Derogatory terms (racist, sexist, ethnic, and homophobic epithets) are bully words with ontological force: they serve to establish and maintain a corrupt social system fuelled by distinctions designed to justify relations of dominance and subordination. No wonder they have occasioned public outcry and legal response. The inferential role analysis developed here helps move us away from thinking of the harms as being located in connotation (representing mere speaker bias) or denotation (holding that the terms fail to refer due to (...) inaccurate descriptive content). The issue is not bad attitudes or referential misfires. An inferential role semantic analysis of derogatory terms shows exactly what is at stake between those who argue that the terms should be eliminated (Absolutists) and those who claim they can be successfully rehabilitated (Reclaimers). The Reclaimer maintains, and the Absolutist denies, that certain contexts can detach the derogatory force from deeply derogatory terms. The article looks at these claims with respect to ‘nigger’ and ‘dyke,’ setting out the inferential role of each term and examining detachability potential. Explaining detachability in terms of linguistic commitments, this article also addresses the issue of whether such terms count as political discourse, and examines the implications of that issue. (shrink)

Intuitively, a speaker who uses slurs to refer to people is doing something morally objectionable even if no one is measurably affected by their speech. Perhaps they are only talking to themselves, or they are speaking with bigots who are already as vicious as they can be. This paper distinguishes between slurring as an expressive act and slurring as the act of causing a psychological effect. It then develops an expression-focused ethical account in order to explain the intuition that slurring (...) involves an effect-independent moral wrong. The core idea is that the act of expressing a morally defective attitude is itselfpro tantomorally objectionable. Unlike theories that focus only on problematic effects, this view is able to shift the moral burden of proof away from victims of slurring acts and onto speakers. It also offers moral guidance with respect to metalinguistic and pedagogical utterances of slurs. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Books ReceivedThe Ahmadis: Community, Gender, and Politics in a Muslim Society. By Antonio Gualtieri. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2004. Pp. xvi + 192. Hardcover $65.00. Paper Cdn $24.95 / U.S. $19.95.American Knees. By Shawn Wong. Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 2005. Pp. xxi + 229. Paper $14.95.The Art of Worldly Wisdom. By Baltasar Gracian and translated by Joseph Jacobs. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2005. Pp. (...) xiii + 114. Paper $5.95.Bashō's Journey: The Literary Prose of Matsuo Bashō. Translated by David Landis Barnhill. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005. Pp. xvii + 191. Hardcover $59.50. Paper $17.95.Bringing the Gods to Mind: Mantra and Ritual in Early Indian Sacrifice. By Laurie L. Patton. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. Pp. xv + 289. Hardcover $49.95/£32.50.Buddhist Inclusivism: Attitudes Towards Religious Others. By Kristin Beise Kiblinger. Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2005. Pp. viii + 145. Hardcover $89.95.A Chinese Ethics for the New Century: The Ch'ien Mu Lectures in History and Culture, and Other Essays on Science and Confucian Ethics. By Donald J. Munro. Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 2005. Pp. xlv + 158. Hardcover $33.00.Chinese Theories of Reading and Writing: A Route to Hermeneutics and Open Poetics. By Ming Dong Gu. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005. Pp. xiv + 334. Hardcover $85.00.A Dictionary of Cantonese Slang: The Language of Hong Kong Movies, Street Gangs, and City Life. By Christopher Hutton and Kingsley Bolton. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2005. Pp. xxiv + 492. Paper $28.00.Ghazālī and the Poetics of Imagination. By Ebrahim Moosa. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. Pp. xiii + 349. Hardcover $59.95. Paper $22.50.Going Forth: Visions of Buddhist Vinaya. Edited by William M. Bodiford. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2005. Pp. x + 317. Hardcover $48.00.The Harem: Inside the Grand Seraglio of the Turkish Sultans. By N. M. Penzer. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2005. Pp. 277. Paper $14.95.Ideals of the East: The Spirit of Japanese Art. By Kakuzo Okakura. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2005. Pp. xiv + 106. Paper $5.95. [End Page 365]An Illustrated Chinese Materia Medica. By Jing-Nuan Wu. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Pp. 706. Price not given.Jews and Arabs: A Concise History of Their Social and Cultural Relations. By S. D. Goitein. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2005. Pp. xv + 263. Paper $12.95.The Logic of Nothingness: A Study of Nishida Kitarō. By Robert J. J. Wargo. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2005. Pp xi + 241. Paper $25.00.The Moral and Political Thought of Mahatma Gandhi. By Raghavan N. Iyer. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000. Pp. xiii + 449. Paper Rs 520.00.Nietzsche's Epic of the Soul: Thus Spoke Zarathustra. By T. K. Seung. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2005. Pp. xxviii + 370. Hardcover $83.00. Paper $27.95.Of Guilds, Companies, Corporations, and Governance: A Conceptual Sketch. By Leonardo R. Silos. Makati City, Philippines: Asian Institute of Management, 2005. Pp. xvi + 238. Price not given.The Path to Rome. By Hilaire Belloc. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2005. Pp. ix + 251. Paper $12.95.The Philosophy of the Bhagavadgātā : A Study based on the Evaluation of the Commentaries of Śamkara, Rāmānuja and Madhva. By S. M. Srinivasa Chari. New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers, 2005. Pp. xxvi + 294. Hardcover Rs 575.00.The Philosophy of Rabindranath Tagore. By Kalyan Sen Gupta. Burlington, VT: Ash-gate Publishing Company, 2005. Pp. ix + 103. Hardcover $79.95.The Pristine Dao: Metaphysics in Early Daoist Discourse. By Thomas Michael. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005. Pp. xi + 170. Hardcover $60.00. Paper $21.95.Three Mountains and Seven Rivers: Prof. Musashi Tachikawa's Felicitation Volume. Edited by Shoun Hino and Toshihiro Wada. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass Publishers. 2004. Pp. xx + 903. Hardcover Rs. 1800.The Unity of Mystical Traditions: The Transformation of Consciousness in Tibetan and German Mysticism. By Randall Studstill. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2005. Pp. xii + 304. Hardcover @89/$127.00.Writing the World: On Globalization. Edited by David... (shrink)

In this paper, I defend against a number of criticisms an account of slurs, according to which the same semantic content is expressed in the use of a slur as is expressed in the use of its neutral counterpart, while in addition the use of a slur conventionally implicates a negative, derogatory attitude. Along the way, I criticise competing accounts of the semantics and pragmatics of slurs, namely, Hom's 'combinatorial externalism' and Anderson and Lepore's 'prohibitionism'.

The norms surrounding pejorative language, such as racial slurs and swear words, are deeply prohibitive. Pejoratives are typically a means for speakers to express their derogatory attitudes. As these attitudes vary along many dimensions and magnitudes, they initially appear to be resistant to a truth-conditional, semantic analysis. The goal of the paper is to clarify the essential linguistic phenomena surrounding pejoratives, survey the logical space of explanatory theories, evaluate each with respect to the phenomena and provide a (...) preliminary assessment of the initial resistance to a truth-conditional analysis. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Kierkegaard on Faith and LoveDaniel WhistlerSharon Krishek. Kierkegaard on Faith and Love. Modern European Philosophy. Cambridge-New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Pp. xiii + 201. Cloth, $90.00.Contemporary scholarship on Kierkegaard is frequently confronted by two problems. First, there is the question of Kierkegaard’s worldliness: does Kierkegaard have anything substantial to say about politics, society, and the ethical dilemmas of intersubjective existence? Second, there remains the perennial problem of (...) the rhetorical singularity of Kierkegaard’s writings: can anything conceptually coherent be salvaged from the panoply of pseudonyms, indirections, and ironies? And, if so, to what extent do such abstractions falsify the richness of a particular text? The virtue of Krishek’s Kierkegaard on Faith and Love is that it answers both these questions in a radical and challenging manner. To the problem of worldliness, Krishek responds by insisting on the presence of a disposition to “full concreteness” or “a full return to the world” in Kierkegaard’s account of love (128). In answer to the problem of rhetorical singularity, Krishek embraces Kierkegaard’s incoherence, so as to affirm Fear and Trembling against Works of Love (or “Kierkegaard versus Kierkegaard,” as she puts it on p. 138).Kierkegaard on Faith and Love is a sustained investigation into the status and structure of love in Kierkegaard’s corpus. It thus takes its place alongside Evans’s Kierkegaard’s Ethics of Love (Oxford, 2004), Ferreira’s Love’s Grateful Striving (Oxford, 2001), Amy Laura Hall’s Kierkegaard and the Treachery of Love (Cambridge, 2002), Ronald L. Hall’s The Human Embrace (Penn State, 2000), and Mooney’s Love and Faith in Kierkegaard (Indiana, 2008) as one more contribution to the recent explosion of literature on the subject. However, Krishek is distinctive in limiting her scope to romantic love alone; she steadfastly reconstructs [End Page 302] a Kierkegaardian phenomenology of romantic attitudes toward the beloved—the proper and improper modes of comportment when in love.The first half of the book is split into three chapters, which together present a hierarchy of these different comportments. The reader passes by inadequate attempts to hold onto the beloved through recollection (chapter 2) and resignation (chapter 3) to arrive at the Kierkegaardian ideal of faithful or “faith-full” love. Modelled on the knight of faith of Fear and Trembling, the faith-full lover accomplishes a double movement in which he resigns himself to the loss of the beloved while simultaneously trusting in her return. Unfortunately, on the way to this ideal, some of the great lovers of Kierkegaard’s writings (Don Juan, the Seducer) are brushed aside in an overly schematic way. This is a shame because they surely have much to teach us about his views on romantic love. Nevertheless, the effect of Krishek’s whistle-stop tour through the aesthetic works is to quickly bring us face to face with Fear and Trembling, in which, she contends, we find a positive model of romantic love. Making the early, pseudonymous Fear and Trembling determinative of Kierkegaard’s conception of love is a bold move, especially in light of the tendency in recent Kierkegaard scholarship to valorize the “rediscovered” religious works. Yet it pays off: Krishek’s choice not only allows a rich and affirmative description of romantic love to emerge; it also sheds light on Fear and Trembling itself, especially the Merman episode.The final three chapters of Kierkegaard on Faith and Love take up the task of justifying this ideal of faith-full love. First, Krishek attempts to show its conceptual plausibility by appealing to non-Kierkegaardian examples: the novel On the Way Home, Kubrik’s Eyes Wide Shut, and Almodóvar’s All About My Mother. Second, she engages at length with existing scholarship, employing the double movement of love abstracted from Fear and Trembling to great effect to overturn the orthodox emphasis on resignation, failure, and asceticism in Kierkegaard’s account of love. Finally, Krishek turns to Works of Love, which is usually regarded as Kierkegaard’s mature and definitive statement of a philosophy of love. She challenges the derogatory attitude Kierkegaard takes therein to romantic or “preferential” love with her more affirmative model drawn from Fear... (shrink)

Derogatory language is common in medicine. “Objectifying” because it treats people as objects, it reflects an attitude toward patients, who are overwhelmingly seen as wrong, abnormal, and other. I discuss examples of objectifying language and its results; writers have attempted to explain demeaning jargon, but their attempts glorify doctors without admitting how destructive this language is. Legitimale concerns, such as limit-setting, are insufficient explanation. Medical training can be humiliating and shameful, and real responsibility cannot develop under such threat. Doctors-in-training (...) turn on patients and gain a potent, childish sense of security. Recommendations for doctors to change their behavior are discussed. (shrink)

The authors outline a program for understanding the semantics and pragmatics of slur terms, proposing that slurs are mixed expressives that predicate membership in some social group G while simultaneously invoking a complex of historical facts and social attitudes about G. The authors then point to the importance of distinguishing between the potential offensive and derogatory effects of slur terms, with the former deriving from the impact on the listener of the invoked content itself, and the latter deriving (...) from inferences about speaker attitudes and intentions. The authors use the resulting framework to discuss several controversial cases of slurs and slurring: terms targeting political views such as ‘Nazi’ and ‘terf’, and cases in which non-slurs are used to derogate, as in cases of misgendering. The authors conclude that what counts as a slur is in part dependent on a background system of ideological assumptions, meaning that whether a particular term counts as a slur will depend in part on one’s ideological commitments and assumptions. (shrink)

Plato’s attitude towards women in his major political works, the Republic and Laws, is complex. On the one hand, Plato argues that in well-run cities, women should hold positions of rule; but on the other, he suggests that women are inferior to men with respect to virtue. To reconcile these conflicting attitudes, some scholars argue that Plato’s progressive proposals are about women as they could be given the right education and environment, while his derogatory comments are about women (...) as they are. Surprisingly, however, commentators who defend this line of thought fail to identify which aspect or aspects of women’s current social position is the problem. I argue that a central problem is women’s role in the private family. More specifically, I argue that Plato thinks the institution of the private family and household is an impediment to virtue; since the private family and household is the primary domain of women, they will be particularly susceptible to its ill effects. In short, individuals’ characters are shaped by the institutions they inhabit; the private family and household is a character-shaping institution that is the primary domain for women, and as a result their characters will be shaped for the worse. (shrink)

It has become common to distinguish between two kinds of ethical concepts: thick and thin ones. Bernard Williams, who coined the terms, explains that thick concepts such as “coward, lie, brutality, gratitude and so forth” are marked by having greater empirical content than thin ones. They are both action-guiding and world-guided: -/- If a concept of this kind applies, this often provides someone with a reason for action… At the same time, their application is guided by the world. A concept (...) of this sort may be rightly or wrongly applied, and people who have acquired it can agree that it applies or fails to apply to some new situation. -/- Thin concepts are concepts such as good and bad, right and wrong, obligation and duty. Judgments applying thick concepts have been seen as lending support to the possibility of explaining moral knowledge, and objectivity in ethics. It appears that due to their empirical content – their world-guidedness – judgments employing thick concepts can be true or false, depending on whether they get the worldly facts right. In addition they provide reasons for action – they are action-guiding – and thus may provide the starting point of a realist account of practical reasons: the view that reasons are facts and whether or not a person has a reason to act does not (normally) depend on her attitudes. The cruelty of an action is a reason not to perform it or to prevent it; that an action is kind is a reason in its favour. Of course these remarks aren’t conclusive – far from it. But even so, some non-cognitivists may regard them as completely wrongheaded, and so does Bernard Williams even though he is not a non-cognitivist. However, he believes that having a practical reason does depend on a person’s attitudes and motives. A certain worry about thick concepts will make clear what the problem is. It has most expressly been raised by Simon Blackburn, who sees it as undermining even the most superficial plausibility of moral cognitivism, as well as the claim that the properties picked out by thick concepts provide reasons. While we may readily accept that the kindness of an action or the fact that it is required by justice is a reason to perform it, there are many thick concepts whose action-guiding role we would reject. Some derogatory – e.g., racist or sexist - words express thick concepts too, Blackburn notes. And surely there are no racist or sexist truths. Furthermore there are concepts that some people use evaluatively (like chaste or obscene), but many of us do not regard the propositions in which those concepts feature as even prima facie reason giving. In raising these points, Blackburn claims that it is morally objectionable to regard the facts asserted in propositions which employ thick concepts as action-guiding because it leads to “a conservative and ultimately self-serving complacency.” As he sees it, the problem is that if we believe that the correct application of thick concepts yields evaluative truths and that evaluative truths state reasons for actions, we seem to be committed to accepting that some people are, say, fat, derog., and therefore to be ridiculed, and that there is at least a pro tanto reason to lead a chaste life, or feel affection towards cute women. Therefore, the view that all evaluative properties provide reasons for action or for attitudes such as admiration, affection or (dis)approval must be rejected. I will call this worry henceforth Blackburn’s challenge. The challenge is that understanding judgments employing thick concepts as expressing evaluative truths and providing reasons for actions or for attitudes leads to a morally unacceptable view. Blackburn suggests instead that we should separate the conditions for applying thick concepts and the reasons that we have in virtue of the concept applying. She may be cute, yes, but that is not a reason for “admiration and arousal.” -/- …it is morally vital that we proceed by splitting the input from the output in such a case. By refusing to split we fail to open an essential specifically normative dimension of criticism. -/- According to Blackburn, the meaning of thick concepts is made up of two distinct and in principle separable components: a descriptive one and the expression of an attitude. The truth-aptness and cognitive appearance of judgments employing thick concepts is explained by the descriptive component alone. Blackburn writes “[w]e get nothing but detachable and flexible attitudes, coupled with delineations of traits of character or action”. I will call this reply to Blackburn’s challenge the separability thesis. I agree with Blackburn that any account of thick concepts has to face and answer the challenge that he poses. In this paper, I will focus on one reply to the challenge which denies separability, namely Bernard Williams’s. Williams answers Blackburn’s challenge, while holding on to a cognitivist understanding of thick concepts. But his particular brand of cognitivism is peculiar: Williams rejects the separability thesis, and claims that correct applications of thick concepts yield evaluative (and not just descriptive) knowledge. But this is a special kind of knowledge. It is confined to a local community. The members of a community which uses certain thick concepts may have reasons to act accordingly, but the non-members do not. And even the reasons of members remain a little fragile: they may not want to continue using their concepts upon thorough reflection. The local knowledge view allows Williams to answer Blackburn’s challenge, because even though thick concepts are evaluative concepts and their application can yield evaluative knowledge, no one who isn’t a member of the relevant community has reason to be guided by the concept. Complementing a cognitivist view of thick concepts with reasons internalism allows Williams to answer the challenge. My aim in this paper is to show that Williams’s position is, despite its initial attraction, untenable. In particular, I am going to show why the internal reasons view is incompatible with Williams’s own understanding of thick concepts. My modest result is that the internalist view of reasons does not help to answer Blackburn’s challenge. My aim in this paper is not to answer the challenge but, rather, to explore the possibility of developing Williams’s attenuated version of cognitivism, and the possibility of combining it with reasons internalism. (shrink)

Obnoxious labels are derogatory terms which speak extensively on the ignorant dispositions of scholars who either rush into faulty conclusions, or have prior decisions to promote class distinction through the uncomplimentary colours they paint of what others hold as divine, spiritual, and transcendental. For such derogatory terms to gain wide audience in a globalized age explain the frame of mind of discordant voices which have been based on arm-chair scholarship. The thrust of this article therefore, is to use (...) Igbo experience to explore the problems of atheism and humanism in a globalized world. The exploratory research will help adopt cultural centred approach in analyzing the dichotomy between the various philosophical view points on God, spirits and man’s religious belief system in Igbo land in particular and Africa in general. It is hoped that the analyses of the challenges posed by atheism and humanism in a globalized world will balance ideas, views, attitudes and behaviour that will reposition Igbo religious beliefs, values and practices in line with the proposed theistic humanism associated with Igbo culture in particular and African culture in general. This will breach the persisted conflict between the sacred and the secular pointing to a dynamic and progressive Igbo culture. (shrink)

The words we call slurs are just plain vanilla descriptions like ‘cowboy’ and ‘coat hanger’. They don't semantically convey any disparagement of their referents, whether as content, conventional implicature, presupposition, “coloring” or mode of presentation. What distinguishes 'kraut' and 'German' is metadata rather than meaning: the former is the conventional description for Germans among Germanophobes when they are speaking in that capacity, in the same way 'mad' is the conventional expression that some teenagers use as an intensifier when they’re emphasizing (...) that social identity. That is, racists don’t use slurs because they’re derogatory; slurs are derogatory because they’re the words that racists use. To use a slur is to exploit the Maxim of Manner (or Levinson’s M-Principle) to signal one’s affiliation with a group that has a disparaging attitude towards the slur’s referent. This account is sufficient to explain all the familiar properties of slurs, such as their speaker orientation and “nondetachability,” with no need of additional linguistic mechanisms. It also explains some features of slurs that are rarely if ever explored; for example the variation in tone and strength among the different slurs for a particular group, the existence of words we count as slurs, such as 'redskin', which almost all of their users consider to be respectful, and the curious absence in Standard English of any commonly used slurs—by which I mean words used to express a negative attitude toward an entire group—for Muslims and women. (shrink)

Recent work on the semantics and pragmatics of slurs has explored a variety of ways of explaining their potential to derogate, with the most popular family of approaches appealing to either: (i), the doxastic or evaluative attitudes or commitments expressed by — or (ii), the propositions concerning such attitudes or commitments semantically or pragmatically communicated by — the speakers who use them. I begin by arguing that no such speaker-oriented approach can be correct. I then propose an alternative (...) treatment of slurs, according to which they are semantically associated with both descriptive and directive content. On the view I defend, when speakers use slurs, they simultaneously propose to add an at-issue proposition to the conversational common ground and issue a not-at-issue directive to their interlocutors to adopt a derogatory perspective toward members of the targeted group. This proposal both avoids the problems faced by other accounts and opens up a novel way of thinking about the phenomenon of appropriation. (shrink)

In 2016, the Five Stars Movement (5SM), one of the parties currently in power in Italy, launched the ‘Rousseau platform’. This is a platform meant to enhance direct democracy, transparency and the real participation of the people in the making of laws, policies and political proposals. Although ennobled with the name of Rousseau, the 5SM’s redemptive promise has been strongly criticised in the public sphere for being irresponsible and ideological. Political realism, I will argue, can perform both a diagnostic and (...) a corrective task, by providing some tools to unveil populist distortions and by offering more solid grounds for political opponents’ critique. Three aspects of realism, in particular, will be pointed out as remedies against populist drifts. First, anti-moralism, complemented by anti-utopianism and contextualism, criticises the populists’ moralistic picture of politics, its anti-pluralistic attitude and its rejection of the role of experts in politics. Second, the Weberian ethic of responsibility offers standards to assess politicians’ actions, instead of embracing the populist aversion towards any professional politician; besides, it contrasts the populist image of politics as a derogatory activity. Finally, realism as ideology critique unveils the distorting narratives underlying populist propaganda and fostering uncritical support. (shrink)

Against content theories of slurs, according to which slurs have some kind of derogatory content, Anderson and Lepore have objected that they cannot explain that even slurs under quotation can cause offense. If slurs had some kind of derogatory content, the argument goes, quotation would render this content inert and, thus, quoted slurs should not be offensive. Following this, Anderson and Lepore propose that slurs are offensive because they are prohibited words. In this paper, we will show that, (...) pace Anderson and Lepore, content theories of slurs do provide an explanation of the fact that quoted slurs can cause offense: even under quotation, the explanation goes, the derogatory content of a slur can still be psychologically efficacious. We will go one step further by pointing out that offensiveness is not the only function of slurs, but that slurs can also be used to create and reinforce negative attitudes towards the target group. While content theories can easily explain this by referring to some kind of derogatory content, Anderson and Lepore’s prohibitionism will lack a satisfactory explanation of this second function of slurs. Concluding, we will argue that, unlike uses of slurs, uses of quoted slurs normally do not derogate the target group. This will again speak in favor of content theories. Accordingly, uses of quoted slurs are not derogatory because quotation renders the derogatory content inert. Hence, rather than speaking against content theories, quoted slurs speak in their favor. (shrink)

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 the pejorative terms are non-empty, which explains the offensiveness of those occurrences. In this paper, I aim to defend this semantic strategy from several recent objections, and I will also present a novel objection, which in my view shows that we should understand the semantic account as a version of inferentialism, rather than radical externalism. (shrink)

Over the last decade, research on derogatory communication has focused on ordinary speech contexts and the use of conventional pejoratives, like slurs. However, the use of social media has given rise to a new type of derogatory behavior that theorists have yet to address: internet trolling. Trolls make online utterances aiming to frustrate and offend other internet users. Their ultimate goal is amusement derived from observing a good faith interlocutor engage with their provocative posts. The basis for condemning (...) a pejorative utterance is often taken to be the harm it causes or a defective attitude in the speaker. However, trolling complicates this picture, since trolling utterances are by definition insincere and should be recognizable as such to other trolls. Further, these utterances seem morally questionable even when they cause little to no harm, and they often do not feature conventional pejoratives. I argue that while the potential for negative effects is relevant to ethical assessment, in general trolling is pro tanto wrong because the troll fails to accord others the proper respect that is their due. However, this characteristic wrong-making feature is sometimes overridden. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Plato's Doctrine of the Psyche as a Self-Moving Motion RAPHAEL DEMOS I WILLXSXTHEREADERto ignore for the time being what he has gleaned about the soul from the reading of the Phaedo and the Republic. In these dialogues Plato speaks of the soul sometimes as wholly rational, as having three parts, and so forth. But in these dialogues he is t~lklng of the human soul, which is a special case, (...) whereas in this essay I am de~Hng with the wider role and the concept of the soul as the efficient cause of motion, change, and all becoming everywhere in the cosmos. My cardinal texts in this exposition are the Sophist (246a-249d), the Phaedrus (245c, d), and a considerable portion of Laws, X. Consider the Phaedo, a dialogue with at least four motifs: it is a dramatic evocation of the last day in the life of Socrates, it is an argument for the immortality of the soul and for the reality of the world of ideas, it is a myth of the nether world, and finally, it is a theory of the cosmos as ruled by purpose--all in all, one of the great pieces of literature of the Western world. For the reader, it is an evocation of an attitude to life, based on Plato's conception of the soul--an attitude expressed in the famous phrase that the wise man spends his life meditating on death. As contrasted with what may be called his existential concern with the soul, in the other dialogues on which I will comment, Plato approaches the topic of the soul as part of his explanation of the cosmos. In these his attitude is objective and quasi-scientific. It is to this side of Plato's thought that I wish to call attention in this essay, where the establishment of the immortality of the soul is incidental to the more basic doctrine that the soul is an arche, a primary factor and an ontological principle. In the,Sophist, we find Plato playing the music of his philosophy in a new key. He refers to the "friends of the forms" as though he, himself, were an outsider looking in; then, too, he asserts that motion is really real in contrast to his derogatory references to motion in the Cratylus, the Phaedo, and the Republic.I In these (and other) dialogues, Plato contrasts change and changing things with the timeless forms in respect of reality: the former are said, at best, to be semi-real; only the latter are really real. But in the Sophist he changes his tune, arguing that total reality (~o ~v, to' ~a~rE~ By) includes both motion and rest (248e 8; 249d 3-4). What does he mean by these two words? That by 'rest' he means the realm of ideas is indicated (if not proved) by his references to the forms in the same context (247b 1But in the Theaeteius,he classifiesmotions in a semi-scientific fashion, leaving the impression on the reader that he regards motion as a reality. [133] 134 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 1-2; 249b, 10, c 1).2 As for motion, Plato makes it clear that the term covers not only (a) physical motion but also (b) life, (c) psyche, and (d) phronesis or naus (249b 5). All these are said to be forms of kinesis; how this is so--how life, soul, mason may be described as motions or changes--is a matter for later comment. What is more to the point is Plato's insistence that motion and what is moved are onta (beings, 249b 2, d 3). Plato uses change (metabol$) interchangeably with kinesis; anticipating the Phaedrus, I will include activity under change. And anticipating the Laws, I will characterize some of this activity as mental; indeed the Sophist, includes within change nous, phronesis, and episteme; that is to say, understanding (in the sense of an activity, 249a, b, c).s Plato offers various reasons in support of his contention that change is real. He may also be offering a special demonstration as follows. The philosopher who denies that change is real is engaged in a mental activity, in short... (shrink)

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)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:John Henry Newman and the Development of Doctrine: Encountering Change, Looking for Continuity by Stephen MorganReinhard HütterJohn Henry Newman and the Development of Doctrine: Encountering Change, Looking for Continuity by Stephen Morgan. Foreword by Ian Ker (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2021), xvi + 315 pp.St. John Henry Newman was controversial during much of his lifetime—as an Anglican as well as a Catholic. Nothing has changed (...) since. There has been an eagerness to silence his voice, and with it the challenge of his theological insights then, and there is such an eagerness to do so also now—in ways more or less subtle. There are historians whose chosen object of study happens to be the Victorian Newman in the Victorian age and who take the immanent frame they tacitly presuppose as normative horizon and their assumed attitude of scientific detachment as indispensable precondition for historical objectivity, and who dismiss all interpretations of Newman that happen to display signs of substantive agreement with his insights and tenets as "Newman hagiographies" lacking the allegedly requisite scientific distance from their object of investigation. This principle of critical detachment would, of course, entail that Platonists are disqualified from investigating reliably Plato's thought, and the same would obtain presumably for Aristotelians regarding Aristotle, for Thomists regarding Thomas Aquinas, for Marxists regarding Karl Marx, for Foucaultians regarding Foucault, and so on and so forth—and last but not least, for historians committed to the immanent frame and historicist tenets regarding their interpretations of Troeltsch and Mannheim. Such an assumption, when consistently applied, carries itself, of course, sooner or later ad absurdum, but the derogatory denomination "Newman hagiography" survives and is conveniently attachable to whatever interpretation one likes to disqualify as scholarly serious and academically reputable work on Newman. Next to the "unmaskers" of "Newman hagiographies" there are those Newman scholars of a primarily evangelical and Anglican provenance eager to demonstrate that Newman's self-characterization, primarily [End Page 1335] in his Apologia Pro Vita Sua, is at best an ex post facto retro-projection, and hence an inherently unreliable, if not an intentional, re-composition of his intellectual past meant to be deceptive and hence bordering on the mendacious—in short, a renewal of Kingsley's charge. Things are not necessarily better on the Catholic side—since Orestes Brownson's attack, there continue notions, popular among Catholic traditionalists as well as Lefebvrists, that Newman's theory of the development of doctrine, if not outright modernist, is at best crypto-modernist, a view sadly encouraged by Catholic neo-modernists who instrumentalize Newman's account as a justification for interpreting "change" as an interminable but allegedly unavoidable sequence of ruptures and "development" as the intentional activity of progressive developers of doctrine establishing an ongoing praxis of pre-projected desired transmutations of faith, doctrine, and practice.It takes so-called "Newman hagiographers" to set the record straight and to save Newman's ongoingly pertinent and indeed salutary insights from multiple distortions and instrumentalizations, let alone attempts of effectively silencing Newman by way of a more or less subtle character assassination. It requires painstaking archival work and a close, careful, and comprehensive reading of Newman's published letters, diary entries, and works (in their original unrevised versions) as well as letters and works of his interlocutors and collaborators in the Oxford Movement to set the record straight, to unearth Newman's authentic voice, and first and foremost, to acquit him of the charge of systematic disingenuity, if not duplicity, in putting together his own account of the development of his religious opinions.John Henry Newman and the Development of Doctrine comprises, next to an introduction and a conclusion, four substantive chapters of about equal length: the first covering the years up to 1833, with a focus on Newman's first monograph, The Arians of the Fourth Century; the second considering the period from 1833 to 1838, with a focus on the Oxford Movement, the Tracts for the Times, and the Via Media; the third covering the period from 1839 to 1842, with a focus on Tract 90 and its aftermath; the fourth and final chapter advancing close... (shrink)

Summary Slurs are pejorative epithets that express negative attitudes toward a class of individuals sharing the same race, country of origin, sexual orientation, religion, and the like. The aim of this paper is to show what happens in communication when slurs are reported. It focuses on the derogatory content of such expressions and on the persistence of their performative effects in reported speech. In this respect, the question concerning the attribution of responsibility for the derogatory content conveyed (...) by the slurs is relevant. Indeed, reporting a slur involves quoting not only the content but also the speaker’s personal commitment and attitude. Different theories on the status of the derogatory component of slurs make different predictions about their offensiveness in reported speech and about the speaker’s “responsibility” for the attitude and feelings conveyed by that word, be she the original speaker or the reporter. The results of a questionnaire show empirically that no single theory can provide a conclusive statement on this matter. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Working with Patience:An Insight into Dealing with Difficult EmotionsDavid VilanovaAs the most trusted professionals in the nation, nurses are expected to care for their patients with empathy and freedom from bias. The reality is that nurses are human, and some form of implicit bias is inevitable. In my own experience, this issue has reared its head on several occasions. My nursing background is prominently in cardiac and intensive care. (...) Seeing patients at their most vulnerable has become a regular part of my practice. Among some of the most challenging cases for me have been when I assume care of a patient withdrawing from alcohol. As an adult child with close alcoholic family members, many instances of abuse and pain stick with me today and these are brought to the surface when I care for patients with alcohol use disorder. In most cases, I easily find a healthy balance between remaining an understanding-and-empathetic provider and protecting my emotional and mental health as I navigate ethical and moral issues. However, with this patient population, walking that fine line is especially challenging. How do I navigate and manage intensely personal emotions and biases while providing the high-quality care I vowed to deliver regardless of my patient's life choices, addictions, and illnesses? How do I maintain an appropriate level of neutrality and clarity as this patient's behavior and attitude spark emotional triggers? In other words, how do I take care of someone I don't like?Mrs. H was a middle-aged Hispanic woman, barely coherent, but speaking clearly enough that I could understand her slurred speech. Immediate dread washed over me as I realized my assignment included a patient withdrawing from alcohol. The patient's affect, incoherence, and aggression were all too reminiscent of a traumatic past I still work to heal from. My coworkers couldn't understand her insults and obscenities and were therefore unphased except for noting her unruly and erratic behavior. On the other hand, I could understand much of what she was yelling at me and any other staff who bravely walked into her room. My immediate thoughts were that this woman clearly did not want our help. My every attempt to enter her room, speak with her, and provide care were met with an all too familiar rejection and denial that she even had a problem. Yet here she was in a hospital room, and I was her nurse. She verbalized denial of drinking too much when told that she was being treated for alcohol withdrawal. She stated this denial more to herself than to the health care providers in the room, and it was reminiscent of the denial I have seen in my loved ones. This was ironic, I always thought, as the need for such self-deception in and of itself points to the fact that something may be wrong and worth addressing.But denial or not, today, this patient—Mrs. H, was entrusted into my care. She refused treatments and medications, and this put me in a complex ethical predicament—treating a patient that I do not like for the personal issues she reminds me of, and the treatment of a patient against their refusal, as she was deemed incapable of making her own decisions. The latter of these two issues was easiest to put aside. Legally, this patient needed to be treated through her alcohol withdrawal. Once her mental status cleared up, she could sign out against medical advice or choose to remain until a safe discharge plan was in place. There was a protocol and legal guidelines for this situation. However, no guidelines [End Page 10] truly exist when it comes to the management of a patient that you simply do not like. The result can be a near-instantaneous dread each time you must answer that patient's bed alarm, call light, or most basic needs. A negative bias takes over, and it would be an understatement to say that this affects the quality of care. Patients in situations like this—with providers who judge them as I have been guilty of—can easily become subject to derogatory remarks, health inequities, and biased labeling... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Transcendence of WordsAkos Krassoy (bio)Levinas’s central contribution to aesthetics and the philosophy of art is his well-known and provocative attempt to ethicize art. Yet, there is hardly any certainty regarding the nature of this ethicization. As far as the realization of Levinas’s program is concerned, readers usually remember its harmful effects.1 On the other hand, there are equally appreciative tones in his reading of art. It might be (...) more correct to say that the derogatory side is part of a fundamentally ambiguous attitude. It is almost as if Levinas’s radical ethical thinking, the job of which is to tackle totalizing Western thought, should speak in two voices when it comes to the aesthetic and the arts.Most of the commentaries run into, and then set out to resolve this weird situation marked by pejoration and ambiguity in one way or another. This is no easy task to accomplish; there is surely no single way out of this labyrinth. An element of irony is definitely required on the side of the interpreter. Arguably, my text may be no exception in the long line of attempts. In the following, I shall try my hand at these complexities and, similarly to other readers, deal with the contradictory remarks and implied but underdeveloped ideas by putting them into a meaningful framework. Like others before me, I shall do my best to provide a narrative as coherent as possible in which the letter [End Page 1] and the spirit of Levinas are followed and the relevant (phenomenological) aesthetic context is taken into account. In my case, this will mean siding with those interpreters who see a fixed set of problems dominating — that is, a single consistent path winding — in Levinas’s difficult itinerary. In more concrete terms, I shall join the camp of those who show sensitivity to the introduction of the critical act and argue that the shortcomings of the aesthetic are, to some extent, reversed in its recontextualization in human communication.2 Yet, unlike these authors who touch upon the issue of criticism to varying degrees, I shall concentrate fully on placing critical activity in the center of Levinas’s aesthetic thought and thus treating art as an important segment of ethical signification. My focus will be on the reintegration of the disengaged image into reality; I shall try to determine what this development in art implies in Levinas’s ethical phenomenological project. Concerning the particular course of my text, I shall concentrate mostly on the issue of ambiguity and, gradually working my way through it, deal with pejoration at the same time. I shall first analyze what is at stake in this ambiguousness, then attempt to establish its governing logic, only to prepare the ground on which criticism as a way out of the maze can be seen in its entirety.A Real Headache: AmbiguousnessAnyone interested in Levinas’s aesthetic thought arrives at a truly interesting but nebulous field. By nebulousness I primarily mean the overly ambiguous character of Levinas’s position. What Levinas has to say is indeed quite difficult to pin down or, at least, it is highly equivocal: the noise of critique is balanced by the sound of quiet but all the more patent affirmation. In every phase of his thinking there is a suspicion felt toward artistic expression, which may on occasion reach the level of derogation; all this is nevertheless accompanied by clear-cut support. This can be sensed in chance remarks, such as, in “Reality and Its Shadow” — the essay mostly responsible for the bad reputation of [End Page 2] Levinas in aesthetics — where Levinas discusses the plasticity of literary works and mentions a “particularly admirable page” in Proust’s The Captive (RS 10). In spite of the anti-aesthetic logic and philistine-like rhetoric of the essay, the art-loving character of the author — who is beyond a doubt an affectionate reader — is revealed for a second.Remarks like this are quite suggestive with respect to Levinas’s appraisal of the arts—as are many other details of Levinas’s work. Of all these, his apparent knowledge and use of artworks in his... (shrink)

While moral perfectionists rank conscious beings according to their cognitive abilities, Paola Cavalieri launches a more inclusive defense of all forms of subjectivity. In concert with Peter Singer, J. M. Coetzee, Harlan B. Miller, and other leading animal studies scholars, she expands our understanding of the nonhuman in such a way that the derogatory category of "the animal" becomes meaningless. In so doing, she presents a nonhierachical approach to ethics that better respects the value of the conscious self. Cavalieri (...) opens with a dialogue between two imagined philosophers, laying out her challenge to moral perfectionism and tracing its influence on our attitudes toward the "unworthy." She then follows with a roundtable "multilogue" which takes on the role of reason in ethics and the boundaries of moral status. Coetzee, Nobel Prize winner for Literature and author of _The Lives of Animals_, emphasizes the animality of human beings; Miller, a prominent analytic philosopher at Virginia Polytechnic Institute, dismantles the rationalizations of human bias; Cary Wolfe, professor of English at Rice University, advocates an active exposure to other worlds and beings; and Matthew Calarco, author of _Zoographies: The Question of the Animal from Heidegger to Derrida_, extends ethical consideration to entities that traditionally have little or no moral status, such as plants and ecosystems. As Peter Singer writes in his foreword, the implications of this conversation extend far beyond the issue of the moral status of animals. They "get to the heart of some important differences about how we should do philosophy, and how philosophy can relate to our everyday life." From the divergences between analytical and continental approaches to the relevance of posthumanist thinking in contemporary ethics, the psychology of speciesism, and the practical consequences of an antiperfectionist stance, _The Death of the Animal_ confronts issues that will concern anyone interested in a serious study of morality. (shrink)

In his 1988 University Lecture in Religion at Arizona State University, Josef van Ess argued for a widespread concept of a “compact” God in early Islam. The notion is expressed by ṣamad in Sura 112.2, an enigmatic word, which “in the first half of the second Islamic century … was understood as meaning ‘massive, compact.’” There is Islamic evidence for this, van Ess argued: “The best testimony, however, comes from outside Islam: Theodore Abū Qurra, bishop of Ḥarrān in Upper Mesopotamia (...) , translated ṣamad into Greek as sphyropēktos, a quite unusual word meaning something like ‘hammered together, closely united.’ Nicetas of Byzantium later on used holosphyros instead, ‘entirely chased in metal.’” Those familiar with the negative reception of these Byzantine translations of ṣamad by several scholars will undoubtedly be surprised by van Ess's statement, which considers the translations as trustworthy testimony. When John Meyendorff had earlier wondered tentatively whether some Byzantine interpretations of Islamic doctrine, including God sphyropēktos or holosphyros, could “in fact come from some forms of popular Arab religion—distinct, of course, from orthodox Islam—which were known to the Byzantines,” his thought was called “provocative.” Scholars translate sphyropēktos as “beaten solid into a ball” or “solid ” and holosphyros as “of hammer-beaten metal” , “made of solid, hammer-beaten metal” , “impenetrable” , or “made of solid metal beaten to a spherical shape” . They are often inclined to assume that the Greek words represent “a clumsy translation” , “a blatant, derogatory mistranslation of the divine epithet ṣamad” , “the result of a biased attitude and wrong interpretation of the Qur՚anic proclamation of Allah” , or “one of the stock examples in Christian polemics against Islam” or that they were “probably originally chosen for polemical reasons, to claim that Muslims believe in a material, corporeal God” . Perhaps under the impression of these views, in his recent translation of Theodore Abū Qurrah, John C. Lamoreaux, instead of sphyropēktos, adopts a variant reading, steiropēktos , meaning “barren-built.”. (shrink)

As an Israeli writing at the turn of the twenty-first century, I have become accustomed to hearing the word ‘settlement’ used by liberals almost invariably as a derogatory term. The Jewish settlements to the west of the Jordan river, now populated by close to a quarter of a million Jews, are often said to be a central obstacle to peace in the Middle East, as well as being immoral in and of themselves. Consistent liberals realize that this attitude poses (...) a problem for the endorsement of the Zionist effort altogether, since settlement has been a central tenet of this doctrine from the start and the main practical tool for achieving its goals within contested territories. It was also the primary apparatus for achieving Western control over North America, Australia, and New Zealand, wholly at the expense of the aboriginal inhabitants of those places. This, too, is the source of a great deal of contemporary liberal breast-beating. (shrink)

Slurs are both derogatory and offensive, and they are said to exhibit “derogatory force” and “offensiveness.” Almost all theories of slurs, except the truth-conditional content theory and the invocational content theory, conflate these two features and use “derogatory force” and “offensiveness” interchangeably. This paper defends and explains the distinction between slurs’ derogatory force and offensiveness by fulfilling three goals. First, it distinguishes between slurs’ being derogatory and their being offensive with four arguments. For instance, ‘Monday’, (...) a slur in the Bostonian argot, is used to secretly derogate African Americans without causing offense. Second, this paper points out that many theories of slurs run into problems because they conflate derogatory force with offensiveness. For example, the prohibition theory’s account of offensiveness in terms of prohibitions struggles to explain why ‘Monday’ is derogatory when it is not a prohibited word in English. Third, this paper offers a new explanation of this distinction from the perspective of a speech act theory of slurs; derogatory force is different from offensiveness because they arise from two different kinds of speech acts that slurs are used to perform, i.e., the illocutionary act of derogation and the perlocutionary act of offending. This new explanation avoids the problems faced by other theories. (shrink)

Semantic relativism maintains that the truth-value of some propositions is sensitive to a judge parameter, facilitating cases whereby a proposition can be true relative to one judge, but false relative to another. Most prominently, semantic relativism has been applied to predicates of personal tastes (PPTs). Recently, Lasersohn [2007. “Expressives, Perspective and Presupposition.” Theoretical Linguistics 33 (2): 223–230; 2017. Subjectivity and Perspective in Truth-Theoretic Semantics. Oxford: Oxford University Press] has urged an extension of semantic relativism to terms traditionally construed as expressives (...) including derogatory epithets (e.g. ‘asshole’) and, more tentatively, expressions like ‘damn’. In this paper, we challenge Lasersohn’s extension of relativism. Section 1 gives a background on semantic theories for expressives and on semantic relativism. In Section 2, we focus on Lasersohn’s [2007. “Expressives, Perspective and Presupposition.” Theoretical Linguistics 33 (2): 223–230] account where he attempts to apply relativism to a wider range of expressives. We argue that because PPTs and expressives have fundamentally different semantic functions, the prospects for a relativistic account are slim. Several problems are presented. Our focus is on the perspective sensitivity of expressive content and the phenomenon of projection failure, as both reveal a fundamental disparity between expressives and PPTs. (shrink)

Slurs are derogatory words; they seem to express contempt and hatred toward marginalized groups. They are used to insult and derogate their victims. Moreover, slurs give rise to philosophical questions. In virtue of what is the word “chink,” unlike “Chinese,” a derogatory word? Does “chink” refer to the same group as “Chinese”? If “chink” is a derogatory word, how is it possible to use it in a non-derogatory way (e.g., by Chinese comedians or between Chinese friends)? (...) Many theories of slurs answer these questions by assuming that slurs communicate derogatory messages. However, little attention has been paid to the speech acts slurs are used to perform. In this dissertation, I argue that slurs are illocutionary force indicators: words to perform the speech acts of derogation. “Chink” is a derogatory word because its use is to derogate the Chinese, just like the phrase “I promise” has the use to make a promise. To derogate the Chinese is to enforce a norm which assigns to them an inferior normative status. Slurs are also propositional indicators: words that contribute to the truth-conditions. “Chink” has the same referent as “Chinese,” its neutral counterpart. Appealing to speech act theory enables my theory to answer questions about slurs, e.g., slurs can be used in non-derogatory ways because the felicity conditions of derogation are not met. To illustrate the advantage of my theory, I will explain how other theories of slurs fall short because they take positions opposite to mine on certain issues. For instance, Mark Richard’s theory, unlike mine, takes utterances of slurs to have no truth values. It follows from his theory, I will argue, that lying with “Chang is a chink” is impossible. Finally, I will defend the force indicator theory from common objections. My force indicator theory provides a case study of the use theory of meaning and a framework for political philosophers to study the harm of slurs. (shrink)

It seems that we can be directly accountable for our reasons-responsive attitudes—e.g., our beliefs, desires, and intentions. Yet, we rarely, if ever, have volitional control over such attitudes, volitional control being the sort of control that we exert over our intentional actions. This presents a trilemma: (Horn 1) deny that we can be directly accountable for our reasons-responsive attitudes, (Horn 2) deny that φ’s being under our control is necessary for our being directly accountable for φ-ing, or (...) (Horn 3) deny that the relevant sort of control is volitional control. This paper argues that we should take Horn 3. (shrink)

In a recent paper, after outlining various distinguishing features of derogatory words, Jennifer Hornsby suggests that the phenomenon raises serious difficulties for inferentialism. Against Hornsby, I claim that derogatory words do not pose any insuperable problems for inferentialism, so long as it is supplemented with apparatus borrowed from Grice and Hare. Moreover, I argue, derogatory expressions pose difficulties for Hornsby's favoured alternative theory of meaning, representationalism, unless it too is conjoined with a similar Grice/Hare mechanism. So, the (...) upshot of the discussion is that, contra Hornsby, focus on derogatory expressions alone does not provide grounds for deciding between competing theories of meaning, but nevertheless serves to highlight important features that any such theory must acknowledge and incorporate. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that Bykvist’s recent challenges to the fitting-attitude account of value (FA) can be successfully met. The challenge from solitary goods claims that FA cannot account for the value of states of affairs which necessarily rule out the presence of favouring subjects. I point out the modal reasons why FA can account for solitary goods by appealing to contemplative attitudes. Bykvist’s second challenge, the ‘distance problem’, questions the ability of FA to match facts about the (...) intensity of fitting attitudes and facts about value, particularly in the case of solitary goods. I argue that this challenge can be met by including the notion of a veil of ignorance in the formulation of FA, and understanding its role as bracketing the relevance of certain facts when determining the fittingness of attitudes to states of affairs. (shrink)

Counterfactual attitudes like imagining, dreaming, and wishing create a problem for the standard formal semantic theory of de re attitude ascriptions. I show how the problem can be avoided if we represent an agent's attitudinal possibilities using "multi-centered worlds", possible worlds with multiple distinguished individuals, each of which represents an individual with whom the agent is acquainted. I then present a compositional semantics for de re ascriptions according to which singular terms are "assignment-sensitive" expressions and attitude verbs are "assignment (...) shifters". (shrink)

This baseline study was conducted to find out the knowledge, attitudes and practices of medical ethics among the undergraduate medical interns who did not have structured ethics curriculum in their course. A descriptive, cross-sectional study was carried out using a self-administered structured questionnaire among the medical undergraduate interns of Maharajgunj Medical Campus, the pioneer medical college of Nepal which enrols 60 students in a year. A total of 46 interns participated in the study. The most common source of knowledge (...) on ethics was lectures/seminars (35.7%) followed by experience at work (24.5%), training (21.4%) and own reading (17.3%). The main contents of Hippocratic Oath were known to 98.8% while 60.9% knew the main contents of Nepal Medical Council (NMC) code of ethics. Great majority (91.3%) regard ethics as very important in medical profession. “Doctors know the best irrespective of patients’ opinion” was disagreed by only 39.1% indicating the paternalistic attitude. However, 78.3% were in favour of adhering to the patient’s wish. None of the participant agreed to abandon confidentiality. Only about one-fourth (26.1%) claim to encounter ethical dilemma every day while the highest number (43.5%) had once in a month. To deal with the situation of ethical dilemma, majority approached to immediate supervisor followed by head of the department and colleagues. Eighty-seven percent of participating interns were involved in research activities involving human subjects. Only one of the participants had encountered the ethical issue on end-of-life and it was do-not-resuscitate consent in a terminally ill patient. On implementation of the curriculum on medical ethics focus should be - principles of biomedical ethics, sensitive ethical dilemmas like end-of-life care and practical experiences with participation in deliberations of the ethics committee. (shrink)

What is involved in the consciousness of a conscious, "occurrent" propositional attitude, such as a thought, a sudden conjecture or a conscious decision? And what is the relation of such consciousness to attention? I hope the intrinsic interest of these questions provides sufficient motivation to allow me to start by addressing them. We will not have a full understanding either of consciousness in general, nor of attention in general, until we have answers to these questions. I think there are constitutive (...) features of these states which can be identified by broadly philosophical investigation, and in the early part of this paper I will try to do some of that identification. -/- Beyond the intrinsic interest of the topic, the nature of such conscious attitudes is highly pertinent to a philosophical account of psychological self-knowledge. So I will also say something about the significance of the constitutive features of these conscious attitudes for a philosophical account of how it can be that a thinker has a distinctive kind of knowledge of some of his mental states. The general challenge in this area is to find anything intermediate between the unexceptionable but uninformative, on the one hand, and the absolutely unbelievable on the other. (shrink)

Explaining Attitudes develops a new account of propositional attitudes - practical realism.

Explaining Attitudes offers an important challenge to the dominant conception of belief found in the work of such philosophers as Dretske and Fodor. According to this dominant view beliefs, if they exist at all, are constituted by states of the brain. Lynne Rudder Baker rejects this view and replaces it with a quite different approach - practical realism. Seen from the perspective of practical realism, any argument that interprets beliefs as either brain states or states of immaterial souls is (...) a 'non-starter'. Practical realism takes beliefs to be states of the whole persons, rather like states of health. What a person believes is determined by what a person would do, say and think in various circumstances. Thus beliefs and other attitudes are interwoven into an integrated, commonsensical conception of reality. (shrink)

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

This chapter provides empirical evidence about everyday attitudes concerning euthanasia. These attitudes have important implications for some ethical arguments about euthanasia. Two experiments suggested that some different descriptions of euthanasia have modest effects on people’s moral permissibility judgments regarding euthanasia. Experiment 1 (N = 422) used two different types of materials (scenarios and scales) and found that describing euthanasia differently (‘euthanasia’, ‘aid in dying’, and ‘physician assisted suicide’) had modest effects (≈3 % of the total variance) on permissibility (...) judgments. These effects were largely replicated in Experiment 2 (N = 409). However, in Experiment 2, judgments about euthanasia’s moral permissibility were best predicted by the voluntariness of the treatment. Voluntariness was a stronger predictor than some demographic factors and some domain general elements of moral judgments. These results help inform some debates about the moral permissibility of euthanasia (e.g., the slippery slope argument) suggesting that some of the key premises of those arguments are unwarranted. (shrink)

According to Lynne Rudder Baker’s Practical Realism, we know that we have beliefs, desires, and other propositional attitudes independent of any scientific investigation. Propositional attitudes are an indispensable part of our everyday conception of the world and not in need of scientific validation. This paper asks what is the nature of the attitudes such that we may know them so well from a commonsense perspective. I argue for a self-ascriptivist view, on which we have propositional attitudes (...) in virtue of ascribing them to ourselves. On this view, propositional attitudes are derived representational states, deriving their contents and their attitude types from our self-ascriptions. (shrink)

This book makes a stimulating contribution to the philosophy of language and philosophy of mind. It begins with a spirited defence of the view that propositions are structured and that propositional structure is 'psychologically real'. The author then develops a subtle view of propositions and attitude ascription. The view is worked out in detail with attention to such topics as the semantics of conversations, iterated attitude ascriptions, and the role of propositions as bearers of truth. Along the way important issues (...) in the philosophy of mind are addressed. Though intended primarily for professional philosophers and graduate students the book will also interest cognitive scientists and linguists. (shrink)

In order to handle presuppositions in the scope of attitude verbs, the binding theory allows presuppositions triggered in a subject's beliefs to be bound at the matrix level; and it allows presuppositions triggered in non-doxastic attitudes to be bound in the subject's beliefs (Geurts, 1999; Maier, 2015). However, we argue that this leads to serious overgeneration, for example it predicts that the unacceptable `Sue will come to the party, but Bill is sure that she won't and that only Sue (...) will come to the party' should be equivalent to the acceptable `Sue will come to the party, but Bill is sure that nobody will come to the party'. This is because the presupposition triggered by `only Sue will come to the party' should be able to be bound at the matrix level. We discuss some responses to this problem, but argue that they all have shortcomings. (shrink)

This paper presents a puzzle involving embedded attitude reports. We resolve the puzzle by arguing that attitude verbs take restricted readings: in some environments the denotation of attitude verbs can be restricted by a given proposition. For example, when these verbs are embedded in the consequent of a conditional, they can be restricted by the proposition expressed by the conditional’s antecedent. We formulate and motivate two conditions on the availability of verb restrictions: a constraint that ties the content of restrictions (...) to the “dynamic effects” of sentential connectives and a constraint that limits the availability of restriction effects to present tense verbs with first-person subjects. However, we also present some cases that make trouble for these conditions, and outline some possible ways of modifying the view to account for the recalcitrant data. We conclude with a brief discussion of some of the connections between our semantics for attitude verbs and issues concerning epistemic modals and theories of knowledge. (shrink)

I offer here a new hypothesis about the nature of implicit attitudes. Psy- chologists and philosophers alike often distinguish implicit from explicit attitudes by maintaining that we are aware of the latter, but not aware of the former. Recent experimental evidence, however, seems to challenge this account. It would seem, for example, that participants are frequently quite adept at predicting their own perfor- mances on measures of implicit attitudes. I propose here that most theorists in this area (...) have nonetheless overlooked a commonsense distinction regarding how we can be aware of attitudes, a difference that fundamentally distinguishes implicit and explicit attitudes. Along the way, I discuss the implications that this distinction may hold for future debates about and experimental investigations into the nature of implicit attitudes. (shrink)

In this paper, I raise a problem for standard precisifications of the Relational Analysis of attitude reports. The problem I raise involves counterfactual attitude verbs. such as ‘wish’. In short, the trouble is this: there are true attitude reports ‘ S wishes that P ’ but there is no suitable referent for the term ‘that P ’. The problematic reports illustrate that the content of a subject’s wish is intimately related to the content of their beliefs. I capture this fact (...) by moving to a framework in which ‘wish’ relates subjects to sets of pairs of worlds, or paired propositions, rather than—as is standardly assumed—sets of worlds. Although other types of counterfactual attitude reports, for example those involving ‘imagine’, may be similarly problematic, at this stage it is unclear whether they can be handled the same way. (shrink)