The Semantic Commons

An Analytic Critique of Identity-Based Pronoun Revision: Why "they/them" isn't a matter of language evolution

Note: One of the more difficult issues I’ve encountered being “gender critical” is some readers’ assumption that my views are based on retrograde social conservatism or an instinctive dislike of gender nonconformity. Nothing could be further from the truth. Through my journey from “Well, these are smart people, and they can’t possibly believe what they seem to believe” to “Good lord, this would make every analytic philosopher’s head explode,” I’ve always been in favor of maximum freedom within the bounds of a reality-based epistemology. As someone who went to the Rocky Horror Picture Show every weekend for two years in high school, and who has had close friends across the gender spectrum, I’m in favor of more, rather than less, freedom to express oneself. However, from the first time I heard someone using “they/them” pronouns, it’s made my brain, trained in analytic philosophy, hurt. So, I’ve written a fairly technical piece to explain why I find using they/them pronouns counter-indicated within the tradition of analytic philosophy. The request to use “they/them” pronouns is much more than just a request to be nice or support someone. It is (though I’m certain unknown to the people who make these requests) a strike against our common epistemology and the already difficult project of making shared meaning.

In the traditions of analytic philosophy and linguistics, the primary function of language is not the expression of the self but the coordination of shared action. Viewed sociobiologically, the thing that differentiates humanity from other species and which has ensured its success is cooperation; language is a (maybe the) tool of cooperation. This is not to say that we don’t use language expressively, but that expression is subordinated to utility. Because the reason we have language at all is that it enabled us to engage in cooperative behavior that increased our viability as a species (and the individuals who cooperated were more likely to pass down their genes than those who didn’t), when there is a conflict between cooperation and expression, we should privilege the cooperative function. Thus, in the analytic tradition, particularly following Ludwig Wittgenstein’s later work, we understand words not as labels for private mental states but as tools within a public language game. For a public tool to be effective, it requires a standard of correctness that is accessible to all users.

If I use a screwdriver, its effectiveness depends on how well it fits the screw. My internal feelings about the nature of screws are irrelevant to the task at hand. To evaluate the introduction of non-binary “they/them” pronouns for specific individuals, we must move beyond the political culture war and instead apply the rigors of a functional analysis: Does this linguistic change enhance or degrade the tool’s ability to map and express reality and facilitate understanding?

The Functionalist Premise: Language as Infrastructure

At the outset, we need to distinguish between open-class and closed-class words. Open-class words are those that admit new members as words change meaning or the need to create new words arises. In the philosophy of language, nouns and verbs are “open.” We frequently add new terms to our vocabulary as new objects and actions emerge (e.g., we “Google” a new friend or “send an email”—neither of these words existed when I was a kid.) These are the specialized tools of the trade, evolving as our environment changes.

Pronouns, however, are closed-class words; they are part of the structural architecture of the language. These words function as anaphoric pointers, designed to reduce cognitive load by allowing the listener to track a referent through a discourse without constant re-identification. They are, in effect, pointers, and they are only effective if they point unambiguously to their referents. It’s this utility that determines the appropriateness of their use. To people familiar with computer programming, they are defined variables. A variable only functions if it points unambiguously and predictably.

Traditionally, pronouns have tracked the most salient, binary, immutable, and observable division in the human (or any mammalian) species: biological sex. This provides a lowest common denominator for communication: a brute fact that almost 99%+ of observers can verify in 99+% of cases. The attempt to treat pronouns as open-class words, subject to individual preference rather than communal rules, represents a fundamental misunderstanding of the linguistic infrastructure. If we treat a pronoun as an expressive ornament rather than as a structural fastener, we risk the stability of the entire semantic process (which is to say, meaning- transmitting).

The Enclosure of the Commons

A public tool requires a standard of correctness that is accessible to all users. When we move the criterion for pronoun use from observable sex to unobservable identity, we are essentially privatizing, or enclosing, the commons. We are replacing a public, verifiable rule with a private, unverifiable dictate. Like the landlords of 16th- to 19th-century Britain who enclosed the common lands to privatize and extract wealth, enclosing the semantic commons turns a tool meant for cooperative action into a means of individual expression.

The central question for the analytic philosopher is not one of kindness or inclusion, but of epistemic accessibility: Can a language-game survive if its core pointers are tethered to the private theater of the subject’s mind, inaccessible to the listener?

The analytic tradition generally rejects linguistic voluntarism, the view that the meaning of words is subject to the speaker’s will. As Lewis Carroll’s Humpty Dumpty famously claimed, “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean.” The analytic response, championed by thinkers from Frege to Kripke, is that such a view makes communication impossible. For a pronoun to mean something, it has to be bound by a rule that the speaker did not invent and cannot unilaterally change.

By observing the best practices of analytic philosophy, we can see that the move toward identity-based pronouns is not a matter of progress in the tool but a functional breakdown of the system itself. We are trading a high-resolution, objective mapping of the world for a low-resolution, subjective ritual.

The Private Language Critique

The central metaphysical claim of the gender identity movement is that every individual possesses a gender identity that may or may not be different from their biological sex. From the perspective of the philosopher of language, this raises a problem: If “nonbinary” refers to a private, internal sensation, how can it function as a public word? This is identical to the issue of defining the words “man” and “woman” based on gender identity that I wrote about at length in my essay, The Beetle, The Beard, and the Biological Kind: A Philosophical Critique of Gender Identity.

The Rule-Following Paradox

For a public tool like a pronoun to work, there must be a way to tell if it is being used incorrectly. This is what analytic philosophers call the publicity requirement.

• Public Rule: We use “she” for adult human females. If I call a man she, I have made a factual or linguistic error that any observer can correct.

• Private Rule: We use “they” for whoever feels nonbinary. If I call a person “she” and she says, “Actually, my pronouns are ‘they/them’,” I haven’t made a linguistic error; I have failed to guess a private mental state.

If the rule for a word’s usage is whatever the subject says it is at this moment, then the word has no rule. As Wittgenstein famously noted: “To think one is obeying a rule is not to obey a rule.” Without an external, biological manifestation, “they/them” is not a linguistic category; it is a private mental state masquerading as grammar.

Anscombe and the Social Contract of Description

Elizabeth Anscombe, in her 1958 article On Brute Facts, argues that human descriptions must rely on brute facts. To say “that is a woman” is to report a brute fact of the natural world. To replace this with “that is a person who feels like they don’t relate to gender norms” is to move from the realm of the philosophy of science, where we categorize based on observable traits, to the realm of post-structuralist mysticism, where we categorize based on hidden essences.

The Necessity of Brute Facts

According to Anscombe, institutional or cultural facts, such as owing money or being married, can only exist because they rest on a foundation of brute facts, such as buying potatoes or signing a piece of paper. If we apply this to pronouns:

• The Brute Fact: The observation of a human being’s sexual dimorphism (adult human male or female).

• The Institutional Fact: The linguistic convention of using he or she to refer to them.

The nonbinary project seeks to create an institutional fact untethered from brute facts. If “they” does not point to a specific, observable biological reality, it becomes what Anscombe would call a vacuous description. For a social convention to have teeth, it must be anchored in something that exists independently of our opinions. If we remove the brute fact of sex from the pronoun, the pronoun no longer points to anything in the physical world; it becomes a floating signifier.

The Authority of the Observer

A key takeaway from the Anscombe tradition is that descriptions belong to the observer, not the observed. If I am digging a hole, I might intend to be building a foundation, but a neighbor is not wrong if they describe me as “disturbing the soil.” My internal intention does not colonize their descriptive faculty.

Similarly, a person may intend to project a nonbinary identity, but they have no authority to demand that an observer abandon the brute fact description of their sex. To demand “they/them” is to demand that the observer prioritize the subject’s internal intentions over the observer’s own rational perceptions. In Anscombe’s framework, this is a form of descriptive dishonesty. Using a less precise term when a more precise one is available is an act of obfuscation and a refusal to acknowledge the brute reality of the person standing before you.

The Pragmatic Breakdown: Grice’s Maxims and the Terry Problem

Beyond the formal logical collapse outlined by Anscombe, there is the pragmatic failure of the communication that enables coordinated action. Here, we draw on the work of Paul Grice, whose Cooperative Principle remains the gold standard for understanding how rational agents infer meaning. Communication requires following certain “maxims”; the introduction of specific singular “they” represents a systematic violation of several of Grice’s important innovations in the understanding of how language works. Grice’s Maxims are not prescriptive in the sense that they tell us how language should work; rather, they describe how language does work. Breaking the maxims doesn’t break schoolmarmish rules about usage and prescriptive grammar, but the rules of linguistics and the descriptive grammar that guides the evolution of language.

The Maxim of Manner: The Ambiguity of They

The Maxim of Manner explicitly commands us to avoid ambiguity. Pronouns are pointers designed to resolve ambiguity, not create it. Consider the Terry problem through the lens of anaphoric resolution:

• Case A: “I spoke to Terry and her colleague. She was pleased with the result.”

• Case B: “I spoke to Terry and their colleague. They were pleased with the result.”

In Case A, the listener performs an instantaneous dereference. The pronoun she matches the biological referent, isolating the subject. In Case B, the tool is blunted. The listener must now decide whether “they” refers to Terry, the colleague, or the pair as a whole. By choosing an identity-based pronoun, the speaker has intentionally introduced chaos into the system, prioritizing a private “Maxim of Validation” over the public Maxim of Manner.

The Maxim of Quantity and Cognitive Load

The Maxim of Quantity states that a contribution should be as informative as is required. A pronoun is a compressed packet of information. Using “they” to refer to a specific individual withholds information. This often forces the speaker to be prolix (i.e., to add extra words to clarify the referent’s identity), which increases the listener's cognitive load. A tool that requires more energy to achieve the same result is inferior.

The Dave-God Problem: Ontological Commitment

Comparing pronouns to names is a profound category error. A name is a “rigid designator” (Kripke); a pronoun is a “categorical predicate” (Frege). To conflate the two is to misunderstand the “metaphysical tax” that identity-based pronouns levy upon the listener.

The Divine Spark Analogy

Imagine a friend, Dave, joins a mystical sect believing in a “Divine Spark,” a common enough theological view that God exists in all of us, that the animating force in every soul is God. Thus, his sect-members call each other Dave-God or Sarah-God. To ask you, a nonbeliever, to call him “Dave-God” would be weird, and it would be reasonable to reply, “Dave, I don’t share your beliefs. Can I please just you Dave?” Imagine, however, that he asks you not only to call him Dave-God but also to refer to him as such when talking to others. This is fundamentally different from asking to be called Dave-God. He is asking you to utilize a vocabulary that implicitly assents to his private cosmology. If you comply, you are performing an act of epistemic complicity, speaking as if his unobservable Divine Spark were a brute fact. This is precisely analogous to the request to use “they/them” pronouns with others: gender identity is a private state, unknowable through brute facts, and to use “they/them” with others would signify or imply agreement with the existence of non-binary gender identity.

The idea that people would “have” pronouns essentially misunderstands the way pronouns function. The person who has pronouns for you is the person who is speaking about you…not you. This is why the statement “my pronouns are X and Y” is nonsensical. They are not your pronouns. They belong to those who refer to you and it is up to them to deploy them effectively in the public language game.

Quinean Commitment and Linguistic Hypocrisy

W.V.O. Quine observed that our use of language carries an ontological commitment: “To be is to be the value of a variable.” Using the gender-neutral “they” for a specific person commits our discourse to the existence of a “gendered soul” that supposedly supersedes biological reality. If the listener does not believe in this gendered soul, they are forced into a state of linguistic hypocrisy, using a tool that contradicts their own perception of reality.

Performativity vs. Reference

Much of the philosophical (and I use that term loosely in this context) justification for the use of “they/them” pronouns comes from Berkeley’s Judith Butler. She argues in Gender Trouble that gender is not a brute fact but a performative act. This represents the fundamental divide. For Butler, language is constitutive; calling someone a woman “assigns” them to a category rather than reporting a reality.

From the analytic perspective of Wittgenstein and Austin, language is descriptive. Butler commits the linguistic fallacy by believing that changing the label changes the object. The analytic tradition is realist; we believe a world exists regardless of what we say about it. The postmodern approach is anti-realist. The “they/them” demand forces the public to act as if Butler’s metaphysics were true, which is to say that the category is more real than the body.

Butler’s view renders language unusable as a public tool. If language is purely a site of political subversion, it loses its ability to coordinate and communicate. A public tool must be stable and predictable, like a screwdriver. You cannot build a functional society on performance art.

Conclusion: The Defense of the Linguistic Commons

The mandate of “they/them” pronouns risks the integrity of language as a shared, objective toolkit. Allowing private identity to dictate public pronouns privatizes the linguistic commons. When meaning is disconnected from brute facts, communication becomes a matter of submission rather than coordination. The language-game becomes a wall of enforced subjectivities.

By prioritizing subjective validation over the Maxim of Manner, the “they/them” requirement introduces entropy. A society that cannot agree on basic pointers will eventually struggle to agree on more complex truths.

To the analytic philosopher, clarity is a moral and intellectual virtue. Resisting the engineering of pronouns is an act of stewardship of our semantic commons. We must insist on a language that refers to the world as it is, remains accessible to all, and preserves the distinction between names and pronouns. “Man” and “woman” are functional, biological markers. To defend the sex-based pronoun is to defend the possibility of a shared world built on observable truth.

Bibiliography

I. The Nature of Reference and Meaning

• Frege, Gottlob. (1892). “On Sense and Reference” (Über Sinn und Bedeutung). The foundational text for modern logic and analytic philosophy. Frege demonstrates that the “sense” of a term is the mode by which we grasp its “reference.” If we alter the sense of a term like “woman” to exclude its biological reference, we are no longer speaking the same language.

• Wittgenstein, Ludwig. (1953). Philosophical Investigations. Blackwell. Particularly the “Private Language Argument.” Wittgenstein argues that meaning cannot be internal or subjective; if “gender” is purely what one feels inside, it lacks the public criteria necessary for a meaningful word in a shared language.

• Kripke, Saul. (1980). Naming and Necessity. Harvard University Press. Introduces “rigid designators.” Kripke argues that some names refer to the same object in every possible world on the basis of essential properties, thereby providing a logical barrier to the postmodern attempt to treat all categories as fluid.

II. Brute Facts vs. Social Constructions

• Anscombe, G. E. M. (1958). “On Brute Facts.” Analysis 18, no. 3: 69-72. Anscombe argues that “institutional facts” (like owing someone money) only make sense in the context of “brute facts” (like the physical exchange of goods). Without the brute fact of biology, the institutional labels of gender become logically hollow.

• Searle, John. (1995). The Construction of Social Reality. Free Press. A rigorous map of how social reality is built. Searle demonstrates that you cannot have a social construction (like “citizenship” or “marriage”) without a base of non-constructed, physical facts.

• Boghossian, Paul. (2006). Fear of Knowledge: Against Relativism and Constructivism. Oxford University Press. A modern classic that dismantles the “equal validity” of all perspectives. Boghossian defends the existence of objective epistemic reasons that are independent of social power.

• Austin, J. L. (1962). How to Do Things with Words. Oxford University Press. The definitive text on speech act theory. Austin distinguishes between "constative" utterances (which describe the world) and "performative" utterances (which change the world). It is essential for understanding how language can be used as a tool for social action rather than a mirror of reality.

III. The Defense of Rational Discourse

• Frankfurt, Harry. (2005). On Bullshit. Princeton University Press. Distinguishes the liar (who recognizes the truth and tries to hide it) from the bullshitter (who simply does not care about truth). This is the definitive diagnostic tool for much of “Queer Theory.”

• Sokal, Alan, and Bricmont, Jean. (1998). Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science. Picador. An empirical and logical takedown of “Theorists” who use scientific metaphors they do not understand to justify irrational claims about reality.

• Quine, W. V. O. (1951). “Two Dogmas of Empiricism.” The Philosophical Review. While complex, Quine’s “web of belief” illustrates why redefining core linguistic terms (the semantic commons) can unravel the entire structure of our knowledge.

IV. Contemporary Analytic Applications

• Stock, Kathleen. (2021). Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism. Fleet. A masterclass in using analytic philosophy to defend biological categories against the linguistic encroachment of “gender identity.”

• Byrne, Alex. (2023). Trouble with Gender: Sex Facts, Gender Fictions. Polity Press. Byrne applies the rigor of MIT-style analytic philosophy to show that the current move to replace “sex” with “gender” results in a series of logical contradictions.