When Orders Collide

So, what happens when first-order and second-order arguments get entangled? You get a mess, that's what.

Justin Weinberg, in his recent post Trans Women and Philosphy: Learning from Recent Events, says the following in the section "Some final notes":

Please avoid first-order discussion of trans-inclusive and trans-exclusionary arguments or arguments about bathroom or prison policies and the like; I’m not interested in hosting those disputes in the comments on this post.

Which, in his defense, seems like a reasonable rule if you're trying to have a second-order discussion. However! I then recalled the following bit from the original piece by t philospher:

My gender is not up for debate. I am a woman. Any trans discourse that does not proceed from this initial assumption — that trans people are the gender that they say they are — is oppressive, regressive, and harmful.

This is followed by a "call to action" which states that contrary views should not be published, spoken, or otherwise given a platform.

It seems to me that t philosopher's position effectively couples first-order and second-order concerns, and that this is a major contributing factor to why discussions of some trans-identity-related issues have proven intractable.

Publication and speaking are the tools which philosphers have traditionally used to investigate first order problems. I publish a paper saying "X is bad", someone else publishes a rebuttal "No, X is good", someone else chimes in with "No, you're both wrong", etc. t philospher asserts that these traditional tools should be restricted, and justifies that restriction based on a first-order consideration. Which, seemingly inevitably, leads to the situation where one can't discuss which tools are appropriate without bringing up and examining first-order concerns.

I would really like to have seen Justin grapple with this aspect of the discussion more. Specifically, what are the fallbacks if part of the traditional philosophic tool suite has been proscribed? Presumably he wants to see philosophy continue as a going concern, which would seem to necessitate some viable, alternative approach.

Now, in my last post I mentioned that I'd had an epiphany. The epiphany is: This problem isn't confined to philosophy.

You can see variants on the dilemma above playing out in other places. "It's not my job to educate you", for example, is primarily a request for people to engage in self-education. But it also has the side-effect of removing a useful tool from the toolkit, specifically the ability to identify a particular individual's opinion on some topic.

More generally, any assertion that investigative tools should be limited on the basis of first-order concerns is almost certainly going to cause problems if those same tools are needed to validate the underlying concern. Having restated the problem like that, it starts to look an awful lot like a form of epistemic closure: The tools need to validate a belief are forbidden as a consequence of that same belief, thus the belief itself becomes immune to correction.

Yeah, Justin definitely needs to address that: How do we prevent t philosopher's position from leading to epistemic closure?