Philorum. Wed 21 Jan 2009. The Semantics of Gay Marriage. (Matthew Hammerton)
In this talk I will take some ideas that have emerged in philosophy of language in the last 40 years and apply them to the issue of gay marriage. My concern will not be the social/moral/political debate about whether gay marriage should be legalised, but rather the semantic question regarding what the term 'marriage' means. This question about the meaning of 'marriage' has become relevant to the gay marriage debate because some people have argued that it is a semantic fact that marriage must be heterosexual. In other words, it is part of the meaning of the term 'marriage' that only people of opposite sexes can be married, just as it is part of the meaning of the term 'bachelor' that only males can be bachelors. Let's call this semantic thesis about 'marriage' the 'heterosexual marriage thesis' (HMT). Advocates of HMT claim that even if it is right to allow homosexual couples to enter civil unions with the same rights and entitlements as heterosexual couples, it would be a misuse of language, a conceptual confusion, to call such unions 'marriages'. In order to assess the truth of HMT, I will first discuss some theories about concepts and meaning that seem to me quite plausible. Following this, I will argue that if we accept the theories I have discussed then it is probably the case that HMT is false. Note. Wed 4th Feb 2009: Philorum will be suspended for the evening. . as there will be a great deal of interest in ... Peter Singer The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty http://www.gleebooks.com.au/default.asp?p=events/events4.htm Time and Place for Philorum Group @ Central 1st and 3rd Wednesdays of every month. 18:15 for a 18:30 Start. Finish 21:30 (Feel free to come and go at any point during the night.) The Members Bar, Floor 1 (Keep winding up to the top of the stairs.) The Gaelic Club 64 Devonshire Street, Surry Hills Sydney, Australia (100 metres from a Central railway station exit.) Cost: Free (Patronise the bar). http://www.philorum.org/centralFutureCalendar.html John Bentley. _______________________________________________ SydPhil mailing list [email protected] List Info: http://lists.arts.usyd.edu.au/mailman/listinfo/sydphil NEW LIST ARCHIVE: http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/
