Switch to: References

Add citations

You must login to add citations.
  1. (1 other version)Conceptual Ethics I.Alexis Burgess & David Plunkett - 2013 - Philosophy Compass 8 (12):1091-1101.
    Which concepts should we use to think and talk about the world and to do all of the other things that mental and linguistic representation facilitates? This is the guiding question of the field that we call ‘conceptual ethics’. Conceptual ethics is not often discussed as its own systematic branch of normative theory. A case can nevertheless be made that the field is already quite active, with contributions coming in from areas as diverse as fundamental metaphysics and social/political philosophy. In (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   200 citations  
  • Glasgow's Race Antirealism: Experimental Philosophy and Thought Experiments.Jeremy Pierce - 2013 - Journal of Social Philosophy 44 (2):146-168.
    Joshua Glasgow argues against the existence of races. His experimental philosophy asks subjects questions involving racial categorization to discover the ordinary concept of race at work in their judgments. The results show conflicting information about the concept of race, and Glasgow concludes that the ordinary concept of race is inconsistent. I conclude, rather, that Glasgow’s results fit perfectly fine with a social-kind view of races as real social entities. He also presents thought experiments to show that social-kind views give the (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Different Women. Gender and the Realism-Nominalism Debate.Natalie Stoljar - 2010 - In Charlotte Witt (ed.), Feminist Metaphysics: Explorations in the Ontology of Sex, Gender and the Self. Springer Verlag. pp. 27--46.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   20 citations  
  • The Social Construction of Human Kinds.Ásta Kristjana Sveinsdóttir - 2013 - Hypatia 28 (4):716-732.
    Social construction theorists face a certain challenge to the effect that they confuse the epistemic and the metaphysical: surely our conceptions of something are influenced by social practices, but that doesn't show that the nature of the thing in question is so influenced. In this paper I take up this challenge and offer a general framework to support the claim that a human kind is socially constructed, when this is understood as a metaphysical claim and as a part of a (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   39 citations  
  • Verbal Disputes.David J. Chalmers - 2011 - Philosophical Review 120 (4):515-566.
    The philosophical interest of verbal disputes is twofold. First, they play a key role in philosophical method. Many philosophical disagreements are at least partly verbal, and almost every philosophical dispute has been diagnosed as verbal at some point. Here we can see the diagnosis of verbal disputes as a tool for philosophical progress. Second, they are interesting as a subject matter for first-order philosophy. Reflection on the existence and nature of verbal disputes can reveal something about the nature of concepts, (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   233 citations  
  • Ontological Commitments, Sex and Gender.Mari Mikkola - 2010 - In Charlotte Witt (ed.), Feminist Metaphysics: Explorations in the Ontology of Sex, Gender and the Self. Springer Verlag. pp. 67--83.
    This paper develops an alternative for (what feminists call) ‘the sex/gender distinction’. I do so in order to avoid certain problematic implications that the distinction underpins. First, the sex/gender distinction paradigmatically holds that some social conditions determine one’s gender (whether one is a woman or a man), and that some biological conditions determine one’s sex (whether one is female or male). Further, sex and gender come apart. Since gender is socially constructed, this implies that women exist mind-dependently, or due to (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   23 citations  
  • What Is Gender Essentialism?Charlotte Witt - 2010 - In Feminist Metaphysics: Explorations in the Ontology of Sex, Gender and the Self. Springer Verlag. pp. 11--25.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   15 citations  
  • History and the critique of social concepts.Brian Epstein - 2010 - Philosophy of the Social Sciences 40 (1):3-29.
    Many theorists, including Nietzsche, Adorno, and Foucault, have regarded genealogy as an important technique for social criticism. But it has been unclear how genealogy can go beyond the accomplishments of other, more mundane, critical methods. I propose a new approach to understanding the critical potential of history. I argue that theorists have been misled by the assumption that if a claim is deserving of criticism, it is because the claim is false. Turning to the criticism of concepts rather than criticism (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   7 citations  
  • Gender concepts and intuitions.Mari Mikkola - 2009 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 39 (4):pp. 559-583.
    The gender concept woman is central to feminism but has proven to be notoriously difficult to define. Some feminist philosophers, most notably Sally Haslanger, have recently argued for revisionary analyses of the concept where it is defined pragmatically for feminist political purposes. I argue against such analyses: pragmatically revising woman may not best serve feminist goals and doing so is unnecessary. Instead, focusing on certain intuitive uses of the term ‘woman’ enables feminist philosophers to make sense of it.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   22 citations  
  • Naturalistic approaches to social construction.Ron Mallon - 2009 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    Social “construction,” “constructionism” and “constructivism” are terms in wide use in the humanities and social sciences, and are applied to a diverse range of objects including the emotions, gender, race, sex, homo- and hetero-sexuality, mental illness, technology, quarks, facts, reality, and truth. This sort of terminology plays a number of different roles in different discourses, only some of which are philosophically interesting, and fewer of which admit of a “naturalistic” approach—an approach that treats science as a central and successful (if (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   17 citations  
  • Feminist perspectives on sex and gender.Mari Mikkola - 2008 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    Feminism is the movement to end women’s oppression. One possible way to understand ‘woman’ in this claim is to take it as a sex term: ‘woman’ picks out human females and being a human female depends on various anatomical features (like genitalia). Historically many feminists have understood ‘woman’ differently: not as a sex term, but as a gender term that depends on social and cultural factors (like social position). In so doing, they distinguished sex (being female or male) from gender (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   43 citations  
  • What good are our intuitions: Philosophical analysis and social kinds.Sally Haslanger - 2006 - Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 80 (1):89-118.
    Across the humanities and social sciences it has become commonplace for scholars to argue that categories once assumed to be “natural” are in fact “social” or, in the familiar lingo, “socially constructed”. Two common examples of such categories are race and gender, but there many others. One interpretation of this claim is that although it is typically thought that what unifies the instances of such categories is some set of natural or physical properties, instead their unity rests on social features (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   116 citations  
  • The Myth of Factive Verbs.Allan Hazlett - 2010 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 80 (3):497 - 522.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   129 citations  
  • Soll „Rasse“ aus dem Grundgesetz gestrichen werden?Niklas Eickhoff - 2024 - Zeitschrift für Praktische Philosophie 11 (1).
    In the German legal system, the concept of race occupies an important and controversial position. The desire to eliminate it is understandable but not inherently obvious, as not all reasons for deletion are valid. One central issue with the term “race” is its ambiguity, encompassing both scientific-biological and social-constructivist categorisations of individuals. Choosing one interpretation over the other is neither meaningful nor purposeful. Instead, it is more sensible to understand how the concept of race functions and how it can be (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Speaking of ‘violence’: Figleaf use in sexualized violence contexts.Madeleine Kenyon - 2024 - Philosophical Quarterly 74 (4):1207-1227.
    In this project, I develop the concept of a sexualized violence figleaf, a speech mechanism often used in sexualized violence discourse to dismiss or characterize assault as some other kind of thing: a misunderstanding, a change of heart by the victim, a mischaracterization of the perpetrator, or any other number of things which are not rape, or violence. Sexualized violence figleaves are an extension of Jennifer Saul's work on racial and gender figleaves, as the underlying mechanics of the utterance track (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • The Content and Implications of Nativist Claims. A Philosophical Analysis.Riin Kõiv - 2021 - Dissertation, University of Tartu
    We often hear how scientists have discovered that a certain human trait – or a trait of another type of organism – is innate, genetic, heritable, inherited, naturally selected etc. All these claims have something in common: they all declare a trait to have significant organism internal (for instance genetic) causes that are present in the organism at its birth. I call claims like these “nativist claims”. Nativist claims are important. They shape our overall understanding of what we are, what (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Sex and Gender.Esther Rosario - 2024 - In Kathrin Koslicki & Michael J. Raven (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Essence in Philosophy. New York, NY: Routledge.
    This chapter surveys essentialist and anti-essentialist theories of sex and gender. It does so by engaging three approaches to sex and gender: externalism, internalism, and contextualism. The chapter also draws attention to two key debates about sex and gender in the feminist literature: the debate about the sex/gender distinction (the distinction debate) and the debate about whether sex and gender have essences (the essentialism/anti-essentialism debate). In addition, it describes three problems that theories of sex and gender tend to face: the (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • Classifying Sexes.Hane Htut Maung - 2023 - Journal of Diversity and Gender Studies 10 (1):35-52.
    In the political discourse regarding gender identity, the concept of biological sex has been weaponised by gender critical commentators to oppose gender affirmation for trans people. Recently, these commentators have appealed to an essentialist model of sex based on anisogamy, or relative gamete size, to argue that one’s sex is an immutable characteristic. I argue that the gender critical argument is unsound. The diverse purposes of sex classification and the complex variability of people’s sexual characteristics show that an essentialist model (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Verbal Disagreement and Semantic Plans.Alexander W. Kocurek - 2023 - Erkenntnis.
    I develop an expressivist account of verbal disagreements as practical disagreements over how to use words rather than factual disagreements over what words actually mean. This account enjoys several advantages over others in the literature: it can be implemented in a neo-Stalnakerian possible worlds framework; it accounts for cases where speakers are undecided on how exactly to interpret an expression; it avoids appeals to fraught notions like subject matter, charitable interpretation, and joint-carving; and it naturally extends to an analysis of (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • A Plea for Descriptive Social Ontology.Kathrin Koslicki & Olivier Massin - 2023 - Synthese 202 (Special Issue: The Metametaphysi):1-35.
    Social phenomena—quite like mental states in the philosophy of mind—are often regarded as potential troublemakers from the start, particularly if they are approached with certain explanatory commitments, such as naturalism or social individualism, already in place. In this paper, we argue that such explanatory constraints should be at least initially bracketed if we are to arrive at an adequate non-biased description of social phenomena. Legitimate explanatory projects, or so we maintain, such as those of making the social world fit within (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • Relational nonhuman personhood.Nicolas Delon - 2023 - Southern Journal of Philosophy 61 (4):569-587.
    This article defends a relational account of personhood. I argue that the structure of personhood consists of dyadic relations between persons who can wrong or be wronged by one another, even if some of them lack moral competence. I draw on recent work on directed duties to outline the structure of moral communities of persons. The upshot is that we can construct an inclusive theory of personhood that can accommodate nonhuman persons based on shared community membership. I argue that, once (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • Hermeneutical Injustice and Child Victims of Abuse.Arlene Lo - 2023 - Social Epistemology 37 (3):364-377.
    This article analyses how child victims of abuse may be subjected to hermeneutical injustice. I start by explaining how child victims are hermeneutically marginalised by adults’ social and epistemic authority, and the stigma around child abuse. In understanding their abuse, I highlight two epistemic obstacles child victims may face: (i) lack of access to concepts of child abuse, thereby causing victims not to know what abuse is; and (ii) myths of child abuse causing misunderstandings of abuse. When these epistemic obstacles (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • The medical model, with a human face.Justis Koon - 2022 - Philosophical Studies 179 (12):3747-3770.
    In this paper, I defend a version of the medical model of disability, which defines disability as an enduring biological dysfunction that causes its bearer a significant degree of impairment. We should accept the medical model, I argue, because it succeeds in capturing our judgments about what conditions do and do not qualify as disabilities, because it offers a compelling explanation for what makes a condition count as a disability, and because it justifies why the federal government should spend hundreds (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  • (1 other version)Conceptual Engineering: A Road Map to Practice.Manuel Gustavo Isaac, Steffen Koch & Ryan Nefdt - 2022 - Philosophy Compass 17 (10):1-15.
    This paper discusses the logical space of alternative conceptual engineering projects, with a specific focus on (1) the processes, (2) the targets and goals, and (3) the methods of such projects. We present an overview of how these three aspects interact in the contemporary literature and discuss those alternative projects that have yet to be explored based on our suggested typology. We show how choices about each element in a conceptual engineering project constrain the possibilities for the others, thereby giving (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   36 citations  
  • The moral relevance of social categories: Analysing the case of childhood.Nico Brando - 2022 - European Journal of Philosophy 31 (1):195-208.
    What makes the categorisation of a human collective morally relevant? How does the categorisation of individuals into groups affect their social status and treatment? This article provides an account of the moral relevance of social categories and assesses the status of “childhood” within this framework. It distinguishes morally relevant social categories (labelled as social groups) through three conditions: first, individuals are externally ascribed to the social category; second, the properties of the social category are reified through the social construction of (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Same-tracking real kinds in the social sciences.Theodore Bach - 2022 - Synthese 200 (2):1-26.
    The kinds of real or natural kinds that support explanation and prediction in the social sciences are difficult to identify and track because they change through time, intersect with one another, and they do not always exhibit their properties when one encounters them. As a result, conceptual practices directed at these kinds will often refer in ways that are partial, equivocal, or redundant. To improve this epistemic situation, it is important to employ open-ended classificatory concepts, to understand when different research (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  • Of Witches and White Folks.Daniel Wodak - 2021 - Wiley: Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 104 (3):587-605.
    A central debate in philosophy of race is between eliminativists and conservationists about what we ought do with ‘race’ talk. ‘Eliminativism’ is often defined such that it’s committed to holding that (a) ‘race’ is vacuous and races don’t exist, so (b) we should eliminate the term ‘race’ from our vocabulary. As a stipulative definition, that’s fine. But as an account of one of the main theoretical options in the debate, it’s a serious mistake. I offer three arguments for why eliminativism (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   6 citations  
  • (1 other version)Conceptual Exploration.Rachel Etta Rudolph - 2021 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    Conceptual engineering involves revising our concepts. It can be pursued as a specific philosophical methodology, but is also common in ordinary, non-philosophical, contexts. How does our capacity for conceptual engineering fit into human cognitive life more broadly? I hold that conceptual engineering is best understood alongside practices of conceptual exploration, examples of which include conceptual supposition (i.e., suppositional reasoning about alternative concepts), and conceptual comparison (i.e., comparisons between possible concept choices). Whereas in conceptual engineering we aim to change the concepts (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  • (1 other version)What is White Ignorance?Annette Martín - 2021 - Philosophical Quarterly 71 (4):pqaa073.
    In this paper, I identify a theoretical and political role for ‘white ignorance’, present three alternative accounts of white ignorance, and assess how well each fulfils this role. On the Willful Ignorance View, white ignorance refers to white individuals’ willful ignorance about racial injustice. On the Cognitivist View, white ignorance refers to ignorance resulting from social practices that distribute faulty cognitive resources. On the Structuralist View, white ignorance refers to ignorance that results as part of a social process that systematically (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   26 citations  
  • The Communicative Significance of Beliefs and Desires.Uku Tooming - 2014 - Dissertation, Universitatis Tartunesis
    When we think about what others believe and want, we are usually affected by what we know about their attitudes. If I’m aware that another person believes something, I have an opportunity to agree or disagree with it. If I think that another person wants something, I can endorse or disapprove of her desire. The importance of such reactions to attributed beliefs and desires has thus far been overlooked in philosophy of mind where the focus has been on explanatory and (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • (1 other version)Normative generics: Against semantic polysemy.Samia Hesni - 2021 - Thought: A Journal of Philosophy 10 (3):218-225.
    Thought: A Journal of Philosophy, Volume 10, Issue 3, Page 218-225, September 2021.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   6 citations  
  • Reparations and Egalitarianism.Megan Blomfield - 2021 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 24 (5):1177-1195.
    Some claim that a commitment to egalitarianism is in tension with support for reparations for historical injustice. This tension appears to arise insofar as egalitarianism is a forward-looking approach to justice: an approach that tells us what kind of world we should aim to build, where that world is not defined in terms of the decisions or actions of previous generations. Some have claimed that egalitarianism thereby renders reparations redundant. One popular option for egalitarians who aim to reject this thesis (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  • Invariantist, Contextualist, and Relativist Accounts of Gender Terms.Dan Zeman - 2020 - EurAmerica 4 (50):739-781.
    In this paper, I explore a range of existent and possible ameliorative semantic theories of gender terms: invariantism, according to which gender terms are not context-sensitive, contextualism, according to which the meaning of gender terms is established in the context of use, and relativism, according to which the meaning of gender terms is established in the context of assessment. I show that none of these views is adequate with respect to the plight of trans people to use their term of (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • (1 other version)What is White Ignorance?Annette Martín - forthcoming - The Philosophical Quarterly.
    In this paper, I identify a theoretical and political role for ‘white ignorance’, present three alternative accounts of white ignorance, and assess how well each fulfils this role. On the Willful Ignorance View, white ignorance refers to white individuals’ willful ignorance about racial injustice. On the Cognitivist View, white ignorance refers to ignorance resulting from social practices that distribute faulty cognitive resources. On the Structuralist View, white ignorance refers to ignorance that (1) results as part of a social process that (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   6 citations  
  • Counterlogicals as Counterconventionals.Alexander W. Kocurek & Ethan J. Jerzak - 2021 - Journal of Philosophical Logic 50 (4):673-704.
    We develop and defend a new approach to counterlogicals. Non-vacuous counterlogicals, we argue, fall within a broader class of counterfactuals known as counterconventionals. Existing semantics for counterconventionals, 459–482 ) and, 1–27 ) allow counterfactuals to shift the interpretation of predicates and relations. We extend these theories to counterlogicals by allowing counterfactuals to shift the interpretation of logical vocabulary. This yields an elegant semantics for counterlogicals that avoids problems with the usual impossible worlds semantics. We conclude by showing how this approach (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   11 citations  
  • What are the debates on same-sex marriage and on the recognition of transwomen as women about? On anti-descriptivism and revisionary analysis.Brice Bantegnie - 2020 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 63 (9-10):974-1000.
    ABSTRACT In recent years, debates on same-sex marriage and the recognition of transwomen as women have been raging. These debates often seem to revolve around the meaning of, respectively, the word ‘marriage’ and ‘woman’. That such debates should take place might be puzzling. It seems that if debates on gay and transgender rights revolve around the meaning of these words, then those in favor of same-sex marriage and of the recognition of transwomen as women have no room left to maneuver. (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • A case for integrative epistemology.Lisa Miracchi - 2020 - Synthese 198 (12):12021-12039.
    Western analytic epistemology is undergoing an upheaval: the importance of social justice concerns is becoming increasingly recognized. Many of us want epistemology to reflect our lived experiences, and to do real work for us on issues that matter. Motivated by these concerns, researchers are increasingly focusing on ameliorating our epistemic concepts: finding ones that contribute to social justice. At the same time, however, many epistemologists claim that their project is purely metaphysical and thus value-neutral: epistemology is just about the truth, (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Does False Consciousness Necessarily Preclude Moral Blameworthiness?: The Refusal of the Women Anti-Suffragists.Lee Wilson - 2021 - Hypatia 36 (2):237–258.
    Social philosophers often invoke the concept of false consciousness in their analyses, referring to a set of evidence-resistant, ignorant attitudes held by otherwise sound epistemic agents, systematically occurring in virtue of, and motivating them to perpetuate, structural oppression. But there is a worry that appealing to the notion in questions of responsibility for the harm suffered by members of oppressed groups is victim-blaming. Individuals under false consciousness allegedly systematically fail the relevant rationality and epistemic conditions due to structural distortions of (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • How to Philosophically Tackle Kinds without Talking About ‘Natural Kinds’.Ingo Brigandt - 2020 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 52 (3):356-379.
    Recent rival attempts in the philosophy of science to put forward a general theory of the properties that all (and only) natural kinds across the sciences possess may have proven to be futile. Instead, I develop a general methodological framework for how to philosophically study kinds. Any kind has to be investigated and articulated together with the human aims that motivate referring to this kind, where different kinds in the same scientific domain can answer to different concrete aims. My core (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   12 citations  
  • The Language of Mental Illness.Renee Bolinger - 2021 - In Rebecca Mason (ed.), Hermeneutical Injustice. Routledge.
    This paper surveys some philosophical issues with the language surrounding mental illness, but is especially focused on pejoratives relating to mental illness. I argue that though 'crazy' and similar mental illness-based epithets (MI-epithets) are not best understood as slurs, they do function to isolate, exclude, and marginalize members of the targeted group in ways similar to the harmfulness of slurs more generally. While they do not generally express the hate/contempt characteristic of weaponized uses of slurs, MI-epithets perpetuate epistemic injustice by (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • On the Relation Between Conceptual Engineering and Conceptual Ethics.Alexis Burgess & David Plunkett - 2020 - Ratio 33 (4):281-294.
    In recent years, there has been growing discussion amongst philosophers about “conceptual engineering”. Put roughly, conceptual engineering concerns the assessment and improvement of concepts, or of other devices we use in thought and talk (e.g., words). This often involves attempts to modify our existing concepts (or other representational devices), and/or our practices of using them. This paper explores the relation between conceptual engineering and conceptual ethics, where conceptual ethics is taken to encompass normative and evaluative questions about concepts, words, and (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   24 citations  
  • How Much Gender is Too Much Gender?Robin Dembroff & Daniel Wodak - 2021 - In Rebecca Mason (ed.), Hermeneutical Injustice. Routledge. pp. 362-376.
    We live in a world saturated in both racial and gendered divisions. Our focus is on one place where attitudes about these divisions diverge: language. We suspect most everyone would be horrified at the idea of adding race-specific pronouns, honorifics, generic terms, and so on to English. And yet gender-specific terms of the same sort are widely accepted and endorsed. We think this asymmetry cannot withstand scrutiny. We provide three considerations against incorporating additional race-specific terms into English, and argue that (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   9 citations  
  • Aesthetic Evaluation and Film.Ted Nannicelli - 2020 - British Journal of Aesthetics 60 (3):362-364.
    Aesthetic Evaluation and Film KlevanAndrew. Manchester University Press. 2018. pp. 256. £16.99.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Sexual Orientation, Ideology, and Philosophical Method.Matthew Andler - 2020 - Journal of Social Ontology 5 (2):205-227.
    Here, I examine the epistemic relation between beliefs about the nature of sexual orientation (e.g., beliefs concerning whether orientation is dispositional) and beliefs about the taxonomy of orientation categories (e.g., beliefs concerning whether polyamorous is an orientation category). Current philosophical research gives epistemic priority to the former class of beliefs, such that beliefs about the taxonomy of orientation categories tend to be jettisoned or revised in cases of conflict with beliefs about the nature of sexual orientation. Yet, considering the influence (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  • Some Internal Problems with Revisionary Gender Concepts.Tomas Bogardus - 2020 - Philosophia 48 (1):55-75.
    Feminism has long grappled with its own demarcation problem—exactly what is it to be a woman?—and the rise of trans-inclusive feminism has made this problem more urgent. I will first consider Sally Haslanger’s “social and hierarchical” account of woman, resulting from “Ameliorative Inquiry”: she balances ordinary use of the term against the instrumental value of novel definitions in advancing the cause of feminism. Then, I will turn to Katharine Jenkins’ charge that Haslanger’s view suffers from an “Inclusion Problem”: it fails (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   14 citations  
  • On Haslanger’s Meta-Metaphysics: Social Structures and Metaphysical Deflationism.E. Díaz-León - 2018 - Disputatio 10 (50):201-216.
    The metaphysics of gender and race is a growing area of concern in contemporary analytic metaphysics, with many different views about the nature of gender and race being submitted and discussed. But what are these debates about? What questions are these accounts trying to answer? And is there real disagreement between advocates of differ- ent views about race or gender? If so, what are they really disagreeing about? In this paper I want to develop a view about what the debates (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  • Semantic contestations and the meaning of politically significant terms.Deborah Mühlebach - 2021 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 64 (8):788-817.
    In recent discussions on the meaning of derogatory terms, most theorists base their investigations on the assumption that slurring terms could in principle have some neutral, i.e. purely descriptive, counterpart. Lauren Ashwell has recently shown that this assumption does not generalize to gendered slurs. This paper aims to challenge the point and benefit of approaching the meaning of derogatory terms in contrast to their allegedly purely descriptive counterparts. I argue that different discursive practices among different communities of practice sometimes change (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   9 citations  
  • Slurs, Interpellation, and Ideology.Rebecca Kukla - 2018 - Southern Journal of Philosophy 56 (S1):7-32.
    The goal of this paper is to give an account of the pragmatic and social function of slurs, taken as speech acts. I develop a theory of the distinctive illocutionary force and pragmatic structure of slurs. I argue that slurs help to produce subjects who occupy social identities carved out by pernicious ideologies, and that they do this whether or not anyone involved intends for the slur to work that way or has any particular feelings or conscious thoughts associated with (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   17 citations  
  • Disabilities Are Also Legitimately Medically Interesting Constraints on Legitimate Interests.Chong-Ming Lim - 2018 - Mind 127 (508):977-1002.
    What is it for something to be a disability? Elizabeth Barnes, focusing on physical disabilities, argues that disability is a social category. It depends on the rules undergirding the judgements of the disability rights movement. Barnes’ account may strike many as implausible. I articulate the unease, in the form of three worries about Barnes’ account. It does not fully explain why the disability rights movement is constituted in such a way that it only picks out paradigmatic disability traits, nor why (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  • (1 other version)Neutralism and Conceptual Engineering.Patrick Greenough - 2019 - In Alexis Burgess, Herman Cappelen & David Plunkett (eds.), Conceptual Engineering and Conceptual Ethics. New York, USA: Oxford University Press.
    Conceptual Engineering alleges that philosophical problems are best treated via revising or replacing our concepts (or words). The goal here is not to defend Conceptual Engineering but rather show that it can (and should) invoke Neutralism—the broad view that philosophical progress can take place when (and sometimes only when) a thoroughly neutral, non-specific theory, treatment, or methodology is adopted. A neutralist treatment of one form of skepticism is used as a case study and is compared with various non-neutral rivals. Along (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   8 citations