Download or read book Slurs and Thick Terms written by Bianca Cepollaro and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2020-08-31 with total page 185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is the relation between language, communication, and values? In Slurs and Thick Terms: When Language Encodes Values, Bianca Cepollaro explores the ways in which certain pieces of evaluative language not only reflect speakers’ moral perspectives, but also contribute to promoting their evaluative stance. She focuses on slurs—the prototypical example of hate speech, including racial and homophobic epithets—and so-called thick terms, that is, those expressions, much discussed in metaethics, that mix description and evaluation such as "lewd," "chaste," "generous," or "selfish." This book argues that in employing such terms, speakers not only say something purely factual about people and things, but also presuppose certain values, as if they were common ground among the conversation participants. Cepollaro illustrates how this linguistic mechanism effectively explains the pervasive social and moral effects of evaluative language. Using a multidisciplinary approach, she tackles issues in philosophy of language, linguistics, ethics, and metaethics. Moreover, the theoretical investigation takes into consideration and discusses empirical data from psychology and experimental philosophy.
Download or read book Thick Concepts written by Simon Kirchin and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2013-04-25 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is the difference between judging someone to be good and judging them to be kind? Both judgements are typically positive, but the latter seems to offer more description of the person: we get a more specific sense of what they are like. Very general evaluative concepts (such as good, bad, right and wrong) are referred to as thin concepts, whilst more specific ones (including brave, rude, gracious, wicked, sympathetic, and mean) are termed thick concepts. In this volume, an international team of experts addresses the questions that this distinction opens up. How do the descriptive and evaluative functions or elements of thick concepts combine with each other? Are these functions or elements separable in the first place? Is there a sharp division between thin and thick concepts? Can we mark interesting further distinctions between how thick ethical concepts work and how other thick concepts work, such as those found in aesthetics and epistemology? How, if at all, are thick concepts related to reasons and action? These questions, and others, touch on some of the deepest philosophical issues about the evaluative and normative. They force us to think hard about the place of the evaluative in a (seemingly) nonevaluative world, and raise fascinating issues about how language works.
Download or read book Thick Evaluation written by Simon Kirchin and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The descriptions 'good' and 'bad' are examples of thin concepts, as opposed to 'kind' or 'cruel' which are thick concepts. Simon Kirchin provides one of the first full-length studies of the crucial distinction between 'thin' and 'thick' concepts, which is fundamental to many debates in ethics, aesthetics and epistemology
Download or read book Slurs and Expressivity written by Eleonora Orlando and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2021-04-20 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Slurs and Expressivity: Semantics and Beyond, edited by Eleonora Orlando and Andres Saab,focuses on the analysis of the expressive aspects of slur-words, namely, those words prima facie related to the conveyance of contemptuous or derogatory feelings for the members of a certain group of people identified in terms of their ethnicity, sexual orientation, religion, political ideology, and other personal qualities. In as far as they are used to express emotional attitudes, slurs are, thus, a kind of expressive words. This collection provides different hypotheses regarding the way in which the expressive import of slurs and other related expressive words is semantically encoded in the grammar and how their meaning impacts other aspects related to their use in different practices of linguistic communication. These linguistic practices are usually, but not always, related to segregation and discrimination of particular human groups. Therefore, any contribution to the theory of slur meaning is, directly or indirectly, also a contribution to a better understanding of those practices and to finding the best way to eradicate them.
Download or read book Nigger written by Randall Kennedy and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2008-12-18 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Randall Kennedy takes on not just a word, but our laws, attitudes, and culture with bracing courage and intelligence—with a range of reference that extends from the Jim Crow south to Chris Rock routines and the O. J. Simpson trial. It’s “the nuclear bomb of racial epithets,” a word that whites have employed to wound and degrade African Americans for three centuries. Paradoxically, among many Black people it has become a term of affection and even empowerment. The word, of course, is nigger, and in this candid, lucidly argued book the distinguished legal scholar Randall Kennedy traces its origins, maps its multifarious connotations, and explores the controversies that rage around it. Should Blacks be able to use nigger in ways forbidden to others? Should the law treat it as a provocation that reduces the culpability of those who respond to it violently? Should it cost a person his job, or a book like Huckleberry Finn its place on library shelves?
Download or read book Theory of Value Structure written by Erich H. Rast and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2022-03-08 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The theory of value structure concerns the meaning of “better than” and “good,” as well as the way in which values serve as a basis for rational decision making. Drawing methodologically from economics and theories of decision making, the aim of serious axiology in metaethics is to do justice to problems that have puzzled philosophers of value for centuries. Can value comparisons be cyclic? Are all values comparable with each other and can decision makers just add up different aspects of an evaluation to determine the best course of action? A Theory of Value Structure: From Values to Decisions starts with a thorough introduction to the modeling of “better than” comparisons from a normative perspective. In the philosophical part of the book, Erich H. Rast argues that aspects of “better than” comparisons can differ qualitatively so much that one aspect may outrank another. Consequently, the classical weighted sum aggregation model fails. Values cannot always be summed up and comparisons may be fundamentally noncompensatory, an indeterminacy that explains problems like the apparent nontransitivity of “better than” and hard cases in decision making. Using a lexicographic method of value comparisons, Rast develops a multidimensional theory of “better than” and shows how and to which extent it can be combined with standard methods of decision making under uncertainty by using rank-dependent utility theory.
Download or read book Beyond Slurs written by Rose Elizabeth Lenehan and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 43 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Slurs have recently received a great deal of attention from philosophers of language. They are thought to be special in both their linguistic properties and their rhetorical effects-that is, in both what they mean and what they do. In this paper, drawing on the work of Elisabeth Camp and Rae Langton, I argue that a wide variety of speech shares the interesting features normally imputed to slurs. In using a slur, Camp argues, a speaker signals allegiance to a derogating perspective. He does not indicate merely that he believes a certain proposition; he indicates that certain features of the world are salient for him and that he experiences them as having a particular kind of disvalue. In her work on hate speech, Langton has argued that speech can be successful not only in its appeal to believe something but also in its appeal to feel or desire something. By presupposing that a hearer feels a certain way, a speaker can make it the case that she feels that way. But none of this is specific to slurs and hate speech. Non-evaluative terms can function in just the same way. When a speaker uses the expression "You're skinny" as a compliment, for example, she presupposes a particular evaluative perspective. Because the perspective is communicated as part of the not-at-issue content of her utterance, it is especially difficult for her hearers to object. The perspective can thus become taken for granted in the conversation without having been explicitly proposed or argued for. This kind of utterance doesn't merely change hearers' beliefs; it can also change their conative attitudes. And, like uses of slurs and other thick terms, it can change what we have social permission to say and do.
Download or read book Just Words written by Mary Kate McGowan and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-01-31 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We all know that speech can be harmful. But what are the harms and how exactly does the speech in question brings those harms about? Mary Kate McGowan identifies a previously overlooked mechanism by which speech constitutes, rather than merely causes, harm. She argues that speech constitutes harm when it enacts a norm that prescribes that harm. McGowan illustrates this theory by considering many categories of speech including sexist remarks, racist hate speech, pornography, verbal triggers for stereotype threat, micro-aggressions, political dog whistles, slam poetry, and even the hanging of posters. Just Words explores a variety of harms - such as oppression, subordination, discrimination, domination, harassment, and marginalization - and ways in which these harms can be remedied.
Download or read book Philosophy for Girls written by Melissa Shew and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-09-18 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This revolutionary book empowers its readers by exploring enduring, challenging, and timely philosophical issues in new essays written by expert women philosophers. The book will inspire and entice these philosophers' younger counterparts, curious readers of all genders, and all who support equity in philosophy. If asked to envision a philosopher, people might imagine a bearded man, probably Greek, perhaps in a toga, pontificating about abstract ideas. Or they might think of that same man in the Enlightenment, gripping a quill pen and pouring universal truths onto a page. They may even call to mind a much more modern man, wearing a black sweater and smoking a cigarette in a Paris café, expressing existential angst in a new novel or essay. What people are unlikely to picture, though, is a woman. Women have historically been excluded from the discipline of philosophy and remain largely marginalized in contemporary textbooks and anthologies. The under-representation of women in secondary and post-secondary curricula makes it harder for young women to see themselves as future philosophers. In fact, it makes it harder for all people to engage the valuable contributions that women have made and continue to make to intellectual thought. While some progress has been made in building a more inclusive world of philosophy, especially in the last fifty years, important work remains to be done. Philosophy for Girls helps correct the pervasive and problematic omission of women from philosophy. Divided into four sections that connect to major, primary fields in philosophy (metaphysics, epistemology, social and political philosophy, and ethics), this anthology is unique: chapters are all written by women, and each chapter opens with an anecdote about a girl or woman from mythology, history, art, literature, or science to introduce chapter topics. Further, nearly all primary and secondary sources used in the chapters are written by women philosophers. The book is written in a rigorous, academic spirit but in lively and engaging prose, making serious philosophical insights accessible to readers who are new to philosophy. This book appeals to a wide audience. Individual readers will find value in these pages--especially girls and women ages 16-24, as well as university and high school educators and students who want a change from standard anthologies that include few or no women. The book's contributors both represent and map the diverse landscape of philosophy, highlighting its engagement with themes of gender and equity. In doing so, they encourage philosophers current and future philosophers to explore new territory and further develop the topography of the field. Philosophy for Girls is a rigorous yet accessible entry-point to philosophical contemplation designed to inspire a new generation of philosophers.
Download or read book Bad Words written by David Sosa and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-07-12 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What makes a word bad? Bad Words is a philosophical examination of slurs and other derogatory and problematic language, by some of the leading contributors to the field. Slurs are an interesting case for the philosophy of language. On the one hand, they seem to be meaningful in something like the way many other expressions are meaningful - different slurs might seem in some way to refer to different groups, for example. But on the other hand, it's clear that slurs also have distinctive practical effects and roles: they can seem to be just an arbitrary tool for insulting or enabling harm. How are those aspects related? Just how the use of words is related to their significance is of course one of the deepest issues in philosophy of language: slurs not only refine that issue, by presenting a kind of use that presents novel challenges, but also give the issue a compelling practical relevance. The Engaging Philosophy series is a new forum for collective philosophical engagement with controversial issues in contemporary society.
Download or read book Speaking of Silence in Heidegger written by Wanda Torres Gregory and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2021-10-06 with total page 165 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Speaking of Silence in Heidegger, Wanda Torres Gregory critically analyzes Heidegger’sthoughts on silence. Arguing that silence about silence is a guiding principle in his sparse and often reticent words, Torres Gregory sets out to decipher their elusive meanings. Charting the trajectory of Heidegger’s reflections, from Being and Time to On the Way to Language, she shows that he develops his ideas of silence in increasingly closer relations to his also evolving ideas of truth as the unconcealedness of being/beyng and language as disclosive sonorous saying. Torres Gregory distinguishes between human, primordial, and primeval forms of silence, and the linguistic, pre-linguistic, and proto-linguistic levels at which silence can occur in relation to sonorous speech. While the book focuses on these inner conceptual dynamics, the author remains mindful of Heidegger’s ties to National Socialism and clarifies how his theoretical assumptions allow for oppressive silencing. The book concludes with critical reflections on the later Heidegger’s thinking of silence and proposes alternatives to his claims concerning the sound beyond sounds, the metaphysics of mystical silence, the uniquely linguistic essence of the mortals, and the loud idle talk in the age of modern technology.
Download or read book Choosing Normative Concepts written by Matti Eklund and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-08-04 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Theorists working on metaethics and the nature of normativity typically study goodness, rightness, what ought to be done, and so on. In their investigations they employ and consider our actual normative concepts. But the actual concepts of goodness, rightness, and what ought to be done are only some of the possible normative concepts there are. There are other possible concepts, ascribing different properties. Matti Eklund explores the consequences of this thought, for example for the debate over normative realism, and for the debate over what it is for concepts and properties to be normative. Conceptual engineering - the project of considering how our concepts can be replaced by better ones - has become a central topic in philosophy. Eklund applies this methodology to central normative concepts and discusses the special complications that arise in this case. For example, since talk of improvement is itself normative, how should we, in the context, understand talk of a concept being better?
Download or read book Bad Words written by David Sosa and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-07-18 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What makes a word bad? Bad Words is a philosophical examination of slurs and other derogatory and problematic language, by some of the leading contributors to the field. Slurs are an interesting case for the philosophy of language. On the one hand, they seem to be meaningful in something like the way many other expressions are meaningful - different slurs might seem in some way to refer to different groups, for example. But on the other hand, it's clear that slurs also have distinctive practical effects and roles: they can seem to be just an arbitrary tool for insulting or enabling harm. How are those aspects related? Just how the use of words is related to their significance is of course one of the deepest issues in philosophy of language: slurs not only refine that issue, by presenting a kind of use that presents novel challenges, but also give the issue a compelling practical relevance. The Engaging Philosophy series is a new forum for collective philosophical engagement with controversial issues in contemporary society.
Download or read book Invisible Language written by Garth L. Hallett and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2014-03-06 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Invisible Language: Its Incalcuable Significance for Philosophy reveals that although the use of language is visible or audible, the medium employed boasts neither of these attributes. Garth L. Hallet suggests that from Plato until now, the intangibility of language has exercised a far more profound influence in philosophy than even Wittgenstein came close to demonstrating. Indeed, without that pervasive factor of language, the history of philosophy would have been undeniably different. Yet philosophy is, and can legitimately aspire to be, much more than a struggle between language and human comprehension of it. Ultimately, this book suggests that philosophy’s positive possibilities, so often obscured by linguistically-inattentive practice, reach as far as human thought can reach.
Download or read book Metaphor and Metaphilosophy written by Sarah A. Mattice and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2014-10-08 with total page 167 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sarah A. Mattice explores contemporary philosophical activity and the way in which one aspect of language—metaphor—gives shape and boundary to the landscape of the discipline. The book examines metaphors of combat, play, and aesthetic experience and emphasizes how the choices we make in philosophical language are deeply intertwined with what we think philosophy is and how it should be practiced. Drawing on a broad range of resources, from cognitive linguistics and hermeneutics to aesthetics and Chinese philosophy, Mattice's argument provides insight into the evolution and future of philosophy itself.
Download or read book Thick Concepts written by Simon Kirchin and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2013-04-25 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An international team of experts explores the distinction between 'thin' concepts (general, evaluative terms like 'good' and 'bad') and 'thick' concepts (more specific concepts, such as 'brave', or 'rude'). Their essays touch on key debates in metaethics about the evaluative and normative, and raise fascinating questions about how language works.
Download or read book Philosophy of Language written by Susana Nuccetelli and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2008 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of classic and contemporary essays in philosophy of language offers a concise introduction to the field for students in graduate and upper-division undergraduate courses. It contains some of the most important basic sources in philosophy of language, including a number of classic essays by philosophers such as Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, Kripke, Grice, Davidson, Strawson, Austin, and Putnam, as well as more recent contributions by scholars including John McDowell, Stephen Neale, Ruth Millikan, Stephen Schiffer, Paul Horwich, and Anthony Brueckner, among others, who are on the leading edge of innovation in this increasingly influential area of philosophy. The result is a lively mix of readings, together with the editors' discussions of the material, which provides a rigorous introduction to the subject.
