ABSTRACT Epistemic social oppressions such as ‘epistemic partiality’, ‘epistemic injustice’, ‘epistemic harms and wrongs’, ‘epistemic oppression’, ‘epistemic exploitation’, ‘epistemic violence’, or ‘epistemicide’ are terms with increasing theoretical importance and empirical applications. However, less literature is devoted to social strategies to overcome such oppressions. Here the Sorelian and Gramscian concept of social myth is considered in that sense. The empirical case is the myth of ‘The last Indigenous peoples of Europe’ present in the Basque Country, divided between France and Spain and (...) with a historical national culture under their statist powers. The myth has a renewal in a recent social movement, the Biltzarre platform and its Basque Cultural Instinct Team, currently followed through a Participatory Action Research. The results show how such social myth gives coherence and empowers the Basque identity against the loss of identity caused by the French and Spanish powers. Finally, progress is being made on how epistemic oppressons can end, ironically, because of the success of an epistemicide. Presumably, social myths counteract epistemic oppression, strengthening the social identity and self-esteem of the subject, as a form of empowerment in social and political issues. (shrink)

Psycholinguistics re-emerged in an almost explosive fashion during the 1950s and 1960s. It then underwent an equally abrupt decline as an independent sub-discipline. This paper charts this fall and identifies five general factors which, it is argued, were responsible for its demise. These are: (a) an uncompromisingly strong version of nativism; (b) a growing isolation of psycholinguistics from the body psychology; (c) a preference for formal theory over empirical data; (d) several abrupt modifications in the Standard Theory in linguistics; and (...) (e) a failure to appreciate the strong commitment to functionalism that characterizes experimental psychology. In short, what looked like a revolution two decades ago turned out to be merely a local reformation that occurred along side of and largely independent from the real revolution in the cognitive sciences. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Semiotica Jahrgang: 2015 Heft: 205 Seiten: 37-86.