Sentences with impersonal pronouns, like 'You do it like this', seem to make both statistical and prescriptive claims, that a certain way of behaving is common and that it is prescriptively good. We argue that these kinds of sentences are closely related to another kind of sentence, namely, indefinite singular generics, like 'A person does it like this'. We propose that there is a single underlying mechanism that allows both kinds of sentences to express mixed statistical/prescriptive readings. We (...) then provide a compositional semantic analysis of these sentences and explain how, together with this single underlying mechanism, it accounts for this phenomenon. (shrink)

In this essay, Karl Philipp Moritz seeks to demonstrate how a psychological analysis of language can clarify the deeper meaning behind the use of certain linguistic expressions. Specifically, Moritz focuses on impersonal verbs (in German, constructed with the pronoun ‘es’) and argues that these verbs express states of mind – sensations and thoughts – that the subject passively undergoes and, thus, cannot trace back to their own spontaneous mental activity. Moritz’s essay is a pivotal contribution to 18th-century linguistic thought, (...) as it explores the relationship between how states of mind are expressed linguistically and the origin and nature of these states within the subject’s mental life. (shrink)

Philosophers have used the terms 'impersonal' and 'personal value' to refer to, among others things, whether something's value is universal or particular to an individual. In this paper, I propose an account of impersonal value that, I argue, better captures the intuitive distinction than potential alternatives, while providing conceptual resources for moving beyond the traditional stark dichotomy. I illustrate the practical importance of my theoretical account with reference to debate over the evaluative scope of cultural heritage.

This chapter introduces readers to the empirical questions at issue in debates over gendered pronouns and assesses the plausibility of various possible answers to these questions. It has two parts. The first is a general introduction to the linguistics and psychology of grammatical gender. The second focuses on the meanings of gendered pronouns in English. It begins with a discussion of some methodological limitations of empirical approaches to the topic and the normative implications of those limitations. It then (...) argues against three simple theories of the semantics of gendered pronouns in English and proposes an alternative that fares better: the Gender-First View. Finally, it discusses the singular use of 'they' and its connection to nonbinary gender identities. (shrink)

In recent years, pronouns have become a white-hot interface between language and social and political issues. “My pronouns are he/they” signals allegiance to one side in the culture wars, as does “My pronouns are whatever.” But there is surprisingly little philosophical work at this interface; this paper aims to chart the main questions and argue for some answers, with the hope of stimulating more research.

Pronouns often convey information about a person’s social identity (e.g., gender). Consequently, pronouns have become a focal point in academic and public debates about whether pronouns should be changed to be more inclusive, such as for people whose identities do not fit current pronoun conventions (e.g., gender non-binary individuals). Here, we make an empirical contribution to these debates by investigating which social identities lay speakers think that pronouns should encode and why. Across four studies, participants were (...) asked to evaluate different types of real and hypothetical pronouns, including binary gender pronouns, race pronouns, and identity-neutral pronouns. We sampled participants from two languages with different pronoun systems: English (N = 1,120) and Turkish (N = 260). English pronouns commonly denote binary gender (e.g., he for men), whereas Turkish pronouns are identity-neutral (e.g., o for anyone). Participants’ reasoning about pronouns reflected both a familiarity preference (i.e., participants preferred the pronoun type used in their language) and—critically—participants’ social ideologies. In both language contexts, participants’ ideological beliefs that social groups are inherently distinct (essentialism) and should be hierarchal (social dominance orientation) predicted relatively greater endorsement of binary gender pronouns and race pronouns. A preregistered experimental study with an English-speaking sample showed that the relationship between ideology and pronoun endorsement is causal: Ideologies shape attitudes toward pronouns. Together, the present research contributes to linguistic and psychological theories concerning how people reason about language and informs policy-relevant questions about whether and how to implement language changes for social purposes. (shrink)

The young Edmund Husserl stressed that the success of his philosophy hinged upon his ability to determine the subject and the predicate of impersonal propositions and their expressions, such as ‘It is raining’. This essay accordingly investigates the tenability of Husserl’s early thought, by executing the first study of his analysis of impersonal propositions from the late 1890s. This examination reshapes our understanding of the inception of phenomenology in two ways. First, Husserl pinpoints the subject by outlining why (...) impersonal expressions are employed during communication. This contravenes interpretations of the early Husserl as uninterested in intersubjectivity. Second, by studying how Husserl determines the predicate by investigating existential propositions, I show that Husserl, in the late 1890s, came to his final view on the concept of being. (shrink)

In this paper, I outline a novel approach to the semantics of natural language pronouns. On this account, which I call 'demonstrativism', pronouns are semantically equivalent to demonstratives. I begin by presenting some contrasts that provide support for demonstrativism. Then I try to explain these contrasts by developing a particular demonstrativist proposal. I build on the "hidden argument" theory of demonstratives. On this theory, demonstratives are semantically similar to definite descriptions, with one important difference: demonstratives take two arguments, (...) rather than one. Using these ideas, I propose that pronouns also take two (covert) arguments, and that the second argument needs to be sufficiently salient to members of the conversation in order for the use of a pronoun to be felicitous. As for the first argument, I maintain that its content is constrained by the process of noun-phrase deletion. Taken together, I argue that these constraints provide us with a satisfying account of the uses to which pronouns are put. (shrink)

Traditionally, pronouns are treated as ambiguous between bound and demonstrative uses. Bound uses are non-referential and function as bound variables, and demonstrative uses are referential and take as a semantic value their referent, an object picked out jointly by linguistic meaning and a further cue—an accompanying demonstration, an appropriate and adequately transparent speaker’s intention, or both. In this paper, we challenge tradition and argue that both demonstrative and bound pronouns are dependent on, and co-vary with, antecedent expressions. Moreover, (...) the semantic value of a pronoun is never determined, even partly, by extra-linguistic cues; it is fixed, invariably and unambiguously, by features of its context of use governed entirely by linguistic rules. We exploit the mechanisms of Centering and Coherence theories to develop a precise and general meta-semantics for pronouns, according to which the semantic value of a pronoun is determined by what is at the center of attention in a coherent discourse. Since the notions of attention and coherence are, we argue, governed by linguistic rules, we can give a uniform analysis of pronoun resolution that covers bound, demonstrative, and even discourse bound readings. Just as the semantic value of the first-person pronoun ‘I’ is conventionally set by a particular feature of its context of use—namely, the speaker—so too, we will argue, the semantic values of other pronouns, including ‘he’, are conventionally set by particular features of the context of use. (shrink)

Words are vessels of power; the power to convey meaning. Words can give shape to the identity of a group, and the same word can stereotype one for generations. This research paper is about one such word – ‘Otaku’. The aim of this research paper is to trace the history of the term ‘otaku’, and understand how it evolved from a second person pronoun to a term that identifies an entire subculture.

This essay examines Elizabeth Grosz's provocative claim that feminist and anti-racist theorists should reject a politics of recognition in favor of "a politics of imperceptibility." She criticizes any humanist politics centered upon a dialectic between self and other. I turn to Spinoza to develop and explore her alternative proposal. I claim that Spinoza offers resources for her promising politics of corporeality, proximity, power, and connection that includes all of nature, which feminists should explore.

It is common practice in formal semantics to assume that the context specifies an assignment of values to variables and that the same variables that receive contextually salient values when they occur free may also be bound by quantifiers and λs. These assumptions are at work to provide a unified account of free and bound uses of third person pronouns, namely one by which the same lexical item is involved in both uses. One way to pursue this account is (...) to treat quantifiers and λs as monsters in Kaplan’s sense. We argue that this move should be avoided and explore an alternative route based on the idea that there is a variable assignment coordinate in the context and a variable assignment coordinate in the circumstance of evaluation, with the definition of truth in context identifying them. One fundamental challenge that arises in pursuing a unified account is to explain the difference in the way the gender presuppositions of bound and free pronouns project. The proposal that emerges from the attempt to meet this challenge is a non-indexical account of free third person pronouns and a new conception of the role and structure of assignment functions. (shrink)

University of California, Santa Barbara.

Anaphora resolution is one of the most active research areas in natural language processing. This study examines focusing as a tool for the resolution of pronouns which are a kind of anaphora. Focusing is a discourse phenomenon like anaphora. Candy Sidner formalized focusing in her 1979 MIT PhD thesis and devised several algorithms to resolve definite anaphora including pronouns. She presented her theory in a computational framework but did not generally implement the algorithms. Her algorithms related to focusing (...) and pronoun resolution are implemented in this paper. This implementation provides a better comprehension of the theory both from a conceptual and a computational point of view. The resulting program is tested on different discourse segments, and evaluation and analysis of the experiments are presented together with the statistical results. (shrink)

David Benatar has argued both for anti-natalism and for a certain pessimism about life's meaning. In this paper, I propose that these positions are expressions of a deeply impersonal philosophical temperament. This is not a problem on its own; we all have our philosophical instincts. The problem is that this particular temperament, I argue, leads Benatar astray, since it prevents him from answering a question that any moral philosopher must answer. This is the question of rational authority, which requires (...) the moral philosopher to say why existing human agents have strong practical reasons to comply with the philosopher's dictates. A purely impersonal ethical system can never do this, and this is why Benatar has no answer to this question. (shrink)

The study investigated assessment of sex and age impersonation as academic dishonest behaviour among post graduate students’ of Federal Universities of South-South, Nigeria. The study which is a survey research, involved a multi-stage stratified random sampling technique of 440 males and 490 females from 3 universities and 3 faculties of the same universities in South-South, Nigeria. Sample was selected through stratified random sampling approach. The study adopted frequencies, percentages, factor analysis and multiple classification analysis statistical tools. A questionnaire developed and (...) validated by the researcher titled: “Academic Dishonest Behaviour Questionnaire’’ (ADBQ) with Cronbach coefficient alpha reliability of 0.83 was used for data collection. Two research questions and one hypothesis were formulated for the study. The findings indicated that the students used for this study were involved in Sex and Age impersonation aspect of academic dishonest behaviours. Female students were seen to be more involved than male in impersonation, Students ages 25-29years are more culpable in impersonation as academic dishonest behaviour. It is therefore recommended among others that there should be synergy among stakeholders in the educational process to fight this art of impersonation. (shrink)

Sentences such as 'Chocolate tastes good' have been widely discussed as sentences that give rise to faultless disagreement. As such, they actually belong to the more general class of impersonal perception reports, which include 'The violin sounds / looks strange' as well sentences that are about an agent-centered situation such as 'It feels / seems like it is going to rain'. I maintain the view that faultless disagreement is due to first person-based genericity, which, roughly, consists in attributing a (...) property to anyone the speaker (or described agent) identifies with (which generally requires a first-person experience) (Moltmann 2010). Unlike my previous analysis (and similar analyses), this paper no longer makes use of experiencers or judges as implicit arguments of taste predicates, but argues that impersonal perception verbs (taste, look, feel, seem), have a logophoric character. More precisely, such verbs describe perceptual occurrences whose experiencer is identical to the agent of the utterance situation, described attitudinal situation, or the situations a generic operator may range over. Perceptual occurrences are sharply distinguished ontologically from perceptual experiences as well as perceptual objects, entities we refer to as ‘the taste of chocolate’, ‘the sound of the violin’, ‘the look of the violin’. Sentences about perceptual objects ('the taste of chocolate is good', 'the sound of the violin is great', 'the look of the violin is beautiful') also give rise to faultless disagreement, but the source of that is a first-person-based attribution of an evaluative predicate to an (objective) perceptual object. (shrink)

A notable feature of our moral and legal practices is the recognition of privileges, powers, and entitlements belonging to a select group of individuals in virtue of their status as victims of wrongful conduct. A philosophical literature on relational normativity purports to account for this status in terms of such notions as interests, rights, and attitudes of disregard. This paper argues that such individualistic notions cannot account for prevailing and intuitive ways of demarcating the class of victims. The focus of (...) the discussion is the wrongful infliction of harm, and the mediating role played by impersonal “danger-making properties” in the determination of the class of victims. Beginning with a treatment of one of the most well-known discussions of negligently-inflicted harm — from the most famous case of the American common law tradition, Palsgraf v. Long Island Railroad Co. — the analysis is then extended to the morality of harm-doing more broadly, negligent and intentional alike. The paper’s chief targets are interest theories of rights — including contractualist theories of moral claim-rights of the kind defended by R. Jay Wallace — and neo-Strawsonian Quality of Will theories of “moral injury”. (shrink)

A non-dual ontology of Self shares the difficulty of any systematic order: it has presuppositions that it cannot represent within its system. For most theoretical concerns, this problem is trivial. For the non-dual philosophies of Śaṅkara and Nishitani, on the other hand, it points to a central aspect: their thinking rests on a radical turn of experience whose existential dimension cannot be represented in their propositions but can very well be expressed. Along the relationship between personality and impersonality, the contribution (...) will trace this expression and thus point to the fruitful superfluity of a non-dual philosophy that can be exhausted neither in theory nor in practice. (shrink)

The Impossibility of Poetry Adorno's aesthetic theory bears the profound scars of his personal experience of fascism. Even after Auschwitz, he feared that modern bourgeois society is a breeding ground for new forms of fascist terror. It was said that, after Auschwitz, one could no longer write poems. But Adorno insisted that postwar art is an indispensable means for telling the truth about how the social order was fundamentally changed by that catastrophe.1 Not to tell the truth is to be (...) guilty of complicitous silence; yet, the unbearable truth is that society is pervasively and radically evil. As long as…. (shrink)

According to what McMahan and Savulescu (2024) call the “popular position”, embryo selection is less ethically problematic than gene editing (other things being equal). The Two-Tier View, defended by McMahan and Savulescu, implies that the popular position is mistaken. The authors treat gene editing of embryos similarly to standard cases of medical treatments that promise expected benefits for the (subsequent) person even though gene editing also may create risks of harmful side effects for her. McMahan and Savulescu assume that if (...) gene editing is (successfully) done, it is better for the person who developed from the beneficently edited embryo. And, if the editing had not been done, although it was possible, that would have been worse for the same person in question. Thus, the comparator must always be a possible, even if unlikely, world in which she would have existed. That is why gene editing, in their view, resembles medical treatments. Therefore, assuming that standard medical treatments are not more ethically problematic than embryo selection, they conclude that (in general) gene editing should also be treated as not more problematic than embryo selection. In this paper, I am taking one step further than McMahan and Savulescu in questioning the central assumptions in the bioethical debates about new reproductive technologies. In the previous work, we argued that the very distinction between person-affecting and identity-affecting interventions is based on a questionable form of material-origin essentialism (Żuradzki and Dranseika 2022). Here, I argue that the bipartite distinction between person-affecting and impersonal reasons, as used by McMahan and Savulescu, insufficiently represents different possible counterfactual comparisons between real and merely possible outcomes. In particular, I argue that the evaluation of gene editing requires counterfactual comparisons to situations in which the benefited person might or might not exist. Such evaluation requires an additional class of reasons, let me call them “semi-person-affecting,” that cannot be reduced to either person-affecting or impersonal ones. This aspect of gene editing makes it dissimilar to standard cases of medical treatments. (shrink)

I begin with an exposition of the two main variants of the Prosentential Theory of Truth (PT), those of Dorothy Grover et al. and Robert Brandom. Three main types of criticisms are then put forward: (1) material criticisms to the effect that (PT) does not adequately explain the linguistic data, (2) an objection to the effect that no variant of (PT) gives a properly unified account of the various occurrences of "true" in English, and, most importantly, (3) a charge that (...) the comparison with proforms is explanatorily idle. The last objection is that, given a complete semantic account of pronouns, proadjectives, antecedents, etc., together with a complete (PT), the essential semantic character of "true" could be deduced, but then, the idleness of the comparison with pronouns would be apparent. It turns out that objections (2) and (3) are related in the following way: the prosentential terminology is held to conceal the lack of unity in (PT), by describing the different data in the same terms ("proform", "antecedent", etc.). But this, I argue, is only a way of truly describing, rather than explaining, the data, these being certain relations of equivalence and consequence between sentences. I consider a language for which (PT) would be not only true, but also explanatory, but note that this language is very different from English. I end by showing that Robert Brandom's case that "is true" is not a predicate fails, and that his motivation for saying so is based on fallacious reasoning (namely, Boghossian's argument against deflationism). (shrink)

Analogical counterfactuals such as “If I were you, I would do so and so...” create a puzzle for philosophical semantics. Whereas the ‘received view' in philosophical semantics has it that the first person pronoun always refers to its utterer, one may wonder whether this is still the case when the first person pronoun is embedded in analogical counterfactuals such as “If I were you, I would stay away from me”. I suggest that the intelligibility of lies in the fact that (...) the token of the expression ‘I' in the consequent of the counterfactual does not refer to its utterer. Should one then conclude, following the ‘anaphoric theory' that the second occurrence of ‘I' in does refer to its addressee? For the ‘anaphoric theory', ‘I' in ‘I would stay away from me' refers anaphorically, thanks to the linguistic context, to the referent of ‘you' in ‘If I were you'. On the basis of an analysis of the imaginative project involved in uttering a practical advise in the form of, I suggest contra the ‘anaphoric theory' that the first pronoun ‘I' in the consequent of behaves as an indexical and that its content is obtained by the application of its character to a pretend context differing from the context of its utterance. According to the so-called ‘pretence theory', the first person pronoun in its second occurrence in pretends to refer to a fictional composite of the utterer and the addressee. (shrink)

I here respond to Pietro Salis’s objections against my original critique of the Prosentential Theory of Truth. In addition, I clarify some points regarding the relationship between anaphoric relationships and “general semantic notions” like “equivalence”, “consequence”, and “sameness of content”, and make some further points about ’s ability gto explain pragmatic and expressive features of “true”.

We live in a world saturated in both racial and gendered divisions. Our focus is on one place where attitudes about these divisions diverge: language. We suspect most everyone would be horrified at the idea of adding race-specific pronouns, honorifics, generic terms, and so on to English. And yet gender-specific terms of the same sort are widely accepted and endorsed. We think this asymmetry cannot withstand scrutiny. We provide three considerations against incorporating additional race-specific terms into English, and argue (...) that these considerations also support eliminating the analogous gender-specific terms. With respect to these parts of speech, English should be no more gender-specific than it already is race-specific. (shrink)

The 3sg pronouns “he” and “she” impose descriptive gender conditions (being male/female) on their referents. These conditions are standardly analysed as presuppositions (Cooper in Quantification and syntactic theory, Reidel, Dordrecht, 1983; Heim and Kratzer in Semantics in generative grammar, Blackwell, Oxford, 1998). Cooper argues that, when 3sg pronouns occur free, they have indexical presuppositions: the gender condition must be satisfied by the pronoun’s referent in the actual world. In this paper, we consider the behaviour of free 3sg (...) class='Hi'>pronouns in conditionals and focus on cases in which the pronouns’ gender presuppositions no longer seem to be indexical and project locally instead. We compare these cases to previously reported shifty readings of indexicals in so-called “epistemic conditionals” (Santorio in Philos Rev 121(3):359–406, 2012) and propose a unified account of locally projected gender presuppositions and shifty indexicals based on the idea that indicative conditionals are Kaplanian monsters. (shrink)

The 3sg pronouns “he” and “she” impose descriptive gender conditions on their referents. These conditions are standardly analysed as presuppositions. Cooper argues that, when 3sg pronouns occur free, they have indexical presuppositions: the gender condition must be satisfied by the pronoun’s referent in the actual world. In this paper, we consider the behaviour of free 3sg pronouns in conditionals and focus on cases in which the pronouns’ gender presuppositions no longer seem to be indexical and project (...) locally instead. We compare these cases to previously reported shifty readings of indexicals in so-called “epistemic conditionals” :359–406, 2012) and propose a unified account of locally projected gender presuppositions and shifty indexicals based on the idea that indicative conditionals are Kaplanian monsters. (shrink)

This paper discusses ancient versions of paradoxes today classified as paradoxes of presupposition and how their ancient solutions compare with contemporary ones. Sections 1–4 air ancient evidence for the Fallacy of Complex Question and suggested solutions, introduce the Horn Paradox, consider its authorship and contemporary solutions. Section 5 reconstructs the Stoic solution, suggesting the Stoics produced a Russellian-type solution based on a hidden scope ambiguity of negation. The difference to Russell’s explanation of definite descriptions is that in the Horn Paradox (...) the Stoics uncovered a hidden conjunction rather than existential sentence. Sections 6 and 7 investigate hidden ambiguities in “to have” and “to lose” and ambiguities of quantification based on substitution of indefinite plural expressions for indefinite or anaphoric pronouns, and Stoic awareness of these. Section 8 considers metaphorical readings and allusions that add further spice to the paradox. (shrink)

To claim that the divine is a person or personal is, according to Swinburne, ‘the most elementary claim of theism’. I argue that, whether the classical theist’s concept of the divine as a person or personal is construed as an analogy or a metaphor, or a combination of the two, analysis necessitates qualification of that concept such that any differences between the classical theist’s concept of the divine as a person or personal and revisionary interpretations of that concept are merely (...) superficial. Thus, either the classical theist has more in common with revisionary theism than he/she might care to admit, or classical theism is a multi-faceted position which encompasses interpretations which some might regard as revisionist. This article also explores and employs the use of a gender-neutral pronoun in talk about God. (shrink)

A classic objection to act-consequentialism is that it is overdemanding: it requires agents to bear too many costs for the sake of promoting the impersonal good. I develop the complementary objection that act-consequentialism is underdemanding: it fails to acknowledge that agents have moral reasons to bear certain costs themselves, even when it would be impersonally better for others to bear these costs.

The Buddha, unlike the Upaniṣadic or Brahmanical way, has avoided the concept of the self, and it seems to be left with limited conceptual possibilities for free will and moral responsibility. Now, the question is, if the self is crucial for free will, then how can free will be conceptualized in the Buddhist ‘no-self’ (anattā) doctrine. Nevertheless, the Buddha accepts a dynamic notion of cetanā (intention/volition), and it explicitly implies that he rejects the ultimate or absolute freedom of the will, (...) but not the minimal power of free will. It seems that the Buddha’s view shifts from agent causation (independent ownership) to a causal sequence of impersonal processes (psychophysical factors). This paper claims to shed clarity on ‘whether free will is viable in the context of the anattāvāda in Buddhism.’ It mainly studies the secondary sources (even though it has also discussed the primary sources) and their interpretations of freedom of the will and how it further does argue for a compatibility approach of free will in Buddhist thought. (shrink)

This self-contained lecture examines uses and misuses of the adverb conversely with special attention to logic and logic-related fields. Sometimes adding conversely after a conjunction such as and signals redundantly that a converse of what preceded will follow. -/- (1) Tarski read Church and, conversely, Church read Tarski. -/- In such cases, conversely serves as an extrapropositional constituent of the sentence in which it occurs: deleting conversely doesn’t change the proposition expressed. Nevertheless it does introduce new implicatures: a speaker would (...) implicate belief that the second sentence expresses a converse of what the first expresses. Perhaps because such usage is familiar, the word conversely can be used as “sentential pronoun”—or prosentence—representing a sentence expressing a converse of what the preceding sentence expresses. -/- (2) Tarski read Church and conversely. -/- This would be understood as expressing the proposition expressed by (1). Prosentential usage introduces ambiguity when the initial proposition has more than one converse. Confusion can occur if the initial proposition has non-equivalent converses. -/- Every proposition that is the negation of a false proposition is true and conversely. -/- One sense implies that every proposition that is the negation of a true proposition is false, which is true of course. But another sense, probably more likely, implies that every proposition that is true is the negation of a false proposition, which is false: the proposition that one precedes two is not a negation and thus is not the negation of a false proposition. The above also applies to synonyms of conversely such as vice versa. Although prosentence has no synonym, extrapropositional constituents are sometimes called redundant rhetoric, filler, or expletive. Authors discussed include Aristotle, Boole, De Morgan, Peirce, Frege, Russell, Tarski, and Church. END OF PUBLISHED ABSTRACT -/- See also: Corcoran, John. 2015. Converses, inner and outer. 2015. Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, third edition, Robert Audi (editor). Cambridge: Cambridge UP. https://www.academia.edu/10396347/Corcoran_s_27_entries_in_the_1999_second_edition_Audi_s_Cambridge_ Dictionary_of_Philosophy . (shrink)

The article explores the relationship between Baukunst and Zeitwille in the practice and pedagogy of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and the significance of the notions of civilization and culture for his philosophy of education and design practice. Focusing on the negation of metropolitan life and mise en scene of architectural space as its starting point, it examines how Georg Simmel’s notion of objectivity could be related to Mies’s understanding of civilization. Its key insight is to recognize that Mie’s practice (...) and pedagogy was directed by the idea that architecture should capture the driving force of civilization. The paper also summarizes the foundational concepts of Mies’s curriculum in Chicago. It aims to highlight the importance of the notions of Zeitwille and impersonality in Mies van der Rohe’s thought and to tease apart the tension between the impersonality and the role of the autonomous individual during the modernist era. (shrink)

The main concern of this paper is the proper analysis of the NP celui-ci in French. The contribution of L. Tasmowski to this discussion is well known. In my view, this contribution makes two important points: 1) in its anaphoric uses, celui-ci cannot be analysed as a "nominal anaphoric" along the lines suggested by Corblin for its exophoric uses. This point is also made in Kleiber, Zribi-Hertz, Imoto ; 2) eventhough celui-ci like pronouns and definite NPS must be linked (...) in its anaphoric uses to a familiar discourse referent, it involves "une rupture de familiarité" [a familiarity break]. Basically, I will argue in this paper that these two points are correct, although they seem to draw the analysis of celui-ci in two opposite directions and look somewhat paradoxical. In this paper, I propose a solution to those difficulties which is based on the analysis of celui-ci as a "mentional NP". Other mentional NPs in French are, for instance, le premier, le second, ce dernier. Mentional NPS, it will be claimed, are just NPs which are associated to a previously established discourse referent by using only the properties of the previous mention having evoked this discourse referent in the discourse context. I will claim that there is a strong association between mentionals and NPs without a noun in French, namely that mentional references are achieved by NPs without a noun. I will show moreover that this specific kind of reference based on contingent properties of a discourse referent is the key for understanding how a coindexed NP produces the break in topic continuity noted by Tasmowski. (shrink)

In "On Social Facts" (1989) and subsequent works, Margaret Gilbert has suggested a plural subject account of the semantics of ‘we’ that claims that a central or standard use of ‘we’ is to refer to an existing or anticipated plural subject. This contrasts with the more general approach to treat plural pronouns as expressions referring to certain pluralities. I argue that (i) the plural subject approach cannot account for certain syntactic phenomena and that (ii) the sense of intimacy, which (...) Gilbert cites as evidence for her plural subject account, has a different source than the existence of joint commitments constituting a respective plural subject. Moreover, (iii) there is a wide varie-ty of phenomena in the linguistic record, which, while not constituting conclusive evidence against the plural subject account, nevertheless, are dealt with better by the plurality account. ‘We’ thus refers to pluralities, which may or may not be plural subjects. The precise analysis of ‘we’ thus reveals a multi-layered ontology of groups. (shrink)

In English, as in many other languages, male-gendered pronouns are sometimes used to refer not only to men, but to individuals whose gender is unknown or unspecified, to human beings in general (as in ―mankind‖) and sometimes even to females (as when the casual ―Hey guys‖ is spoken to a group of women). These so-called he/man or masculine generics have come under fire in recent decades for being sexist, even archaic, and positively harmful to women and girls; and advocates (...) of gender-neutral (or nonsexist) language have put forward serious efforts to discourage their use. Have they been successful, and to what extent? In this paper, I review some of the main arguments in favor of abolishing sexist male generics. I then present three studies tracking the use of he/man terminology in academic, popular, and personal discourse over the past several decades. I show that the use of these terms has fallen dramatically in recent years, while nonsexist alternatives have gradually taken their place. We may be paying witness to the early stages of the ultimate extinction of masculine generics. (shrink)

Eric Olson and David Shoemaker argue that our numerical identity over time is irrelevant to such practical issues as moral responsibility or self-concern. Being the same individual at different moments in time may, in our case, can be seen as the preservation of the relevant biological processes (e.g., according to Olson), while psychological continuity, independent of these processes, may be crucial for such issues. I will defend the view that, contrary to the above authors, any conception of our diachronic identity (...) has ethical implications, at least with regard to the aforementioned issues. My argument has two basic assumptions. (1) The dispute over identity of persons is a dispute over the conditions of our persistence in time as the same individuals, whether we consider being a person as our essential property or not (e.g., Olson maintains the latter). The question is under what conditions I am the same as a particular earlier or later individual. (2) The pronoun “I,” on the other hand, is an essential component of practical reasoning, so also of ethical one. Thus, the debate on the persistence of persons concerns the identity conditions of the individuals to whom/which we refer when planning our future actions, formulating our intentions. My rational self-concern or my moral responsibility for past actions regards the individual to whom the pronoun refers. An additional result of my argument is to undermine the influential strategy of defending positions on our diachronic identity against the charge of controversial ethical implications. It cannot be argued in the case of every such controversy that a given ethical issue only apparently involves our identity, while in fact what is relevant to it is a different relation binding persons at different moments in time. (shrink)

The pronoun ‘I’ refers to myself from the first-person perspective and a person (me) from the third person perspective. Essentially there is something common between the two perspectives taken: ‘I’ from the first person perspective refers to ‘self’; from the third person perspective refers to a ‘person’. Now ‘self’ and ‘person’ signify the same concept. ‘Self’ is a term used in context of first-person statements and ‘person’ is a term used in third person contexts. Both the terms refer to the (...) same concept but from different perspectives. Consequently the terms ‘no-person’ and ‘no-self’ will be taken as synonymous in this article. The use of ‘I’ signifies one more thing – that there exists a ‘self’ or ‘person’ that exists through time, in other words, it signifies ‘self-identity’ or ‘personal identity’. The aim of this article is to analyze the notion of ‘self’ or ‘person’ as denoted in the usage of the pronoun ‘I’. This article would examine ‘I’ as a fictitious entity in the background of the two historical theories of personal identity – David Hume’s theory and the Buddhist theory. (shrink)

As all philosophical concepts, also the concept of person constitutes itself referring to a particular problem. The analysis drafted by Marcel Mauss regarding the genesis of the aforementioned category permits to analyse the problematic nucleus to which such concept refers to, disclosing that it responds to the necessity of solving the ancient problem of the link between mind and body in a specific perspective. In this respect, Bergsonian theory of images represents a solid attempt of passing not only the habitual (...) solution of the problem represented by the concept of person, but also the problem itself whereto refers. The deleuzian reading of Henri Bergson’s theory leads him to define the impersonal and pre-individual field sketched out by Bergson as a plane of immanence, and this last as “a life”. The ultimate aim of this paper is to analyse the nature of such plane and to suggest an interpretation of the latest Gilles Deleuze’s piece of writing, "L’immanence: une vie..." that unveils its profound Bergsonism. (shrink)

In large, impersonal moral orders many of us wish to maintain good will toward our fellow citizens only if we are reasonably sure they will maintain good will toward us. The mutual maintaining of good will, then, requires that we somehow communicate our intentions to one another. But how do we actually do this? The current paper argues that when we engage in moral responsibility practices—that is, when we express our reactive attitudes by blaming, praising, and resenting—we communicate a (...) desire to maintain good will to those in the community we are imbedded in. Participating in such practices alone will not get the job done, though, for expressions of our reactive attitudes are often what economists call cheap talk. But when we praise and blame in cases of moral diversity, expressions of our reactive attitudes act as costly signals capable of solving our social dilemma. (shrink)

The generic pronoun 'one' (or its empty counterpart, arbitrary PRO) exhibits a range of properties that show a special connection to the first person, or rather the relevant intentional agent (speaker, addressee, or described agent). The paper argues that generic 'one' involves generic quantification in which the predicate is applied to a given entity ‘as if’ to the relevant agent himself. This is best understood in terms of simulation, a central notion in some recent developments in the philosophy of mind (...) and cognitive science (Simulation Theory). (shrink)

In this paper, we defend two main claims. The first is a moderate claim: we have a negative duty to not use binary gender-specific pronouns he or she to refer to genderqueer individuals. We defend this with an argument by analogy. It was gravely wrong for Mark Latham to refer to Catherine McGregor, a transgender woman, using the pronoun he; we argue that such cases of misgendering are morally analogous to referring to Angel Haze, who identifies as genderqueer, as (...) he or she. The second is a radical claim: we have a negative duty to not use any gender-specific pronouns to refer to anyone, regardless of their gender identity. We offer three arguments in favor of this claim (which appeal to concerns about inegalitarianism and risk, invasions of privacy, and reinforcing essentialist ideologies). We also show why the radical claim is compatible with the moderate claim. Before concluding, we examine common concerns about incorporating either they or a neologism such as ze as a third-person singular gender-neutral pronoun. These concerns, we argue, do not provide sufficient reason to reject either the moderate or radical claim. (shrink)

Stressing that the pronoun "I" picks out one and only one person in the world (i.e., me), I argue against Hunt (and other like-minded Rand commentators) that the supposed "hard case" of destructive people who do not care for their own lives poses no special difficulty for rational egoism. I conclude that the proper response to a terse objection like "What about suicide bombers?" is the equally terse assertion "But I don't want to get blown up.".

In this article, I examine the moral dimensions of gender affirmation. I argue that the moral value of gender affirmation is rooted in what Iris Murdoch called loving attention. Loving attention is central to the moral value of gender affirmation because such affirmation is otherwise too fragile or insincere to have such value. Moral reasons to engage in acts that gender affirm derive from the commitment to give and express loving attention to trans people as a way of challenging their (...) marginalization. In the latter part of the paper, I will discuss how my arguments bear on recent arguments by Robin Dembroff and Daniel Wodak (2018) on the use of gender-neutral language. They argue that we have a duty not to use gender-specific pronouns for anyone. Their conclusion turns, in part, on a rejection of gender affirmation as a moral duty. The value of gender affirmation, rooted in our moral perception of trans people, should make us skeptical of this conclusion, in favor of a more nuanced and pluralistic approach to the ethics of gendering. (shrink)

The social categories to which we belong—Latino, disabled, American, woman— causally influence our lives in deep and unavoidable ways. One might be pulled over by police because one is Latino, or one might receive a COVID vaccine sooner because one is American. Membership in these social categories most often falls outside of our control. This paper argues that membership in social categories constitutes a restriction on human agency, creating a situation of non-ideal agency for many human individuals. -/- However, there (...) are ways to resist the causal influence of social categories, and certain socially marginalized groups can be understood as attempting to do just this. I discuss two instances of social category resistance: gender pronouns and the rights of trans individuals. I suggest that the intentional declaration of gender pronouns (“she/her” or “they/them”) can be understood as an attempt to resist the causal powers of nonconsensual social categorization. Similarly, one among many reasons to support the rights of trans individuals is that their self-declarations of gender identity can be viewed as a reclamation of agency in the face of causal constraints imposed by socially defined and imposed gender categories. This lesson can be generalized to people belonging to a broad range of marginalized groups. (shrink)

I argue that free indirect discourse should be analyzed as a species of direct discourse rather than indirect discourse. More specifically, I argue against the emerging consensus among semanticists, who analyze it in terms of context shifting. Instead, I apply the semantic mechanisms of mixed quotation and unquotation to offer an alternative analysis where free indirect discourse is essentially a quotation of an utterance or thought, but with unquoted tenses and pronouns.

Persons think. Bodies, time-slices of persons, and brains might also think. They have the necessary neural equipment. Thus, there seems to be more than one thinker in your chair. Critics assert that this is too many thinkers and that we should reject ontologies that allow more than one thinker in your chair. I argue that cases of multiple thinkers are innocuous and that there is not too much thinking. Rather, the thinking shared between, for example, persons and their bodies is (...) exactly what we should expect at the intersection of part sharing and the supervenience of the mental on the physical. I end by responding to the overcrowding objection, the personhood objection, the personal-pronoun reference problem and the epistemic objection. (shrink)

Is suffering really bad? The late Derek Parfit argued that we all have reasons to want to avoid future agony and that suffering is in itself bad both for the one who suffers and impersonally. Nietzsche denied that suffering was intrinsically bad and that its value could even be impersonal. This paper has two aims. It argues against what I call ‘Realism about the Value of Suffering’ by drawing from a broadly Nietzschean debunking of our evaluative attitudes, showing that (...) a recently influential response to the debunking challenge (the appeal to phenomenal introspection) fails. It also argues that a Nietzschean approach is well suited to support the challenge and is bolstered by the empirical literature. As strangers to ourselves, we cannot know whether suffering is really intrinsically bad for us. (shrink)

Kant is famous for his universalist moral theory, which emphasizes human dignity, equality, and autonomy. Yet he also defended sexist and (until late in his life) racist views. In this essay, I address the question of how current readers of Kant should deal with Kant’s sexism and racism. I first provide a brief description of Kant’s views on sexual and racial hierarchies, and of the way they intersect. I then turn to the question of whether we should set aside Kant’s (...) sexism and racism or ‘translate’ his egalitarian principles into inegalitarian ones. I argue for a third position, namely, that we should highlight the tensions that pervade Kant’s theory. In the final section, I argue that the use of inclusive language and female pronouns in recent discussions of Kant’s moral and political philosophy carries significant risks. I end by articulating several preconditions for fruitfully using Kant’s moral principles to criticize sexism and racism. (shrink)