The failings of philosophy

Going further than is useful

I’ve observed in various places that professionals (lawyers, doctors, engineers, pharmacists, veterinarians) are visibly more intelligent than social science or humanities academics/graduates when you trap sufficient numbers of both groups in a single room and set them off against each other.

This is something I witnessed a great deal as an undergraduate, because of the way Australia educates its lawyers. Unlike the UK or US, it’s normal in Australia for lawyers to study what’s called “arts/law,” starting at 17 or 18 and graduating with two degrees in five or six years.

Few of the people who pursue classics or literature or history at the same time as learning how to draft a commercial lease or incorporate a company will get work as classicists or novelists or historians. I am unusual in doing so—although I was a bog-standard lawyer for a long time, too.

The rationale—given at the time such dual degrees were introduced—was to ensure the members of an important profession were not “dreadful boors” at social functions.

This means a potential student must gain admission to both arts and law, and winning a place in the latter faculty is harder. However, once in university halls, law students aren’t segregated from liberal arts students in class. They compete academically with arts students as well as among themselves in their law subjects.

Law typically requires an ATAR of more than 98 (from a maximum of 99.95). Liberal arts typically requires an ATAR of more than 90.¹ For foreigners, don’t fret: like the USA’s SATs, ATAR scores (roughly) track IQ. Both the student with more than 98 and the student with more than 90 are in the “top decile”. If you forced all the 98+ kids to sit the Mensa exam, most of them would get in. If you forced all the 90+ kids to sit an IQ test, most of them would be around 110-120. In other words, none of these kids are daft.

However, the gap between law students and liberal arts students when the two groups are forced to compete with each other manifests as an intellectual chasm. When I was an undergraduate lawyer, for some inexplicable (to me) reason, International Law was offered as a first year elective, alongside compulsory subjects like tort/delict and contract. I took it because it seemed interesting, and soon learned why baby lawyers were allowed to study it in first year. “It’s like an arts subject,” I said—after getting probably the easiest distinction in my entire academic legal career—echoing generations of Australian law students. The great undergraduate lawyer’s dismissal of an easy course was always, “oh, it’s like an arts subject”.

This intellectual gulf meant law students not only carried off most of the prizes in liberal arts, it also generated weird anomalies. I knew one woman who started out in arts/law, proceeded to fail all her law subjects and abandon the degree—all the while getting a university medal in her liberal arts course. A university medal is the Australian equivalent of a starred or congratulatory first, or summa cum laude in the US (before grade inflation, so when it meant something).

My law school had a policy of insisting that future lawyers be numerate, so certain applied maths and commercial courses were compulsory. I did financial accounting, financial management, and statistics at the law school’s behest. A subject called “set theory and logic” was also “strongly recommended”, so I did it as well.

And at the end of first year (surprise, surprise), I had prizes in statistics and set theory. Statistics was taught by the psychology department. Set theory was taught jointly, by philosophy and maths. Note: the lecturer from the maths department was much, much better than the lecturer from the philosophy department.

Back in the Pleistocene, Australian universities used to host pleasant receptions with champagne and nibbles for prize winners. There, academics would try to convince the prize-winners to study more of the discipline in question. Some weeks before the reception, beggy letters signed by the departmental Dean would go out to prize-winners, something I know various liberal arts disciplines hated when the recipient was a law student. Law students could seldom be diverted from law, and were hated for winning “their” prizes.

In response to the beggy psychology letter, I started reading psychology papers in the university library, only to discover many of them did things I’d just spent a year being taught (carefully, properly) not to do: small sample size, obvious p-hacking, problems with representative sampling, and—something I suspected, but could not prove—dropping out all the nulls in meta-analyses.

I did not want to study any more psychology. At the reception, I told one particularly insistent academic that I thought his entire discipline was about as “genuine as a pile of three dollar bills”.

Philosophy and maths also sent out beggy letters and held a joint reception, and I formed very different views of the two disciplines. The maths people were weird but also interesting and at ease with what they were. The philosophy people, by contrast, were nit-pickers. They picked more nits than lawyers, and lawyers pick a lot of nits. If you pick more nits than lawyers, there is probably something wrong with your discipline. Philosophers simply make more distinctions than are useful.

I realised years later that I’d caught the first whiff of what would later become the replications crisis. As everyone knows, this started in psychology but then cut great swathes across all the social sciences, and is now landing on supposedly more rigorous disciplines.

Karlstack

—which really only exists to discuss academic statistical fraud, bias, and hype—devotes its latest exposé to a paper on the pricing of corporate bonds.

However, at the philosophy reception, I also told a couple of insistent academics that I thought their discipline was “about as genuine as a pile of three dollar bills”, and took philosophy to task for nit-picking and detachment from reality.

They already disliked lawyers. This ensured they really, really disliked lawyers—so much so it got back to me on the practitioners’ bush telegraph that one of them attempted to complete a rural property conveyance without a solicitor and finished up in a nasty and expensive mess.

Anyone with eyes and an interest in what ails the modern academy is aware of the replications crisis. Philosophy is not similarly known for a nitpicking and unreality crisis, and yet it should be.

To that end, I’ve commissioned a standalone piece from

Lorenzo Warby

—better known to most of you for his ongoing “Worshipping the Future” series—showing where an excessive devotion to picking nits coupled with a lack of reality tests leads. Be aware that the paper Lorenzo picks apart is not a bad paper. He could have chosen many easier targets—think of the awful stuff Boghossian, Pluckrose, and Lindsay were able to get published in various journals across the humanities and social sciences, including philosophy.

I instructed him not to stoop to easy targets.

It’s become easy for bright people outside the academy to mock it based on what Lorenzo calls “post-Enlightenment progressivism” and a lot of other people call “woke”. However—even though there were elements of Wokery getting around in the 90s when I was an undergraduate—I’ve long held the view that the universities were at least partly broken long before woke came along. Cooking the books and smelling your own farts (psychology and philosophy respectively) is just as wasteful and wrong as arguing that whiteness is cancer or that all boundaries should be dissolved.

And doing both of those for decades before Wokery escaped from the lab made the latter’s intellectual colonisation task much easier: already, loads of things didn’t have to be true, or useful, or based on reality.

Now, here’s Lorenzo for your (intellectual) fun & profit.

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Paul Griffiths is a philosopher at Sydney University, the university at which I did my undergraduate degree in History and Philosophy.

He has written an essay seeking to define sex in a way that is grounded in biological reality while separating that out from other discussions we may wish to have about what sex means, and does or does not imply among humans.

He has clearly read a considerable amount of the relevant scientific literature: the essay has an excellent bibliography. He conveys the import of this literature well. Unfortunately, however, he does not succeed in conveying it as well as he needs to.

Griffiths wants a definition of sex that will apply across all sexually-reproducing species, which means that the definition that applies, or not, in one organism is taken to affect how you can use the terms male or female in another. That may, or may not, be a useful way to proceed.

The spectrum of reproductive strategies by rate of producing offspring: source.

Not all organisms use chromosomes in the way humans do. But in humans, chromosomes are absolutely a useful indicator of sex. There are some fuzzy boundary elements involved (as there often is in biology) but an indicator that works 99, 98, 97 per cent of the time is still a useful indicator.

That there may be a general biological understanding of male and female that nevertheless means different things in different species is a reasonable way to proceed.

This goes to the difference between the scientific and the philosophical approach, between trying to map the world structurally (what being a biologist is about) and trying to map the world conceptually (what philosophers try to do).

There is a huge problem with the latter. As I discuss here and here, we cannot consciously “see” the basic building blocks of our concepts: those building blocks fall below the level of coherence necessary for us to be consciously aware of them.

This is why science has been much more successful than philosophy as a mechanism for exploring reality. Science is grounded in grappling with the structure of things, which forces reality tests and limits how far we need to go in making distinctions. Science entails systematic ways of testing hypotheses against structure.

Lawyers—who are trying to make human interactions work within a structure of rules—have a similar advantage over philosophy.

Hence, if you end up nit-picking more than lawyers do—or science needs—you have gone too far. Philosophy regularly goes too far: it’s stuck with concepts rather than grappling with constraining structure.

It is not an accident that the great law-making cultures (Rome and England) were practical and empirical cultures where philosophy was either mocked or parked in a distant place so it couldn’t influence anything. Meanwhile, the great philosophy cultures (Greece, India, China) were not very good at law. Sunni Islam also largely rejected philosophy in the name of (revealed) law, a rejection epitomised in the thought of Al-Ghazali. Fiqh, Islamic legal reasoning, resembles common law analogical reasoning.

Attending to structure in the way science or law does gives one clear decision-rules. Philosophy, on the slippery slopes of the concepts-in-themselves, lacks clear decision-rules, so can both nit-pick too much while failing to connect concepts to structure in an accurate or useful way.

Griffiths covers the biology of sex in considerable detail — often useful and clearly expressed detail — focusing on gametes as reproductive strategy. Yet he goes astray, because he does not fully grasp what reproductive strategy entails.

Sex is not merely producing gametes, it is part of a whole-of-life reproductive strategy and includes child, juvenile and menopausal periods as part of the reproductive strategy.

We can see this failure to grasp what reproductive strategy entails in his attempt to define sex:

In this section we have seen that it is not the whole organism that is male, female or hermaphroditic but a life-history stage of that organism. Sexes are fundamentally the reproductive stages of life cycles, and assigning a sex to a reproductively competent individual is straightforward. Juveniles, however, are assigned their predicted future sex and these predictions may be more or less reliable. Non-reproductives are assigned sexes because their non-reproductive developmental trajectory is a modification of one of the reproductive forms (Table 1). I do not suggest that this is an exhaustive list of the reasons a life history stage of an individual might be assigned a biological sex, and that, in fact, is an important take-home message from this discussion.

No, sex is not a life-history stage — that which involves the production of gametes. Gametes are not an end in themselves, they are a key (and distinctive) operational element in a reproductive strategy. A successful reproductive strategy produces viable offspring who survive and then produce viable offspring of their own.  

A post-menopausal mother is still a mother (and is most certainly still female). Homo sapiens females have unusually long post-fertility lifespans precisely because that helps along our reproductive strategy.

Our long childhoods means that a mother who lives 15-20 years past the birth of her last child can be expected to have more children reach reproductive adulthood, given that she is no longer producing eggs. Long menopauses (way longer than our primate cousins) are an effective reproductive strategy, given our long childhoods.

As I’ve suggested elsewhere, even the production of the occasional homosexual may assist a lineage’s reproductive strategies.

This is a perennial problem in philosophy: not noticing when your exploration of concepts-in-themselves has stumbled into error, due to a lack of reality testing. Hence attending-directly-to-structure science is so much more successful in exploring reality and attending-directly-to-structure law generates much better reasoning about human action.

Griffiths’ failure to grasp what reproductive strategy entails (or not) is clearest in his discussion of eusocial species:

In the eusocial insects all non-reproductive castes have evolved from female forms. But this is just a quirk—the eusocial mammal the Naked Mole Rat (Heterocephalus glaber) has non-reproductive workers of both sexes, both of which implement the same reproductive strategy of transferring resources to relatives who share their genes. This is the best strategy available to the non-reproductive individuals to maximise their genetic representation in future generations, but it is not a distinctively male or female strategy. The reproductive strategy of the non-reproductive individuals does not centre on the production of one of the two kinds of gametes, and the body of theory about the evolution of male and female strategies does not apply to them. For example, females normally have lower variance in fitness than males, but this important generalisation cannot be straightforwardly applied to organisms that are ‘females’ in the extended sense that their non-reproductive form is a modification of an ancestral female form.

Eusocial species are a useful test case: the breakthrough in understanding their evolutionary dynamics came when scientists realised that non-reproductive castes had no reproductive strategy. That they are instruments of another organism’s reproductive strategy: the breeding female (the “queen”).

Defining sex

If we grasp that what we are looking at is reproductive strategies, then we can define sex in a quite general way. Strategies are what selection processes work on.

An organism is male if it is structured to engage in a small-gamete reproductive strategy. That is true whether or not it is currently (or ever) able to produce viable gametes.

An organism is female if it is structured to engage in a large-gamete reproductive strategy. That is also true whether or not it is currently (or ever) able to produce viable gametes.

An organism shifts from male to female if it shifts from being structured to engage in a small-gamete reproductive strategy to being structured to engage in a large-gamete reproductive strategy. It shifts from female to male if it shifts from being structured to engage in a large-gamete reproductive strategy to being structured to engage in a small-gamete reproductive strategy. It is hermaphroditic if it structured for both at the same time.

Hence, there is no such thing as a “sex change operation,” as we lack the surgical or hormonal capacity to change which gamete-reproduction strategy for which a human body is structured. There are only surgery and hormonal treatments to attempt to better “pass” as the other sex. Millions of generations of evolution have selected sexually-reproducing organisms (such as ourselves) to be able to detect which member of your species is of the opposite sex: hence the desire to “pass” for post-operative and hormone-treatment Transfolk.

Sexual reproduction is much more complicated than previous systems of reproduction. But that is the evolutionary point: sexual reproduction generates a lot more filters, so enables evolution of much more complex organisms. There is natural selection on the male and the female; sexual selection on the male and the female; selection on the process of reproduction itself. Miscarriages, for example, are a way of filtering out offspring who would represent too poor a biological investment.

Sexual reproduction produces more filters, so tests whether the investment is likely to be “worth it”. This allows much-more-likely-to-be-viable complexity to explore more strategies and to more readily take advantage of successful strategies. By “throwing” the genetic die with each male-female combination, successful strategies can be exploited more readily, generating a potentially huge evolutionary pay off from that complexity. This is why sexually reproducing species make up a huge proportion of total biomass.

Increased organism complexity provides more potential lines of attack for pathogens and parasites, but sexual reproduction’s genetic recombination mechanism enables much quicker selection for responses to those pathogens and parasites. This is another way that sexual reproduction makes greater organism complexity viable.

Genuinely social animals are phylogenetically rare: it’s hard to trip over from lineage competition into systematic lineage cooperation. As we’ve seen, eusocial species solve the problem by social groups operating as single lineages. Even so—while social animals are phylogenetically rare—they’re a fantastically successful form of increased complexity, constituting a majority of animal biomass.

Culture is an even quicker way of generating and exploiting successful strategies. It’s so quick it runs into the danger of “running past” our—much slower to change—biological adaptations. Notable examples of this include the way the agricultural revolution was something of metabolic disaster. Even now, 11,000 years after its development, our adaptations for it tend to wear off as we age. Similarly, the industrial-age processed diet is also something of a metabolic disaster: cultural evolution of food strategies has outpaced our biological evolution.

Observed not assigned

Despite being all keen on gametes (and only actually producing gametes) as defining sex, Griffiths still falls into the “assigning sex” usage. Admittedly, he uses it to denote organisms that can be reliably predicted as becoming future gamete producers, but still, it is bad usage.

Sex is not assigned (an act of power), it is observed. Sex is not a conceptual game, it is a structural reality.

“Assigning sex” is typical critical constructivism—a popularisation of Critical Theories we often call “woke”. It’s playing conceptual games for alchemical—changing reality—purposes rather than accurate description.

It’s critical constructivism that gives us the following: people are not homeless, they’re unhoused, because someone unhoused them. Folk are not illegal immigrants, they are undocumented, because someone failed to provide them with documents. People are not of a marginal or minority group, they are marginalised or minoritised because someone marginalised or minoritised them. All have actions performed upon them, because—in this system—the true cause is an oppressive power structure which created structural inequalities to which these people are subjected.

“Assigning sex” is the same Foucauldian power nonsense, turning everything into socially constructed power-games whose deconstruction “unmasks” the oppressive power involved.

Critical constructivism attempts to systematically replace observing structure with the playing of conceptual games. This is not surprising when its roots go back to a pre-Darwinian metaphysician who pretended to be a social scientist.

Critical constructivism pretends (including to itself) to be about structure — e.g., the concern with “structural/systemic racism”. However, it’s really about rhetoric useful for generating moralised social leverage. It relies on burying analytically impoverished analyses of social dynamics under a fog of conceptual games. Inconvenient attention to reality is de-legitimised as collaboration with alleged structures of oppression.

Hence the attack on evolutionary biology as “patriarchal, white supremacist, heteronormative” etc etc.

Listening to Heather Heying and Bret Weinstein’s free, online, “graduate seminar” on evolutionary theory is enormously helpful for grasping key elements of what an evolutionary strategy is (and is not). They go on and on about lineage, for very good reasons.

Griffiths makes a distinction between two domains:

These two domains in which ‘biological sexes’ are discussed have very different goals and criteria of success. One domain is evolutionary biology, where biologists seek to understand the diversity of reproductive systems and their evolution. The other domain is in philosophy, gender studies and related fields, which seek to both understand and challenge the assignment of people to categories like ‘man’ and ‘woman’.

One of these domains is seriously wrestling with structure and the other is playing academic games. One is trying to do something useful and the other is all too often engaging in bullshit Theory and generating spurious “expertise”.

Yes, it’s useful to grasp the difference between sex (biology), sex roles (the behavioural manifestations of sex) and gender (the cultural manifestations of sex). Each in turn is more social, and so more fluid, than that from which it emerges.

Even so, each is observed. There may be ascription (an act of judgement) on the basis of such observation. But it is not assigned (an act of power). That is constructivist crap.

So, sex is about which reproductive strategy your body is structured to engage in. Talking about sex or gender being “assigned” is constructivist nonsense which goes to the heart of the problem with philosophy: it is ultimately a series of conceptual games rather than tests against structure.

This is why philosophy is prone to nit-picking further than it is useful to do, or otherwise getting intellectually lost. It means not noticing when your nit-picking has stumbled over into error.

References

Books

James Franklin, The Science of Conjecture: Evidence and Probability before Pascal, Johns Hopkins University Press, [2001] 2015.

Heather Heying and Bret Weinstein, A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life, Swift, 2021.

Helen Joyce, Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality, OneWorld, 2021.

John Man, Alpha Beta: How our alphabet shaped the western world, Headline, 2000

Christian Rudder, Dataclysm: Who We Are (When We Think No One’s Looking), Fourth Estate, 2014.

Erwin Schrödinger, What Is Life? The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell with Mind And Matter & Autobiographical Sketches, Cambridge University Press, [1944, 1958, 1992] 2013.

Abigail Shrier, Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, Regnery, [2020] 2021.

Kathleen Stock, Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism, Fleet, 2021.

Robert Trivers, The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life, Basic Books, [2011], 2013.

Articles, papers, book chapters, podcasts

P. W. Anderson, ‘More is Different,’ Science, New Series, Vol. 177, No. 4047. (Aug. 4, 1972), 393-396.

Menelaos Apostolou, ‘Sexual selection under parental choice: the role of parents in the evolution of human mating,’ Evolution and Human Behavior, 28 (2007) 403–409.

Barry Bogin, Jared Bragg, Christopher Kuzawa, ‘Humans are not cooperative breeders but practice biocultural reproduction,’ Annals of Human Biology, 2014 Jul-Aug; 41(4): 368-80.

Jacobus J. Boomsma, ‘Lifetime monogamy and the evolution of eusociality,’ Philosophical Transactions of Royal Society B,  (2009) 364, 3191–3207.

Harry Frankfurt, ‘On Bullshit,’ Raritan Quarterly Review, Fall 1986, Vol.6, No.2.

Chris D. Frith, ‘The role of metacognition in human social interactions,’ Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 2012, 367, 2213–2223.

David C Geary, Jennifer Byrd-Craven, Mary K Hoard, Jacob Vigil, Chattavee Numtee, ‘Evolution and development of boys’ social behavior,’ Developmental Review, Volume 23, Issue 4, 2003, 444-470.

Herbert Gintis, Carel van Schaik, and Christopher Boehm, ‘Zoon Politikon: The Evolutionary Origins of Human Political Systems,’ Current Anthropology, Volume 56, Number 3, June 2015, 327-353.

Paul E. Griffiths, ‘What are biological sexes?,’ Preprint: 27 October 2021.

Kim Hill, Michael Barton, and A. Magdalena Hurtado, ‘The Emergence of Human Uniqueness: Characters Underlying Behavioral Modernity,’ Evolutionary Anthropology, 2009, 18:187–200

Erik P. Hoel, Larissa Albantakis, and Giulio Tononi, ‘Quantifying causal emergence shows that macro can beat micro,’ PNAS, December 3, 2013, vol. 110, no. 49, 19790–19795.

Ada Johansson, Pekka Santtila, Nicole Harlaar, Bettina von der Pahlen, Katarina Witting, Monica Algars, Katarina Alanko, Patrick Jern, Markus Varjonen, and N. Kenneth Sandnabba, ‘Genetic Effects on Male Sexual Coercion,’ Aggressive Behavior, 2008 Volume 34, 190–202.

Tim Kaiser, Marco Del Giudice, Tom Booth, ‘Global sex differences in personality: Replication with an open online dataset,’ Journal of Personality, 2020, 88, 415–429.

Hillard Kaplan, Jane Lancaster & Arthur Robson, ‘Embodied Capital and the Evolutionary Economics of the Human Life Span,’ in Carey, James R. and Shripad Tuljapurkar (eds.), Life Span: Evolutionary, Ecological, and Demographic Perspectives, Supplement to Population and Development Review, vol. 29, 2003. New York: Population Council, 152-182.

Hillard Kaplan, Kim Hill, A. Magdalena Hurtado, and Jane Lancaster, ‘The embodied capital theory of human evolution,’ in Peter T. Ellison (ed.) Reproductive ecology and human evolution, De Gruyter, (2001), 293-317.

Hillard Kaplan, Kim Hill, Jane Lancaster, A. Magdalena Hurtado, ‘A theory of human life history evolution: Diet, intelligence, and longevity,’ Evolutionary Anthropology, August 2000, Vol.9, Iss.4, 156-185.

Monika Karmin, et al., ‘A recent bottleneck of Y chromosome diversity coincides with a global change in culture,’ Genome Resources, 2015 Apr;25(4):459-66.

Katherine J. Latham, ‘Human Health and the Neolithic Revolution: an Overview of Impacts of the Agricultural Transition on Oral Health, Epidemiology, and the Human Body,’ Nebraska Anthropologist, 2013, 187, 95-102.

Stella O’Malley & Sasha Ayad, ‘A Takedown of Gender Politics with Wesley Yang,’ Gender: A Wider Lens, Ep.93, October 28, 2022.

https://gender-a-wider-lens.captivate.fm/episode/93-a-takedown-of-gender-politics-with-wesley-yang

Stella O’Malley & Sasha Ayad, ‘Gender: Philosophy, Institutions and Policy with Leor Sapir,’ Gender: A Wider Lens, Ep.88, September 23, 2022.

Peter J. Richerson, and Robert Boyd, ‘The evolution of human ultra-sociality,’ in Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt and Frank K. Salter (eds.), Indoctrinability, ideology, and warfare: Evolutionary perspectives, Berghahn, 1998, 71-95.

Grant A. Rutledge, Laurence D. Mueller, Larry G. Cabral, and Michael R. Rose, ‘Evolutionary Biology of Diet, Aging, and Mismatch,’ Journal of Evolution and Health, Vol.3, Iss.1, Article 1, 2019.

R. Schacht and K.L. Kramer, ‘Are We Monogamous? A Review of the Evolution of Pair-Bonding in Humans and Its Contemporary Variation Cross-Culturally,’ Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution, 2019, 7:230.

David P. Schmitt, Martin Voracek, Anu Realo, Ju¨ri Allik, ‘Why Can’t a Man Be More Like a Woman? Sex Differences in Big Five Personality Traits Across 55 Cultures,’ Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2008, Vol. 94, No. 1, 168–182.

Michael Tomasello, ‘The ultra-social animal,’ European Journal of Social Psychology, 2014, 44, 187–194.

John Tooby and Leda Cosmides, ‘The Psychological Foundations of Culture,’ in The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary psychology and the generation of culture, J. Barkow, L. Cosmides, J. Tooby (eds), Oxford University Press, 1992, 19-136.

Robert Trivers, ‘Parental investment and sexual selection,’ in B. Campbell, Sexual Selection and the Descent of Man, Aldine de Gruyter, 1972, 136–179.

Tian Chen Zeng, Alan J. Aw & Marcus W. Feldman, ‘Cultural hitchhiking and competition between patrilineal kin groups explain the post-Neolithic Y-chromosome bottleneck,’ Nature Communications, 2018, 9:2077.

1. This is at better universities, collectively known as the “sandstones”. Yes, Australia has sketchy universities offering sketchy degrees: those are not the subject of my discussion here.