Cancel culture is a form of societal self-defense that becomes prominent particularly during periods of substantial moral upheaval. It can lead to the polarization of incompatible viewpoints if it is indiscriminately demonized. In this brief editorial letter, I consider framing cancel culture as an essentially contested concept (ECC), according to the theory of Walter B. Gallie, with the aim of establishing a groundwork for a more productive discourse on it. In particular, I propose that intermediate agreements (...) and principles of reasonableness can help refocus the debate on cancel culture towards democratic discourse, without blanket justification for every instance. In this context, asserting that cancel culture is an ECC does not dismiss the potential of achieving consensus on its shared core meaning or societal role. Like other similar ECCs, such as democracy or rule of law, it highlights the importance of contestations in shaping our collective understanding of the concept. (shrink)

In this article, I approach some phenomena seen predominantly on social-media sites that are grouped together as cancel culture with guidance from two major themes in Plato’s thought. In the first section, I argue that shame can play a constructive and valuable role in a person’s improvement, just as we see Socrates throughout Plato’s dialogues use shame to help his interlocutors improve. This insight can help us understand the value of shaming people online for, among other things, their (...) morally reprehensible views. In the second section, I argue that it is required for the proper functioning of democratic institutions that some views be excluded from the public sphere, which follows some Platonic ideas from the Laws. In neither case do I argue that this approach is good in an unqualified sense or even ultima facie good. However, I maintain that these important insights from Plato’s dialogues illuminate crucial aspects of how we should think about cancel culture. (shrink)

Many view cancellation as a method for holding influential personalities accountable for bad behavior, while others think cancelling amounts to censorship and bullying. I hold that neither of these accounts are worth pursuing, especially if the aim is social progress. In this paper, I offer a situated account of cancellation and cancel culture, locating the phenomenon in our exclusionary history while examining the social dynamics of belief. When we situate cancel culture, we can see how problematic (...) instances of cancelling are embedded in ignorance. While combatting ignorance appears to call for a remedy rooted in feminist standpoint epistemology, there are risks in adopting naive practices of deference. Applying criticisms of epistemic injustice and adopting Táíwò’s elite capture framework, I explain how well-intentioned cancelling can work against social movements. Since epistemic trust mechanisms discourage self-reflection and belief revision, the relevant tactics for enacting social change—coalition politics and education—seem out of reach. I conclude by sketching cancel culture as a diagnostic tool: cancellation can be used appropriately in marginalized communities, but when it comes to combatting ignorance among privileged folks, we should view cancel culture as a method for determining where our social institutions are failing us. (shrink)

Vor wenigen Tagen hat das Hamburger Kabarett-Theater Schmidts Tivoli die Zusammenarbeit mit dem Komiker Kay Ray beendet, offenbar weil rassistische Witze in der Show einen zentralen Platz einnehmen. Kurz nach der Cancel-Affäre zwischen Lisa Eckhart und dem Hamburger Nochtspeicher sieht sich nun auch Ray als Opfer von „Cancel Culture“, die die Kunstfreiheit immer weiter einschränke. Um die Kunst und Kunstfreiheit geht es dabei aber eigentlich gar nicht. Sie ist nur der Austragungsort gesellschaftspolitischer Auseinandersetzungen um Sexismus, Rassismus und (...) Transphobie. Dabei sind Kunstfreiheit und Meinungsfreiheit zentrale Argumente – oder besser: Waffen – des konservativen politischen Projekts geworden, mit dem emanzipative Änderungen abgewehrt werden (s. auch Schubert, in: Leviathan, 48 (1), S. 29–51). Dieser machtpolitische Missbrauch muss klar von der grundrechtlichen Dimension unterschieden werden. Dafür ist zwischen drei Ebenen Kunstfreiheit zu differenzieren: im nichtstaatlichen, parastaatlichen und staatlichen Bereich. Die Neuregelungen von Diskurs, Kultur und Kunst durch „Politische Korrektheit“, „Cancel Culture“ oder „Identitätspolitik“ bedeuten nicht den Zerfall der Demokratie, sondern sind ein Schritt in Richtung ihrer vollständigeren Realisierung. (shrink)

While ‘cancel culture’ is commonly regarded as limiting freedom of speech and artistic freedom, this article proposes a new understanding of ‘cancel culture’ as emancipatory norm-setting that is key for democratization. On a non-governmental level of the self-regulation of the art world, the argument for artistic freedom ignores the fact that art is permeated by power. The introduction of ‘politically correct’ norms leads to a justified redistribution of such power. On a parastatal level of public broadcasting (...) and state cultural funding, neutrality is necessary but should be understood materially to include marginalized voices. Restrictions of freedom of speech and artistic freedom do occur on the state-level of hate-speech regulation. Here, the danger of a potential shift from emancipatory regulation to a harmful restriction is particularly virulent, as a discussion of the German BDS ban shows. (shrink)

There is an ongoing discussion among scholars as well as among the public about whether liberal democracies should have laws against hate speech. Proponents of hate speech laws argue that these laws play a crucial part in liberal democracies since they help ensure the protection of basic rights, such as every citizen being treated equally with respect. Opponents of hate speech laws, on the other hand, argue that hate speech laws are a threat to freedom of (political) speech and that, (...) hence, these laws are illegitimate in a liberal democracy. I argue that hate speech laws can actually work both as a protection for minority groups, while at the same time also as a defence against unreasonable demands for restrictions on (political) speech. Further, I argue that laws against hate speech are an expression of democratic formation, meaning that the respect for, and protection of, minorities should be an inherent part of an enlightened and educated modern democracy. I present an argument from democratic formation, which builds on foundational pillars of democracy such as dignity, civility, equality, and critical thinking. I hold that phenomena like cancel culture and ‘extreme political correctness’ are a result of a tendency towards the decline of democratic formation in modern society in general – something, which springs from, inter alia, decades of a growing focus on technological development, while at the same time a decreasing focus on critical thinking in the educational system. (shrink)

„Political Correctness“, „Identitätspolitik“ und „Cancel Culture“ werden heutzutage überwiegend als Waffen von Konservativen eingesetzt, um ihre Privilegien gegen emanzipative Neuregelungen zu verteidigen. Solche Neuregelungen als Einschränkung der Kunst- und Meinungsfreiheit zu kritisieren ist deshalb meist falsch. Tatsächlich tragen „Political Correctness“, „Identitätspolitik“ und „Cancel Culture“ zur inklusiveren Verwirklichung der Demokratie bei. Im Artikel zeige ich, dass es darauf ankommt, auf welcher Ebene politische Regulierungen der Kunst stattfinden: nicht-staatlich im allgemeinen Kunstbetrieb, para-staatlich im öffentlich-rechtlichen Rundfunk, oder staatlich. Nur (...) wenn der Staat mit zentralisierter rechtlicher, ökonomischer und symbolischer Macht in laufende Debatten eingreift, kann man von problematischer Cancel Culture sprechen - das ist fast nie der Fall. (shrink)

Academic freedom is under attack, both in authoritarian democracies, such as Hungary and Turkey, and in liberal Western democracies, such as the United States, the UK, France and Germany. For example, Gender Studies are being targeted by right-wing governments in Eastern Europe, and in France President Emmanuel Macron has attacked post-colonial and critical theories as “Islamo-gauchisme“, portraying them as a danger to the Republic. However, dominant discourses about academic freedom and free speech in the global north, lately especially in France (...) and Germany, focus on an alleged threat to academic freedom through “political correctness” and “cancel culture”, that, under scrutiny, often turn out to be exactly the opposite, namely defences of plurality and critical voices. (shrink)

Bajo el título «Utopías, distopías y otras nostalgias», la cuarta edición del Congreso de Pensamiento Interdisciplinar, organizado por alumnos del grado de Filosofía, Política y Economía de la Alianza 4 Universidades, abordó el controvertido fenómeno woke, una supuesta mezcla de izquierda identitaria y progresismo políticamente correcto al que se acusa de promover la censura y la llamada «cultura de la cancelación». Sobre esta cuestión conversaron la escritora y filósofa Elizabeth Duval, la investigadora Ayme Román y el director académico y profesor (...) del Instituto Superior de Sociología, Economía y Política (ISSEP), Miguel Ángel Quintana Paz, en un debate moderado por dos de los alumnos organizadores del congreso, Guzmán Díez e Isabel Rodríguez. (shrink)

This commentary continues an exchange on eugenics in Monash Bioethics Review between Anomaly (2018), Wilson (2019), and Veit, Anomaly, Agar, Singer, Fleischman, and Minerva (2021). The eponymous question, “Can ‘Eugenics’ be Defended?”, is multiply ambiguous and does not receive a clear answer from Veit et al.. Despite their stated desire to move beyond mere semantics to matters of substance, Veit et al. concentrate on several uses of the term “eugenics” that pull in opposite directions. I argue, first, that Veit et (...) al. (2021) makes much the same error as does Anomaly (2018) in characterizing eugenics; second, that the paper misunderstands the relationship between eugenics and enhancement; and third, that it distorts the views expressed in my “Eugenics Undefended”. (shrink)

The primary aim of this chapter is to outline the consensuses that have emerged in recent philosophical works tackling normative questions about responding to immoral artist’s art. While disagreement amongst philosophers is unavoidable, there is actually much agreement on the ethics of media consumption. How should we evaluate immoral artist’s art? Philosophers generally agree that we should not always separate the artist from the art. How should we engage with immoral artist’s art? Philosophers generally agree that we should not always (...) reflexively turn away from them. In turn, these responses reveal that moral value is not autonomous from aesthetic value, and neither dominates the other. The secondary aim of this chapter is to explore the ramifications of this revelation. I argue that, in addition to an ethics of media consumption, we need an aesthetics of media consumption that is fundamentally social rather than solitary. (shrink)

Shaming behavior on social media has been the cause of concern in recent public discourse. Supporters of online shaming argue that it is an important tool in helping to make social media and online communities safer and more welcoming to traditionally marginalized groups. Objections to shaming often sound like high-minded calls for civility, but I argue that shaming behavior poses serious risks. Here I identify moral and political risks of online shaming. In particular, shaming threatens to undermine our commitment to (...) the co-deliberative practices of morality. As a result, online shaming can undermine the very goals it is supposed to accomplish. (shrink)

This chapter offers an overview of issues posed by the problem of immoral artists, artists who in word or deed violate commonly held moral principles. I briefly consider the question of whether the immorality of an artist can render their work aesthetically worse (making connections to chapters in the Theory section of the handbook), and then turn to questions about what the audience should do and feel in response to knowledge of these moral failings. I discuss questions such as whether (...) audiences have reason not to purchase or consume work by these artists, whether their shows and exhibitions should be canceled, and how fans might grapple with the emotional turmoil they feel when artists whom they love act or speak in ways that are morally condemnable. (shrink)

Seunghyun Song’s recent article on epistemic repair for Japan’s military sex slavery lays out the case for considering acknowledgment as a form of reparative justice particularly suited to redressing epistemic wrongs. I agree with Song, but press her on the relationship between epistemic repair and reparative justice more generally. I also outline other forms that backward-looking epistemic responsibility might take. Distinguishing between revisionism and denialism, I ask: Should individual agents who’ve publicly made denialist statements about Japan’s military sex slavery be (...) criminally liable? Should their revisionist counterparts be subject to the kind of social sanctions that are associated with present-day cancel culture? (shrink)

The UK Government's Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill is currently progressing through Parliament. The bill is designed to strengthen free speech and academic freedom in higher education, in response to what former Education Secretary Gavin Williamson describes as ‘the rise of intolerance and cancel culture upon our campuses’. But is there really a crisis of academic freedom in British universities?To see that there is, say Judith Suissa and Alice Sullivan, we need only look at the contemporary reality (...) of suppression of debate on sex and gender. The evidence they catalogue of suppression of research, of blacklisting, harassment and smear campaigns, of no-platforming, disinvitations and shutting down of events, is incontrovertible. The recent experience of scholars and students wishing to discuss the material reality and political salience of sex makes complacency about academic freedom a luxury we cannot afford.Suissa and Sullivan set out a powerful argument for the role of academic freedom in pursuing truth within the academy and developing democracy beyond it. They effectively counter attempts to narrow the scope of academic freedom so as to render it compatible with no-platforming. And they lay out a series of practical steps administrators can take to ensure that universities are places where an expansive and pluralistic intellectual climate prevails.This is a timely and compelling intervention in a vexed but urgent public debate. For their clear-sighted diagnosis of where and how academic freedom has been eroded in our universities, and for their judicious account of what must be done to rebuild it, Suissa and Sullivan deserve a wide and attentive hearing. (shrink)

In den aktuellen Kulturkämpfen kritisieren Konservative Identitätspolitik und “Cancel Culture” als Einschränkungen von individueller Freiheit. Der Artikel untersucht die dabei zugrundeliegenden Freiheitsbegriffe. Die konservative Kritik stützt sich in der Regel auf einen negativen Begriff von Freiheit als Nichteinmischung im Sinne der liberalen Tradition. In der politischen Theorie wird ein solcher negativer Freiheitsbegriff als Gegensatz zur Auffassung von sozialer Freiheit gesehen, die Freiheit in hegelianischer und kommunitaristischer Tradition als ein gemeinschaftliches Unternehmen begreift. Der Artikel zeigt, dass beide Konzepte – (...) trotz ihrer philosophischen Gegensätze – in der zeitgenössischen konservativen Kritik an Identitätspolitik übereinstimmen und daher politisch kompatibel sind. Beide Freiheitsbegriffe kranken an einem falschen Universalismus. Im Gegensatz dazu hilft die radikaldemokratische Tradition, Freiheit partikularistisch zu verstehen. Dabei wird verständlich, dass Identitätspolitik nicht in erster Linie eine Einschränkung individueller Freiheit ist, sondern als Demokratisierung der Demokratie ein Beitrag zur Freiheit aller ist. (shrink)

_One of the strongest arguments against hate speech legislation is the so-called Argument from Political Speech. This argument problematizes the restrictions that might be placed on political opinions or political critique when these opinions are expressed in a way which can be interpreted as ‘hateful’ towards minority groups. One of the strongest free speech scholars opposing hate speech legislation is Ronald Dworkin, who stresses that having restrictions on hate speech is, in fact, illegitimate in a liberal democracy. The right to (...) express oneself freely concerning any political decision is, according to Dworkin, a core democratic principle; it is what self-governance – and hence liberal democracies – are built upon. Dworkin and many other free speech scholars based in the United States see hate speech legislation as a threat to expressing oneself freely and critically. I argue that Dworkin and other US-based free speech scholars tend to overlook actual hate speech legislation in countries where such laws have been implemented and have functioned for decades. Furthermore, I argue that the real threat against political speech lies not in hate speech legislation but rather outside of the law, namely, in private institutions such as universities and museums. Restrictions on political speech in various societal circumstances have been on the rise over the last decades – first and foremost in the US. I analyse why these restrictions on political speech are more widespread in the only Western country without laws against hate speech than they are in countries with implemented hate speech laws._ _Keywords_: political speech, hate speech, hate speech legislation, private institu-tions, universities, USA. (shrink)

While spreading wide-world, the new coronavirus Sars-CoV-2 made changes in many social departments of our society on levels we never thought about and messes with all our cultural habits. Thus, we witnessed that the religious denominations took into consideration changes without precedent in their cultic history and thus dogmatic as well concerning the actual threat of Coronavirus. We saw for example the Roman-Catholic Church who suspended all masses here and there[1] at first or banned the crucial gestures in rituals [to (...) suspend the distribution of Holy Communion from the Chalice[2], to distribute the Eucharist preferably into the hands of the faithful, and to avoid the physical contact from a peaceful handshake, to forego ash crosses on forehead, to suspend placing water in holy water fonts at the entrance of churches, that the churchgoers "refrain" from kissing or touching the cross for veneration, or even cancellation of masses]. We witnessed Buddhist temples and Protestant churches around Korea [at first] and beyond that have also suspended religious gatherings, and so on. In my case, the Romanian Orthodox Church did the same thing[3], but in a controversial way, firstly making some recommendations for its believers [e.g. not to kiss public icons in Churches, but their indoor ones, and receive Holy Communion with teaspoons for single-use]; afterward same Church reconsidered these recommendations and withdrew its decision [perhaps at the pressure of civil fundamentalists]. How can we qualify all these measures and, moreover, the withdrawal on behalf of religious believers, as weakness, populism, diligence, assuming the human limits, or...something else? What would be the correct and coherent answer religion should assume in this particular regard, and especially what are the reasons to qualify it in a way or another? (shrink)

On 11 March 2020, the World Health Organization declared a pandemic of the COVID-19 coronavirus disease that was first recognized in China in late 2019. Among the primary effects caused by the pandemic, there was the dissemination of health preventive measures such as physical distancing, travel restrictions, self-isolation, quarantines, and facility closures. This includes the global disruption of socio-economic systems including the postponement or cancellation of various public events (e.g., sporting, cultural, or religious), supply shortages and fears of the same, (...) schools and universities closure, evacuation of foreign citizens, a rise of unemployment, changes in the international aid schemes, misinformation, and incidents of discrimination toward people affected by or suspected of having the COVID-19 disease. The pandemic has brought to the fore unpreparedness in critical areas that require attention, amid prospects and challenges. Moreover, considerable reorganization efforts are required with implications for assets, resources, norms, and value systems. COVID-19 is challenging the concept of globalization and stimulating responses at the levels of local and regional socio-economic systems that lead to the mobilization of assets that have been unrecognized earlier on, such as various forms of economic capital, social capital, cultural capital, human capital, and creative capital. For example, through digital channels, local groups are forming to create schemes of support for physical and mental wellbeing. These emerging exchanges lead to various social and technological innovations by building on skills and assets that are less important in the free-market economy, such as empathy, skills for crafts, making and fixing; locally grown microgreens; and micromanufacturing. Isolation and local living are also making it much harder to ignore the civic responsibilities towards communities, meant as individuals, vulnerable groups, and local businesses. Whilst the pandemic is limiting physical participation, this challenging time is uncovering alternative ways of mutual support, which may create long-term benefits for socio-economic systems, including environmental and biodiversity protection, reduction of the air pollution, and climate action. The pandemic’s threat to public health will hopefully be overcome with implications for disruption for an extended period that we are unable to forecast at this stage. It is key to focus on studies recognizing the activities and interventions leading to the recovery of socio-economic systems after the pandemic. Reflecting and planning on how societies and economies will go back to “business as usual” requires new forms of communication and cooperation, imaginative design thinking, new styles of management, as well as new tools and forms of participation in various public policies. Many questions related to the care of the vulnerable, economic restart, and the risk of future pandemics, to mention but a few, are already occupying the academic, scientific, experts, and activist communities, who have started to imagine the “new normal.”. (shrink)

This paper questions the adequacy of the explicit cancellability test for conversational implicature as it is commonly understood. The standard way of understanding this test relies on two assumptions: first, that that one can test whether a certain content is conversationally implicated, by checking whether that content is cancellable, and second, that a cancellation is successful only if it results in a felicitous utterance. While I accept the first of these assumptions, I reject the second one. I argue that a (...) cancellation can succeed even if it results in an infelicitous utterance, and that unless we take this possibility into account we run the risk of misdiagnosing philosophically significant cases. (shrink)

Several philosophers advance substantive theories of propositions, to deal with several issues they raise in connection with a concern with a long pedigree in philosophy, the problem of the unity of propositions. The qualification ‘substantive’ is meant to contrast with ‘minimal’ or ‘deflationary’ – roughly, views that reject that propositions have a hidden nature, worth investigating. Substantive views appear to create spurious problems by characterizing propositions in ways that make them unfit to perform their theoretical jobs. I will present in (...) this light some critical points against Hanks’ (2015, 2019) act-theoretic view, and Recanati’s (2019) recent elaboration of Hanks’ notion of cancellation. Both Hanks and Recanati, I’ll argue, rely on problematic conceptions of fiction and pretense. (shrink)

In this paper, new evidence is presented for the assumption that the reason-relation reading of indicative conditionals ('if A, then C') reflects a conventional implicature. In four experiments, it is investigated whether relevance effects found for the probability assessment of indicative conditionals (Skovgaard-Olsen, Singmann, and Klauer, 2016a) can be classified as being produced by a) a conversational implicature, b) a (probabilistic) presupposition failure, or c) a conventional implicature. After considering several alternative hypotheses and the accumulating evidence from other studies as (...) well, we conclude that the evidence is most consistent with the Relevance Effect being the outcome of a conventional implicature. This finding indicates that the reason-relation reading is part of the semantic content of indicative conditionals, albeit not part of their primary truth-conditional content. (shrink)

Several philosophers have recently claimed that if a proposition is cancellable from an uttered sentence then that proposition is not entailed by that uttered sentence. The claim should be a familiar one. It has become a standard device in the philosopher's tool-kit. I argue that this claim is false. There is a kind of entailment—which I call “modal entailment”—that is context-sensitive and, because of this, cancellable. So cancellability does not show that a proposition is not entailed by an uttered sentence. (...) I close the paper by describing an implication this has for a disagreement between J. L. Austin and Grice concerning the relation between felicity and truth. (shrink)

Explicatures are not cancellable. Theoretical considerations.

Empirical support is offered for the claim that the original Knobe effect, whereby our intentional action ascriptions exhibit certain asymmetries in light of our moral attitudes, can be successfully cancelled. This is predicted by the view that the Knobe effect can be explained in purely pragmatic terms (Adams and Steadman 2004a, 2004b, 2007). However, previous cancelling studies (Adams and Steadman 2007; Nichols and Ulatowski 2007) have failed to identify evidence of cancellability. The key to the successful cancelling strategy presented here (...) is to provide subjects with the opportunity to assent to statements that involve sufficiently strong forms of moral censure. (shrink)

BAIL JURISPRUDENCE in India (as in other common law countries) has evolved laying emphasis on the right to liberty of the accused as opposed to the requirement of the State to keep him/her under custody... The mechanism for cancellation of bail is provided in law in order to ensure that justice will be done to the society by preventing the accused who had been set at liberty by the bail order from tampering with the evidence in a heinous crime. At (...) the same time, cancellation of bail takes away the liberty granted by the Constitution and affirmed by an order of the Court, which granted bail. Taking note of the fact that cancellation of bail necessarily involves the review of a decision already made, it has been emphasized that the same should always be exercised very sparingly by the court of law. (shrink)

Keith DeRose and Stewart Cohen object to the fallibilist strand of pragmatic invariantism regarding knowledge ascriptions that it is committed to non-cancelable pragmatic implications. I show that this objection points us to an asymmetry about which aspects of the conveyed content of knowledge ascriptions can be canceled: we can cancel those aspects that ascribe a lesser epistemic standing to the subject but not those that ascribe a better or perfect epistemic standing. This situation supports the infallibilist strand of pragmatic (...) invariantism according to which knowledge semantically requires absolute certainty but this claim is often pragmatically weakened: it turns out that exactly those aspects of the conveyed content are cancelable that this view claims are pragmatic. I also argue that attributor contextualism and relativism do not have an alternative explanation of this phenomenon. (shrink)

During the lifetime of a structured product, payment events and cancellation events mainly affect the value of the option. This article presents a model for pricing generic cancellable option. The model is used to build most common kinds of cancellation schedules and compute the cancellation probability.

A brief reference article on cultural relativism, forthcoming in the Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology, 2nd edition.

Cancellability is an essential feature of implicatures. However, its reliability has been challenged by several cases and examples in which conversational implicatures seem to be hard or even impossible to cancel. Should it then be concluded that not all implicatures are cancellable, and therefore Grice's cancellability test should be weakened or abandoned? The present paper addresses this problem by drawing a distinction between theoretical and practical cancellability, where the latter concept captures the (un)reasonableness of explicit or contextual cancellation. By (...) analyzing three legal cases of misleading advertising, I show how the indefensibility of an interpretation can account for the practical uncancellability of an implicature. To explain and account for the reasonableness of an interpretation, the presumptive inferences involved must be reconstructed and evaluated considering different dimensions, such as the conversational context and the associated presumptions. (shrink)

In the face of differences between the ethical religio-philosophies believed across the globe, how should a media ethicist theorize or make recommendations in the light of theory? One approach is relativist, taking each distinct moral worldview to be true only for its own people. A second approach is universalist, seeking to discover a handful of basic ethical principles that are already shared by all the world's peoples. After providing reasons to doubt both of these approaches to doing media ethics, consideration (...) is given to a third. This under-explored approach offers moral claims that would be reasonable for nearly all long-standing cultures to accept even though they currently do not, with the aim of creating new common ground among them. The chapter advances some rights and responsibilities, particularly as they concern the media's role in respect of self-government and self-expression, on which many of those with African, Confucian, Islamic, and Western foundational commitments could sensibly converge. (shrink)

Despite centuries of colonization in the Philippines, the traditional Filipino healing system has survived. However, as modern education has continued to spread and Western medicine has grown in influence, traditional healing practices have been pushed to the margins and labeled as unscientific or mere superstition. This also suggests that unrecorded information may be lost forever. For future generations to appreciate this rich cultural heritage, cultural mapping of traditional healers in a local community is necessary. Thus, the researcher explored, identified, documented, (...) and analyzed the cultural profile of the traditional healers in a local community. Specifically, he studied the (1) background information, (2) description of the intangible cultural heritage, (3) stories/narratives associated with traditional healing, (4) significance of the practice, (5) assessment of the practice, and (6) references/supporting documentation of the traditional healers. The study was conducted in one of the local communities in the province of Quezon. The research participants were selected using inclusion criteria, and 11 traditional healers served as the key informants of the study. This study also employed qualitative research through cultural mapping, and pertinent data were obtained using participant observation, documentation, and interview guides. Qualitative content analysis was used in analyzing the gathered data. The findings revealed that the traditional healers have diverse background information, reflected in the element types, the geographical location and range of the element, and the related domains of the intangible cultural heritage. Likewise, the description of the intangible cultural heritage gave a wide array of descriptions of the history of practice, occasion/season, processes, and procedures involved, beliefs associated, settings, aims, social functions, and cultural meaning, culture bearer/s and practitioner/s of the element, mode of transmission, list of significant tangible movable heritage used associated with the element and list of significant flora/fauna used associated with the element. Meanwhile, spiritual guides and supernatural claims, healing severe cases, and being accused of malpractice or maltreatment were some of the stories/narratives associated with the element. In addition, traditional healing has historical, aesthetic, scientific, social, socio-economic, socio-political, and spiritual significance. Moreover, the assessment of practice exposed the condition/status of traditional healing, which is in danger because of the elderliness of the traditional healers and because no one is accepting the knowledge and practices. Furthermore, the constraint, threat, issue, or challenge experienced by the traditional healers is making false accusations against them. Nevertheless, traditional healers have identified several safeguarding measures in their traditional healing practice. These are transmission through informal education, identification, documentation, research, promotion, enhancement, and revitalization. Finally, sacred texts, books, pictures, prayers, and saints are the references or supporting documentation used in traditional healing. Based on the findings and conclusions, it is recommended to utilize the two research outputs: “Kaalaman at Kasanayan: Cultural Profile of Traditional Healers,” a booklet, and “Tanging Healing,” a documentary film about traditional healing for the preservation of local heritage, community development, and heritage education. (shrink)

Observers have noted a decline (in the US) in attributions of genetically-based inferiority (e.g. in intelligence) to Blacks, and a rise in attributions of culturally-based inferiority. Is this "culturalism" merely warmed-over racism ("cultural racism") or a genuinely distinct way of thinking about racial groups? The question raises a larger one about the relative place of biology and culture in racist thought. I develop a typology of culturalisms as applied to race: (1) inherentist or essentialist culturalism (inferiorizing cultural characteristics wrongly (...) but intelligibly regarded as inhering in the nature of racial groups). This view has an historical pedigree in the work of J.G. von Herder, and the tradition of "national racism." (2) non-inherentist culturalism (groups regarded as possessing changeable, malleable inferiorizing cultural characteristics). (3) colonalist culturalism (colonial subjects regarded as uncivilized but capable of becoming civilized under European tutelage). (4) neo-racism (cultures of former colonial subjects in or potentially immigrating to European countries are regarded in an inherentist manner and incompatible with but not inferior to European cultures). Non-inherentist culturalism (#2) can be put to either a racist or an anti-racist use. (shrink)

The phenomenon of presupposition suspension can be analyzed in terms of explicatures and the corresponding non-presumptive interpretative reasoning underlying it. On the view presented in this paper, the polyphonic articulation of an utterance at different levels can be used to explain cases in which presuppositions are suspended. Presuppositional suspensions indicate that the presumptive reading does not hold and a different interpretation is needed. Utterances can display various types of polyphonic structures, accounting for the speaker’s and the hearer’s commitments. A speaker (...) can be held directly responsible for what he says, but he is committed only indirectly to what he presupposes, i.e. what is uttered by a second voice (the second utterer or enunciator) representing what the common opinion accepts to be true. The reconstruction of the pragmatic structure of an utterance is guided by a complex type of reasoning, which can be represented as an argumentative abductive pattern, grounded on hierarchies of presumptions. By comparing the possible presumptions associated with the explicit meaning and the contextual information, the hearer can find a best possible explanation of the intended effect of the utterance. (shrink)

This essay is a defense of the social construction of racialism. I follow a standard definition of “racialism” which is the belief that “there are heritable characteristics, possessed by members of our species, that allow us to divide them into a small set of races, in such a way that all the members of these races share certain traits and tendencies with each other that they do not share with other members of any other race”. In particular I want to (...) defend the “radical” social-constructive thesis that holds “the concept of race is exclusively the product of historical and cultural causes. It claims that humans do not tend to classify people into races when groups with different phenotypes meet, save for particular historical circumstances”. The quoted position is the consensus view among historians, sociologists, anthropologists, and other social scientists who study racialism but has recently been criticized by philosophical defenders of cognitive/evolutionary psychological approaches to racialism. Drawing on developmental studies as well as historical and contemporary cross-cultural research, CEP philosophers point to similarities of racialism across time and space. They hold that social constructionist approaches to racialism cannot explain these similarities. I hold that SC approaches do explain these similarities and that such similarities actually pose a significant challenge to the proposed CEP research program on racialism. (shrink)

We consider the complex interactions between rape culture and epistemology. A central case study is the consideration of a deferential attitude about the epistemology of sexual assault testimony. According to the deferential attitude, individuals and institutions should decline to act on allegations of sexual assault unless and until they are proven in a formal setting, i.e., a criminal court. We attack this deference from several angles, including the pervasiveness of rape culture in the criminal justice system, the epistemology (...) of testimony and norms connecting knowledge and action, the harms of tacit idealizations away from important contextual factors, and a contextualist semantics for 'knows' ascriptions. (shrink)

Following recent arguments that cultural practices in wild animal populations have important conservation implications, we argue that recognizing captive animals as cultural has important welfare implications. Having a culture is of deep importance for cultural animals, wherever they live. Without understanding the cultural capacities of captive animals, we will be left with a deeply impoverished view of what they need to flourish. Best practices for welfare should therefore require concern for animals’ cultural needs, but the relationship between culture (...) and welfare is also extremely complex, requiring us to rethink standard assumptions about what constitutes and contributes to welfare. (shrink)

Abstract In The Descent of Man (1879), Charles Darwin proposed a speculative evolutionary explanation of extended benevolence—a human sympathetic capacity that extends to all nations, races, and even to all sentient beings. This essay draws on twenty-first century social science to show that Darwin’s explanation is correct in its broad outlines. Extended benevolence is manifested in institutions such as legal human rights and democracy, in behaviors such as social movements for human rights and the protection of nonhuman animals, and in (...) normative attitudes such as emancipative values and a commitment to promote the rights or welfare of animals. These phenomena can be substantially explained by cultural evolutionary forces that trace back to three components of what Darwin called the human “moral sense”: (1) sympathy, (2) our disposition to follow community rules or norms, and (3) our capacity to make normative judgments. Extended benevolence likely emerged with “workarounds,” including political ideologies, that established an inclusive sympathetic concern for sentient life. It likely became as widespread as it is now due to recently arisen socio-economic conditions that have created more opportunities for people to have contact with and take the perspective of a broader cross-section of humanity, as well as other species. (shrink)

What makes fast, cumulative cultural evolution work? Where did it come from? Why is it the sole preserve of humans? We set out a self-assembly hypothesis: cultural evolution evolved culturally. We present an evolutionary account that shows this hypothesis to be coherent, plausible, and worthy of further investigation. It has the following steps: (0) in common with other animals, early hominins had significant capacity for social learning; (1) knowledge and skills learned by offspring from their parents began to spread because (...) bearers had more offspring, a process we call CS1 (or Cultural Selection 1); (2) CS1 shaped attentional learning biases; (3) these attentional biases were augmented by explicit learning biases (judgements about what should be copied from whom). Explicit learning biases enabled (4) the high-fidelity, exclusive copying required for fast cultural accumulation of knowledge and skills by a process we call CS2 (or Cultural Selection 2), and (5) the emergence of cognitive processes such as imitation, mindreading and metacognition – ‘cognitive gadgets’ specialised for cultural learning. This self-assembly hypothesis is consistent with archaeological evidence that the stone tools used by early hominins were not dependent on fast, cumulative cultural evolution, and suggests new priorities for research on ‘animal culture’. (shrink)

Recent work in psychology on ‘cultural cognition’ suggests that our cultural background drives our attitudes towards a range of politically contentious issues in science such as global warming. This work is part of a more general attempt to investigate the ways in which our wants, wishes and desires impact on our assessments of information, events and theories. Put crudely, the idea is that we conform our assessments of the evidence for and against scientific theories with clear political relevance to our (...) pre-existing political beliefs and convictions. In this paper I explore the epistemological consequences of cultural cognition. What does it mean for the rationality of our beliefs about issues such as global warming? I argue for an unsettling conclusion. Not only are those on the ‘political right’ who reject the scientific consensus on issues like global warming unjustified in doing so, some of those on the ‘political left’ who accept the consensus are also unjustified in doing so. I finish by addressing the practical implications of my conclusions. (shrink)

In this paper, I present an outline of the oppression account of cultural appropriation and argue that it offers the best explanation for the wrongfulness of the varied and complex cases of appropriation to which people often object. I then compare the oppression account with the intimacy account defended by C. Thi Nguyen and Matt Strohl. Though I believe that Nguyen and Strohl’s account offers important insight into an essential dimension of the cultural appropriation debate, I argue that justified objections (...) to cultural appropriation must ultimately be grounded in considerations of oppression as opposed to group intimacy. I present three primary objections to the intimacy account. First, I suggest that in its effort to explain expressive appropriation claims (those that purportedly lack an independent ground), the intimacy account doubles down on the boundary problem. Second, I question whether group intimacy possess the kind of bare normativity that Nguyen and Strohl claim for it. Finally, I argue that these objections give us reason to accept the importance of group intimacy to the cultural appropriation debate, but question the source of its significance as identified by Nguyen and Strohl. (shrink)

What could ground normative restrictions concerning cultural appropriation which are not grounded by independent considerations such as property rights or harm? We propose that such restrictions can be grounded by considerations of intimacy. Consider the familiar phenomenon of interpersonal intimacy. Certain aspects of personal life and interpersonal relationships are afforded various protections in virtue of being intimate. We argue that an analogous phenomenon exists at the level of large groups. In many cases, members of a group engage in shared practices (...) that contribute to a sense of common identity, such as wearing certain hair or clothing styles or performing a certain style of music. Participation in such practices can generate relations of group intimacy, which can ground certain prerogatives in much the same way that interpersonal intimacy can. One such prerogative is making what we call an appropriation claim. An appropriation claim is a request from a group member that non-members refrain from appropriating a given element of the group’s culture. Ignoring appropriation claims can constitute a breach of intimacy. But, we argue, just as for the prerogatives of interpersonal intimacy, in many cases there is no prior fact of the matter about whether the appropriation of a given cultural practice constitutes a breach of intimacy. It depends on what the group decides together. (shrink)

This essay frames systemic patterns of mental abuse against women of color and Indigenous women on Turtle Island (North America) in terms of larger design-of-distribution strategies in settler colonial societies, as these societies use various forms of social power to distribute, reproduce, and automate social inequalities (including public health precarities and mortality disadvantages) that skew socio-economic gain continuously toward white settler populations and their descendants. It departs from traditional studies in gender-based violence research that frame mental abuses such as gaslighting--commonly (...) understood as mental manipulation through lying or deceit--stochastically, as chance-driven interpersonal phenomena. Building on structural analyses of knowledge in political epistemology (Dotson 2012, Berenstain 2016), political theory (Davis and Ernst 2017), and Indigenous social theory (Tuck and Yang 2012), I develop the notion of cultural gaslighting to refer to the social and historical infrastructural support mechanisms that disproportionately produce abusive mental ambients in settler colonial cultures in order to further the ends of cultural genocide and dispossession. I conclude by proposing a social epidemiological account of gaslighting that a) highlights the public health harms of abusive ambients for minority populations, b) illuminates the hidden rules of social structure in settler colonial societies, and c) amplifies the corresponding need for structural reparations. (shrink)

Every year, the Vietnamese people reportedly burned about 50,000 tons of joss papers, which took the form of not only bank notes, but iPhones, cars, clothes, even housekeepers, in hope of pleasing the dead. The practice was mistakenly attributed to traditional Buddhist teachings but originated in fact from China, which most Vietnamese were not aware of. In other aspects of life, there were many similar examples of Vietnamese so ready and comfortable with adding new norms, values, and beliefs, even contradictory (...) ones, to their culture. This phenomenon, dubbed “cultural additivity”, prompted us to study the co-existence, interaction, and influences among core values and norms of the Three Teachings –Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism–as shown through Vietnamese folktales. By applying Bayesian logistic regression, we evaluated the possibility of whether the key message of a story was dominated by a religion (dependent variables), as affected by the appearance of values and anti-values pertaining to the Three Teachings in the story (independent variables). Our main findings included the existence of the cultural additivity of Confucian and Taoist values. More specifically, empirical results showed that the interaction or addition of the values of Taoism and Confucianism in folktales together helped predict whether the key message of a story was about Confucianism, β{VT ⋅ VC} = 0.86. Meanwhile, there was no such statistical tendency for Buddhism. The results lead to a number of important implications. First, this showed the dominance of Confucianism because the fact that Confucian and Taoist values appeared together in a story led to the story’s key message dominated by Confucianism. Thus, it presented the evidence of Confucian dominance and against liberal interpretations of the concept of the Common Roots of Three Religions (“tam giáo đồng nguyên”) as religious unification or unicity. Second, the concept of “cultural additivity” could help explain many interesting socio-cultural phenomena, namely the absence of religious intolerance and extremism in the Vietnamese society, outrageous cases of sophistry in education, the low productivity in creative endeavors like science and technology, the misleading branding strategy in business. We are aware that our results are only preliminary and more studies, both theoretical and empirical, must be carried out to give a full account of the explanatory reach of “cultural additivity”. (shrink)

Is there something morally wrong with cultural appropriation in the arts? I argue that the little philosophical work on this topic has been overly dismissive of moral objections to cultural appropriation. Nevertheless, I argue that philosophers working on epistemic injustice have developed powerful conceptual tools that can aid in our understanding of objections that have been levied by other scholars and artists. I then consider the relationship between these objections and the harms of cultural essentialism. I argue that focusing on (...) the systematic nature of appropriative harms may allow us to sidestep the problem of essentialism, but not without cost. (shrink)

The study of cultural evolution has taken on an increasingly interdisciplinary and diverse approach in explicating phenomena of cultural transmission and adoptions. Inspired by this computational movement, this study uses Bayesian networks analysis, combining both the frequentist and the Hamiltonian Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) approach, to investigate the highly representative elements in the cultural evolution of a Vietnamese city’s architecture in the early 20th century. With a focus on the façade design of 68 old houses in Hanoi’s Old Quarter (...) (based on 78 data lines extracted from 248 photos), the study argues that it is plausible to look at the aesthetics, architecture, and designs of the house façade to find traces of cultural evolution in Vietnam, which went through more than six decades of French colonization and centuries of sociocultural influence from China. The in-depth technical analysis, though refuting the presumed model on the probabilistic dependency among the variables, yields several results, the most notable of which is the strong influence of Buddhism over the decorations of the house façade. Particularly, in the top 5 networks with the best Bayesian Information Criterion (BIC) scores and p<0.05, the variable for decorations (DC) always has a direct probabilistic dependency on the variable B for Buddhism. The paper then checks the robustness of these models using Hamiltonian MCMC method and find the posterior distributions of the models’ coefficients all satisfy the technical requirement. Finally, this study suggests integrating Bayesian statistics in the social sciences in general and for the study of cultural evolution and architectural transformation in particular. (shrink)

Cultural attractor theory (CAT) is a highly visible and audacious approach to studying human cultural evolution. However, the explanatory aims and some central explanatory concepts of CAT remain unclear. Here I remedy these problems. I provide a reconstruction of CAT that recasts it as a theory of forces. I then demonstrate how this reinterpretation of CAT has the resources to generate both cultural distribution and evolvability explanations. I conclude by examining the potential benefits and drawbacks of this reconstruction.

Trolley problems have been used in the development of moral theory and the psychological study of moral judgments and behavior. Most of this research has focused on people from the West, with implicit assumptions that moral intuitions should generalize and that moral psychology is universal. However, cultural differences may be associated with differences in moral judgments and behavior. We operationalized a trolley problem in the laboratory, with economic incentives and real-life consequences, and compared British and Chinese samples on moral behavior (...) and judgment. We found that Chinese participants were less willing to sacrifice one person to save five others, and less likely to consider such an action to be right. In a second study using three scenarios, including the standard scenario where lives are threatened by an on-coming train, fewer Chinese than British participants were willing to take action and sacrifice one to save five, and this cultural difference was more pronounced when the consequences were less severe than death. (shrink)