Philosophy and Language

[Antonio the Sixth]

I've been meaning to make this thread for a while, and recently got reminded of it with the problem of universals. I do believe that philosophy can teach us substantive frameworks to interpret reality, but in order to do so, there is a considerable language barrier that must be overcome. Even philosophers who have the same native language often use terms in substantively different ways such that even understanding the nature of their disagreement requires a lot of soul-searching - and sometimes at the end of that soul-searching you find out that there really is very little of substance to it. This was, of course, Wittgenstein's great contribution, but I feel like still today a lot of philosophers haven't truly grappled with the issue.

In the case of the problem of universals, there is something to it, but only if you presuppose a very specific ontology (one where material objects are assumed to be "real" by default) that strikes me as outdated. In other extreme cases, though, there are entire philosophical questions who seem entirely predicated on poor understanding of language. Take for example the question, that was (and perhaps still is?) seriously discussed by people with PhDs at some point, of statements made about fictional entities. Is the statement "Harry Potter is a wizard" true or false? This is supposed to be puzzling, but it only is if one uses languages in a way completely detached from the way normal people use it. Of course, when normal people speak, they tend to leave most of the substantive content of their statement implied. In this case, when someone says "Harry Potter is a wizard", what they actually mean is "The character of Harry Potter, as written by JK Rowling in the eponymous series, is written to be a wizard within that narrative context" - in which case the statement is uncontroversially true. Of course, if one were to say "Harry Potter is a wizard" and the interlocutor had no context to interpret that statement, they would have no way to immediately assess its truth-value, but that's true of any statement. It is how language works: context is what gives its meaning.

This also comes up a lot in debates over free will and determinism. People think free will and determinism are incompatible because they define free will as "the ability to have acted differently than one did", but this definition is so vague as to be useless. What does "ability" actually mean here? There are ways to coherently define it - the approach that makes the most sense to me is that a decision that was made as a product of processes internal to the human brain without direct input from other conscious actors is a free one. But some people leave it at this vague, fuzzy metaphysical level, and from there develop all sorts of absurd ideas. Hence the bizarre notion that determinism and free will are incompatible, because supposedly if your actions are ultimately consequences of external causes, that means they aren't truly free. I guess that means the only expression of free will would be to act randomly then? Of course, if you adopt this perspective, the only sound conclusion is to become a hard determinist ("libertarian free will" is just as childish and fanciful as anything else libertarian). But I digress: the point here is that this false dichotomy only exists because people have adopted an absurdly vague idea of what "the ability to have acted otherwise" is.  There are plenty of things that happened in my life that, if fully understand, could fully explain why I chose to post on Atlas Talk Elections Forum past midnight on the day after Christmas, but that doesn't mean I didn't choose to do that. If I didn't want to do it, I wouldn't have, but I do want to, and there are deterministic reasons that led me to want it, but no one made me want it.

Anyway, these are just the first examples that came to my mind of where philosophical thinking was rendered a sterile, meaningless exercise due to poor understanding of language. There are other famous examples, of course. The ontological "argument" for the existence of God can also charitably be understood at one such cases (less charitably, it can be seen as deliberate linguistic trickery). As someone who genuinely values philosophy and despises the attitude that sees it as being all meaningless blather, I think it's all the more important to be on the lookout for these pitfalls.

What are some other instances of semantic confusion leading to philosophical dead ends you've noticed?

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

A classic example from the world of confessional theology is the ambiguity at the Latrocinium and then the Council of Chalcedon about whether the Greek word physis was best rendered into Latin as persona or natura. The fact that the Council Fathers proceeded straight to lynching one another rather than adopting a consistent working translation led to the first major, permanent schism in Christendom even though nearly all modern commentators believe the two sides' Christologies were substantively identical.

[vitoNova]

Free will is a figment of the primate imagination.  

[Antonio the Sixth]

Seems like this thread isn't going anywhere...

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Seems like this thread isn't going anywhere...

Another example that comes to mind (which Battista Minola mentioned to me but wasn't sure he wanted to post about himself, understandably given how sensitive the topic is) is trans issues. What used to be a fairly straightforward and (among people who weren't out-and-out reactionaries) agreed-upon set of terminology--sex is what biologists or anatomists or doctors study, gender is the socially constructed bits, and which does or should prevail over the other varies according to cultural and occupational context--has spent thirty-odd years now on a euphemism and/or dysphemism treadmill that shows no signs of slowing down, to, in my opinion, the detriment of anyone trying to tell a compelling story of trans existence that can win over the general public. Thanks, Judith Butler!

[Antonio the Sixth]

Seems like this thread isn't going anywhere...

Another example that comes to mind (which Battista Minola mentioned to me but wasn't sure he wanted to post about himself, understandably given how sensitive the topic is) is trans issues. What used to be a fairly straightforward and (among people who weren't out-and-out reactionaries) agreed-upon set of terminology--sex is what biologists or anatomists or doctors study, gender is the socially constructed bits, and which does or should prevail over the other varies according to cultural and occupational context--has spent thirty-odd years now on a euphemism and/or dysphemism treadmill that shows no signs of slowing down, to, in my opinion, the detriment of anyone trying to tell a compelling story of trans existence that can win over the general public. Thanks, Judith Butler!

Yeah. I made the same point to John Dule at one point, from the opposite end. At the end of the day, the answer to the infamous "what is a woman?" question is "whatever society chooses to recognize as a woman". People on both sides should accept that this is a normative argument rather than a descriptive one. In my experience, conservatives are less willing to bite that bullet than progressives, but a lot of progressives fall into that trap too.

[Antonio the Sixth]

Thank you for your contributions, Nathan. It looks like no one else was interested in this topic. Sad.

[PSOL]

I feel that “what is a woman” in regards to transgender issues goes beyond semantics and goes into definitions, which is something totally different.

The example regarding “physis” and the example Antonio brought up seems more like an excuse brought on by people looking for an excuse to break things up and start an argument/split over something entirely different.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I feel that “what is a woman” in regards to transgender issues goes beyond semantics and goes into definitions, which is something totally different.

How would you describe the difference?

[Associate Justice PiT]

What are some other instances of semantic confusion leading to philosophical dead ends you've noticed?

     What's interesting is the question of whether there is semantic confusion at all, which is in fact core to the theological disputes between the Catholic and Orthodox Churches. This is especially noticeable with the Filioque dispute, where one has to haggle endlessly over what it means for the Holy Spirit to proceed and what it means for the Son to participate in His procession.

     This instance also introduces another issue that you handwaved away in your original post, which is when people have different languages. The history of that dispute includes Latins trying to interpret Greek and Greeks trying to interpret Latin. Then you have the issue of an interlocutor such as myself coming in at the end, not knowing either language and trying to make sense of it based on translations and scholarly works in English. I am currently studying Spanish (after having studied French and German in school), and the experience of learning another language helps me appreciate just how challenging semantics actually is, and how easy it is to create subtle misunderstandings based on words that are related between two languages, but don't have the same semantic range.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I am currently studying Spanish (after having studied French and German in school), and the experience of learning another language helps me appreciate just how challenging semantics actually is, and how easy it is to create subtle misunderstandings based on words that are related between two languages, but don't have the same semantic range.

Or sometimes not so subtle. The English word "embarrassed" is, for misogynistic reasons, related to and very similar-sounding to the Spanish "embarazada" for pregnant. Other examples might be "ancien" and "enfant" in French ("former" and "child," not "very old" and "baby"), "stark" in German ("strong," not "firm," "rigid," or "austere"), and smaller connotative shifts in many English loanwords from East Asian languages, especially those connected to martial arts.

[Antonio the Sixth]

I wasn't trying to handwave away the difficulty of communicating philosophical ideas across different languages, far from it. I was just saying that I think even people who are well familiar with the inherent difficulty of translation (as I am, as someone who has to frequently switch between three languages) often tend to assume that when people are speaking the same language, they share the same understanding of the words they use, and that this is an underappreciated issue in philosophy. But I absolutely agree that translation, especially translation from Ancient languages that don't have their own native speakers in their relevant forms, adds a lot more complexity.

Or sometimes not so subtle. The English word "embarrassed" is, for misogynistic reasons, related to and very similar-sounding to the Spanish "embarazada" for pregnant. Other examples might be "ancien" and "enfant" in French ("former" and "child," not "very old" and "baby"), "stark" in German ("strong," not "firm," "rigid," or "austere"), and smaller connotative shifts in many English loanwords from East Asian languages, especially those connected to martial arts.

My favorite thing is how you can make a 4-prong semantic chain of them between Italian and English cognates of different meaning:
- fattoria means farm, not factory
- fabbrica means factory, not fabric
- stoffa means fabric, not stuff
- roba means stuff, not robe

Bit off topic, but I wonder if there are other languages you can do that with English.

[afleitch]

Yeah, not to make this a trans thread but the English language and it's use/non use of pronouns and gendered language jumps out as both an example of the above and perhaps a cart leading the horse example of the Anglo dominant obsession with that aspect of the culture war.

Also I've had to correct some obsessives that 'woman' has it's root not in 'womb' but in 'wife'.

[Battista Minola 1616]

Yeah, not to make this a trans thread but the English language and it's use/non use of pronouns and gendered language jumps out as both an example of the above and perhaps a cart leading the horse example of the Anglo dominant obsession with that aspect of the culture war.

Also I've had to correct some obsessives that 'woman' has it's root not in 'womb' but in 'wife'.

The words for "male" and "female" in other languages can have very different connotations too, which is I believe what sparked my considerations that Nathan and Antonio alluded to here about how much of this discourse is very language-dependent. But again, I don't want to make this a trans thread either.

Kind of unrelated, but your second point reminds me that it is interesting how in English "woman" for "wife" is non-standard and awkward, which is similar to Italian but unlike quite a few other European languages.

[Alcibiades]

Related to what Antonio was saying in his OP, the equivocation fallacy - when words with multiple or ambiguous meanings are used in these multiple different senses across the premises of an argument - seems like it is one of the fallacies which crops up the most even in some very famous philosophical works.

The confusion usually seems to arise when the meanings of the word only subtly (but ultimately crucially) differ, such that the fact that the two meanings are in fact even different may not be obvious at first glance. An example would be in Mill’s “proof” of utilitarianism, which appears to equivocate over both the meaning of “good” (whether it is referring to the substantial notion of goodness - good in general - or the relational notion - good for someone), and “desirable” (whether this describes something that is desirable, or ought to be desirable - this is closely related to confusions between normative and descriptive claims, of course).

Another example, from the mind-body problem is that the conceivability argument, and the argument from doubt, which both argue for substance dualism, equivocate over whether “possible” refers epistemic possibility or metaphysical possibility - a distinction which may appear pedantic at first, but which becomes vital when talking about notions of doubt and conceivability.

[Antonio the Sixth]

Related to what Antonio was saying in his OP, the equivocation fallacy - when words with multiple or ambiguous meanings are used in these multiple different senses across the premises of an argument - seems like it is one of the fallacies which crops up the most even in some very famous philosophical works.

The confusion usually seems to arise when the meanings of the word only subtly (but ultimately crucially) differ, such that the fact that the two meanings are in fact even different may not be obvious at first glance. An example would be in Mill’s “proof” of utilitarianism, which appears to equivocate over both the meaning of “good” (whether it is referring to the substantial notion of goodness - good in general - or the relational notion - good for someone), and “desirable” (whether this describes something that is desirable, or ought to be desirable - this is closely related to confusions between normative and descriptive claims, of course).

Another example, from the mind-body problem is that the conceivability argument, and the argument from doubt, which both argue for substance dualism, equivocate over whether “possible” refers epistemic possibility or metaphysical possibility - a distinction which may appear pedantic at first, but which becomes vital when talking about notions of doubt and conceivability.

That's a great point, yeah. Modal logic seems particularly vulnerable to this semantic confusion/obfuscation. What does it means for something to be possible/impossible or necessary/contingent? These are properties that only make sense in reference to a specific hypothetical set of conditions, but those conditions are often left unspecified in the argument. People are used to leaving these conditions implied because they're usually obvious in most settings - if I ask "is it possible that it will rain tomorrow?" the condition is obviously based on current weather patterns and available forecasts. But if I ask "is it possible for a philosophical zombie to exist?" (which I think is what you were referring to), then what are the conditions that would make it possible? Biological processes as we currently understand them? Clearly they don't answer the question of whether philosophical zombies are possible, since if they did, that would mean we have a scientific understanding of what consciousness is, and we clearly don't. And clearly something being conceivable doesn't make it possible - people love to imagine scenarios that we know to be contrary to known facts of the world.

So yeah, that's a good catch. We need to be very careful when speaking of possibility and necessity.

[Antonio the Sixth]

Another example that's recently come up in another thread has to do with moral nihilism. I do think there are logically sound arguments for moral nihilism, but my issue is that people who claim to be moral nihilist are almost never willing to take their claims to their logical conclusion. Let's start with the obvious fact: people do make prescriptive statements, all the time. If nihilists want to argue that all these statements are wrong, they must argue that there's an entire category of words we use that is either devoid of meaning, or reducible to a different type a statement like preference. So when I say "slavery is wrong" I'm either speaking gibberish (in which case, it's odd that most people in all societies and throughout history would be able to immediately understand what I meant, provided I said it in their language) or I am saying something that is semantically indistinguishable from "I don't like slavery". Which, fine, you can bite that bullet if you want, but here too, it does seem like most people would intuitively perceive a difference. And I think that is in fact true even of moral nihilists. How many of them actually practice what they preach and refuse to ever make any prescriptive statements? I'm willing to bet very few.

Indeed, reading up on it on Wikipedia, I came across this gem: "However, holding nihilism does not necessarily imply that we should give up using moral or ethical language; some nihilists contend that it remains a useful tool.[4] In fact Mackie and other contemporary defenders of Error Theory, such as Richard Joyce, defend the use of moral or ethical talk and action even in knowledge of their fundamental falsity. The legitimacy of this activity however is questionable and is a subject of great debate in philosophy at the moment."

This is a baffling statement on multiple levels. First off, because it boils down to saying "yeah, there's an entire category of speech we regularly use that's utter nonsense, but eh, whatever, let's keep using it anyway". That's a remarkable level of epistemic frivolity for a philosopher to engage in, even a nihilist. Ideas do have consequences, and if you truly don't believe in morality as a concept, I would expect you to do something about it. I understand that there's a practicality to speaking a language everyone can understand, that sometimes leads you to be imprecise in your language. But if I believe a term or concept is that deeply misguided, I try to point it out at least some of the time (see my reaction every time someone discusses politics in terms of "small" or "big" government, or every time someone talks about socialism like it's an economic system rather than a set of values). Of course, nihilists aren't morally compelled to do that, but you'd think they'd at least be inclined to.

The even greater irony, of course, is that the very question of whether we should use moral language is itself a prescriptive (and therefore fundamentally moral) one. So by even engaging in it, nihilists are proving the unviability of their own belief system. Sure, you could argue you're only discussing its "practical utility" or something like that, but practical utility is only a relevant consideration if you have a certain specific goal. If you are making a broad social prescription, you can't have a specific goal in mind. Like, you might say something like "ethical language is a good way to add weight to your personal preferences and make others conform to them", but that doesn't tell us anything about whether people should use it or not. So by even engaging this question, nihilists are implicitly conceding that they do believe in broad social prescriptions in some form or other.

At the end of the day, it's hard for me to resist the conclusion that most self-professed moral nihilists, even those with PhDs in philosophy, are fundamentally just edgelords whose everyday attitudes are not that different from the rest of us, but who like to posture as if they have reached a deeper understanding, even if that understanding doesn't affect their concrete behavior in any way. I understand the skepticism about moral realism (I freely concede it's fundamentally unprovable), but there are plenty of sounder alternatives than moral nihilism, alternatives that are actually compatible with the way we speak every day.

[Bleach Blonde Bad Built Butch Bodies for Biden]

Perhaps this isn't the best example of what Tony is alluding to, as I understand it; I immediately remembered this thread during the sermon today. Some branches of Christianity practice baptism by immersion, which according to their interpretation means that you die before being "born again." That obviously has pretty serious theological implications, especially given the difficulty of contextualizing that term in a way that makes Biblical sense.

Ditto to PiT, both for being a fellow Spanish learner and what both he and I have learned along the way. Even though this is my first experience seriously learning another language, I've also come to understand and appreciate the linguistic factors and barriers.

_{(my personal opinion: Spanish does a better job than English in some areas but not so much in other ways, like their arbitrary word-gendering)}

[Antonio the Sixth]

_{(my personal opinion: Spanish does a better job than English in some areas but not so much in other ways, like their arbitrary word-gendering)}

I feel like the problems with grammatical gender are often overstated. The main issue is that it makes it harder to innovate gender-neutral language that feels natural and leads to headaches like Meloni's whole "il presidente" shtick. But in most of everyday life, I haven't really seen it affect how people think. Arguably, the fact that gender applies to inanimate objects too can actually demystify it in some ways and make it easier to realize that it's fundamentally arbitrary.

[Torie]

Interesting thread on a subject that I don't do very well at, and never have.

On the matter of nihilism, e.g., slavery is evil versus as a personal preference, I intensely dislike slavery, the thought that popped into my head is that a pinch of extra precision can lead to an avalanche of confusion. When 99.999% of educated opinion intensely dislikes slavery, calling it just wrong is close enough for government work. Sure, one might posit that in certain circumstances, in certain places, after human brains have been reprogrammed, and whatnot, slavery might be better than the available alternative, so in that sense not "wrong," but pondering those circumstances can get one off track, lead to misunderstandings, and is just not worth the time, and indeed could prove subversive of the "good," whatever the hell that is.

So it is time to move on. Saying slavery is wrong is not infractible, even if Socrates or somebody could cause mischief with it, and corrupt the youth.

I told you I am not very good at this stuff, now didn't I? 

One other comment on the ambiguity of words, is that other than going about the business of carefully defining them (so that when dealing with the complex or nuance one might want to convert them into defined words of art), is to be very sensitive to connotation.

For example, use of the word "stark" has connotations, one of which actually is firm (which is a meaning for it, albeit an unusual one), but also ominous or portentious, or where the stakes are high:

The contrast between Robert Moses, who wants to pave over Greenwich Village with a 12 lane expressway, and lengthen the pedestrian journey between the village and NYU to 2 miles from 4 blocks, and Torie, who wants to eliminate all off street parking requirements in the zoning laws, and limit the use of the Holland and Lincoln Tunnels to buses and delivery trucks, could not be more stark.

[Antonio the Sixth]

On the matter of nihilism, e.g., slavery is evil versus as a personal preference, I intensely dislike slavery, the thought that popped into my head is that a pinch of extra precision can lead to an avalanche of confusion. When 99.999% of educated opinion intensely dislikes slavery, calling it just wrong is close enough for government work. Sure, one might posit that in certain circumstances, in certain places, after human brains have been reprogrammed, and whatnot, slavery might be better than the available alternative, so in that sense not "wrong," but pondering those circumstances can get one off track, lead to misunderstandings, and is just not worth the time, and indeed could prove subversive of the "good," whatever the hell that is.

So it is time to move on. Saying slavery is wrong is not infractible, even if Socrates or somebody could cause mischief with it, and corrupt the youth.

I think that's a slightly different issue, though. Sure, with enough imagination, you could conjure up scenarios where slavery could be argued to be morally acceptable (utilitarians love making up thought experiments like that). But that's already conceding the premise that calling things "morally right" and "morally wrong" is a meaningful statement. That, in itself, contradicts the nihilist position that moral statements are necessarily either false or incoherent. It is enough for me to show that enslaving one specific person in one specific time can be meaningfully described as "wrong" for nihilism to be disproven. Of course I'm not even necessarily claiming I can do that - but I can at least say that for nihilists to assert that implies a radically different relationship to language from the rest of us.

[Mr. Smith]

_{(my personal opinion: Spanish does a better job than English in some areas but not so much in other ways, like their arbitrary word-gendering)}

I feel like the problems with grammatical gender are often overstated. The main issue is that it makes it harder to innovate gender-neutral language that feels natural and leads to headaches like Meloni's whole "il presidente" shtick. But in most of everyday life, I haven't really seen it affect how people think. Arguably, the fact that gender applies to inanimate objects too can actually demystify it in some ways and make it easier to realize that it's fundamentally arbitrary.

Would you feel this way if got into a language that was completely gender-less and case-less even extending to people?

But I don't see it as arbitrary, only the names are arbitrary, likewise for the vastly more concrete cases.

Both of these are there specifically for, well, specificity, and this specificity would have to be replaced by something else on paper, left entirely on listening context of the speaker, or even get completely lost. I've found genders to be quite useful for sorting out function, especially with the shorthand [whereas all the times English uses "it" can be very confusing].

[Antonio the Sixth]

_{(my personal opinion: Spanish does a better job than English in some areas but not so much in other ways, like their arbitrary word-gendering)}

I feel like the problems with grammatical gender are often overstated. The main issue is that it makes it harder to innovate gender-neutral language that feels natural and leads to headaches like Meloni's whole "il presidente" shtick. But in most of everyday life, I haven't really seen it affect how people think. Arguably, the fact that gender applies to inanimate objects too can actually demystify it in some ways and make it easier to realize that it's fundamentally arbitrary.

Would you feel this way if got into a language that was completely gender-less and case-less even extending to people?

But I don't see it as arbitrary, only the names are arbitrary, likewise for the vastly more concrete cases.

Both of these are there specifically for, well, specificity, and this specificity would have to be replaced by something else on paper, left entirely on listening context of the speaker, or even get completely lost. I've found genders to be quite useful for sorting out function, especially with the shorthand [whereas all the times English uses "it" can be very confusing].

You mean would I be more puzzled by grammatical gender if I grew up speaking a language that was entirely devoid of it? Yeah, I definitely would. Just like there are things that still puzzle me about English (like seriously, what is up with your pronunciation? Half the time it's pure guesswork). Once you start learning a few languages it doesn't take long to realize that basically every language are features that seem utterly bizarre unless you grew up with them.

As for grammatical gender being useful, I agree it is in some cases, but I don't think what makes it good is connected to the utility of the social construct of gender. You can easily have a different noun class system (for example based on animacy) that works just as well.

[Associate Justice PiT]

Perhaps this isn't the best example of what Tony is alluding to, as I understand it; I immediately remembered this thread during the sermon today. Some branches of Christianity practice baptism by immersion, which according to their interpretation means that you die before being "born again." That obviously has pretty serious theological implications, especially given the difficulty of contextualizing that term in a way that makes Biblical sense.

Ditto to PiT, both for being a fellow Spanish learner and what both he and I have learned along the way. Even though this is my first experience seriously learning another language, I've also come to understand and appreciate the linguistic factors and barriers.

_{(my personal opinion: Spanish does a better job than English in some areas but not so much in other ways, like their arbitrary word-gendering)}

     One could go 20 pages on religion-related examples, but I encountered one more in the philosophy realm recently. I was discussing Descartes's famous cogito ergo sum with the missus, and she told me that in Spanish she learned it as pienso luego existo. Now existo is not the most direct translation of sum, but it gets the meaning across. Luego on the other hand is a problem. It relates pretty strictly to chronology, and does not necessarily mean there is causation. Entonces would have been better, and por lo tanto better still.

     I know Western European languages are big on having a semantic continuum between chronological progression and logical predication (such as with "then" in English), but that translation goes to the exact wrong end of that continuum and implies that existing comes after thinking! She admitted that she had never understood what it meant, and I can see why she wouldn't if that is the form in which she was taught this idea. I've also come to think about how silly it is to join the two major ideas implied by "then" as a result of this episode, and it makes me wonder the extent to which it opens the door for confusion wherein people just assume that X causes Y because someone expresses that Y follows X.

[Sol]

I don't have much good to say--I don't have a deep understanding of the philosophy of language, and neither do I of semantics, but I do think that the idea of semantic prototypes is useful in these kinds of discussions, because it complicates the notion of a strict word meaning, rather placing concepts in a gradient--i.e. an English word like "bird" applies to a wide of array of potential categories, some which are seen as more "quintessential" than others -- i.e. English speakers will usually think of a songbird before thinking of a cassowary or penguin, even though the term applies to all three. Then there are concepts which are even less central than "cassowary" or "penguin," like toy birds, or airplanes, or paper cranes, or dinosaurs, which for some people fall in that category but are very much border straddlers.

And of course these maps of associations don't cross languages either--I imagine the network of associations for French oiseau are a bit different, but probably even more different for, say, Māori manu.

_{(my personal opinion: Spanish does a better job than English in some areas but not so much in other ways, like their arbitrary word-gendering)}

I feel like the problems with grammatical gender are often overstated. The main issue is that it makes it harder to innovate gender-neutral language that feels natural and leads to headaches like Meloni's whole "il presidente" shtick. But in most of everyday life, I haven't really seen it affect how people think. Arguably, the fact that gender applies to inanimate objects too can actually demystify it in some ways and make it easier to realize that it's fundamentally arbitrary.

Would you feel this way if got into a language that was completely gender-less and case-less even extending to people?

But I don't see it as arbitrary, only the names are arbitrary, likewise for the vastly more concrete cases.

Both of these are there specifically for, well, specificity, and this specificity would have to be replaced by something else on paper, left entirely on listening context of the speaker, or even get completely lost. I've found genders to be quite useful for sorting out function, especially with the shorthand [whereas all the times English uses "it" can be very confusing].

You mean would I be more puzzled by grammatical gender if I grew up speaking a language that was entirely devoid of it? Yeah, I definitely would. Just like there are things that still puzzle me about English (like seriously, what is up with your pronunciation? Half the time it's pure guesswork). Once you start learning a few languages it doesn't take long to realize that basically every language are features that seem utterly bizarre unless you grew up with them.

As for grammatical gender being useful, I agree it is in some cases, but I don't think what makes it good is connected to the utility of the social construct of gender. You can easily have a different noun class system (for example based on animacy) that works just as well.

The big utility of grammatical gender seems to be that it functions similar to obviation in disambiguating third-person referents, and it's especially useful in doing so (moreso than even an animacy distinction) because it lets you distinguish between different human referents. This is almost certainly why English has kept the distinction between he and she, even while losing grammatical gender. There are other strategies to keep these distinct, like obviatives, switch-reference markers, or logophors, but it's as effective a strategy as any of those at disambiguation. This is why nearly all Indo-European and Semitic languages have kept grammatical gender, in a wide array of different social arrangements and across vast spans of time.

French's grammatical gender is really very normal, many languages work like it.