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)

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.

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.

Acts that are considered undesirable standardly violate our expectations. In contrast, acts that count as morally desirable can either meet our expectations or exceed them. The zone in which an act can be morally desirable yet not exceed our expectations is what we call the zone of moral indifference, and it has so far been neglected. In this paper, we show that people can use positive terms in a deflated manner to refer to actions in the zone of moral indifference, (...) whereas negative terms cannot be so interpreted. (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 Introduction to "Non-Derogatory Uses of Slurs", special issue of Grazer Philosophische Studien.

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)

ABSTRACT A widespread thesis in contemporary philosophy of language is that certain speech constitutes, rather than merely causes, harm. McGowan develops a prescriptive account of harm constitution, according to which harm-constituting speech enacts norms that prescribe harm. Ordinary verbal bigotry, she claims, is harmful in this sense. We submit that the norms enacted by ordinary racist (or otherwise bigoted) utterances are not prescriptive. In our view, ordinary verbal bigotry enacts ‘non-neutrally’ permissive norms rendering harmful behaviours locally permitted—and indeed preferred over (...) non-harmful options. We conclude by arguing that, although ordinary verbal bigotry enacts non-prescriptive norms, it can still constitute harm. (shrink)

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)

In this paper we discuss two issues addressed by Stanley in How Propaganda Works: the status of slurs (Section 1) and the notion of positive propaganda (Section 2). In particular, in Section 1 we argue contra Stanley that code words like ‘welfare’ are crucially different from slurs in that the association between the lexical item and an additional social meaning is not as systematic as it is for slurs. In this sense, slurs bring about a special kind of propagandistic effect, (...) even if it typically concerns informal contexts rather than public debates. In Section 2, we consider positive propaganda and its relation to emotional effects. For Stanley, positive propaganda relies on the production of emotional effects, feature which risks to erode rational debates even if there is a good purpose behind. Instead, we argue that positive propaganda can work with no appeal to emotions. To this end, we focus on the use of ‘she’ as the default personal pronoun in academic writing and suggest that this measure can count as positive propaganda which rather than eroding rational debates by relying on emotional effects, closely resembles affirmative action aimed at counterbalance a pre-existing form of injustice and inequality. (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.

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)

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)

In this paper we distinguish two dimensions in which the reclamation of slurs can succeed (or fail). By reclamation we refer to the linguistic practice whereby certain speakers employ slurs in order to express pride, foster camaraderie, manifest solidarity, subvert extant structures of discrimination, and so on. Reclamation can succeed, we propose, in at least two senses: in terms of felicity, insofar as a certain use of a slur counts as a move within a reclamatory practice; and in terms of (...) accomplishment, insofar as it achieves the goals typically associated with reclamation. In the first part, we present the distinction between felicity and accomplishment. In the second, we show that it provides a deeper understanding of the worries and concerns to which reclamation may give rise within and outside the academic debate. This distinction thus constitutes a valuable addition to the theoretical toolkit for analyzing the phenomenon of reclamation. (shrink)

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.

The past 20 years witnessed a growing interest in philosophy of language and linguistics for expressives and, in particular, for slurs – terms that target people and groups on accounts of their belonging to a certain category (typically having to do with ethnic origins, gender, sexual orientation, religion, and so on). This lively debate often relies on empirical claims – “these terms are not derogatory in this context”, “their use affects the audience’s beliefs and attitudes in this and that way”, (...) “reporting a slur backfires”, and so on and so forth. Some scholars have tried to back up their claims with existing empirical data from psychology and psycholinguistics, while a few others went and investigated their questions on experimental grounds. In this chapter, I offer an overview of this experimental literature on slurs and derogatory labels, and I illustrate an array of ways in which the philosophical issues that slurs raise to the proverbial armchair benefit from empirical studies in psychology, psycholinguistics, and experimental philosophy. (shrink)

This paper offers a brief survey of the philosophical literature on assertion, presenting each contribution to the RIFL special issue "Assertion and its social significance" within the context of the contemporary debate in which it intervenes. The discussion is organised into three thematic sections. The first one concerns the nature of assertion and its relation with assertoric commitment – the distinctive responsibility that the speaker undertakes in virtue of making a statement. The second section considers the epistemic significance of assertion, (...) exploring the role that assertion plays in the transmission of knowledge, the epistemic constraints that regulate it, and its relation with truth. The third section deals with communicative content that goes beyond what is literally asserted: implicatures, metaphors and expressive meaning. (shrink)

In this paper I offer a brief introduction about what derogatory epithets are, how we use them and why they should ever interest philosophers of language and lin-guists; I will present three kinds of possible analyses of slurs, focusing on what kind of intui-tions they account for and what kind of problems they encounter. In the last session, I sketch the theory I defend: an analysis of slurs’ derogatory content in terms of presuppositions. Be-sides presenting the explanatory advantages of such (...) approach, I briefly present the challenges this strategy faces and propose possible solutions to the main objections. (shrink)

In this paper, we identify and examine an overlooked strategy to counter bigoted speech on the spot. Such a strategy we call ‘bending’. To ‘bend’, in our sense, is to deliberately give a distorted response to a speaker’s harmful move – precisely, an ameliorative response, which may turn that move into a different, less harmful, contribution. To substantiate our proposal, we distinguish two ideas of uptake – interpretation and response – and argue for the general claim that a distorted response (...) on the hearer’s part may end up transforming a speaker’s contribution. Patterns of distortion have been analyzed in the literature as unjustly undermining speakers’ agency and exacerbating oppression. Our analysis shows that, under certain circumstances, distortion can be employed to derail bigoted speech and thus serve the purposes of social justice. We close by discussing the virtues and limits of bending vis-à-vis a different, much-discussed, counterspeech strategy, i.e. ‘blocking’ (Langton 2018). (shrink)

In this short piece belonging to a book symposium on my book How Propaganda Works (Oxford University Press, 2015), I reply to the objections, comments and suggestions provided by the contributors: Bianca Cepollaro and Giuliano Torrengo, Olúfémi O. Táíwò, and Maria Cristina Amoretti. I show how some of the objections can be accommodated by the framework adopted in the book, but also how various comments and suggestions have contributed to the development, in future work, of several threads pertaining (...) to the general view put forward in How Propaganda Works. (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)

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)

Social responsibility is typically examined at the firm level, yet there are instances in which consumers’ social responsibility perceptions of the firm’s product brands differ from social responsibility perceptions with regard to the firm [i.e., corporate social responsibility ]. This article conceptualizes brand social responsibility and delineates it from CSR. Following the development of a BSR scale, this research demonstrates variations in consumers’ social responsibility perceptions across product brands even if they are owned by the same corporation and compete in (...) the same product category. BSR is distinct from CSR, and better predicts consumers’ responses to product brands compared to corporate level measures. Consistent with the conceptual distinction, this research demonstrates the unique contribution of BSR and CSR in predicting product brand and corporate outcomes, respectively. From a theoretical viewpoint, this research is one of the few to examine differences between product brand and CSR. From a managerial viewpoint, the consideration of social responsibility at the product brand level facilitates the assessment of social responsibility perceptions across brands in brand portfolios managed under a mixed-branding or house-of-brands strategy. (shrink)

This article interlaces the story ‘Comfort’ by Alice Munro with Hannah Arendt’s understanding of education as intergenerational passing on. Its principal aim is not to criticise Arendt or the fictional character of Lewis but to work with them towards a richer and more complex understanding of what can go wrong in education in general and teaching in particular. For this purpose, the article does not start from a theoretical framework but from the concrete aesthetic artifact – the story – itself. (...) The departing question is: What can we learn from the literary description for our theoretical understanding of the intergenerational in educational relations? (shrink)

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

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)

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)

In this paper I propose a novel interpretation of Kant’s proof of the existence of the outer world in the Refutation of Idealism. According to this interpretation, Kant’s proof does not provide a regressive explanation of our capacity to determine the temporal order of our experiences. Rather, it expresses a counterfactual reflection on what it takes for something to be actual in contrast to being merely imagined. On the ground of this reflection, Kant argues against the Cartesian sceptic that, even (...) if all our representations of empirical objects other than ourselves failed to be veridical, we would still know a priori that in every situation in which we, as thinking things, actually exist, something outside us in space must necessarily exist. (shrink)

Health innovation is mainly envisioned in direct connection to medical research institutions or pharmaceutical and technology companies. Yet, these types of innovation often do not meet the needs and expectations of individuals affected by health conditions. With the emergence of digital health technologies and social media, we can observe a shift, which involves people living with illness modifying and improving medical and health devices outside of the formal research and development sector, figuring both as users and innovators. This patient‐led innovation (...) has been celebrated in innovation studies and economics as a “bottom‐up” type of innovation. In this article, we take a closer look at open‐source patient‐led innovation in the context of type 1 diabetes care. In our inquiry, we pay particular attention to the social and ethical dimensions of this innovation, building on empirical material. Upon exploring the notion of patient‐led innovation and its socio‐political context through the lens of intersectional and global health justice, we argue that a proactive strategy is needed to ensure that open‐source patient‐led innovation will be more globally accessible, center the health needs of the most underserved populations, as well as facilitate equitable and just health benefits. To support this aim, we provide a range of examples of different initiatives addressing the persistent inequalities that have so far inhibited patient‐led innovation from more fully materializing its innovative potential. (shrink)

L’auteur s’interroge sur la transmission du traumatisme chez les descendants des survivants de génocide. Il insiste sur le gel des affects, l’adhésivité dans la concrétude à des traces du passé. Des pseudo-identifications agies peuvent être comprises grâce au travail dans le contre-transfert.

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)

It is no secret that various versions of logical empiricism argued for the importance of unified science. Carnap was a proponent of unity of science views, although he expressed this in different idioms at different times. In the Aufbau (1928) he spoke of the unity of the object domain secured through definability in the constitutional system, in his physicalist period he argued that a physicalist language could serve as the universal language of science, and in his mature philosophical work he (...) investigated a variety of meanings that might be attached to reductionist projects for unifying various scientific fields. Our essay focuses less on Carnap’s several proposals than on a prior interpretive question: what was philosophically at stake for Carnap in the question of the unity of science? We begin with some suggestions in Carnap’s 1963 Intellectual Autobiography, where he calls unity of science “one of the main tenets of our general philosophical conception” and one in which Neurath’s emphasis on the “interdependence of all decisions … made a strong impression” on him. We follow Carnap in the suggestion that an account of his approach to unity of science does not take us into questions of unity of nature but rather of the scientific attitude and the unity of reason. (shrink)

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)