We investigate experimentally whether the perceived offensiveness of slurs survives when they are reported, by comparing Italian slurs and insults in base utterances (Y is an S), direct speech (X said: “Y is an S”), mixed quotation (X said that Y is “an S”), and indirect speech (X said that Y is an S). For all strategies, reporting decreases the perceived offensiveness without removing it. For slurs, but not insults, indirect speech is perceived as more offensive than direct speech. Our (...) hypothesis is that, because slurs constitute hate speech, speakers employ quotation marks to signal their dissociation from slur use. (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.

Martin Gustafsson and Richard Sørli. The Philosophy of J. L. Austin. Oxford. Oxford University Press, 2011. ISBN: 9780199219759 Reviewed by Claudia Bianchi.

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 paper I expose and criticise the distinction between pure indexicals and demonstratives, held by David Kaplan and John Perry. I oppose the context of material production of the utterance to the “intended context” (the context of interpretation, i.e. the context the speaker indicates as semantically relevant): this opposition introduces an intentional feature into the interpretation of pure indexicals. As far as the indexical I is concerned, I maintain that we must distinguish between the material producer of the utterance (...) containing I and the “intended agent of the context” - i.e. the individual designated by the material producer as the responsible for the utterance. (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)

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)

Eating disorders are mental illnesses that can have a significant and persistent physical impact, especially for those who are not treated early in their disease trajectory. Although many persons w...

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.

Analyzes Aristotle's natural philosophy and metaphysics from a feminist, deconstructive, psychoanalytic perspective, showing that Aristotelian teleology relies on the disparagement of chance and the feminine simultaneously and finding resources therein for contemporary feminist thought.

At a time of pedagogical exhaustion, this article wants to imagine ways to redeem education, to spare education from its unaccomplished promises, reinvent and renew its vows, and make it somehow work towards possible futures. But how can this be done when there is no longer the old inherited faith in a direction of history with an end, no ‘telos’ nor faith that educational institutions will inevitably move societies forwards? Is there any ‘after’ if the arrow of history points in (...) no direction? What can we collectively expect from education if we have no assurance that schooling can lead to anything better than what we are now, or that caring for truth will make people freer? In place of the modernist idea of progress, the alternative narrative that is being offered to school systems and teachers is what I will describe as the ‘innovation paradigm’. Within this framework what we are, what we have, and what is in place are presented as declining, inadequate, and unsatisfactory. This narrative has become so powerful that from a ‘pedagogical popular culture’ perspective it has turned into the mainstream way of thinking about our educational institutions, practices, and hopes. Would it not, however, be more pedagogically productive to speak of ‘variation’ instead of ‘innovation’? Might this be the potential path for redeeming education after progress? [Editorial note: this paper forms part of the suite of papers entitled ‘Education After Progress’.]. (shrink)

The purpose of this study is to analyse the structure of written argumentative texts produced by pupils in grades 3, 5, 7 and 11 in relation to three different tasks: Group A — subjects are assigned a topic question consisting of a single statement (open question); Group B — subjects are given a topic question consisting of both a statement and its opposite (opposite opinions); Group C — subjects are given an initial and a final sentence of a text, which (...) they have to complete, and which refers to opposite opinions (oriented task). Six different types of text organization were evidenced on the basis of the argumentative moves presented in the texts, the linguistic indexes used to express the relationships between the moves, the presence or absence of counter-arguments and the type of argumentation or reasoning used. The organization of the texts range from a simple affirmation of a position (repitition of the proposition or its opposition without any support) to a use of data or reasons to support a position, to others still in which two positions are presented in the body of a unitary structure, developed ‘in parallel’ and interconnected regularly. Our analysis found a well-defined tendency corresponding to the age levels in the types of texts produced by the subjects. The texts produced by the younger group, the pupils in elementary school, contained a fairly simple structural organization, characterized by very few argumentations or a lack of explicitness of the essential moves and a juxtaposing of arguments. The older subjects, in particular those attending secondary school, were able to produce texts which were more complex with regard to the presence and the organization of the argumentative moves, and more coherent and cohesive with respect to their articulation of opinions and use of adequate linguistic indices to analyze t topic. As regards the different types of tasks, when the subjects were presented explicitly with two opposite opinions (though in different terms), they developed both positions in their responses, contrary to the situation in which they produced one position when only one of two opinions was presented. (shrink)

Greco-Roman antiquity is often presumed to provide the very paradigm of Western humanism. This paradigm has been increasingly thrown into question by new theoretical currents such as posthumanism and the "new materialisms", which point toward entities, forces, and systems that pass through andbeyond the human and which dislodge it from its primacy as the measure of things. Antiquities beyond Humanism seeks to explode this presumed dichotomy between the ancient tradition and the twenty-first century "turn": fourteen original essays explore the myriad (...) ways in which Greek and Roman philosophy and literature can be understood as foregrounding the non-human rather thansimply reflecting the ideals of classical humanism. Greek philosophy is filled with metaphysical explanations of the cosmos grounded in observations of the natural world. Other areas of ancient humanistic inquiry - ethics, poetry, political theory, medicine, rhetoric - extend into the realms ofplant and animal life, even stone life, continually throwing into question the ontological status of living and non-living beings. By casting the non-human or more-than-human in a new light in relation to contemporary questions of gender, the environment, and networks of communication, the volumedemonstrates that encounters with ancient texts, experienced as both familiar and strange, can help forge new understandings of life, whether understood as zoological, physical, psychical, ethical, juridical, political, divine, or cosmic. (shrink)

In 1697, the Presbyterian, William Bates, presented an address, on behalf of some dissenting ministers, to William of Orange. In this, he called for measures against the Socinians and Deists, and, in particular, for the banning of the publication of Socinian works. Bates' address was published in JOHN HOWE, Sermon Preech'd on the Day of Thanksgiving (1698). On 17th February, 1698, the House of Commons presented an address to the King, We do further, in all humility, beseech Your Majesty, that (...) Your Majesty would give such effectual order, as to Your Royal Wisdom shall seem fit, for the suppressing all pernicious books and pamphlets, which contain in them impious doctrines against the Holy Trinity, and other fundamental articles of our Faith, tending to the subversion of the Christian Religion; and that the authors and publishers thereof may be discounted and punished.The statute 9 and 19 William III, c. 32, An Act for the more effectual suppressing of Blasphemy and Profaneness, accepted these requests. It prohibited the writing, publishing and teaching of doctrines that were contrary to the Trinity, Christian truth or the divine authority of the Old and the New Testaments.It should be noted that the Toleration Act of 1689 does not extend tolerance to, amongst others, those who deny the dogma of the Trinity. It was not until 1813 that the Unitarians were free to practise their cult. The Trinity Act (An Act to relieve persons who impugn the Doctrine of the Holy Trinity from certain Penalties. 53 Geo. III, c. 160) of that year exempted the Unitarians from the penalties laid down by the Toleration Act and by the Blasphemy Act quoted above. (shrink)

Während Adorno bisher kaum in den zeitgenössischen Debatten des affective turn rezipiert wird, sucht der vorliegende Aufsatz eine bisher weitestgehend vernachlässigte affekttheoretische Lektüre von Adornos Schriften zu entwickeln. Mit Adornos Formulierung ‚unter dem und wider den Bann des Einheitsprinzips‘, die er in der Negativen Dialektik von 1966 entwickelt hat, soll eine bis heute relativ vernachlässigte Doppelperspektive auf Adornos Verständnis von Affekten herausgearbeitet werden: Zum einen wird die affektive Bereitschaft der Subjekte gezeigt, sich mit der Macht der „verwalteten Welt“ zu identifizieren (...) und sich also an sie zu binden. Diese Perspektive wird in dem Aufsatz anhand der Formulierung ‚unter dem Bann des Einheitsprinzips‘ skizziert. Zum anderen wird ebenso die affektive Bereitschaft der Subjekte herausgearbeitet, durch die Subjekte sich auch von ihren Bindungen an die Mächte der „verwalteten Welt“ desidentifizieren und tiefere Klarheit über den Zustand ihres Weltbezugs und ihrer eigenen Situation gewinnen können. Diese Sicht wird durch die Formulierung ‚wider den Bann des Einheitsprinzips‘ erläutert. (shrink)

Com base no Teeteto de Platão, busca-se compreender a dimensão do termo ánthropos na famosa sentença de Protágoras. Segundo a crítica platônica, Protágoras parece entender corpo e alma como diferentes tipos de percipientes: os órgãos sensoriais corporais percebem a aparência imediata de algo que provoca a sensibilidade; a alma, por sua vez, ‘percebe’ por ter julgamentos admitidos pela aprendizagem e experiência. O homem-medida protagórico, do tema da realidade sensível, conduz-nos à formulação do problema em termos de julgamento e opinião, e (...) a medida, que inicialmente é atribuída a cada indivíduo, para além de cada ser humano, é reputada a cada cidade. (shrink)

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)

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)

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)

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, 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.

In The Explanatory Dispensability of Idealizations, Sam Baron suggests a possible strategy enabling the indispensability argument to break the symmetry between mathematical claims and idealization assumptions in scientific models. Baron’s distinction between mathematical and non-mathematical idealization, I claim, is in need of a more compelling criterion, because in scientific models idealization assumptions are expressed through mathematical claims. In this paper I argue that this mutual dependence of idealization and mathematics cannot be read in terms of symmetry and that Baron’s non-causal (...) notion of mathematical difference-making is not effective in justifying any symmetry-breaking between mathematics and idealization. The function of making a difference that Baron attributes to mathematics cannot be referred to physical facts, but to the features of quantities, such as step lengths or time intervals taken into account in the models. It appears, indeed, that it does not follow from Baron’s argument that idealizations do not help to carry the explanatory load at least for two reasons: mathematics is not independent of idealizations in modelling and idealizations help mathematics to carry the explanatory load of a model in different degrees. (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)

In conceptual debates involving the quantum gravity community, the literature discusses the so-called “emergence of space–time”. However, which interpretation of quantum mechanics (QM) could be coherent with such claim? We show that a modification of the Copenhagen Interpretation of QM is compatible with the claim that space–time is emergent for the macroscopic world of measurements. In other words, pure quantum states do not admit space–time properties until we measure them. We call this approach “Achronotopic” (ACT) Interpretation of QM, which yields (...) a simple and natural interpretation of the most puzzling aspects of QM, such as particle-wave duality, wave function collapse, entanglement, and quantum superposition. Our interpretation yields the same results in all measurements as the Copenhagen Interpretation, but provides clues toward the sub-Planckian physics. In particular, it suggests the non-existence of quantum gravity in the conventional sense understood as the quantization of a classical theory. (shrink)

We consider the classical concept of time of permanence and observe that its quantum equivalent is described by a bona fide self-adjoint operator. Its interpretation, by means of the spectral theorem, reveals that we have to abandon not only the idea that quantum entities would be characterizable in terms of spatial trajectories but, more generally, that they would possess the very attribute of spatiality. Consequently, a permanence time shouldn’t be interpreted as a “time” in quantum mechanics, but as a measure (...) of the total availability of a quantum entity in participating to a process of creation of a spatial localization. (shrink)

The objectives of the Center Leo Apostel for Interdisciplinary Studies were summarized by his creator as: interdisciplinarity, construction of world views and broad dissemination of scientific knowledge. In compliance with the third of these objectives, we provide a rigorous but accessible popular science version of a research article published by Aerts and Sassoli de Bianchi, where an extended version of the quantum formalism was proposed as a possible solution to the measurement problem. We hope that through articles of this (...) kind, written with an educational spirit and addressed to both academic and nonacademic readers, the interdisciplinary dialogue about foundational issues will be stimulated and the gap between the different sciences reduced. (shrink)

In this article I reflect on my experiences of using Facebook as a recruitment tool. Although there were many benefits associated with using this method of recruitment, there were also several unanticipated ethical dilemmas that arose. This article reflects on these dilemmas, locating them within some broader concerns around online research and privacy, and considers some potential avenues for avoiding similar issues in future research. It became apparent that these ethical issues were heightened for me as a doctoral researcher in (...) a process of identity transition. I consider how this state of ‘shifting’ identity heightened my experience of these ethical tensions, and brought to the fore questions around online identity management and ways of ‘doing’ identity online. (shrink)

This paper provides an overview of semiotic studies about advertising, beginning with the early work done in the 1960s. Advertising communication plays a particular role in semiotic studies in the second half of the twentieth century. Pioneering studies of advertising messages, in particular those of Roland Barthes and Umberto Eco, date to the 1960s and were carried out for the most part using the tools of classical rhetoric. Following a period in which semiotics displayed a relative lack of interest in (...) advertisements, in the 1980s advertising texts were used as examples in applied narratological analysis by Jean-Marie Floch and others. This occurred at the same time as the so-called “passion turn of semiotics,” which stressed that the passions and emotions present in texts are crucial issues in textual semiotics, and it also seemed to offer fresh perspectives for the analysis of advertising communication. The passion turn took account of the evolution of advertising itself, since modern advertising is more and more interested in conveying passions and emotions. The effectiveness of an advert tends to be closely bound up with the presentation of sensations associated with a given product or brand. Recently, semioticians have begun to study more general features of advertising and marketing discourse. (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 aim of this paper is to evaluate which context determines the illocutionary force of written or recorded utterances—those involved in written texts, films and images, conceived as recordings that can be seen or heard in different occasions. More precisely, my paper deals with the “metaphysical” or constitutive role of context—as opposed to its epistemic or evidential role: my goal is to determine which context is semantically relevant in order to fix the illocutionary force of a speech act, as distinct (...) from the information the addressee uses to ascertain the semantically relevant context. In particular I will try to assess two different perspectives on this problem, a Conventionalist Perspective and an Intentionalist Perspective. Drawing on the literature on indexicals in written texts and recorded messages, I will argue in favor of the Intentionalist Perspective: the relevant context is the one intended by the speaker. Bringing intentions into the picture, however, requires qualification; in particular, I will distinguish my Weak Intentionalist proposal from a Strong Intentionalist one. I will show that the Weak Intentionalist Perspective is flexible enough to deal with cases of delayed communication, but not so unrestricted as to yield counter-intuitive consequences. (shrink)

Giving money to others feels good. In the past years, this claim has received strong empirical support from psychology and neuroscience. It is now standard to use the label ‘warm glow feelings’ to refer to the pleasure people take from giving, and many explanations of apparently altruistic behavior appeal to these internal rewards. But what exactly are warm glow feelings? Why do people experience them? In order to further our understanding of the phenomenon, we ran two studies: a recall task (...) in which participants were asked to remember a donation they made, and a donation task in which participants were given the opportunity to make a donation before reporting their affective states. In both studies, correlational and experimental evidence converge towards the conclusion that, if the nature of the warm glow is straightforward, its source is multifaceted. Regarding the nature of ‘warm glow’, the pleasure people took in giving was mainly predicted by one particular positive emotion (‘joyful feelings’) and was indeed described by participants as a ‘warm’ sensation. Regarding the underlying psychological mechanisms, ‘warm glow’ feelings were elicited both by positive appraisals regarding the donor’s moral character and positive appraisals regarding the actual impact of the donor’s donation on the welfare of others. We discuss the implications of these findings for the role of positive emotions in explaining why people give. (shrink)