Matt Walsh and The Socratic Fallacy
As luck would have it, Matt Walsh and Socrates have one thing in common.
On the issue of gender identity, Matt Walsh is something of a right wing darling. His documentary “What is Woman?” has garnered him quite the reputation. In this film, Matt Walsh asks people the question “what is a woman?” and pokes holes in their attempts to answer that question. Admittedly, many of the answers he receives are obviously bad. He receives several answers along the lines of “a woman is a person who identifies as a woman”. I won’t bore you with the details about why this definition is circular and why circular definitions are bad. If you’re not up to speed, then read page 113 of Patrick J. Hurley’s “A Concise Introduction to Logic”. Matt Walsh makes it a point to let the viewer know that liberals and other pro-trans people are very bad at defining the word woman. From this, however, he infers (or at least, the viewer is invited to infer) that the people Walsh is speaking to don’t know what the word woman means. It seems that Matt Walsh has at least one thing in common with Socrates - he commits the Socratic Fallacy.
The Fallacy
What is the Socratic Fallacy? It’s named after an inference that Socrates makes (or at least, that Socrates seems to invite the reader to make) in the Socratic dialogues. Time and time again, Socrates will ask his interlocutors questions like “what is piety?” or “what is knowledge?”, and will proceed to provide counterexamples to whatever definitions they give. After Socrates has disposed with every definition his interlocutor provides, he seems to indicate that because his interlocutor cannot define the word in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions, that therefore they do not know what the word means.
So what’s wrong with Socrates’ inference? Well, you can’t define the vast majority of words in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions1. Seriously, try to come up with a definition of the word “chair”, that admits of no counterexamples. You won’t succeed, I promise you. In fact, philosophers have been trying to come up with a definition of “knowledge” in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions and have failed time and time again. And yet, we know what the word “chair” means, and we know what the word “knowledge” means. In fact, if we didn’t know what the word knowledge meant on some level, then we couldn’t know what counts as a counterexample to a given analysis of knowledge. We can know what words means even if we cannot define them in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions. From the fact that a person cannot define a word in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions, it does not follow that they don’t know what that term means.
A Bridge Too Far
And now we return to Matt Walsh. The problem should be clear by now - from the fact that trans-activists and gender studies professors can’t define the word “woman” in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions, we can’t infer that they don’t know what the word “woman” means. Of course, this does not mean that when they try to define the word “woman”, they are attempting to capture a lexical definition of the word “woman”. It seems that many of these people are actually creating definitions - they are giving stipulative definitions. Nonetheless, we cannot go so far as to say that they don’t know what the word means. Have a good day.
Some scientific terms like “water” can be easily defined in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions, though.
It's not viciously circular to define "woman" as someone who identifies as a woman. It is true that the phrase "identifies as a woman" technically contains a use of the term "woman," provided that "woman" functions as a term here rather than part of a multi-word term. But everyone understands "identifies as a woman" to be equivalent to "uses the word 'woman' to describe themselves and/or prefers to be called 'she/her.'" And once the definition is rewritten that way, the use of "woman" disappears. All that's left is a mention of the term, and words about the person's use of the term. But a definition of a term t is only circular in the traditional sense if it contains a use of t.
Great piece!