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Introduction: When Inherited Meaning Is No Longer Enough The question “What is a woman?” rarely causes difficulty in ordinary language. Speakers acquire the term early, use it fluently, and navigate its meaning without conscious reflection. In everyday contexts, it functions smoothly, without hesitation or demand for explicit definition. Yet in academic, legal, or political settings, the same question often produces silence, deferral, or visible unease. This contrast does not indicate ignorance or breakdown in understanding. Rather, it signals a shift in the semiotic conditions under which the question operates. The problem lies not in the word itself, but in the system that requires it to perform a different function. Language as an Inherited System Ferdinand de Saussure’s conception of language provides a critical starting point. For Saussure, language is not a tool invented or modified at will by individual speakers, but a social institution transmitted across generations. ...

SCOTUS. AI image Introduction Recent debates before the United States Supreme Court concerning sex-segregated sports have revived a question that appears, at first glance, almost self-evident: what is a woman? The persistence of this question, however, suggests that the difficulty does not arise from everyday language suddenly failing to function. Speakers of English continue to use the term without hesitation in ordinary contexts. The problem emerges instead when an inherited word from natural language is transferred into a legal system that depends on explicit, operational categories in order to adjudicate rights and obligations. This article approaches the controversy not from a legal or ethical standpoint, but from a linguistic and semiotic one. Drawing on Ferdinand de Saussure’s conception of language as an inherited social institution, together with Roland Barthes’s distinction between first-order and second-order semiotic systems, it argues that the current impasse reflects ...