-I think the claim that pronouns don't have truth conditions is _false as a matter of cognitive science_. Humans are _pretty good_ at visually identifying the sex of other humans by integrating cues from various [secondary sex characteristics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secondary_sex_characteristic)—it's the kind of computer-vision capability that would have been useful in our environment of evolutionary adaptedness. If it _didn't_ work so reliably, we wouldn't have ended up with languages like English where identifying a person's sex is baked into the grammar. And _because_ we ended up with (many) languages that have it baked into the grammar, departing from that usage has cognitive consequences: if someone told you, "Come meet my friend at the mall; she's really cool and you'll like her"
+I think the claim that pronouns don't have truth conditions is _false as a matter of cognitive science_. Humans are _pretty good_ at visually identifying the sex of other humans by integrating cues from various secondary sex characteristics—it's the kind of computer-vision capability that would have been useful in our environment of evolutionary adaptedness. If it _didn't_ work so reliably, we wouldn't have ended up with languages like English where identifying a person's sex is baked into the grammar. And _because_ we ended up with (many) languages that have it baked into the grammar, _departing_ from that conventional usage has cognitive consequences: if someone told you, "Come meet my friend at the mall; she's really cool and you'll like her" and then the friend turned out to be obviously male, you would be _surprised_. The fact that the "she ... her" language [constrained your anticipations](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/a7n8GdKiAZRX86T5A/making-beliefs-pay-rent-in-anticipated-experiences) so much would seem to immediately falsify the "no truth conditions" claim as an empirical matter of psychology.
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+From a certain first-principles perspective (that is proudly uncurious about whether there might be any _reason_ so many human languages ended up "gendered" [noun classes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noun_class)), this is _terrible language design_. The grammatical function of pronouns is to have a brief way to refer back to entities already mentioned: it's more user-friendly to be able to say "Katherine put her book on its shelf" rather than "Katherine put Katherine's book on the book's shelf". But then why couple that grammatical function to sex-category membership? You shouldn't _need_ to take a stance on someone's reproductive capabilities to talk about them putting a book on the shelf.
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+If you want more classes to reduce the probability of collisions (where [Spivak _ey_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spivak_pronoun) or universal singular _they_ would result in more need to repeat names where a pronoun would be ambiguous), you could use initials to form pronouns (<em>K</em>atherine put <em>k</em>er book on its shelf?), or imitate [American Sign Language's pointer system](https://www.handspeak.com/learn/index.php?id=27) (which [...])
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+[TODO: normative circularity makes no sense, but you do have free variables on _what_ pronouns map to; when arguing this recently, I recevied a very interesting comment that suggests that trans women are the deer
+given that sex is one of the first things we perceive about someone, and that it _is_ discrete, it's not surprising that languages latched onto that as a pronoun class, given that people in the past didn't have the hangups our civilization developed during the last five years
+]