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Author: Bianca Cepollaro
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1793610533
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 185
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Book Description
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.
Author: Bianca Cepollaro
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1793610533
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 185
Get Book Here
Book Description
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.
Author: Simon Kirchin
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191652504
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 248
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Book Description
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.
Author: Simon Kirchin
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198803435
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 211
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Book Description
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
Author: Eleonora Orlando
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1793614377
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 229
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Book Description
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.
Author: Matti Eklund
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191027650
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 232
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Book Description
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?
Author: Mary Kate McGowan
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192565222
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 222
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Book Description
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.
Author: Randall Kennedy
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307538915
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 210
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Book Description
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?
Author: Eduardo García-Ramírez
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1498562736
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 243
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Book Description
Open Compositionality: Towards a New Methodology of Language argues that natural languages, like English and Spanish, are not only systems of representation useful for communication but also highly interactive cognitive capacities allowing humans to engage in complex forms of cognition. This view goes against the orthodox approach within philosophy of language, which considers natural languages to be specialized systems consisting of only linguistic elements and functioning in a closed compositional manner, allowing for fully formal, algebraic descriptions. Eduardo García-Ramírez rejects the longstanding principle of compositionality, according to which the meaning of any complex expression is fully determined by its parts and the way they are combined, and he substitutes it with an alternative, open, and interactive one. This novel view of the nature of language better accounts for the empirical evidence. García Ramírez develops an account of open compositionality, accompanied by the cognition-first methodology, in which natural languages are conceived as supermodular cognitive capacities that allow for interaction among multiple distinct areas of human cognition. The explanatory success of this original proposal and its accompanying methodology are tested by the author’s account of three enduring philosophical problems: substitution failure, empty names, and the nature of moral discourse.
Author: Erich H. Rast
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1793616957
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 234
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Book Description
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.
Author: Garth L. Hallett
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 0739182870
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 244
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Book Description
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.
