How language works — its functions, mechanisms, and limitations — matters to the early moderns as much as it does to contemporary philosophers. Many of the moderns make reflection on language central to their philosophical projects, both as a tool for explaining human cognition and as a weapon to be used against competing views. Even in philosophers for whom language is less central, we can find important connections between their views on language and their other philosophical (...) commitments. (shrink)

The dynamic nature of physics cannot be captured through an exclusive focus on the static mathematical formulations of physical theories. Instead, we can more fruitfully think of physics as a set of distinctively social, cognitive, and theoretical/methodological practices. An emphasis on practice has been one of the most notable aspects of the recent “naturalistic turn” in general philosophy of science, in no small part due to the arguments of many feminist philosophers of science. A major project of (...) class='Hi'>feminist philosophy of physics has been to shine a critical light on the social and cognitive practices in physics, and how those ultimately influence other aspects of the science. Here we argue that traditional philosophy of physics has focused exclusively on the theoretical/methodological practices of physics, and that feminist philosophy of physics seeks to broaden the focus to include the social and cognitive practices as well. (shrink)

Standpoint theory is an explicitly political as well as social epistemology. Its central insight is that epistemic advantage may accrue to those who are oppressed by structures of domination and discounted as knowers. Feminist standpoint theorists hold that gender is one dimension of social differentiation that can make such a difference. In response to two longstanding objections I argue that epistemically consequential standpoints need not be conceptualized in essentialist terms, and that they do not confer automatic or comprehensive epistemic (...) privilege on those who occupy them. Standpoint theory is best construed as conceptual framework for investigating the ways in which socially situated experience and interests make a contingent difference to what we know (well), and to the resources we have for determining which knowledge claims we can trust. I illustrate the advantages of this account in terms of two examples drawn from archaeological sources. (shrink)

on race and Adorno’s philosophy of language by engaging Kant, Hegel, Heidegger, Lacan, and Derrida; -/- singled out in the collection as "superb" by the reader for Sage Press.

This article is a feminist intervention into the ways that disability is researched and represented in philosophy at present. Nevertheless, some of the claims that I make over the course of the article are also pertinent to the marginalization in philosophy of other areas of inquiry, including philosophy of race, feminist philosophy more broadly, indigenous philosophies, and LGBTQI philosophy. Although the discipline of philosophy largely continues to operate under the guise of neutrality, (...) rationality, and objectivity, the institutionalized structure of the discipline implicitly and explicitly promotes certain ontologies, epistemologies, and methodologies as bona fide philosophy, while casting the ontologies, epistemologies, and methodologies of marginalized philosophies as mere simulacra of allegedly fundamental ways of knowing and doing philosophy and thus rendering these marginalized philosophies more or less expendable. This article is designed to show that legitimized philosophical discourses are vital mechanisms in the problematization of disability. (shrink)

Experimental philosophy of language uses experimental methods developed in the cognitive sciences to investigate topics of interest to philosophers of language. This article describes the methodological background for the development of experimental approaches to topics in philosophy of language, distinguishes negative and positive projects in experimental philosophy of language, and evaluates experimental work on the reference of proper names and natural kind terms. The reliability of expert judgments vs. the judgments of ordinary speakers, (...) the role that ambiguity plays in influencing responses to experiments, and the reliability of metalinguistic judgments are also assessed. (shrink)

This chapter tells the story of how the philosophy of language, as it exists now, grew out of work in the history of analytic philosophy. I pay particular attention to the history of semantics, to debates about propositional content, and to the origins of contemporary pragmatics and speech-act theory. I identify an overarching narrative: Many of the ideas that are now used to understand natural language on its own terms were originally developed not for this purpose, (...) but as methodological tools for diverse philosophical ends. (shrink)

Metaethics is the study of metaphysics, epistemology, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language, insofar as they relate to the subject matter of moral or, more broadly, normative discourse – the subject matter of what is good, bad, right or wrong, just, reasonable, rational, what we must or ought to do, or otherwise. But out of these four ‘core’ areas of philosophy, it is plausibly the philosophy of language that is most central (...) to metaethics – and not simply because ‘metaethics’ was for a long time construed more narrowly as a name for the study of moral language. The philosophy of language is central to metaethics because both the advantages of and the open problems facing different metaethical theories differ sharply over the answers those theories give to central questions in the philosophy of language. In fact, among the open problems over which such theories differ, are included particularly further problems in the philosophy of language. This article briefly surveys a range of broad categories of views in metaethics and both catalogues some of the principal issues faced by each in the philosophy of language, as well as how those arise out of their answers to more basic questions in the philosophy of language. I make no claim to completeness, only to raising a variety of important issues. (shrink)

Recent feminist philosophy of language has highlighted the ways that the speech of women can be unjustly impeded, because of the way their gender affects the uptake their speech receives. In this chapter, I explore how similar processes can undermine the speech of a different sort of speaker: Indigenous communities. This involves focusing on Indigeneity rather than gender as the salient social identity, and looking at the ways that group speech, rather than only individual speech, can be (...) unjustly impeded. To do this, I make use of the notion of ‘discursive injustice’ that has been developed by Quill Kukla, and, with reference to three case studies, show how discursive injustice can effectively derail the speech of Indigenous communities. (shrink)

Vision is an important metaphor in ethical and political questions of knowledge. The feminist philosopher Donna Haraway points out the “perverse” nature of an intrusive, alienating, all-seeing vision (to which we might cry out “stop looking at me!”), but also encourages us to embrace the embodied nature of sight and its promises for genuinely situated knowledge. Current technologies of machine vision – surveillance cameras, drones (for war or recreation), iPhone cameras – are usually construed as instances of the former (...) rather than the latter, and for good reasons. However, although in no way attempting to diminish the real suffering these technologies have brought about in the world, I make the case for understanding technologies of computer vision as material instances of embodied seeing and situated knowing. Furthermore, borrowing from Iris Murdoch’s concept of moral vision, I suggest that these technologies direct our labor towards self-reflection in ethically significant ways. My approach draws upon paradigms in computer vision research, phenomenology, and feminist epistemology. Ultimately, this essay is an argument for directing more philosophical attention from merely criticizing technologies of vision as ethically deficient towards embracing them as complex, methodologically and epistemologically important objects. (shrink)

This article considers the implications of inferentialist philosophy of language for debates in the historiography of philosophy. My intention is to mediate and refine the polemics between contextualist historians and ‘analytic’ or presentist historians. I claim that much of Robert Brandom’s nuanced defence of presentism can be accepted and even adopted by contextualists, so that inferentialism turns out to provide an important justification for orthodox history of philosophy. In the concluding sections I argue that the application (...) of Brandom’s theory has important limits, and that some polemics by contextualists against presentists are therefore justified. (shrink)

A typical device in film is to have a character narrating what is going on, but this narration is not always a reliable guide to the events. According to Maier, distortions may be caused by the narrator’s intent, naivety, use of drugs, and/or cognitive disorder/illness. What is common to these various causes, he argues, is the presence of a point of view, which appears in a movie as shots. While this perspective-based account of unreliability covers most cases, I unpack its (...) methodological consequences and gesture at a possibility that Maier’s analysis overlooks. A narration, I suggest, can be unreliable simply because it is ill-timed with the events shown on screen. In such a case, the distortion is not due to any character’s point of view; rather, it comes from the film medium’s ability to divorce what is seen and what is heard. As a consequence of this mismatch, it is possible to have a reliable narrator but an unreliable narration. Since voice and context of utterance usually match in ordinary speech, I conclude that philosophy of language may be ill-suited to properly understand this particular phenomenon. (shrink)

Whilst the distinction between French and Anglo-American feminism was always rather dubious two specific linguistic differences between French and English have nevertheless determined two streams of feminist thought, and complicated the relation between them. Since the 1960s, English-language feminisms, in so far as they are distinctive, have centrally either presupposed or explicitly theorized the category of gender, for which there is no linguistic equivalent in French. At the same time, much (although not all) that came to be categorized (...) as ʻFrenchʼ feminism has been articulated around the category of le féminin, for which there is no ready equivalent in English, although there is an obvious translational choice: ʻthe feminineʼ. Various Anglo-American feminisms have made consideration of what have been seen as feminine attributes and values central to their critical and reconstructive projects, but it is not this (adjectival) sense which is at issue here in the translation of le féminin, a noun. For despite the fact that the French and English words connote differently (in particular, le féminin also covers most of what is meant by the English ʻfemaleʼ), ʻthe feminineʼ, as a direct translation of the different and specific uses of le féminin in various French discourses, has become a common category in English-language feminist discourse, specifically English-language feminist philosophy of a ʻcontinentalʼ disposition, where it is often presumed to be both the proper object of such a philosophy and the proper goal of feminism. But is it? Or what exactly is at stake in making it so? Is ʻthe feminineʼ a necessary or useful category for feminism today? (shrink)

This essay explores the speech act of dogwhistling (sometimes referred to as ‘using coded language’). Dogwhistles may be overt or covert, and within each of these categories may be intentional or unintentional. Dogwhistles are a powerful form of political speech, allowing people to be manipulated in ways they would resist if the manipulation was carried outmore openly—often drawing on racist attitudes that are consciously rejected. If philosophers focus only on content expressed or otherwise consciously conveyed they may miss what (...) is most powerful and pernicious in the speech of political culture. This essay is a call to start paying attention to these more covert speech acts, and a first attempt at beginning to theorize them. It argues that dogwhistles present a complex and interesting case for the philosopher of language, and explores their implications for democratic politics. (shrink)

J.L. Austin argues that ordinary language should be used to identify when it is appropriate or inappropriate to make, accept, or reject knowledge claims. I criticize Austin’s account: In our ordinary life, we often accept justifications rooted in racism, sexism, ableism, and classism as reasons to dismiss knowledge claims or challenges, despite the fact such reasons are not good reasons. Austin’s Ordinary Language Epistemology (OLE) classifies the discounting of knowledge claims in classic cases of epistemic injustice as legitimate (...) ordinary maneuvers. I provide recommendations for revision of OLE and offer a means of distinguishing between dismissals in cases of epistemic injustice and their legitimate counterparts. (shrink)

This book is an introduction to and interpretation of the philosophy of language devised by Donald Davidson over the past 25 years. The guiding intuition is that Davidson's work is best understood as an ongoing attempt to purge semantics of theoretical reifications. Seen in this light the recent attack on the notion of language itself emerges as a natural development of his Quinian scepticism towards "meanings" and his rejections of reference-based semantic theories. Linguistic understanding is, for Davidson, (...) essentially dynamic, arising only through a continuous process of theory construction and reconstruction. The result is a conception of semantics in which the notion of interpretation and not the notion of knowing a language is fundamental. In the course of his book Bjorn Ramberg provides a critical discussion of reference-based semantic theories, challenging the standard accounts of the principle of charity and elucidating the notion of radical interpretation. The final chapter on incommensurability ties in with the discussions of Kuhn's work in the philosophy of science and suggests certain links between Davidson's analytic semantics and hermeneutic theory. (shrink)

In this chapter, I try to answer the above question, and another question that it presupposes: can philosophy of language help us navigate the political news cycle? A reader can be sceptical of a positive answer to the latter question; after all, citizens, political theorists, and journalists seem to be capable of following current politics and its coverage in the news, and there is no reason to think that philosophy of language in particular should be capable (...) of helping people make sense and respond to the news. I will illustrate the application of philosophy of language to three contrasting strategies of political propaganda: dogwhistles, meaning perversions, and bald-faced lies. I hope that these help us see that philosophy of language can be a good tool in diagnosing demagoguery, and in resisting it. (shrink)

I survey some points of contact between contemporary vice epistemology and feminist philosophy of science.

Objective The relations between thought and reality are studied in many fields of philosophy and science. Examples include ontology and metaphysics in general, linguistics, neuroscience and even mathematics. Each one has its postulates, its language, its methods and its own constraints. It would be unreasonable, however, for them to ignore each other. In the pages that follow we will try to identify areas of proximity between the ideas of contemporary philosophers of language and those issued mainly by (...) Ontology of Knowledge but also by mathematics and neuroscience. We will try to take advantage of the clarity and the perfect structuring of the lecture « La philosophie contemporaine du langage » (the contemporary philosophy of language) given by Professor Denis Vernant . We will make use of this lecture, both for the ideas presented and as a reference process. The goal of this article is to bring out, through a benevolent confrontation, new ideas for the benefit of knowledge in general. (shrink)

The role of intuition in Kripke's arguments for the causal-historical theory of reference has been a topic of recent debate, particularly in light of empirical work on these intuitions. In this paper, I develop three interpretations of the role intuition might play in Kripke's arguments. The first aim of this exercise is to help clarify the options available to interpreters of Kripke, and the consequences for the experimental investigation of Kripkean intuitions. The second aim is to show that understanding the (...) role of intuition in Kripke's arguments, and in other arguments commonly interpreted as ?appeals to intuition? requires that we pay careful attention to the argumentative context and theoretical commitments of the work in question. The interpretations of Kripke developed here provide a set of options which might be adapted to other arguments to help clarify what role (if any) intuition plays. (shrink)

Philosophy of Language, introduces students to the main issues and theories in twenty-first-century philosophy of language, focusing specifically on linguistic phenomena. Author Salah Ismail divided the book into seven chapters. Ch. I, Philosophy of language: Defining term and Indication of trends. Ch.2, Empirical theory in language learning (Quine). Ch.3, Mental theory in language learning and its knowledge (Chomsky). Ch.4, Theories of meaning, surveys the competing theories of linguistic meaning and compares their various (...) advantages and liabilities; theory of ideas, theory of verification, use theory. Ch.5, Theory of communication- intention. Ch.6, Pragmatics and rules of conversation. Ch.7, Language, truth and reality. يعالج الكتاب الموضوعات الأساسية في فلسفة اللغة وهي المعنى والإشارة والصدق، بالإضافة إلى تعلم اللغة ومعرفتها. ويعرض بأسلوب رصين وبدقة نظريات الفلاسفة المعاصرين في هذه الموضوعات بداية من فتجنشتين، ومرورا بكواين وتشومسكي وجرايس، إلى جون سيرل في وقتنا الحالي. وستجد فيه إجابات عن أسئلة من قبيل: كيف نتعلم اللغة؟ وما المعنى؟ وكيف تعني الكلمات ما تعنيه؟ وما شروط صدق الجملة؟ وما الاختلاف بين معنى الجملة والمعنى لدى المتكلم؟ وكيف يكون التواصل اللغوي ممكنا؟ وما قواعد المحادثة؟ وما الاختلاف بين علم الدلالة وعلم الاستعمال؟ ويدافع المؤلف عن نظرية الاستعمال في المعنى . (shrink)

The writings of Simone Weil support a feminist philosophy of education that locates freedom in self-determined creative work within contexts of necessity. In particular, Weil’s discussion of Force, the Good, Work, Method and Time provide criteria for a feminist philosophy of education, in terms of educational ends and means. Philosophy for Children is relevant to each of these themes, in various ways.

The Philosophy ofLanguage belongs to the foundations of philosophical reflexion. In this volume, its central problems and strategies are explained, and the nature of sentences and other elements of language are analysed. The didactical exposition of the most important schools and thinkers makes the volume particularly interesting for readers new to the subject.

An investigation of Frege’s various contributions to the study of language, focusing on three of his most famous doctrines: that concepts are unsaturated, that sentences refer to truth-values, and that sense must be distinguished from reference.

While feminist epistemologists have made important contributions to the deconstruction of the traditional representationalist model, some elements of the Cartesian legacy remain. For example, relativism continues to play a role in the underdetermination thesis used by Longino and Keller. Both argue that because scientific theories are underdetermined by evidence, theory choice must be relative to interpretive frameworks. Utilizing Davidson's philosophy of language, I offer a nonrepresentationalist alternative to suggest how relativism can be more fully avoided.

In this paper I trace the manner in which Herder’s philosophy of language grounds his approach to hermeneutical issues regarding history, interpretation, and translation. Herder’s approach to the question of language has been repeatedly lauded for its important influence on the later work done by Schleiermacher, Dilthey, and Gadamer, but in this discussion I am going to put him more directly in conversation with Wilhelm von Humboldt. Although recent critics have derided Humboldt’s theory as both derivative and (...) wrong, I will argue that we should instead recognize that Humboldt’s philosophy of language represents a significant development of Herder’s thesis. This development is accomplished by way of Humboldt’s application of Kant’s mature theory of reason to a program for comparative linguistics. In Humboldt’s hands, this amounts to a new strain of philosophical anthropology. (shrink)

ABSTRACT: With this article, I advance a historicist and relativist feminist philosophy of disability. I argue that Foucault’s insights offer the most astute tools with which to engage in this intellectual enterprise. Genealogy, the technique of investigation that Friedrich Nietzsche famously introduced and that Foucault took up and adapted in his own work, demonstrates that Foucault’s historicist approach has greater explanatory power and transgressive potential for analyses of disability than his critics in disability studies have thus far recognized. (...) I show how a feminist philosophy of disability that employs Foucault’s technique of genealogy avoids ahistorical, teleological, and transcultural assumptions that beleaguer much work in disability studies. The article also situates feminist philosophical work on disability squarely in age-old debates in (Eurocentric) Western philosophy about universalism vs. relativism, materialism vs. idealism, realism vs. nominalism, and freewill vs. determinism, as well as contributes to ongoing discussions in (Western) feminist philosophy and theory about (among other things) essentialism vs. constructivism, identity, race, sexuality, agency, and experience. (shrink)

Through a close reading of Judith Butler's 1989 essay on Merleau-Ponty's “theory” of sexuality as well as the texts her argument hinges on, this paper addresses the debate about the relation between language and the living, gendered body as it is understood by defenders of poststructural theory on the one hand, and different interpretations of Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology on the other. I claim that Butler, in her criticism of the French philosopher's analysis of the famous “Schneider case,” does not take (...) its wider context into account: either the case study that Merleau-Ponty's discussion is based upon, or its role in his phenomenology of perception. Yet, although Butler does point out certain blind spots in his descriptions regarding the gendered body, it is in the light of her questioning that the true radicality of Merleau-Ponty's ideas can be revealed. A further task for feminist phenomenology should be a thorough assessment of his philosophy from this angle, once the most obvious misunderstandings have been put to the side. (shrink)

This book examines the central role that language plays in understanding and human flourishing. The book begins by exploring Heidegger's idea that language is an essential element of how we dwell in the world and is, for the most part, ready-to-hand for us. With Gadamer, I then begin to explore phenomena where language is not ready-to-hand but calls for interpretation. The latter half of the book explores distinct ways in which language can become unready-to-hand for individuals (...) (e.g., in cases of trauma, depression, and social subordination) and examines the way that such situations have been analyzed by twentieth-century Continental thinkers (e.g., Blanchot, Kristeva, Derrida). (shrink)

هذا الكتاب هو الجانب الأكبر من أطروحتي للدكتوراه من جامعة القاهرة "فلسفة اللغة والمنطق عند كواين" وهو أول دراسة عربية عن هذا المنطقي الفيلسوف. تنقسم الدراسة إلى خمسة فصول يسبقها مدخل ويلحقها خاتمة. يحدد المدخل المراد بفلسفة اللغة وفلسفة المنطق، وتيارات فلسفة اللغة المعاصرة وموقع كواين منها. ويناقش الفصل الأول مشكلة التحليلية. ويشرح الثاني نظرية كواين التجريبية السلوكية في دراسة اللغة والإشارة. ويعالج الفصل الثالث مشكلة المعنى. ويحلل الرابع دعوى اللاتحديد في الترجمة. ويبحث الخامس آراء كواين في فلسفة المنطق. وفي (...) الخاتمة تأصيل لفلسفة كواين التي تسمى التجريبية الطبيعية أحيانا أو التجريبية البراجماتية أحيانا أخرى. ويقع الكتاب في 356 صفحة . (shrink)

There’s an interesting debate in moral and political philosophy about the nature of, and relationship between, ideal and non-ideal theory. In this paper we discuss whether an analogous distinction can be drawn in philosophy of language. Our conclusion is negative: Even if you think that distinction can be put to work within moral and political philosophy, there’s no useful way to extend it to work that has been done in the philosophy of language.

In this paper I examine parallels between C.S. Peirce's most mature account of signs and contemporary philosophy of language. I do this by first introducing a summary of Peirce's final account of Signs. I then use that account of signs to reconstruct Peircian answers to two puzzles of reference: The Problem of Cognitive Significance, or Frege's Puzzle; and The Same-Saying Phenomenon for Indexicals. Finally, a comparison of these Peircian answers with both Fregean and Direct Referentialist approaches to the (...) puzzles highlights interesting parallels and important differences between Peirce's final account of signs, and the concepts used in analytic philosophy of language. (shrink)

يقدم هذا البحث معالجة تحليلية موجزة للاتجاهات الأساسية في فلسفة اللغة المعاصرة، وهي ثلاثة: 1- الاتجاه الممتد من فريجه ورسل وفتجنشتين المبكر عبر الوضعية المنطقية وكواين وديفيدسون ودميت وبتنام وكريبكي. ويهتم بالعلاقة بين المعنى والصدق والإشارة. والسؤال الأساسي في هذا الاتجاه هو: ما شروط صدق الجملة؟ 2- الاتجاه الممتد من مور وفتجنشتين المتأخر ومدرسة أكسفورد (رايل، وأوستن وستراوسون، وجرايس) وسيرل وهابرماس وبراندوم. ويهتم بالعلاقة بين اللغة والمتكلم. والسؤال الأساسي في هذا الاتجاه هو: ما العلاقة بين المعنى والاستعمال. 3- الاتجاه الذي (...) يمثله تشومسكي وتلاميذه في علم اللغة مثل كاتز وفودور ومن سايرهم. ويهتم بالمعرفة اللغوية. والسؤال الأساسي في هذا الاتجاه هو: كيف نفسر الإبداع اللغوي؟ . (shrink)

This is a review of Scott Soames's Philosophy of Language, Princeton, 2010.

Many philosophers have assumed, without argument, that Wittgenstein influenced Austin. More often, however, this is vehemently denied, especially by those who knew Austin personally. We compile and assess the currently available evidence for Wittgenstein’s influence on Austin’s philosophy of language. Surprisingly, this has not been done before in any detail. On the basis of both textual and circumstantial evidence we show that Austin’s work demonstrates substantial engagement with Wittgenstein’s later philosophy. In particular, Austin’s 1940 paper, ‘The Meaning (...) of a Word’, should be construed as a direct response to and development of ideas he encountered in Wittgenstein’s Blue Book. Moreover, we argue that Austin’s mature speech-act theory in How to Do Things with Words was also significantly influenced by Wittgenstein. (shrink)

Vocal fry is a phonation, or voicing, in which an individual drops their voice below its natural register and consequently emits a low, growly, creaky tone of voice. Media outlets have widely acknowledged it as a generational vocal style characteristic of millennial women. Critics of vocal fry often claim that it is an exclusively female vocal pattern, and some say that the voicing is so distracting that they cannot understand what is being said under the phonation. Claiming that a phonation (...) is so distracting as to prevent uptake of the semantic content of an utterance associated with it is an extreme reaction, especially when accompanied by demands for women to change their phonation. We argue that this reaction limits women's communicative autonomy. We analyze the extreme reaction to female vocal fry, which we characterize as a non-content-based response, from the perspectives of philosophy of language, feminist epistemology, and linguistics. We argue that when fry is heard as annoying and distracting, it is because the hearer interprets the speaker as echoing an utterance from a position of authority to which she is not entitled. We show that this reaction encodes conscious or unconscious sexist attitudes toward women's voices. (shrink)

This is an instructor’s manual with student exercises for the Analytic Philosophy and Philosophy of Language course. It is intended to assist the instructor in teaching the subject to students for whom English is a second language. -/- This manual begins with a chapter that describes the types of learning activities during this course. Next are topic chapters, each of which has four sections: a synopsis of the lecture on the topic; a lecture lesson worksheet with (...) tasks; a seminar lesson worksheet with tasks; and assignments for essay writing. At the end of the manual is a list of key definitions for the course, a list of exam questions, and answer keys for seminar tasks and lecture worksheets. (shrink)

This essay examines how two seventeenth-century feminists use the language of slavery and servitude to describe and protest the domination of women and girls. From their experiences of being forcibly confined to convents at a young age, Arcangela Tarabotti and Gabrielle Suchon demonstrate how the deprivation of knowledge, the restriction and destruction of social and kinship relations, and the impediments to the exercise their free wills impose upon them forms of slavery. The language of “slavery” and “servitude” plays (...) a distinctive role in their writing, the examination of which locates them in wider traditions of moral and political thought, helps us to understand their complaints, and allows us to appreciate their innovative, feminist adaptations of these discourses. The essay concludes with some reflections on how to think about the use of the idiom of slavery applied to the oppression of white Europeans, which is so common in the early modern period, contemporaneous with the rise of the transatlantic slave trade. (shrink)

This introductory talk focuses on Heidegger’s late work, especially his 1959 collection of essays Unterwegs zur Sprache – On the way to language. My thesis is the following: Heidegger's late work marks a general shift from a metaphysical, i.e. a total, definite and centre-oriented description of the world, which is still present in Sein und Zeit, to a strictly situational ontology characterized by its openness, ambiguity and absence of centre. This constellation of our life-world is language, insofar (...) class='Hi'>language is the guiding, yet indefinite way of our involvement or engagement in open affairs. I spell out this main tenet by sketching what I call the situatedness, institutionality and responsiveness of language in the later Heidegger. These points are further developed in an essay project currently under review. © Adrian Wieczorek. (shrink)

The article presents the evolution of the language of advertising from the 1960s to the present, presenting various images of women in advertising. Simultaneously a theoretical analysis has been carried out of the demands of second-wave feminism, which exerted significant influence on the creation of images of women in the mass media. The objective of our comparison of feminist theory with advertising practice is an attempt to answer the question of whether the present media image of women liberated (...) from the binary sexual order and weighted towards the genderqueer and/or transgender phenomena is the desired realization of the feminist demands for emancipation of and equality for women announced in the second half of the twentieth century. (shrink)

In the paper, various notions of the logical semiotic sense of linguistic expressions – namely, syntactic and semantic, intensional and extensional – are considered and formalised on the basis of a formal-logical conception of any language L characterised categorially in the spirit of certain Husserl's ideas of pure grammar, Leśniewski-Ajdukiewicz's theory of syntactic/semantic categories and, in accordance with Frege's ontological canons, Bocheński's and some of Suszko's ideas of language adequacy of expressions of L. The adequacy ensures their unambiguous (...) syntactic and semantic senses and mutual, syntactic and semantic correspondence guaranteed by the acceptance of a postulate of categorial compatibility of syntactic and semantic (extensional and intensional) categories of expressions of L. This postulate defines the unification of these three logical senses. There are three principles of compositionality which follow from this postulate: one syntactic and two semantic ones already known to Frege. They are treated as conditions of homomorphism of partial algebra of L into algebraic models of L: syntactic, intensional and extensional. In the paper, they are applied to some expressions with quantifiers. Language adequacy connected with the logical senses described in the logical conception of language L is, obviously, an idealisation. The syntactic and semantic unambiguity of its expressions is not, of course, a feature of natural languages, but every syntactically and semantically ambiguous expression of such languages may be treated as a schema representing all of its interpretations that are unambiguous expressions. (shrink)

Considering the short history of the feminist philosophy of language, Rae Langton’s article “Speech Acts and Unspeakable Acts” was highly influential as one of the first positive research programs in the movement. In that paper, Langton – using John L. Austin’s speech act theory – tries to interpret Catharine MacKinnon’s thesis: pornography is a speech that subordinates and silences women. Despite the importance of the subject, those unfamiliar with certain historical and contextual features of the topic would (...) hardly understand it. My paper aims to introduce some of the major accounts in this special area in the intersection of speech act theory and feminist philosophy. Rather than just reconstructing Langton’s arguments and the most common objections against it, I will take a more holistic approach, examining its surrounding literature as well. This article has six sections. In Section 1, I contrast the conservative and liberal arguments against pornography and sketch MacKinnon’s liberal critique. In Section 2, I give alternative interpretations of MacKinnon’s thesis, “pornography is harm.” In Section 3, I try to make sense of the prima facie implausible assumption that pornography is speech. In Section 4 and 5, I will analyze the Langtonian theories about subordination and silencing. Finally, in Section 6, I will mention the most challenging problems for Langton’s approach, considering the verbal nature or pornography, the limits of the protection of free speech, and the different positions on sexual consent. (shrink)

Maria Gołaszewska (1926–2015), a Polish philosopher, was associated throughout her life with Poland’s oldest academic institution, the Jagiellonian University in Cracow. She was a student of the phenomenologist Roman Ingarden, himself a student of Edmund Husserl. During the postwar and communist years in Poland, Gołaszewska conducted research focusing on issues related to art and aesthetics. She created her own conception of empirically and anthropologically oriented aesthetics, which I believe is a prime example of a theory that accounts for the perspective (...) of gender, and in this sense should be acknowledged as an important contribution to contemporary gender-sensitive/feminist philosophy. In the article, I present Gołaszewska’s life, academic career, and philosophy as a cognitively valuable response to feminist philosophy’s search for a suitable description of women’s experiences related to art and aesthetic perception. (shrink)

The chapter draws a very rough (and rather idiosyncratic) map of the terrain of the contemporary scene in the philosophy of language, as it was set out in the work of Frege, Russell and the early Wittgenstein – the presupposed common background, taught to beginners in the discipline, for the themes to be further explored from a present-day perspective in the rest of the book. The chapter outlines some core issues as they are presented in the insightful systematic (...) articulation of Frege’s and Russell’s themes in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Then it sums up the main issues, describes some contributions to them in Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein and other historical landmarks, and indicates how they are approached today, as presented in the book's chapters. The introduction concludes with a brief discussion of research methods and problems in the field. (shrink)

The past eighteen years witnessed the rapid development of experimental philosophy of language. Adopting a bibliometric approach, this study examines the research trends and status quo of this burgeoning field based on a corpus of 237 publications retrieved from PhilPapers. It is observed that experimental philosophy of language has undergone three stages, the initiation stage, the development stage, and the extension stage, across which there is a clear upward trend in the annual number of publications. Michael (...) Devitt, Edouard Machery, John Turri, Nat Hansen, et al., are found to be the most productive philosophers, testifying their leading positions in this field. Journals, instead of books, are the major homes of works in this area. The analysis also yields a list of influential works, including the seminal work “Semantics, Cross-cultural Style” and other significant publications on the semantics of various types of expressions. Relatedly, the major research themes are found to include not only intuitions about the reference of proper names, but also a wide array of philosophically and linguistically interesting issues like the meaning of color adjectives, epistemic modals, and predicates of personal taste, the norms of assertions and the essence of lies, etc. These findings showcase that experimental philosophy of language has broadened the research territory and offered deep insights into central issues of philosophy of language that are beyond the reach of the conventional armchair methodology. (shrink)