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Work in Philosophy that uses non-English

Below is a list of works, of which I'm aware, in analytic philosophy, which makes use of observations from non-English languages. If you know of such work that is not listed here, then please send me an email. Tell me what the work is. And I'll add it.

Why have I drawn up this list? Well, analytic philosophers frequently make use of observations about "how language works" in philosophical arguments. But in reality, the vast majority of these observations are observations of how English works, and at their most adventurous, examples are taken from other parts of the Indo-European tree. Having lived in Estonia now for quite some years, I'm personally very interested in encouraging my own students to think through how philosophical debates might look, if Estonian had been, or were, the base language of the relevant debate. To take one example: how would the debate between Russell and Strawson have looked if their mother tongue were Estonian--a language with no articles? "Different" is the answer that, I suspect, would be correct--and, in a way that may well be philosophically significant. That's why I'm quite an enthusiast for philosophical work that makes use of non-English languages. Philosophical Papers has an issue full of papers exploring this matter: https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rppa20/47/1. 

As I say, if you know of more examples, please get in touch, and I'll add them to the list.


Philosophy that uses non-English (in alphabetical order of first author's surname)

Baç and Irmac present evidence that in Turkish there is a way of talking of knowledge on which one can know wrongly. This is presented as a challenge to accounts of knowledge which are based on English data, which don't seem to allow for this possibility of knowing wrongly. Baç and Irmac defend an account of knowledge which is compatible with this heterogeneity across languages.


Cross linguistic data is used to argue against a truth-conditional account of slurs.


Against the predicativist theory of names, Delgado draws attention to constraints on combinations of determiners and proper names, and the pluralization of proper names, in several of the following languages: Afrikaans, Basque, Catalan, Danish, Faroese, German, Hindi, Italian Macedonian, Mandarin, Norwegian, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish and Swedish.


Ditter uses observations from Russian, Turkish and German to argue against the linguistic argument for intellectualism put forward by Stanley and Williamson.


Douskos uses observations from Modern Greek to criticize Stanley's argument(s) for intellectualism. Douskos also responds to Stanley's attempt to show that intellectualism is the best explanation of expressions of knowledge-how in languages which don't express that knowledge (solely) using embedded questions.


Folescu and Higginbothom argue that because in Romanian you can have subjectless sentences (subject information being provided by the verb), a certain account of immunity to error through misidentification that finds plausibility in English, doesn’t do so in Romanian.


Folescu argues that an examination of Romanian shows that immunity to error through misidentification is not to be explained by appeal to the syntactic or lexical structure of a language.


Grimau Roca makes use of data from Icelandic, Finnish, Estonian, Breton, Khamtanga and Classical Arabic in defence of the intelligibility of higher-level plural reference.


Hansen et al. investigate whether certain claims made by philosophers about how common the meaning of “know”/the concept know that is focused upon by epistemologists really is. Makes use of Czech and Spanish.


Jansen uses observations about the use of first person plurals in a variety languages (including: Spanish, Korana, Lihir, Sursurunga, and Pirahã) to argue against Margaret Gilbert's proposed semantics for "we".


Argues that Chinese verb structure may be used as a model for process based biology.


Some philosophers have claimed that there are no second level plurals in natural languages and thus the very idea doesn’t make sense. And yet, if you look across different languages, you do indeed find them, e.g. in Icelandic.


Matilal and Sen perform a comparison of Frege and Russell's context principles on the one hand, and a similar principle, on the other hand, which was noted and debated by Indian scholars , based on observations reported in Sanskrit. It is shown that the way the context principles are reached are not the same for Frege/Russell and the Indian scholars. However,  it is argued that the two temporally and geographically distinct debates nonetheless are relevant to one another.


Liu and Klein argue that locative constructions for talking about pain (e.g. "I have a pain in my foot") don't exist in Mandarin. They argue that those philosophers working on pain who take such constructions literally in defending their theories of pain, are wrongly taking an idiosyncratic feature of English talk of pain to be indicative of a general feature of pain itself.


Machery et al. provide empirical evidence that Gettier cases can be successfully constructed in four different languages (English, Portuguese, Bengali, and Japanese).


Machery et al. present evidence that the Gettier intuition is robust across many languages (and corresponding cultures). The (non-English) languages employed in examining the intuition's robustness were: Bulgarian, French, German, Italian, Lithuanian, Portuguese, Spanish, French, English, Persian, Arabic, Hebrew, Chinese, Bengali, Indonesian, Japanese, Mongolian, Korean.


Machery et al. used data drawn from speakers in India, Mongolia and France. The data consisted of metalinguistic and linguistic judgements (as distinguished by Genoveva Martí). They are used to argue that metalinguistic and linguistic judgements on the reference of proper names are congruent.


Machery et al. present respond to an objection against the view that cross-linguistic data suggest that those with an Asian cultural background have descriptivist intuitions about the reference of names, whereas Westerners have causal-historical intuitions. The objection is that in prior experiments semantic reference and speaker reference have been conflated. The new data provided in support of the aforementioned view is drawn from judgements elicited by Chinese and English texts.


Magidor’s book on category mistakes. Uses cross-linguistic data to argue against a syntactic account of category mistakes.


Moltmann uses data from German in support of conclusions about the non-referentiality of simple numerals.


Neale uses the fact that in Icelandic reflexive and non-reflexive pronouns are differently lexicalized as part of his defence of an analysis of pronouns in English.


Nefdt uses the fact that in Ancient Greek one can combine the definite article with a noun to create an abstract version of that noun in his explanation of Zoltan Szabo's representational account of the type-token distinction.  Neft also uses observations from Yupik languages in defence of the thesis that even identifying a word is significantly harder in agglutinating languages than in say English or Chinese.


Quine draws upon the use of classifiers in Japanese in order to provide a less contrived example in support of his indeterminacy of reference thesis.


Rieppel uses data from German in support of the claim that identifying-definites lack a predicative reading.


Rose et al. present evidence which supports epistemic invariantism (i.e. failures of stakes to influence knowledge attributions). Evidence for this is brought from the following languages: Bulgarian, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, French, Persian, Chinese, Japanese, Mongolian, Bengali.


Rose et al. present evidence that assertion has more primary importance in determining the correctness of belief ascriptions than corresponding behaviour. Evidence for this is drawn from the following languages: Bulgarian, French, German, Italian, Lithuanian,  Portuguese, Spanish, Persian, Hebrew, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Mongolian, Indonesian, and Bengali.


Rumfitt uses the fact that some descriptions of knowledge-how in French combine the French translation of "to know" with an infinitive (not with a question-word) to criticize Stanley and Williamson's argument for intellectualism about knowledge-how.


Stanley argues that, despite cross-linguistic differences, the best explanation of our talk of know-how in different languages is intellectualism. He appeals to observations from: French, German, Afrikaans, Russian, Defaka, Finnish, and Hungarian.


A collection of papers in epistemology that make use of cross-linguistic data.


Uses the existence of a grammatical distinction in one language (Japanese) to support the claim that a sentence in English has multiple readings.


Sytsma and Reuter use German data to argue that common assumptions maintained by philosophers about pain are not reflected in others’ ordinary understanding of pain.


Unnsteinsson uses the fact that in Icelandic there is in addition to the active and passive voices, a mediopassive voice as part of a defence of the thesis that coreferential and reflexive constructions formed using transitive verbs can have monadic equivalents. If there are such monadic equivalents, then, Unnsteinsson argues, there is a kind of mismatch between linguistic meaning and propositional content which cannot be accounted for with existing accounts of context-sensitivity and underspecification.


Zardini uses examples from Italian and Nahuatl to illustrate the apparent fact that a language L can express truth-in-L: an illustration which serves as a criticism of a classical solution to the semantic paradoxes.