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  1. How Not to Not Change the Subject (And How to Actually Not Change the Subject).John Mancini - forthcoming - Southwest Philosophy Review.
    In 2015, ‘marriage’ was redefined in the United States to include same-sex couples. In conceptual engineering, this is often assumed to be a paradigm case of Sally Haslanger’s (2020a, 2020b) semantic amelioration. Semantic amelioration changes a concept’s content to make it better. In the case of [MARRIAGE], [MARRIAGE]’s content was broadened to include same-sex couples – which, many contend, made it morally better. Semantic amelioration faces the following challenge, however: Doesn’t changing a concept’s content ‘change the subject?’ By broadening [MARRIAGE]’s (...)
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  • Conceptual Engineering is Old News.Krzysztof Sękowski & Ethan Landes - forthcoming - Philosophical Quarterly.
    According to a prevailing view, conceptual engineering introduces a revolutionary philosophical methodology, challenging traditional conceptual analysis. However, in our paper, we argue that closer scrutiny reveals not only the falsity but also the inherent ambiguity of this narrative. We explore four interpretations of the "Anti-Novelty Claim", the claim that conceptual engineering is not a new way of doing philosophy. Discussing the Anti-Novelty Claim from the perspective of a text’s producer, the text’s consumers, and the exegetical potential of the text, we (...)
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  • Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Disagreement.Maria Baghramian, J. Adam Carter & Rach Cosker-Rowland (eds.) - 2024 - New York, NY: Routledge.
    Disagreement is one of the deepest and most pervasive topics in philosophy, arguably its very bedrock, and is an ever-increasing feature of politics, ethics, public policy, science and many other areas. Despite the omnipresence of disagreement, the topic itself has received relatively little sustained examination. In this outstanding handbook a team of international contributors examines the philosophy of disagreement and how it extends to debates in public policy and science. Comprising forty-one chapters by an international team of contributors, the Handbook (...)
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  • Contested metalinguistic negotiation.Rachel Etta Rudolph - 2023 - Synthese 202 (3):1-23.
    In ordinary conversation, speakers disagree not only about worldly facts, but also about how to use language to describe the world. For example, disagreement about whether Buffalo is in the American Midwest, whether Pluto is a planet, or whether someone has been canceled, can persist even with agreement about all the relevant facts. The speakers may still engage in “metalinguistic negotiation”—disputing what to mean by “Midwest”, “planet”, or “cancel”. I first motivate an approach to metalinguistic negotiation that generalizes a Stalnakerian (...)
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  • 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 (...)
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  • Conceptual engineering for analytic theology.Patrick Greenough, Jean Gové & Ian Church - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy:1-34.
    Conceptual engineering is the method (or methods) via which we can assess and improve our concepts. Can conceptual engineering be usefully employed within analytic theology? Given that analytic theology and analytic philosophy effectively share the same philosophical toolkit then if conceptual engineering works well in philosophy then it ought to work well in analytic theology too. This will be our working hypothesis. To make good on this hypothesis, we first address two challenges. The first challenge makes conceptual engineering look to (...)
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  • Introduction: Metalinguistic Disagreement and Semantic Externalism.Pedro Abreu & Giulia Terzian - 2023 - Topoi 42 (4):975-981.
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  • Naturalized metaphysics or displacing metaphysicians to save metaphysics.Rasmus Jaksland - 2023 - Synthese 201 (6):1-25.
    Naturalized metaphysics aims to establish justified metaphysical claims, where metaphysics is meant to carry its usual significance, while avoiding the traditional methods of metaphysics—a priori reasoning, conceptual analysis, intuitions, and common sense—which naturalized metaphysics argues are not epistemically probative. After offering an explication of what it means to do metaphysics, this paper argues that naturalized metaphysics, at the outset, is hospitable to doing metaphysics. The underdetermination of metaphysics by science, however, changes the picture. Naturalized metaphysics has to break this underdetermination, (...)
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  • Critical social ontology.Kevin Richardson - 2023 - Synthese 201 (6):1-19.
    Critical social ontology is any study of social ontology that is done in order to critique ideology or end social injustice. The goal of this paper is to outline what I call the fundamentality approach to critical social ontology. On the fundamentality approach, social ontologists are in the business of distinguishing between appearances and (fundamental) reality. Social reality is often obscured by the acceptance of ideology, where an ideology is a distorted system of beliefs that leads people to promote or (...)
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  • Common Ground Between Social Ontology, Conceptual Engineering, and Conceptual Ethics.Jared Oliphint - 2023 - Journal of Social Ontology 9 (1).
    Social objects have become common subjects of interest to both social ontologists and conceptual engineers, but up to this point much of the philosophical work from these two fields has surprisingly been done in isolation from each field. I show how these prolific research fields—social ontology, conceptual engineering, and conceptual ethics—can mutually benefit each other through a unifying model I propose called the 2D-CE model that shows the dependence relations between a given concept, its instantiation conditions, and whatever language represents (...)
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  • Does Schizophrenia Exist?Georg Repnikov - 2023 - Philosophy of Medicine 4 (1).
    This paper develops and defends a deflationary analysis of existence claims involving psychiatric disorders. According to this analysis, a given psychiatric disorder exists if, and only if, there are people who have the disorder. The implications of this analysis are spelled out for our views of nosological decision making, and for the relationship between claims about the existence of psychiatric disorders and claims about their reality. A pragmatic view of psychiatric nosology is defended and it is argued that worries about (...)
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  • A Metaphysics of Dehumanization.Suzy Killmister - 2023 - Philosophers' Imprint 23.
    Most contemporary accounts of dehumanization construe it either as a psychological phenomenon of seeing the other as non-human, or as as an interpersonal phenomenon of failing to treat the other as they are entitled qua moral agent. In this paper I offer an alternative way of thinking about dehumanization. Drawing on recent work in social metaphysics, I argue that we can productively think of the human as a social kind, and correspondingly of dehumanization as a process of excommunication from that (...)
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  • A Socratic Essentialist Defense of Non-Verbal Definitional Disputes.Kathrin Koslicki & Olivier Massin - 2023 - Ratio (4):1-15.
    In this paper, we argue that, in order to account for the apparently substantive nature of definitional disputes, a commitment to what we call ‘Socratic essentialism’ is needed. We defend Socratic essentialism against a prominent neo-Carnapian challenge according to which apparently substantive definitional disputes always in some way trace back to disagreements over how expressions belonging to a particular language or concepts belonging to a certain conceptual scheme are properly used. Socratic essentialism, we argue, is not threatened by the possibility (...)
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  • (1 other version)Mental Fictionalism: A Foothold amid Deflationary Collapse.Meg Wallace - 2022 - In Tamás Demeter, T. Parent & Adam Toon (eds.), Mental Fictionalism: Philosophical Explorations. New York & London: Routledge. pp. 275-300.
    This is my second entry in Mental Fictionalism: Philosophical Explorations. It examines three meta-ontological deflationary approaches - frameworks, verbal disputes, and metalinguistic negotiation - and applies them to ontological debates in philosophy of mind. An intriguing consequence of this application is that it reveals a deep, systematic problem for mental deflationism – specifically, a problem of cognitive collapse. This is surprising. Cognitive collapse problems are usually reserved for serious ontological views such as eliminative materialism and mental fictionalism, not deflationism. This (...)
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  • Normative Standards and the Epistemology of Conceptual Ethics.Tristram McPherson & David Plunkett - 2022 - Inquiry.
    This paper addresses an important but relatively unexplored question about the relationship between conceptual ethics and other philosophical inquiry: how does the epistemology of conceptual ethics relate to the epistemology of other, more “traditional” forms of philosophical inquiry? This paper takes as its foil the optimistic thought that the epistemology of conceptual ethics will be easier and less mysterious than relevant “traditional” philosophical inquiry. We argue against this foil by focusing on the fact that that conceptual ethics is a form (...)
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  • No “Easy” Answers to Ontological Category Questions.Vera Flocke & Katherine Ritchie - 2023 - Philosophical Perspectives 36 (1):78-94.
    Easy Ontologists, most notably Thomasson (2015), argue that ontological questions are shallow. They think that these questions can either be answered by using our ordinary conceptual competence—of course tables exist!—or are meaningless, or else should be answered through conceptual re-engineering. Ontology thus is “easy”, requiring no distinctively metaphysical investigation. This paper raises a two-stage objection to Easy Ontology. We first argue that questions concerning which entities exist are inextricably bound up with “ontological category questions”, which are questions concerning the identity (...)
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  • Merely verbal disputes and common ground.James Miller - 2022 - Theoria (1):114-123.
    In this paper I offer a new characterisation of what makes a dispute merely verbal. This new characterisation builds on the framework initially outlined by Jenkins and additionally makes use of Stalnaker's notion of ‘common ground’. I argue that this ‘common ground account’ can better classify disputes as merely verbal, and can better explain cases of playing devil's advocate. (Paper published Open Access).
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  • Handling rejection.Derek Baker & Jack Woods - 2022 - Philosophical Studies 180 (1):159-190.
    This paper has two related goals. First, we develop an expressivist account of negation which, in the spirit of Alan Gibbard, treats disagreement as semantically primitive. Our second goal is to make progress toward a unified expressivist treatment of modality. Metaethical expressivists must be expressivists about deontic modal claims. But then metaethical expressivists must either extend their expressivism to include epistemic and alethic modals, or else accept a semantics for modal expressions that is radically disjunctive. We propose that expressivists look (...)
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  • What Topic Continuity Problem?Alexander W. Kocurek - 2022 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    A common objection to the very idea of conceptual engineering is the topic continuity problem: whenever one tries to “reengineer” a concept, one only shifts attention away from one concept to another. Put differently, there is no such thing as conceptual revision: there’s only conceptual replacement. Here, I show that topic continuity is compatible with conceptual replacement. Whether the topic is preserved in an act of conceptual replacement simply depends on what is being replaced (a conceptual tool or a conceptual (...)
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  • The Limits of Metalinguistic Negotiation: The Role of Shared Meanings in Normative Debate.François Schroeter, Laura Schroeter & Kevin Toh - 2022 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 52 (2):180-196.
    According to philosophical orthodoxy, the parties to moral or legal disputes genuinely disagree only if their uses of key normative terms in the dispute express the same meaning. Recently, however, this orthodoxy has been challenged. According to an influential alternative view, genuine moral and legal disagreements should be understood as metalinguistic negotiations over which meaning a given term should have. In this paper, we argue that the shared meaning view is motivated by much deeper considerations than its recent critics recognize, (...)
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  • Ontological disagreements, reference, and charity: A challenge for Hirsch's deflationism.Delia Belleri - 2022 - Theoria 88 (5):982-996.
    Eli Hirsch argues that certain ontological disputes involve a conflict between “equivalent” languages, and that the principle of charity compels each disputant to interpret the other as speaking truly in their own language. For Hirsch, a language’s semantics maps sentences (in context) onto sets of possible worlds but assigns no role to reference. I argue that this method leads to an overly uncharitable portrayal of the disputes at issue – whereby ontologists who speak “equivalent” languages can only argue about syntax. (...)
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  • Negotiating “women”: metalinguistic negotiations across languages.Knoll Viktoria - 2022 - Synthese 200 (4):1-20.
    The metalinguistic approach to conceptual engineering construes disputes between linguistic reformers and linguistic conservatives as metalinguistic disagreements on how best to use particular expressions. As the present paper argues, this approach has various merits. However, it was recently criticised in Cappelen’s seminal Fixing Language. Cappelen raises an important objection against the metalinguistic picture. According to this objection – the Babel objection, as I shall call it – the metalinguistic account cannot accommodate the intuition of disagreement between linguistic conservatives and reformers (...)
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  • Disagreement in metametaphysical dispute.Rasmus Jaksland - 2022 - Synthese 200 (3):1-21.
    Recent years have seen several studies of metaphysical disputes as disagreement phenomena employing the resources from the research on disagreement in social epistemology. This paper undertakes an analogous study of the metametaphysical disagreement over the substantiveness of metaphysical disputes between inflationists and deflationists. The paper first considers and questions the skeptical argument that the mere existence of the disagreement mandates the suspension of judgement about the substantiveness of metaphysical disputes. Rather, the paper argues that steadfastness in the face of this (...)
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  • On Inquiries into Metalinguistic Negotiationsメタ言語的交渉をめぐる研究について.Takuya Oda - 2022 - Kagaku Tetsugaku 54 (2):93-111.
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  • Metalinguistic negotiations in moral disagreement.Renée Jorgensen Bolinger - 2022 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 65 (3):352-380.
    The problem of moral disagreement has been presented as an objection to contextualist semantics for ‘ought’, since it is not clear that contextualism can accommodate or give a convincing gloss of such disagreement. I argue that independently of our semantics, disagreements over ‘ought’ in non-cooperative contexts are best understood as indirect metalinguistic disputes, which is easily accommodated by contextualism. If this is correct, then rather than posing a problem for contextualism, the data from moral disagreements provides some reason to adopt (...)
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  • Conceptual Ethics and The Methodology of Normative Inquiry.Tristram McPherson & David Plunkett - 2019 - In Alexis Burgess, Herman Cappelen & David Plunkett (eds.), Conceptual Engineering and Conceptual Ethics. New York, USA: Oxford University Press. pp. 274-303.
    This chapter explores two central questions in the conceptual ethics of normative inquiry. The first is whether to orient one’s normative inquiry around folk normative concepts (like KNOWLEDGE or IMMORAL) or around theoretical normative concepts (like ADEQUATE EPISTEMIC JUSTIFICATION or PRO TANTO PRACTICAL REASON). The second is whether to orient one’s normative inquiry around concepts whose normative authority is especially accessible to us (such as OUGHT ALL THINGS CONSIDERED), or around concepts whose extension is especially accessible to us (such as (...)
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  • Robust Normativity, Morality, and Legal Positivism.David Plunkett - 2019 - In Toh Kevin, Plunkett David & Shapiro Scott (eds.), Dimensions of Normativity: New Essays on Metaethics and Jurisprudence. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 105-136.
    This chapter discusses two different issues about the relationship between legal positivism and robust normativity (understood as the most authoritative kind of normativity to which we appeal). First, the chapter argues that, in many contexts when discussing “legal positivism” and “legal antipositivism”, the discussion should be shifted from whether legal facts are ultimately partly grounded in moral facts to whether they are ultimately partly grounded in robustly normative facts. Second, the chapter explores an important difference within the kinds of arguments (...)
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  • (1 other version)Mental fictionalism: a foothold amid deflationary collapse.Meg Wallace - 2022 - In Tamás Demeter, T. Parent & Adam Toon (eds.), Mental Fictionalism: Philosophical Explorations. New York & London: Routledge. pp. 275-300.
    This paper examines three meta-ontological deflationary approaches – frameworks, verbal disputes, and metalinguistic negotiation – and applies them to ontological debates in philosophy of mind. An intriguing consequence of this application is that it reveals a deep, systematic problem for mental deflationism – specifically, a problem of cognitive collapse. This is surprising; cognitive collapse problems are usually reserved for serious ontological views such as eliminative materialism and mental fictionalism, not deflationism. This paper investigates why deflationism about the mental is particularly (...)
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  • More than merely verbal disputes.Rogelio Miranda Vilchis - 2021 - Metaphilosophy 52 (3-4):479-493.
    It is fundamental that, in philosophy, we make sure that we are not mistaking merely verbal disputes, or “conceptual” disputes, for substantive ones. This essay presents a tripartite framework that is useful for clarifying cases where it is difficult to tell whether we are engaged in substantive or non-substantive disputes. For this purpose, the essay offers some combinatorial possibilities between the following levels: verbal, conceptual, and objectual. We need to distinguish whether we are arguing about the world, concepts, or words (...)
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  • Conceptual Change and Future Paths for Pragmatism.Matthew Shields - 2021 - Southern Journal of Philosophy 59 (3):405-434.
    The pragmatist faces the challenge of accounting for the possibility of rational conceptual change. Some pragmatists have tried to meet this challenge by appealing to Neurathian imagery—imagery that risks being too figurative to be helpful. I argue that we can develop a clearer view of what rationally constrained conceptual revision looks like for the pragmatist. I do so by examining the work of the pragmatist who in recent years has addressed this issue most directly, Richard Rorty. His attempts to solve (...)
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  • Verbal disputes and topic continuity.Viktoria Knoll - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    Changing concepts comes with a risk of creating merely verbal disputes. Accounts of topic continuity (such as Herman Cappelen’s) are supposed to solve this problem. As this paper shows, however, no existing solution avoids the danger of mere verbalness. On the contrary, accounts of topic continuity in fact increase the danger of overlooking merely verbal disputes between pre- and post-ameliorators. Ultimately, this paper suggests accepting the danger of mere verbalness resulting from a change in topic as a downside of conceptual (...)
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  • Gaslighting, First- and Second-Order.Paul-Mikhail Catapang Podosky - 2021 - Hypatia 36 (1):207-227.
    In what sense do people doubt their understanding of reality when subject to gaslighting? I suggest that an answer to this question depends on the linguistic order at which a gaslighting exchange takes place. This marks a distinction between first-order and second-order gaslighting. The former occurs when there is disagreement over whether a shared concept applies to some aspect of the world, and where the use of words by a speaker is apt to cause hearers to doubt their interpretive abilities (...)
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  • Game Counterpossibles.Felipe Morales Carbonell - 2020 - Argumenta 6 (1):117-133.
    Counterpossibles, counterfactuals conditional with impossible antecedents, are notoriously contested; while the standard view makes them trivially true, some authors argue that they can be non-trivially true. In this paper, I examine the use of counterfactuals in the context of games, and argue that there is a case to be made for their non-triviality in a restricted sense. In particular, I examine the case of retro problems in chess, where it can happen that one is tasked with evaluating counterfactuals about illegal (...)
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  • Changing the Subject.Timothy Sundell - 2020 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 50 (5):580-593.
    In Fixing Language, Herman Cappelen defends the project of conceptual engineering from a family of objections that he calls “the Strawsonian challenges.” Those objections are all versions of this: “If I ask you a question about the F’s, and you give me an answer that’s not about the F’s but rather about the G’s, then you haven’t answered my question. You have changed the subject.” I argue that Cappelen’s response succeeds in reply to one understanding of the Strawsonian challenge—on which (...)
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  • "That's not the issue": against a lightweight interpretation of ontological disputes.Manuel J. Sanchís Ferrer - manuscript
    In this paper I argue against what I label as "Lightweight interpretation of ontological disputes". This interpretation criteria sees ontological disputes as metalinguistic negotiations concerning the pursuing of practical objectives. I have developed an argument, called "That's not the issue", which shows that this interpretation criteria is inapplicable to most ontological disputes.
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  • Disability studies, conceptual engineering, and conceptual activism.Elizabeth Amber Cantalamessa - 2021 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 64 (1-2):46-75.
    In this project I am concerned with the extent to which conceptual engineering happens in domains outside of philosophy, and if so, what that might look like. Specifically, I’ll argue that...
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  • Metalinguistic Negotiation and Speaker Error.David Plunkett & Tim Sundell - 2021 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 64 (1-2):142-167.
    In recent work, we have argued that a number of disputes of interest to philosophers – including some disputes amongst philosophers themselves – are metalinguistic negotiations. Prima facie, many of these disputes seem to concern worldly, non-linguistic issues directly. However, on our view, they in fact concern, in the first instance, normative questions about the use of linguistic expressions. This will strike many ordinary speakers as counterintuitive. In many of the disputes that we analyze as metalinguistic negotiations, speakers might quite (...)
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  • 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 (...)
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  • Essentially Practical Questions.Brendan Balcerak Jackson - 2019 - Analytic Philosophy 60 (1):1-26.
    Questions are known to play a crucial role in helping to structure linguistic communication. I argue that paying attention to questions is also necessary for understanding disagreement, and in particular for distinguishing between genuine and merely verbal disagreements. I argue, moreover, that some of the questions that play this role are essentially practical questions, questions about what to do. Such questions can remain open even after questions about what is the case have been settled. Essentially practical questions help structure discourse (...)
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  • On the Pragmatics of Deep Disagreement.Matthew Shields - 2018 - Topoi (5):999-1015.
    In this paper, I present two tools that help shed light on deep disagreements and their epistemological consequences. First, I argue that we are best off construing deep disagreements as disagreements over conflicting understandings of certain concepts. More specifically, I suggest that deep disagreements are disagreements over how to understand concepts that play what Michael Friedman calls a “constitutive” role for speakers. Second, I argue that we need a better understanding of what speakers are doing when they engage in deep (...)
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  • A Guided Tour Of Conceptual Engineering and Conceptual Ethics.Herman Cappelen & David Plunkett - 2019 - In Alexis Burgess, Herman Cappelen & David Plunkett (eds.), Conceptual Engineering and Conceptual Ethics. New York, USA: Oxford University Press. pp. 1-26.
    In this Introduction, we aim to introduce the reader to the basic topic of this book. As part of this, we explain why we are using two different expressions (‘conceptual engineering’ and ‘conceptual ethics’) to describe the topics in the book. We then turn to some of the central foundational issues that arise for conceptual engineering and conceptual ethics, and finally we outline various views one might have about their role in philosophy and inquiry more generally.
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  • Object.Bradley Rettler & Andrew M. Bailey - 2017 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy 1.
    One might well wonder—is there a category under which every thing falls? Offering an informative account of such a category is no easy task. For nothing would distinguish things that fall under it from those that don’t—there being, after all, none of the latter. It seems hard, then, to say much about any fully general category; and it would appear to do no carving or categorizing or dividing at all. Nonetheless there are candidates for such a fully general office, including (...)
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  • Logical Pluralism from a Pragmatic Perspective.Teresa Kouri Kissel - 2018 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 96 (3):578-591.
    This paper presents a new view of logical pluralism. This pluralism takes into account how the logical connectives shift, depending on the context in which they occur. Using the Question-Under-Discussion Framework as formulated by Craige Roberts, I identify the contextual factor that is responsible for this shift. I then provide an account of the meanings of the logical connectives which can accommodate this factor. Finally, I suggest that this new pluralism has a certain Carnapian flavour. Questions about the meanings of (...)
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  • Metaphysics and Conceptual Negotiation.Amie L. Thomasson - 2017 - Philosophical Issues 27 (1):364-382.
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  • Negotiating the Meaning of “Law”: The Metalinguistic Dimension of the Dispute Over Legal Positivism.David Plunkett - 2016 - Legal Theory 22 (3-4):205-275.
    One of the central debates in legal philosophy is the debate over legal positivism. Roughly, positivists say that law is ultimately grounded in social facts alone, whereas antipositivists say it is ultimately grounded in both social facts and moral facts. In this paper, I argue that philosophers involved in the dispute over legal positivism sometimes employ distinct concepts when they use the term “law” and pick out different things in the world using these concepts. Because of this, what positivists say (...)
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  • Substantive metaphysical debates about gender and race: Verbal disputes and metaphysical deflationism.E. Díaz-León - 2020 - Journal of Social Philosophy 53 (4):556-574.
    Journal of Social Philosophy, EarlyView.
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  • (1 other version)The Normativity of Gender Discourse: A Pragmatic Approach.Viktoria Knoll - forthcoming - The Philosophical Quarterly.
    Many disputes about gender are normatively charged. To account for this, some suggest building normativity into the semantics of gender terms. I propose an alternative, pragmatic account. When speakers utter gender-attributing sentences of the form ‘Person A is of gender G’, they often pragmatically convey normative content about whether A should be categorized as G. After critically discussing the semantic approach, I motivate and discuss in detail this novel pragmatic view and elaborate on its compatibility with a number of semantic (...)
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  • What Do Easy Inferences Get Us?Amie L. Thomasson - 2021 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 102 (3):736-744.
    In Ontology Made Easy (2015), I defend the idea that there are ‘easy’ inferences that begin from uncontroversial premises and end with answers to disputed ontological questions. But what do easy inferences really get us? Bueno and Cumpa (this journal, 2020) argue that easy inferences don’t tell us about the natures of properties—they don’t tell us what properties are. Moreover, they argue, by accepting an ontologically neutral quantifier we can also resist the conclusion that properties or numbers exist. Here I (...)
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  • Linguistic Interventions and Transformative Communicative Disruption.Rachel Katharine Sterken - 2019 - In Alexis Burgess, Herman Cappelen & David Plunkett (eds.), Conceptual Engineering and Conceptual Ethics. New York, USA: Oxford University Press. pp. 417-434.
    What words we use, and what meanings they have, is important. We shouldn't use slurs; we should use 'rape' to include spousal rape (for centuries we didn’t); we should have a word which picks out the sexual harassment suffered by people in the workplace and elsewhere (for centuries we didn’t). Sometimes we need to change the word-meaning pairs in circulation, either by getting rid of the pair completely (slurs), changing the meaning (as we did with 'rape'), or adding brand new (...)
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  • Counterpossibles for modal normativists.Theodore D. Locke - 2019 - Synthese 198 (2):1235-1257.
    Counterpossibles are counterfactuals that involve some metaphysical impossibility. Modal normativism is a non-descriptivist account of metaphysical necessity and possibility according to which modal claims, e.g. ‘necessarily, all bachelors are unmarried’, do not function as descriptive claims about the modal nature of reality but function as normative illustrations of constitutive rules and permissions that govern the use of ordinary non-modal vocabulary, e.g. ‘bachelor’. In this paper, I assume modal normativism and develop a novel account of counterpossibles and claims about metaphysical similarity (...)
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