Abstract In the last fifteen years philosophers and linguists have turned their attention to slurs: derogatory expressions that target certain groups on the basis of race, gender, sexual orientation, nationality and so on. This interest is due to the fact that, on the one hand, slurs possess puzzling linguistic properties; on the other hand, the questions they pose are related to other crucial issues, such as the descriptivism/expressivism divide, the semantics/pragmatics divide and, generally speaking, the theory of meaning. Despite these (...) recent investigations about pejoratives, there is no widely accepted explanation of slurs:in my paper I consider the intuitions we have about slurs and I assess the difficulties that the main theories encounter in explaining how these terms work in order to identify the phenomena that a satisfactory account of slurs needs to explain. Then, I focus on the pragmatic theories that deal with the notions of conventional implicature and pragmatic presupposition: I assess the objections that have been raised and I propose two ways of defending the presuppositional account, taking into consideration the notion of cancellability. I will claim that the reason why most pragmatic strategies seem to fail to account for slurs is that they assume a rigid divide between conventional implicatures and presuppositions that should not be taken for granted. Reconsidering the relationship between these two notions gives a hint about how a pragmatic account of slurs should look like. Finally, I assess the problem of which presupposition slurs in fact trigger. (shrink)

In this paper, the authors present a presuppositional account for a class of evaluative terms that encode both a descriptive and an evaluative component: slurs and thick terms. The authors discuss several issues related to the hybrid nature of these terms, such as their projective behavior, the ways in which one may reject their evaluative content, and the ways in which evaluative content is entailed or implicated (as the case may be) by the use of such terms.

We consider the complex interactions between rape culture and epistemology. A central case study is the consideration of a deferential attitude about the epistemology of sexual assault testimony. According to the deferential attitude, individuals and institutions should decline to act on allegations of sexual assault unless and until they are proven in a formal setting, i.e., a criminal court. We attack this deference from several angles, including the pervasiveness of rape culture in the criminal justice system, the epistemology of testimony (...) and norms connecting knowledge and action, the harms of tacit idealizations away from important contextual factors, and a contextualist semantics for 'knows' ascriptions. (shrink)

What is the relation between language, communication, and values? In Slurs and Thick Terms, Bianca Cepollaro explores the ways in which certain pieces of evaluative language, such as slurs and so-called thick terms, not only reflect speakers’ moral perspectives, but also contribute to promote the speaker’s evaluative stance.

Reclamation is usually taken to be the phenomenon wherein in-groups employ a slur to express pride, foster camaraderie, or subvert discriminatory structures. We provide data showing that, under some special circumstances, out-groups successfully reclaim slurs too. Thus, the mainstream restriction to in-groups is merely an approximation of the correct extension of the phenomenon – of who does actually reclaim slurs. Removing any such stipulative restriction opens a path towards further theorizing into the nature of reclamation.

Sabendo que Cármides sofria com dores na cabeça pela manhã, Sócrates se oferece para curar a enfermidade do jovem e, em busca do fármaco para o tratamento, conta que, enquanto esteve em Potideia, recebera o ensinamento de certas práticas mágicas de um discípulo de Zalmoxis. Possíveis causas para as opressões na cabeça de Cármides já foram aventadas, como, por exemplo, a ressaca da embriaguez e a própria intemperança, objeto de análise do diálogo. O nosso propósito neste artigo é, além de (...) sugerir a hipótese de que a moléstia se deve à qualidade de seus sonhos, destacar, dentre algumas práticas caracterizadas como mágicas, aquela que visa a cura por intermédio da liberação da alma do corpo, o que é assinalado pela excursão alçada pelo sono. Para corroborar a nossa hipótese, abordaremos passagens da República em que Platão, ao tratar da transformação do homem democrático em tirânico, menciona a psicologia dos sonhos. (shrink)

In this paper, I discuss the Reclamation Worry (RW), raised by Anderson and Lepore 2013 and addressed by Ritchie (2017) concerning the appropriation of slurs. I argue that Ritchie’s way to solve the RW is not adequate and I show why such an apparent worry is not actually problematic and should not lead us to postulate a rich complex semantics for reclaimed slurs. To this end, after illustrating the phenomenon of appropriation of slurs, I introduce the Reclamation Worry (section 2). (...) In section 3, I argue that Richie’s complex proposal is not needed to explain the phenomenon. To show that, I compare the case of reclaimed and non-reclaimed slurs to the case of polysemic personal pronouns featuring, among others, in many Romance languages. In section 4 I introduce the notion of ‘authoritativeness’ that I take to be crucial to account for reclamation. In section 5, I focus on particular cases (the “outsider” cases) that support my claims and speak against the parsimony of the indexical account. Finally, I conclude with a methodological remark about the ways in which the debate on appropriation has developed in the literature (section 6). (shrink)

In this paper, I consider the phenomenon of evaluation reversal for two classes of evaluative terms that have received a great deal of attention in philosophy of language and linguistics: slurs and thick terms. I consider three approaches to analyze evaluation reversal: (i) lexical deflationist account, (ii) ambiguity account and (iii) echoic account. My purpose is mostly negative: my aim is to underline the shortcomings of these three strategies, in order to possibly pave the way for more suitable accounts.

The last decade saw a growing interest for hate speech and the ways in which language reflects and perpetuates discrimination, with two main focuses of interest: a linguistic-oriented question about how slurs encode evaluation on the one hand, and a philosophical and psychological question about the effects elicited by slurs. In this paper, I show how the two questions are deeply related by illustrating how a certain linguistic analysis of derogatory epithets – the presuppositional one – can shed light on (...) non-linguistic issues, namely what effects the use of slurs produce, especially concerning discrimination. I present a presuppositional account of slurs (Section 2) and I show how such an analysis provides convincing explanations of other non-linguistic phenomena: in particular, I consider the ways in which slurs reflect and spread discrimination by illustrating how they work in conversation (Section 3). In Section 4, I argue that some features of slurs presented in Sections 2 and 3, namely the fact that they always target a category and the fact that the derogatory content that they convey is presented as not open to discussion, make slurs particularly dangerous tools. I conclude by briefly assessing the question as to how one should respond when exposed to the use of slurs. (shrink)

Counterspeech is communication that tries to counteract potential harm brought about by other speech. Theoretical interest in counterspeech partly derives from a libertarian ideal – as captured in the claim that the solution to bad speech is more speech – and partly from a recognition that well-meaning attempts to counteract harm through speech can easily misfire or backfire. Here we survey recent work on the question of what makes counterspeech effective at remedying or preventing harm, in those cases where it (...) is effective, as well as work investigating when and why there is a duty to engage in counterspeech. We suggest that the most fruitful area for philosophical inquiry on this topic, currently, relates to the questions about efficacy. Specifically, we argue that there is a need for better frameworks for conceptualizing the efficacy of counterspeech. Philosophers have collaborative work to do, alongside social scientists, in developing these frameworks. (shrink)

In this article, Bianca Thoilliez draws on pragmatist notions of fallibilism and pluralism to develop proposals for possible educational interventions to address the problem of “post-truth” conditions. Post-truth, she contends, is not only a political danger for liberal democracies, but it also poses a serious threat of extinction for our educational practices. With the help of some of Bruno Latour's and Danna Haraway's categories, and with the narrative intervention of Gerald Durrell's My Family and Other Animals, Thoilliez attempts to (...) adapt both Charles Peirce's and William James's classic pragmatist ideas in order to experiment with new horizons of thought capable of overcoming the exhausted pedagogical divides of docility/indocility, conserve/discard, and optimism/pessimism that often seem woven into the definition of educational relationships, the establishment of curriculum content, and the orientation of pedagogical actions. As an alternative, she recommends building communitarian alliances of fallibilistic inquiry and promoting practices of pluralistic cultural provision as more useful educational ends-in-view that embody a down-to-earth pedagogy capable of reinstating trust, taking care of truths, looking for ways of keeping our lives together, and making education possible again. Thus, here Thoilliez proposes a pedagogy that neither fixes nor evades our troubles, but one that stays with them. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to provide arguments based on linguistic evidence that discard a truth-conditional analysis of slurs and pave the way for more promising approaches. We consider Hom and May’s version of TCA, according to which the derogatory content of slurs is part of their truth-conditional meaning such that, when slurs are embedded under semantic operators such as negation, there is no derogatory content that projects out of the embedding. In order to support this view, Hom and (...) May make two moves: they point to cases where it looks like projection does not occur and they try to explain away cases where projection seems to occur by appealing to a pragmatic phenomenon that they call ‘offense’. Pace Hom and May, we argue that the derogatory content of slurs does in fact project and, in advocating for our claim, we show that those cases where it looks like projection does not occur are in fact metalinguistic uses in which slurs are not really used, by relying on three linguistic tests ; and we refute Hom and May’s attempt to explain why speakers would entertain the supposedly wrong intuition that the derogatory content of slurs projects out of semantic embedding, by focusing on the case of slurs for fictional entities. We conclude that Hom and May’s strategies to support TCA ultimately fail. (shrink)

The case states that a male same-sex couple entered into a surrogacy arrangement with an unrelated surrogate using donor sperm and the surrogate’s eggs. M is the legal mother pursuant to s33 of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act 2008. Though the facts tell us that there was no legally binding arrangement, this is in fact the position of the law: under s1A Surrogacy Arrangements Act, no surrogacy arrangements can ever be binding on the parties. It is not clear whether (...) the donor sperm is from one of the same-sex couple or not. If it was donor sperm and not from either intended father, this is not an arrangement that would be recognised in law, as one of the men must be genetically related to the child in order for them to obtain legal parenthood via a parental order, under s54 HFEA 2008. They could apply to adopt the child, although they may fall foul of adoption legislation1 if any money has moved between them and M and they do not fall within an exemption.2 In any event, an adoption cannot be achieved in time for them to obtain legal parenthood in a crisis situation. In the absence of a biological connection and the resulting legal parenthood, in order to obtain parental responsibility for the child to allow them to make decisions about Baby T’s care, the men would need to apply for leave to apply for a child arrangements order pursuant to s10 Children Act 1989. However, in the …. (shrink)

The Introduction to "Non-Derogatory Uses of Slurs", special issue of Grazer Philosophische Studien.

We present two experimental studies on the Italian expressive ‘stronzo’. The first study tests whether, and to which extent, the acceptability of using an expressive is sensitive to the information available in the context. The study looks both at referential uses of expressives and predicative uses of expressives. The results show that expressives are sensitive to contextual information to a much higher degree than the non-expressive control items in their referential use, but also, albeit to a lesser degree, in their (...) predicative use. The second study tests whether the lower acceptability of expressives in their predicative use may be simply due to saying something negative about someone. A comparison between expressives, such as ‘jerk’, and non-expressive negative terms, such as ‘nasty’ or ‘unbearable’, suggests that it is the expressive nature of these terms, rather than the mere negative valence, that affects acceptability. Our studies present a major challenge to the existing accounts of expressives, and raise several theoretical issues that still call for an answer. (shrink)

We contrast two positions concerning the initial domain of actions that infants interpret as goal-directed. The 'narrow scope' view holds that goal-attribution in 6- and 9-month-olds is restricted to highly familiar actions (such as grasping) (). The cue-based approach of the infant's 'teleological stance' (), however, predicts that if the cues of equifinal variation of action and a salient action effect are present, young infants can attribute goals to a 'wide scope' of entities including unfamiliar human actions and actions of (...) novel objects lacking human features. It is argued that previous failures to show goal-attribution to unfamiliar actions were due to the absence of these cues. We report a modified replication of showing that when a salient action-effect is presented, even young infants can attribute a goal to an unfamiliar manual action. This study together with other recent experiments reviewed support the 'wide scope' approach indicating that if the cues of goal-directedness are present even 6-month-olds attribute goals to unfamiliar actions. (shrink)

The theories of apartness, equality, and n-stable equality are presented through contraction- and cut-free sequent calculi. By methods of proof analysis, a purely proof-theoretic characterization of the equality fragment of apartness is obtained.

Similar to directional asymmetries in animals, language lateralization in humans follows a bimodal distribution. A majority of individuals are lateralized to the left and a minority of individuals are lateralized to the right side of the brain. However, a biological advantage for either lateralization is lacking. The scenario outlined by Vallortigara & Rogers (V&R) suggests that language lateralization in humans is not specific to language or human speciation but simply follows an evolutionarily conserved organizational principle of the brain.

This chapter attempts to differentiate between types of monumental representations of Jerusalem, to locate them historically and to explore the reasons for their extraordinary density by deciphering the essentials of their function as mnemonic devices in the framework of medieval devotionalism. Conditioned by historical events such as the Crusades, Franciscan canonization of the Stations of the Cross and the Counter-Reformation, representation of Jerusalem gradually expanded from copies of Christ's tomb in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre to commemorate the Stations (...) of the Cross and other holy places in Jerusalem and the Holy Land. The holy landscapes are multimedia representations: they combine topography and architecture with life-size figural groups and wall painting to identify the holy places. Groups of such representations could form separate sites at a certain distance from settlements, or encompass a city with a network of reproduced loca sancta. (shrink)

In this article, we present paradoxical findings from a formative evaluation research project that explores how preadolescent girls understand and feel about their bodies after participating in “Girls on the Run of Los Angeles County”, a girl-serving positive youth development program. Findings from pre/post test data show that girls’ body image improved after participation in GOTR LA, yet many girls also reported the dominant thin ideal and the importance of not being fat as key characteristics of strong and healthy bodies. (...) Ethnographic data suggest that institutional, organizational, and interactional factors contribute to these findings. Institutionalized fat-negative discourses translate into subtle messages regarding health and the body through organizational communications and through interactions between volunteer coaches and participants in ways that solidify dominant conceptions of the feminine body despite explicit programmatic intentions to challenge them. Theoretically, we draw from feminist cultural studies’ work on the gendered body to expand the dominant focus on institutionalized obsessions with thinness through the critical analysis of fat and anti-fat bias. On an applied level, our discussion of unintended program outcomes reveals the complexities in organizational interventions designed to influence girls’ body image. (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 56, Issue 3-4, pp 222 - 240 In medieval theories of consequence, we encounter several criteria of validity. One of these is known as the containment criterion: a consequence is valid when the consequent is contained or understood in the antecedent. The containment criterion was formulated most frequently in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, but it can be found in earlier writings as well. In _The Tradition of the Topics in the Middle Ages_, N.J. Green-Pedersen claimed that (...) this criterion originated with Boethius. In this article, the author shows that a notion of containment is indeed present in Boethius, but is not used to define or describe the relation between antecedent and consequent, i.e., the relation of consequence, as Green-Pedersen asserted. The author then offers two interpretations of the notion of containment that are present in Boethius – a metaphysical and a semantic interpretation – and shows how these relate to the containment criterion. (shrink)

Volume 20, Issue 10, October 2020, Page 75-77.

ABSTRACTFor Rorty, any attempt to articulate a theory of truth as such is of no interest. This implies that although it may be meaningful to differentiate the truths from the falsehoods, it is pointless to say what the property of goodness is in the things we believe are good to do. Rorty points out that our no longer understanding Philosophy – with the capital ‘P’–as the framing of normative notions would make room for a post-philosophical culture where the philosophers’ activity (...) would be closer to the practices of cultural critique with the self-imposed limitation of devoting themselves exclusively to advancing descriptions of how things relate to each other. This article aims to explore what would happen if this provocation were brought to the field of Pedagogy. Taking on this Rortyan theme, keeping hope on the potentially liberating and transformative power of education implies a hopeful attitude by which individuals involved in education processes express their love for the world as a commitment to a better future, as well as their belief in its possibilities. (shrink)

The article investigates which epistemological considerations justify how religious life fits into the school life, and examines the debate on the participation of religiosity in the education system. I do this, first, by addressing the pedagogical implications of the distinction between public and private as maintained by Richard Rorty and, second, by reconsidering the pluralist metaphysics held by William James as an alternative path to understanding and re-addressing the question of religious life in school life. The article analyzes how the (...) strict separation of projects of individual self-creation and the public sphere, as defended by Rorty, poses problems in implementing pluralism in democratic societies and their educational institutions. (shrink)

Bianca-Alexandra Savu ABSTRACT: This article discusses the proposal of accommodating grounding theories and structural realism, with the aim to provide a metaphysical framework for structural realism. Ontic structural realism, one of the most accepted metaphysical versions for structural realism, is taken into account here, with the intention of analyzing the framework in which...