SPRING 2026 COLLOQUIUM -- Friday, May 1, 4-6PM
Please join us in Classroom Building 118 to hear Dr Marina DiMarco's talk "Who's Afraid of Imprecise Sexes?" Dr DiMarco is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Washington University, St Louis.
Dr DiMarco will speak for one hour, followed by an hour of Q&A. Students who attend are invited to join Dr DiMarco and the Philosophy and Religious Studies department for dinner after the talk.
Abstract: Sexes stand accused of many forms of indeterminacy: ‘male’ and ‘female’ might have multiple meanings, perhaps in different contexts; they might under-specify other relevant details; their boundaries may be blurry, and so on. One stream of philosophical work on sexes has thus been concerned to achieve precision and clarity about their meaning(s) as a scientific concept(s), or to abandon them if this can’t be adequately salvaged. Against this current, however, some philosophers of science hold that conceptual ambiguity can be ineliminable and even a feature, rather than a bug. In this talk, I’ll ask (1) which imprecision arguments might apply to sexes, (2) how this bears on competing proposals for moving forward with or without them, and (3) what we might learn about conceptual indeterminacy in general from careful attention to sexes. It turns out that various arguments for the value of conceptual imprecision depend on different conditions being met, and that sexes will often struggle to meet them because of their social, political, and methodological baggage. The upshot for the feasibility and desirability of competing proposals for the future of sex concepts is that these may depend on developing surrogates for imprecise sexes in science, changing the world to better reap the benefits of imprecise sexes, or both.
