of gender performativity reveal that certain normative functions can be performed only by relational, as opposed to substantival, categories: to be gendered is not to satisfy a fixed set of biological or cultural criteria, but to be baptized in a system of power relations imbuing one's body and experiences with social significance. The idea that gender is formed, molded, and developed implies that ordinary vocabulary is subject to an error theory: gender performativity illustrates how definitional practice rests on construing gender as substantival, rather than as relational;Footnote ²⁹ how definitional practice mistakenly rests on reifying gender. As Karen Barad phrases it, “[i]t is hard to deny that the power of language has been substantial. One might argue too substantial, or perhaps more to the point, too substantializing” (Barad Reference Barad2003, 802).

I contend that the ways in which Sellars's critique of analysis about knowledge and Butler's critique of definitions of woman bear on each other consist predominantly in how both thinkers espouse conceptual frameworks that are democratically oriented. For both Butler and Sellars, in their respective ways, “[t]he ideal exercise of the rational capacities that any of us has now, from an epistemic as well as a political point of view . . . , seeks to cultivate and educate these same capacities in the direction of maximal inclusiveness” (Kukla Reference Kukla2006, 92).

It is reasonable to claim that Sellars's commitment to antifoundationalism and expansive conceptual frameworks, typified by his notion of synoptic vision,Footnote ³⁰ is democratic and nonsupremacist because the activity of playing the game of giving and asking for reasons is sustained by mutual recognition. Sellars's notion of synoptic vision, namely his attempt to fuse or combine the manifest image of the worldFootnote ³¹ with the ideal scientific image of the world,Footnote ³² aims to be democratic and nonsupremacist because there must be a pluralism of vocabularies in play to adequately make sense of things. To quote James O'Shea here, “the manifest image conception of persons as thinking and intending beings is supposed to be preserved rather than ‘overwhelmed’ (Sellars Reference Sellars1963, 8–9)” (O'Shea Reference O'Shea2007, 136) when combined with the ideal scientific image of the world. Above all, Sellars's commitment to antifoundationalism and to the synoptic vision paints a picture of a thinker who wishes to replace, as Adriana Cavarero would phrase it (see Cavarero Reference Cavarero, Minervini and Sitze2016), a rectitudinal and vertical image of sense-making practice and philosophical inquiry with a stereoscopic image of sense-making practice and philosophical inquiry:Footnote ³³

Such a vision of what philosophy looks like and what its particular mode of cognitive engagement aspires to achieve seems to be shared by Nicholas Rescher:

Central to both Sellars's and Rescher's respective conceptions of the aims and task of philosophy is a commitment to holism. The kind of holism one can reasonably attribute to Sellars and Rescher is a Hegelian variety; in the preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel (in)famously claimed that “[t]he True is the whole. However, the whole is only the essence completing itself through its own development” (Hegel Reference Hegel and Pinkard1807/2018, §20, 13). Here, the framework for understanding objects of experience is not restricted to the level of ordinary consciousness, where we can make only “thin” judgments that express their atomistic separation and only an artificial kind of unity. This is why, for Hegel, a move from ordinary to philosophical consciousness consists in recognizing, to use Paolo Diego Bubbio's terminology, “mediate objectivity”—“an ongoing process of mediation between subject and object which is always already in place” (Bubbio Reference Bubbio2016, 238–39).

Rather than viewing reality as loosely connected sets of objects, we ought to conceive of Being as a complex and interconnected whole in which finite members are dialectically related. Such a move aims to supplant the perspective of Verstand with the perspective of Vernunft in discourse about sense-making. For Hegel, the advantage of drawing this distinction between reason and understanding is that we can be in a position to not be wrapped up in the various dualisms that are the inevitable consequence of reflecting only from the perspective of Verstand, that is, purely analytical forms of reflection. Vernunft provides consciousness with the means to avoid the problems of analysis by thinking dialectically, that is, by drawing distinctions yet establishing interconnectedness to a whole.

Butler's Foucauldian critique of feminist identity politics as well as her performativity thesis are clearly democratic and nonsupremacist:

Crucially, if one's metaphysics of gender is performative, then one is committed to the fallibilist view that the category of gender identity is never fixed, so much so that “[t]his field of possibilities is not static or singular but rather is a dynamic and contingent multiplicity” (Barad Reference Barad2003, 819). Above all, these theoretical gains have an important transformative and emancipatory advantage: they enable more democratic forms of association, “to produce new forms of intimacy, alliance, and communicability” (Butler Reference Butler2004, 208).

To my mind, a particularly evocative example of a category itself needing to be subjected to a reworking from myriad directions, for the purposes of a radical democratic transformation, one bound up with Butler's poststructuralism about gender, is Butler's queering of kinship, namely “the radical project of articulating and supporting the proliferation of sexual practices outside of marriage [producing] variations on kinship that depart from normative, dyadic heterosexually based family forms secured through the marriage vow” (Butler Reference Butler2002, 16–17). For Butler, the contention that marriage—whether heterosexual or homosexual—is what legitimates kinship and sexual relations between partners is “unacceptably conservative” (21). States explicitly disincentivize nonmarital relationships and arrangements, for nonmarital kinship structures are not admitted into state-protection and state-incentive protocols despite having caring relationships. Therefore, the liberal claim to progressiveness, extending marriage to homosexuals, is not just premature, but a disturbing form of ideology.

Coded ideology serves to create a pathological genus of doubt about the metaphysical legitimacy of one's nonmarital relationship. This particular variety of doubt is hermeneutically crippling and deeply distressing, preventing a healthy, practical relation to one's beloved. If your lover is not officially recognized, can you even mourn for them? If your lover is not officially recognized, can you even be said to have lost them if the relationship ends? As Butler writes:

However, in response to my central comparative point concerning Butler and Sellars, namely the democratic and nonsupremacist character of what they substitute for definitional analysis of key concepts, one may object that there is a substantive difference between the sense in which Butler's poststructuralism is aspiring to a radical democratic transformation, which concerns political subjects, and a democratic and nonsupremacist relation between Sellars's two images. Under the Sellarsian synoptic vision of fusing the manifest and scientific images together into one coherent image, as O'Shea correctly notes, “Sellars does indeed want to hold that the ontology of persons as rational agents and conceptual thinkers within the space of reasons is in principle successfully accommodated within the comprehensively physicalist ontology of the ideal scientific image of the world” (O'Shea Reference O'Shea and A2009, 194). Since the Sellarsian synoptic vision is structured primarily by the comprehensively physicalist ontology of the (ideal) scientific image, the purely third-person naturalistic vocabulary will invariably have priority over the first-person intentional vocabulary of the manifest image. Under Sellars's synoptic vision, so the argument goes, there is still some kind of epistemic hierarchy: noneliminativist supremacy of the scientific image.

There is much to agree with in this objection, since there is a real risk of equivocation here. However, though I am happy to concede that, given the fundamental ambiguity of Sellars's conceptual irreducibility of the manifest image-cum-strong scientific realism, his synoptic project is not radically transformative in exactly the same way that Butler's project is radically transformative about kinship structures, I contend that there is still an important sense in which Sellars can be legitimately regarded as radically transformative in the same formal way as Butler. Both thinkers are focused on myth-debunking: in Sellars's case, overcoming the Myth of the Given; in Butler's case, overcoming what one might call the Myth of Immutability—where the ideological contention that marriage is the grounds of kinship shares the same formal fixed character as the Given's foundationalism.

The important parallel between Butler's poststructuralist thesis about gender (as well as kinship structures) and Sellars's normative pragmatism about knowledge enable one to think of her feminism as mapping out pragmatic cognitive strategies and visions for doing philosophy. What I mean by this is that her approach to gendered bodies and experiences employs conceptual resources providing a particularly rich and engaging way of doing philosophy, so much so that philosophy's “self-image” (Williams Reference Williams and Moore2006, 202) can be improved, confirming Gary Gutting's claim that “feminism promises to improve not only the climate for women but also philosophical thinking itself” (Gutting Reference Gutting2017).

If one wishes to remain wedded to a view of philosophy as a second-order discipline concerned with critical reflection on the ways in which one makes sense of sense-making practices, then Butler's poststructuralist antirepresentationalist variety of feminist theorizing makes a substantive metaphilosophical contribution, precisely because overturning the paradigm of definitional practice here is a prime instantiation of critical reflection on making sense of sense-making.

So, as Bernard Williams would put it, what might philosophy become now? It is reasonable to claim that the professional self-image of philosophy in the Anglo-American analytic tradition is “naturalism,” the view that the image of the world provided by the natural sciences is all there is to the world (see Papineau Reference Papineau1993; De Caro and Macarthur Reference De Caro, Macarthur, Caro and Macarthur2004; Ritchie Reference Ritchie2008; De Caro and Macarthur Reference De Caro and Macarthur2010; and Giladi Reference Giladi2019a). Naturalism, therefore, has metaphysical and methodological dimensions: (i) at the most fundamental ontological level, reality is just what the natural sciences deem it to be; (ii) our ways of intelligibly articulating reality, the ways in which we make sense of things, are ultimately justifiable only by the methods and practices of the Naturwissenschaften. The conjunction of (i) and (ii) is often referred to as “scientific naturalism.” In what follows, I propose to treat “naturalism” and the philosophy–science relation in a way close to the anti-essentialist spirit ascribed to Sellars on epistemology and Butler on feminism. Crucially, though, having eschewed definitional treatments of “knowledge” and “woman” in favor of pragmatic/democratic treatments, such a metaphilosophical lesson cannot now insist upon a definitional treatment of “naturalism,” a particularly contested philosophical term.

According to Williams, Jaegwon Kim, and Mario De Caro and David Macarthur respectively:

In terms of one's philosophical coming of age in many analytic departments, one is baptized a naturalist, to remove the original sin of supernaturalism. And, in terms of one's aspirations to be taken seriously in the Anglophone philosophical world and maintain good working relationships with the relevant powers that be, naturalism must be a doctrine that demands absolute loyalty on pain of some intellectual auto-da-fé. To quote Hilary Putnam:

Over many years, however, the naturalistic self-image of Anglo-American analytic philosophy has come under scrutiny by analytically trained thinkers, such as Richard Bernstein, Brandom, Stanley Cavell, Donald Davidson, Susan Haack, John Haugeland, Alasdair MacIntyre, Joseph Margolis, John McDowell, Adrian Moore, Stephen Mulhall, Thomas Nagel, Putnam, Rescher, Rorty, Sellars, Charles Taylor, and Williams,Footnote ³⁴ who are—in varying respects and with varying levels of intensity—internal critics of the Anglo-American analytic tradition.Footnote ³⁵ Crucially, though, these “postanalytic”Footnote ³⁶ thinkers are not clustered together because each of them contributes to a fully defined and articulated philosophical tradition. Rather, Bernstein et al.Footnote ³⁷ are clustered in terms of how they all broadly share a critical stance toward the naturalistic self-image, where the more critical a thinker is of the naturalist orthodoxy, the closer such a thinker is to being branded “apostate.” Footnote ³⁸ Postanalytic philosophy's self-image is no longer a conception of philosophy as handmaiden to the Naturwissenschaften, but rather a conception of philosophy as an amphibious humanistic discipline, at home with both the natural sciences and cultural theory. To quote Williams here, who provides a mantra of postanalytic philosophy's metaphilosophical outlook:

Of course, Butler is not a postanalytic philosopher—and therefore unlikely to identify with the very specific ways in which Williams places philosophy—but it would be incorrect to suppose this stultifies the potential for instituting some communicative space between Butler and postanalytic philosophers like Sellars. Butler's antirepresentationalist poststructuralist variety of feminist theorizing, and Sellars's antirepresentationalist normative pragmatism about knowledge are prime instantiations of critical reflection on making sense of sense-making. The anti-essentialist spirit ascribed to Sellars on epistemology and Butler on feminism means that it would be incorrect to deem Williams's position as “antinaturalist,” as he is critical of scientistic varieties of naturalism only.Footnote ³⁹ As he said in a 2002 interview, “in philosophy the thing that irritates me is smugness, particularly scientistic smugness. What makes me really angry these days are certain kinds of reductive scientism that knock all the philosophical difficulties out” (Jeffries Reference Jeffries2002). Williams, therefore, aims to occupy a middle-ground position between what McDowell calls “bald naturalism” (reductionism or eliminativism) and “rampant Platonism” (antinaturalism):

For Williams et al., recognizing the autonomy and heterogeneity of the normative space of reasons in no way entails conceiving of its features as “imaginary skyhooks” (Baker Reference Baker2013, xxii). Reality is, as Lynne Baker beautifully phrased it, “capacious . . . more English garden than desert landscape” (234). In this respect, anti-essentialism can analogously help democratically treat “naturalism.” I would argue that the “scientism wars” are frustrating, principally because on one side, there are hermeneutic humanists who think that naturalists tout court are denying discourse-pluralism; and on the other, there are scientistic naturalists who think hermeneutic humanists are denying that, in the dimension of describing and explaining the world, science is the measure of all things. Because the Unity of Science thesis, whether reductionist or eliminativist, is not grounded in a careful examination of scientific practice, it risks opening the door to the charge of scientism. However, if one considers those philosophers of science who are looking at science in terms of practices, such as John Dupré, Nancy Cartwright, Steven Horst, and Joseph Rouse, a careful explication of how scientific practices yield a pragmatically efficacious grip on reality, there is reason to reject any top-down commitments to the Unity of Science (as for example driven by some a priori commitment to mechanistic physics as the epistemic ideal of inquiry). But, once one sees that pragmatic realism in philosophy of science does not entail—and in fact, strictly speaking, undermines—the Unity of Science thesis, “scientism” just becomes a chimera.Footnote ⁴⁰

What I hope to have achieved in this article is to start a conversation between two philosophers “to produce new forms of intimacy, alliance, and communicability.” The anti-essentialist spirit I have ascribed to Sellars on epistemology and Butler on feminism reveals a plethora of additional interesting and difficult questions about how the space of reasons is organized, where its epistemic authority comes from, how one negotiates the space of reasons, and especially, how one gets into normative space at all. The task of further articles is to “keep conversation going” (Rorty Reference Rorty1979, 377).