“Epistemology and sharing one’s pronouns: First, second, or third-person knowledge?”, Alexandra Gilbert, Arizona State University, USA

In this paper, I consider sharing one’s pronouns as an act that asserts self-knowledge and positions oneself in relation to an addressee and a shared social landscape: see me this way, interact with me thusly. But on what authority and to what ends do we make such assertions? Considering this question, this project forges connections between sociocultural approaches to the English gendered pronoun system (Nevalainen and Raumolin-Brunberg 1994; McConnell-Ginet 2015), stancetaking (Du Bois, 2007; Kiesling, 2009, 2022b), and post-analytic and neopragmatist philosophy of language (Davidson 2001; Rorty 2009; Brandom 2019). This is done primary in service of transfeminist (Enke 2012; Stryker 2006) goals of self-determination and the continued exploration of the specifically linguistic front of this struggle through trans linguistics (Zimman, 2021). I consider the epistemological grounds for this assertion of self-knowledge in relation to a tripartite distinction of first-person knowledge, second-person knowledge, and third-person knowledge, adapted from Davidson (2001). I question whether epistemological authority can be extended to any of these dimensions of knowledge, exploring each in turn.

Sharing one’s pronouns can be understood as an expression of subjective or first-person knowledge, but to what extent is the assertion of one’s pronouns similar to a description of one’s pain after an injury (an example given by Wittgenstein in the Philosophical Investigations, §244, and later referred to by others in relation to the private language argument)? Sharing one’s pronouns relates to second-person knowledge as it is directed to an addressee and communicates certain metapragmatic information about how the addressee should situate the speaker in their mind. These practices can also be understood in relation to third-person knowledge because they require reference to the self as a particular kind of gendered object.

I suggest that these practices be justified not by reference to an essentialist understanding of privileged access to self-knowledge, but rather through an emphasis on intersubjectivity and free and open cooperation with one another. From this perspective, sharing one’s pronouns is less about asserting an essential truth and more about moving through the world in ways less fettered by cisheteronormativity and other harmful discourses.