About this topic
Summary Feminist philosophy of language is characterized by attention to the social context of language use. This generally takes two forms. First, feminist philosophers have critiqued language itself, arguing that that various human languages masquerade as gender neutral while in fact encoding a world view on which maleness is the norm and women are either invisible or represented as the other. Second, they have critiqued analytic philosophy of language as itself displaying a male bias, and in particular as being driven by an overly individualistic picture of language use. This is not to say that feminist philosophers of language are not interested in meaning, reference, and truth. Rather, many would argue that these central topics in mainstream analytic philosophy of language cannot be properly investigated without attention to the social context in which language operates. 
Key works Language itself comes under fire in Moulton 1981 and Mercier 1995, which establish that terms like 'he' and 'man' do not have gender-neutral meanings and argue that treating them as gender-neutral, like use of gender-specific profession terms such as 'seamstress' or 'lady doctor' contribute to a general sense that maleness is the norm. Frye 1983 notes that the required sex-marking found in English and many other languages serves to make sex relevant where it need not be. Penelope 1990 and Spender 1985 go further, maintaining that the problem is not a particular collection of words, arguing instead that English quite generally encodes a male worldview, subordinates and renders invisible women, and takes males as the norm. Traditional analytic philosophy of language is charged with excessive individualism by Hintikka & Hintikka 2003 and Hornsby 2000, and Nye 1990 argues that philosophers of language have to their detriment not paid sufficient attention to either the political dimensions of language use or to actual failures of communication, preferring to concentrate on purely abstract problems of radical translation or reference across different worlds. Traditional speech act theory however has been put to use by a number of feminists: Langton & Hornsby 1998 use it to explicate Catherine MacKinnon's claim that pornography silences and subordinates women; Kukla 2014 develops a speech-act theoretic concept of discursive injustice.
Introductions Hornsby 2000 Saul 2008 
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  1. Who This Woman Is? Part III ही स्त्री कोण ? भाग तिसरा.Shriniwas Hemade श्रीनिवास हेमाडे - June-July 2012 - Aajacha Sudharak आजचा सुधारक (05):95-105.
    In Search of Womanhood by way of etymology.
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  2. Biased Evaluative Descriptions.Sara Bernstein - forthcoming - Journal of the American Philosophical Association:1-18.
    This paper identifies a type of linguistic phenomenon new to feminist philosophy of language: biased evaluative descriptions. Biased evaluative descriptions (BEDs) are descriptions whose well-intended positive surface meanings are inflected with implicitly biased content. Biased evaluative descriptions are characterized by three main features: (i) they have roots in implicit bias or benevolent sexism, (ii) their application is counterfactually unstable across dominant and subordinate social groups, and (iii) they encode stereotypes. After giving several different kinds of examples of biased evaluative descriptions, (...)
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  3. Conversation's Seedy Underbelly. [REVIEW]Sam Berstler - forthcoming - Journal of Moral Philosophy.
    I provide an opinionated discussion of two recent volumes on the structure, ethics, and politics of bad conversations. In Just Words (2019), Mary Kate McGowan argues that despite our best intentions, we sometimes inadvertently bring oppressive norms to bear on our interactions. In Grandstanding (2020), Justin Tosi and Brandon Warmke argue that the human desire to cut a good moral figure before others systematically distorts moral discourse. Though their authors have different political outlooks, both books converge on a similar theme: (...)
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  4. Epistemic Courage.Jonathan Ichikawa - forthcoming - Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    Epistemic Courage is a timely and thought-provoking exploration of the ethics of belief. Drawing on a wide range of examples, from conspiracy theories to medical misinformation, Ichikawa shows why epistemology is no mere academic abstraction - the question of what to believe couldn't be more urgent. And, he argues, many mainstream ideas about what to believe - those emphasizing the importance of ensuring that one doesn't believe with insufficient evidence - are incomplete and distorting in important and harmful ways. A (...)
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  5. Linguistic Imposters.Denis Kazankov & Edison Yi - forthcoming - The Philosophical Quarterly.
    There is a widespread phenomenon that we call linguistic imposters. Linguistic imposters are systematic misuses of expressions that misusers mistake with their conventional usages because of misunderstanding their meaning. Our paper aims to provide an initial framework for theorizing about linguistic imposters that will lay the foundation for future philosophical research about them. We focus on the misuses of the expressions “grooming” and “CRT” as our central examples of linguistic imposters. We show that linguistic imposters present a distinctive phenomenon by (...)
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  6. Pronouns and Gender.Cameron Domenico Kirk-Giannini & Michael Glanzberg - forthcoming - In Luvell Anderson & Ernie LePore (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Applied Philosophy of Language. Oxford University Press.
    This chapter introduces readers to the empirical questions at issue in debates over gendered pronouns and assesses the plausibility of various possible answers to these questions. It has two parts. The first is a general introduction to the linguistics and psychology of grammatical gender. The second focuses on the meanings of gendered pronouns in English. It begins with a discussion of some methodological limitations of empirical approaches to the topic and the normative implications of those limitations. It then argues against (...)
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  7. How Does Pornography Change Desires? A Pragmatic Account.Junhyo Lee & Eleonore Neufeld - forthcoming - The Philosophical Quarterly.
    Rae Langton and Caroline West famously argued that pornography operates like a language game, in that it introduces certain views about women into the common ground via presupposition accommodation. While this pragmatic model explains how pornography has the potential to change its viewers’ beliefs, it leaves open how pornography changes people’s desires. Our aim in this paper is to show how Langton and West’s discourse theoretic account of pornography can be refined to close this lacuna. Using tools from recent developments (...)
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  8. Ideology and Intersectionality.Matthew McKeever - forthcoming - In Ernie Lepore & Luvell Anderson (eds.), Oxford Handbook Of Applied Philosophy of Language. Oxford: OUP.
    Analytic philosophers increasingly make reference to the concept of ideology to think about how representational structures can lead to oppression, and argue that the distinctively pernicious functioning of things like propaganda and generic generalizations need to be explained in terms of ideology. The aim of this paper is two-fold. First, it aims to serve as an introduction to (some of) the best contemporary work on ideology in the analytic tradition. Second, it proposes a novel challenge for any such theory. The (...)
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  9. Neopragmatist Inferentialism and the Meaning of Derogatory Terms – A Defence.Deborah Mühlebach - forthcoming - Dialectica.
    Inferentialism seems to be an unpopular theory where derogatory terms are concerned. Contrary to most theorists in the debate on the meaning of derogatory terms, I think that inferentialism constitutes a promising theory to account for a broad range of aspects of derogatory language use. In order to make good on that promise, however, inferentialism must overcome four main objections that are usually raised against Michael Dummett's and Robert Brandom's inferentialist explanations of derogatory terms. This paper aims at debunking these (...)
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  10. Discursive Injustice and the Speech of Indigenous Communities.Leo Townsend - forthcoming - In Leo Townsend, Preston Stovall & Hans Bernhard Schmid (eds.), The Social Institution of Discursive Norms. New York: pp. 248-263.
    Recent feminist philosophy of language has highlighted the ways that the speech of women can be unjustly impeded, because of the way their gender affects the uptake their speech receives. In this chapter, I explore how similar processes can undermine the speech of a different sort of speaker: Indigenous communities. This involves focusing on Indigeneity rather than gender as the salient social identity, and looking at the ways that group speech, rather than only individual speech, can be unjustly impeded. To (...)
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  11. Order-Based Salience Patterns in Language: What They Are and Why They Matter.Ella Whiteley - forthcoming - Ergo an Open Access Journal of Philosophy.
    Whenever we communicate, we inevitably have to say one thing before another. This means introducing particularly subtle patterns of salience into our language. In this paper, I introduce ‘order-based salience patterns’, referring to the ordering of syntactic contents where that ordering, pretheoretically, does not appear to be of consequence. For instance, if one is to describe a colourful scarf, it wouldn’t seem to matter if one were to say it is ‘orange and blue’ or ‘blue and orange’. Despite their apparent (...)
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  12. Regulating Speech: Harm, Norms, and Discrimination.Daniel Wodak - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    Mary Kate McGowan’s Just Words offers an interesting account of exercitives. On McGowan’s view, one of the things we do with words is change what’s permitted, and we do this ubiquitously, without any special authority or specific intention. McGowan’s account of exercitives is meant to identify a mechanism by which ordinary speech is harmful, and which justifies the regulation of such speech. It is here that I part ways. I make three main arguments. First, McGowan’s focus on harm is misguided; (...)
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  13. Whose Uptake Matters? Sexual Refusal and the Ethics of Uptake.Rebecca E. Harrison & Kai Tanter - 2024 - Philosophical Quarterly.
    What role does audience uptake play in determining whether a speaker refuses or consents to sex? Proponents of constitution theories of uptake argue that which speech act someone performs is largely determined by their addressee’s uptake. However, this appears to entail a troubling result: a speaker might be made to perform a speech act of sexual consent against her will. In response, we develop a social constitution theory of uptake. We argue that addressee uptake can constitute a speaker’s utterance of (...)
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  14. Does Pornography Presuppose Rape Myths?Richard Kimberly Heck - 2024 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 105 (1):50-74.
    Rae Langton and Caroline West argue that pornography silences women by presupposing misogynistic attitudes, such as that women enjoy being raped. More precisely, they claim that a somewhat infamous pictorial, ‘Dirty Pool’, makes such presuppositions, and that it is typical in this respect. I argue for four claims. (1) There are empirical reasons to doubt that women are silenced in the way that Langton and West claim they are. (2) There is no evidence that very much pornography makes the sorts (...)
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  15. An Epistemic Injustice Critique of Austin’s Ordinary Language Epistemology.Savannah Pearlman - 2024 - Hypatia:1-21.
    J.L. Austin argues that ordinary language should be used to identify when it is appropriate or inappropriate to make, accept, or reject knowledge claims. I criticize Austin’s account: In our ordinary life, we often accept justifications rooted in racism, sexism, ableism, and classism as reasons to dismiss knowledge claims or challenges, despite the fact such reasons are not good reasons. Austin’s Ordinary Language Epistemology (OLE) classifies the discounting of knowledge claims in classic cases of epistemic injustice as legitimate ordinary maneuvers. (...)
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  16. Fanaticism in the manosphere.Mark Alfano & Paul-Mikhail Podosky - 2023 - In Paul Katsafanas (ed.), Fanaticism and the History of Philosophy. London: Rewriting the History of Philosophy.
    This chapter explores a case study in contemporary fanaticism. We adopt Katsafanas’s conceptualization of fanaticism to make possible an in-depth discussion of and evaluation of a diffuse but important social movement — the anglophone manosphere. According to Katsafanas, fanatics are fruitfully understood as members of a group that adopts sacred values which they hold unconditionally to preserve their own psychic unity, and who feel that those values are threatened by those who do not accept them. The manosphere includes several social (...)
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  17. Presupposition and Propaganda: A Socially Extended Analysis.Michael Randall Barnes - 2023 - In Laura Caponetto & Paolo Labinaz (eds.), Sbisà on Speech as Action. Palgrave-Macmillan. pp. 275-298.
    Drawing on work from Marina Sbisà’s “Ideology and the Persuasive Use of Presupposition” (1999), Rae Langton has developed a powerful account of the subtle mechanisms through which hate speech and propaganda spread. However, this model has a serious limitation: it focuses too strongly on individual speech acts isolated from their wider context, rendering its applicability to a broader range of cases suspect. In this chapter, I consider the limits of presupposition accommodation to clarify the audience’s role in helping hate speakers, (...)
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  18. Statistics as Figleaves.Felix Bräuer - 2023 - Topoi 42 (2):433-443.
    Recently, Jennifer Saul (“Racial Figleaves, the Shifting Boundaries of the Permissible, and the Rise of Donald Trump”, 2017; “Racist and Sexist Figleaves”, 2021) has explored the use of what she calls “figleaves” in the discourse on race and gender. Following Saul, a figleaf is an utterance that, for some portion of the audience, blocks the conclusion that some other utterance, R, or the person who uttered R is racist or sexist. Such racial and gender figleaves are pernicious, says Saul, because, (...)
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  19. Some Reflections on Gaslighting and Language Games.Jeff Engelhardt - 2023 - Feminist Philosophy Quarterly 9 (3).
    This paper proposes that, in many cases, conversational norms permit gaslighting when socially subordinate speakers report systemic injustice. Section 1 introduces gaslighting and the kinds of cases on which I focus—namely, cases in which multiple people gaslight. I give examples and statistics to suggest that these cases are common in response to reports of race- or gender-based injustice; and I appeal to scholarship on epistemologies of ignorance to suggest that this kind of gaslighting is common because it is systematically produced (...)
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  20. Questioning Real Gender.Chen Hsiang-Yun - 2023 - Soochow Journal of Philosophical Studies 47:127-145.
    What is gender and on what should gender classification be based? Dembroff (2018) has recently claimed that, for reasons of social justice, gender classification should not track extant gender kinds. They further argue for ontological pluralism—the existence of many gender kinds, and recommend that we combat oppression by imitating the gender kinds and classification practices in non-oppressive communities. Contra Dembroff, I argue that the analysis is subject to a number of internal problems, including a misguided self-characterization and a tension between (...)
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  21. 'Extremely Racist' and 'Incredibly Sexist': An Empirical Response to the Charge of Conceptual Inflation.Shen-yi Liao & Nat Hansen - 2023 - Journal of the American Philosophical Association 9 (1):72-94.
    Critics across the political spectrum have worried that ordinary uses of words like 'racist', 'sexist', and 'homophobic' are becoming conceptually inflated, meaning that these expressions are getting used so widely that they lose their nuance and, thereby, their moral force. However, the charge of conceptual inflation, as well as responses to it, are standardly made without any systematic investigation of how 'racist' and other expressions condemning oppression are actually used in ordinary language. Once we examine large linguistic corpora to see (...)
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  22. Perlocutionary Silencing: A Linguistic Harm That Prevents Discursive Influence.David C. Spewak Jr - 2023 - Hypatia 38 (1):86-104.
    Various philosophers discuss perlocutionary silencing, but none defend an account of perlocutionary silencing. This gap may exist because perlocutionary success depends on extralinguistic effects, whereas silencing interrupts speech, leaving theorists to rely on extemporary accounts when they discuss perlocutionary silencing. Consequently, scholars assume perlocutionary silencing occurs but neglect to explain how perlocutionary silencing harms speakers as speakers. In relation to that shortcoming, I defend a novel account of perlocutionary silencing. I argue that speakers experience perlocutionary silencing when they are illegitimately (...)
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  23. How Statues Speak.David Friedell & Shen-yi Liao - 2022 - The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 80 (4):444-452.
    We apply a familiar distinction from philosophy of language to a class of material artifacts that are sometimes said to “speak”: statues. By distinguishing how statues speak at the locutionary level versus at the illocutionary level, or what they say versus what they do, we obtain the resource for addressing two topics. First, we can explain what makes statues distinct from street art. Second, we can explain why it is mistaken to criticize—or to defend—the continuing presence of statues based only (...)
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  24. Tackling Verbal Derogation: Linguistic Meaning, Social Meaning and Constructive Contestation.Deborah Mühlebach - 2022 - In David Bordonaba Plou, Víctor Fernández Castro & José Ramón Torices (eds.), The Political Turn in Analytic Philosophy: Reflections on Social Injustice and Oppression. Boston: De Gruyter. pp. 173-198.
    Our everyday practices are meaningful in several ways. In addition to the linguistic meanings of our terms and sentences, we attach social meanings to actions and statuses. Philosophy of language and public debates often focus on contesting morally and politically pernicious linguistic practices. My aim is to show that this is too little: even if we are only interested in morally and politically problematic terms, we must counteract a pernicious linguistic practice on many levels, especially on the level of its (...)
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  25. Non-Ideal Philosophy of Language.Deborah Mühlebach - 2022 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    Recently, there has been growing interest in methodological issues of non-ideal theoretical philosophy. While some explicitly commit to non-ideal theorising, others doubt that there is anything useful about the ideal/non-ideal distinction in theoretical philosophy. The aim of this paper is twofold. On the one hand, I propose a way of doing non-ideal theoretical philosophy, once we realise how limited certain idealised projects are. Since there is a big overlap between projects that are called non-ideal and applied, the second aim is (...)
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  26. Distorted Debates.Claudia Picazo - 2022 - Topoi 42 (2):561-571.
    One way to silence the powerless, Langton has taught us, is to pre-emptively disable their ability to do things with words. In this paper I argue that speakers can be silenced in a different way. You can let them speak, and obscure the meaning of their words afterwards. My aim is to investigate this form of silencing, that I call retroactive distortion. In a retroactive distortion, the meaning of the words of a speaker is distorted by the effect of a (...)
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  27. A Comprehensive Definition of Illocutionary Silencing.Laura Caponetto - 2021 - Topoi 40 (1):191-202.
    A recurring concern within contemporary philosophy of language has been with the ways in which speakers can be illocutionarily silenced, i.e. hindered in their capacity to do things with words. Moving beyond the traditional conception of silencing as uptake failure, Mary Kate McGowan has recently claimed that silencing may also involve other forms of recognition failure. In this paper I first offer a supportive elaboration of McGowan’s claims by developing a social account of speech act performance, according to which the (...)
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  28. Girl Talk: Understanding Negative Reactions to Female Vocal Fry.Monika Chao & Julia R. S. Bursten - 2021 - Hypatia 36 (1):42-59.
    Vocal fry is a phonation, or voicing, in which an individual drops their voice below its natural register and consequently emits a low, growly, creaky tone of voice. Media outlets have widely acknowledged it as a generational vocal style characteristic of millennial women. Critics of vocal fry often claim that it is an exclusively female vocal pattern, and some say that the voicing is so distracting that they cannot understand what is being said under the phonation. Claiming that a phonation (...)
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  29. How Much Gender is Too Much Gender?Robin Dembroff & Daniel Wodak - 2021 - In Justin Khoo & Rachel Katharine Sterken (eds.), Routledge Handbook of Social and Political Philosophy of Language. Routledge. pp. 362-376.
    We live in a world saturated in both racial and gendered divisions. Our focus is on one place where attitudes about these divisions diverge: language. We suspect most everyone would be horrified at the idea of adding race-specific pronouns, honorifics, generic terms, and so on to English. And yet gender-specific terms of the same sort are widely accepted and endorsed. We think this asymmetry cannot withstand scrutiny. We provide three considerations against incorporating additional race-specific terms into English, and argue that (...)
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  30. Pornography and Speech Act Theory – An In-Depth Survey.Áron Dombrovszki - 2021 - Elpis 14 (1):9-26.
    Considering the short history of the feminist philosophy of language, Rae Langton’s article “Speech Acts and Unspeakable Acts” was highly influential as one of the first positive research programs in the movement. In that paper, Langton – using John L. Austin’s speech act theory – tries to interpret Catharine MacKinnon’s thesis: pornography is a speech that subordinates and silences women. Despite the importance of the subject, those unfamiliar with certain historical and contextual features of the topic would hardly understand it. (...)
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  31. Slurs, neutral counterparts, and what you could have said.Arianna Falbo - 2021 - Analytic Philosophy 62 (4):359-375.
    Recent pragmatic accounts of slurs argue that the offensiveness of slurs is generated by a speaker's free choice to use a slur opposed to a more appropriate and semantically equivalent neutral counterpart. I argue that the theoretical role of neutral counterparts on such views is overstated. I consider two recent pragmatic analyses, Bolinger (Noûs, 51, 2017, 439) and Nunberg (New work on speech acts, Oxford University Press, 2018), which rely heavily upon the optionality of slurs, namely, that a speaker exercises (...)
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  32. Pornography and accommodation.Richard Kimberly Heck - 2021 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 64 (8):830-860.
    ABSTRACT In ‘Scorekeeping in a Pornographic Language Game’, Rae Langton and Caroline West borrow ideas from David Lewis to attempt to explain how pornography might subordinate and silence women. Pornography is supposed to express certain misogynistic claims implicitly, through presupposition, and to convey them indirectly, through accommodation. I argue that the appeal to accommodation cannot do the sort of work Langton and West want it to do: Their case rests upon an overly simplified model of that phenomenon. I argue further (...)
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  33. “Don’t Let Your Mouth”: On Argumentative Smothering Within Academia.Tempest M. Henning - 2021 - Topoi 40 (5):913-924.
    Despite non/minimal adversarial feminist argumentation models heavily critiquing rude, hostile, uncooperative argumentative practices, I argue that these models slip easily into instances of ‘white talk’ when white individuals are engaged with BIPOC on matters concerning racial injustices. While these models address overt aggression, a more nuanced modification is needed for the models to handle cases of white passive aggressive argumentative tactics. Moreover, I also argue that given the language and argumentative ideology within academia, ‘white talk’ cannot be addressed by BIPOC (...)
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  34. Normative generics: Against semantic polysemy.Samia Hesni - 2021 - Thought: A Journal of Philosophy 10 (3):218-225.
    Thought: A Journal of Philosophy, Volume 10, Issue 3, Page 218-225, September 2021.
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  35. Generics as instructions.Samia Hesni - 2021 - Synthese 199 (5-6):12587-12602.
    Generic claims like ‘women stay home and raise children’ and ‘boys don’t cry’ are normative generics: generic claims that express a norm. The truth conditions of normative generics are even harder to account for than those for more descriptive generics like ‘ducks lay eggs.’ Until recently, such generics were treated as deviant and thus not accounted for in standard accounts of generics. But recent work on the semantics and pragmatics of normative generics has changed that. In light of this recent (...)
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  36. Hermeneutical Injustice.Rebecca Mason - 2021 - In Justin Khoo & Rachel Sterken (eds.), Routledge Handbook of Social and Political Philosophy of Language. Routledge.
  37. Cat‐Calls, Compliments and Coercion.Lucy McDonald - 2021 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 103 (1):208-230.
    In this paper, I offer a novel argument for why cat-calling is wrong. After warding off the objection that cat-calls are compliments and therefore morally benign, I show that it cannot be the semantic content of cat-calls which makes cat-calling wrong, because some cat-calls have seemingly benign content yet seem to wrong their targets (usually women and LGBTQ people) nonetheless. Instead, cat-calling is wrong because it silences targets, by preventing them from blocking cat-callers’ presuppositions of authority, and exploits them, by (...)
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  38. Review of Just Words: On Speech and Hidden Harm. [REVIEW]Mari Mikkola - 2021 - Philosophical Review 130 (3):463-467.
  39. Semantic contestations and the meaning of politically significant terms.Deborah Mühlebach - 2021 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 64 (8):788-817.
    In recent discussions on the meaning of derogatory terms, most theorists base their investigations on the assumption that slurring terms could in principle have some neutral, i.e. purely descriptive, counterpart. Lauren Ashwell has recently shown that this assumption does not generalize to gendered slurs. This paper aims to challenge the point and benefit of approaching the meaning of derogatory terms in contrast to their allegedly purely descriptive counterparts. I argue that different discursive practices among different communities of practice sometimes change (...)
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  40. Not All Speakers are Equal: Harm and Conversational Standing.Claudia Picazo - 2021 - Daimon: Revista Internacional de Filosofía 1 (84).
    McGowan has provided a linguistic mechanism that explains how speech can constitute harm. Her idea is that utterances routinely enact s-norms about what is permissible in a given context. My aim is to argue that these s-norms are sensitive to the conversational standing of the speaker. In particular, I claim that the strength of the norm enacted depends on the standing of the speaker. In some cases, the speaker might even lack the standing required to enact new s-norms.
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  41. Language and Legitimation.Robert Mark Simpson - 2021 - In Justin Khoo & Rachel Katharine Sterken (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Social and Political Philosophy of Language. New York, NY, USA: Routledge.
    The verb to legitimate is often used in political discourse in a way that is prima facie perplexing. To wit, it is often said that an actor legitimates a practice which is officially prohibited in the relevant context – for example, that a worker telling sexist jokes legitimates sex discrimination in the workplace. In order to clarify the meaning of statements like this, and show how they can sometimes be true and informative, we need an explanation of how something that (...)
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  42. Oxford Handbook of Feminist Philosophy.Ásta Sveinsdóttir & Kim Q. Hall (eds.) - 2021
    This exciting new Handbook offers a comprehensive overview of the contemporary state of the field in feminist philosophy. The editors' introduction and forty-five essays cover feminist critical engagements with philosophy and adjacent scholarly fields, as well as feminist approaches to current debates and crises across the world. Authors cover topics ranging from the ways in which feminist philosophy attends to other systems of oppression, and the gendered, racialized, and classed assumptions embedded in philosophical concepts, to feminist perspectives on prominent subfields (...)
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  43. The Critique of Gender Linguistics from the Perspective of Feminist Linguistics.L. A. Ulianitckaia - 2021 - Дискурс 7 (2):135-155.
    Introduction. The paper reviews features and main problems of feminist linguistics. The novelty of the study is an unparalleled take on feminist linguistics in contradistinction to gender linguistics; the identification of their fundamental differences as well as emphasizing arguments in favour of both scholarly importance and practical value of feminist linguistic studies. The relevance of the study is conditioned by the lack of academic papers concerning the subject; the growing interest in studying the language as an anthropocentric sociocultural phenomenon; and (...)
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  44. We’ve Come a Long Way, Guys! Rhetorics of Resistance to the Feminist Critique of Sexist Language.Kalah B. Wilson, Martha Copp & Sherryl Kleinman - 2021 - Gender and Society 35 (1):61-84.
    We provide a qualitative analysis of resistance to calls for gender-neutral language. We analyzed more than 900 comments responding to two essays—one on AlterNet and another on Vox posted to the Vox editor’s Facebook page—that critiqued a pervasive male-based generic, “you guys.” Five rhetorics of resistance are discussed: appeals to origins, appeals to linguistic authority, appeals to aesthetics, appeals to intentionality and inclusivity, and appeals to women and feminist authorities. These rhetorics justified “you guys” as a nonsexist term, thereby allowing (...)
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  45. Linguistic Hijacking.Derek Anderson - 2020 - Feminist Philosophy Quarterly 6 (3).
    This paper introduces the concept of linguistic hijacking, the phenomenon wherein politically significant terminology is co-opted by dominant groups in ways that further their dominance over marginalized groups. Here I focus on hijackings of the words “racist” and “racism.” The model of linguistic hijacking developed here, called the semantic corruption model, is inspired by Burge’s social externalism, in which deference plays a key role in determining the semantic properties of expressions. The model describes networks of deference relations, which support competing (...)
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  46. Metasemantic ethics.Derek Ball - 2020 - Ratio 33 (4):206-219.
    The idea that experts (especially scientific experts) play a privileged role in determining the meanings of our words and the contents of our concepts has become commonplace since the work of Hilary Putnam, Tyler Burge, and others in the 1970s. But if experts have the power to determine what our words mean, they can do so responsibly or irresponsibly, from good motivations or bad, justly or unjustly, with good or bad effects. This paper distinguishes three families of metasemantic views based (...)
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  47. The knowledge norm of assertion in dialectical context.Endre Begby - 2020 - Ratio 33 (4):295-306.
    This paper aims to show that the Knowledge Norm of Assertion (KNA) leads to trouble in certain dialectical contexts. Suppose a person knows that p but does not know that she knows that p. She asserts p in compliance with the KNA. Her interlocutor responds: “but do you know that p?” It will be shown that the KNA blocks the original asserter from providing any good response to this perfectly natural follow-up question, effectively forcing her to retract p from the (...)
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  48. Contextualism and the Semantics of "Woman".Hsiang-Yun Chen - 2020 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 7.
    Contextualist accounts of “woman,” including Saul (2012), Diaz-Leon (2016), and Ichikawa (2020), aim to capture the variability of the meaning of the term, and do justice to the rights of trans women. I argue that (i) there is an internal tension between a contextualist stance and the commitment to trans-inclusive language, and that (ii) we should recognize and tackle the broader and deeper theoretical and practical difficulties implicit in the semantic debates, rather than collapsing them all into semantics. Moving on, (...)
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  49. Pejorative Terms and the Semantic Strategy.E. Diaz-Leon - 2020 - Acta Analytica 35 (1):23-34.
    Christopher Hom has recently argued that the best-overall account of the meaning of pejorative terms is a semantic account according to which pejoratives make a distinctive truth-conditional contribution, and in particular express complex, negative socially constructed properties. In addition, Hom supplements the semantic account with a pragmatic strategy to deal with the derogatory content of occurrences of pejorative terms in negations, conditionals, attitude reports, and so on, according to which those occurrences give rise to conversational implicatures to the effect that (...)
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  50. Towards a Feminist Logic: Val Plumwood’s Legacy and Beyond.Maureen Eckert & Charlie Donahue - 2020 - In Dominic Hyde (ed.), Noneist Explorations II: The Sylvan Jungle - Volume 3 (Synthese Library, 432). Dordrecht: pp. 424-448.
    Val Plumwood’s 1993 paper, “The politics of reason: towards a feminist logic” (hence- forth POR) attempted to set the stage for what she hoped would begin serious feminist exploration into formal logic – not merely its historical abuses, but, more importantly, its potential uses. This work offers us: (1) a case for there being feminist logic; and (2) a sketch of what it should resemble. The former goal of Plumwood’s paper encourages feminist theorists to reject anti-logic feminist views. The paper’s (...)
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