Response to Ásta

I think that the prompt I want to create for myself in response to the Ásta reading is something like: can someone confer a social property onto themselves?

I think that the answer is yes. When I first considered this question in regards to the text the answer I came  to was "no," but the more that I thought about the more I think that the answer is yes. The answer seems intuitively to be no because social properties cannot really exist outside of society. Asta makes the point that one can not be popular on their own to exemplify this point. However, if we consider the five aspects of the conferralist account, I think that one can confer, at least some, social properties onto themselves. To put this all in other words, I think that one can confer the property "man" onto themselves, regardless of whether or not other members of society would confer the same property onto them. 

I think that someone determining for themselves if they are a man using Asta's method might look like the following:

Conferred property: Being a man

Who: The person in question

What: The person in question's own judgement

When: At any point

Base property: Determined by the person in question

I think that humans already consider these questions of  if they have to themselves, at least I have throughout this course. What it means to be a man might seem arbitrary and meaningless if we allow people to determine for themselves if they are one using whatever criteria they want, and perhaps it is arbitrary and meaningless. But it is no less arbitrary and meaningless if an individual allows others to decide for them what it means.