Disagreement with a bald-faced liar

Teresa Marques, University of Barcelona

How do we disagree with a bald-faced liar? To answer, we must settle on what bald-faced lies are: are they assertions? Are they lies? Does the speaker have the intent to deceive? In contexts of bald-faced lies, it is common knowledge that what the speaker says is false. Sorensen (2007) characterizes bald-faced lies as prima facie lies that are made without the intention to deceive. He claims that bald-faced lies are not, because of this, deserving of disapproval. And according to recent proposals by Keiser (2016) and Maitra (2018), a bald-faced liar is not even making an assertion. Maitra has claimed that a bald-faced liar is engaged in a form of fictionality, like actors following a script. If that's the case, can we disagree with a bald-faced liar? There doesn't seem to be a disagreement in doxastic state: both speaker and audience believe that what the speaker said is false. And why would there be a disagreement in activity, when it is common ground that what is said is false and the speaker has no intent to deceive? Against these views, I argue, first, that the criticisms that can be directed at bald-faced liars aren’t, and shouldn’t, be directed at actors following a script, or actors who break character. Second, if the bald-faced lies-are-fiction were a correct theory, we would be mistaken in criticizing walk backs of the illocutionary assertoric force of a bald-faced lie, as we do for instance in political contexts. Moreover, it would be puzzling that bald-faced lies contribute to gaslight – i.e., to dominate the hearer by diminishing her good epistemic stance. Disagreement with a bald-face liar requires not only reinstating the truth, but also to resist accommodating the abusive speaker’s assertion. The bald-faced liar and the hearer do disagree in attitude. A speaker and a hearer do disagree in attitude when they have incompatible intentions concerning permissible context updates, and they do disagree in act, if and when they act on these incompatible intentions.

What use has approved

Timothy Endicott, University of Oxford

I will set out to explain the meaning of a word as a social rule for its use, and I will do so by exploring the nature of customary rules (in law in particular). Attempts to explain the nature of customary rules tend to yield an apparent paradox: that their requirements are determined by the practice of the participants in a social group, and yet those participants may disagree about the requirements of the rule, so that its requirements are not determined by the practice of the participants. I think that the paradox can be resolved in a way that illuminates customary rules, and helps to explain the meaning of a word as a social rule for its use.

Metasemantic Ethics

Derek Ball, University of St Andrews

Metasemantics is the study of what makes it the case that our words mean what they do. I will address two interrelated issues in metasemantics. First, what role do considerations of justice and related norms play in metasemantics? For example, suppose that it would be unfair if certain same-sex relationships are not counted as marriages. Could this play a role in making it the case that “marriage” is correctly applied to certain same-sex relationships, and if so, how? Second, many metasemantic views have it that the meanings of words as used by one speaker are fixed in part by the attitudes or activities of other speakers. For example, on one widely-held view experts play a special role in determining the meaning of “elm” and “arthritis". What responsibilities do speakers with the power to fix meaning have to other speakers, and how can this power be misused?

Populism and the Power of the False Narrative

Åsa Wikforss, University of Stockholm

It has become clear that disinformation in various shapes and forms poses a new threat to liberal democracies across the world. By pushing people to endorse what is false it is possible to sway an election, sow division and hatred and to undermine trust in the democratic institutions that play an essential role for knowledge – media, universities and the courts. In the current turmoil there has been much focus on ‘false news’ and their spread on social media, but there has been less discussion of the ‘false narrative’ that plays an equally important role in deceiving people. In the talk I will discuss false news and false narratives, spell out their respective characteristics and how they manage to make us believe what is false. From the point of view of philosophy of language, the false narrative is of special interest since it is a type of communication that may (in principle) consist of nothing but true statements while, at the same time, it manages to communicate what is false.

Posters

Reclaiming Slurs: New Cases to Consider

Elsa Brisinger, King's College London

To date, the philosophical debate on slurs has been predominantly tied to the domains of philosophy of language and linguistics. Most available theories have focused on the semantics and/or pragmatics of slurs, and reflected a preference for either one to explain their meaning and/or offensiveness. One peculiar feature of slurs is their ability to be reclaimed by the target group. In ’taking back’ the slur, members can attempt to dilute its derogatory force. For philosophers, the question is how to account for this transition in offensiveness.

Despite widespread interest in slurs, I argue that the process of reclamation has been given much too little attention. The reclamation of slurs gives rise to several intriguing cases, many of which are yet to be discussed. Here are three:

1. Asymmetrical Reclamation: The reclamation of slurs is rarely performed symmetrically between in-group and out- group.

2. In-group varieties of using reclaimed slurs: (i) ’Mainstream’ or conformist members of the target group use a slur (originally meant to slur them all) to denigrate less mainstream members of the group, or (ii) less mainstream members of the group take offense when mainstream or conformist members use the slur to describe themselves.

3. Offense variation ’in favor of' out-group speaker: A member of the target group takes less offense when an out-group speaker uses a (partially) reclaimed slur against her, than when one of her 'own' (i.e. another group member) slurs her with the same word.

My suggestion is that in order to understand what goes on in these cases, we must look beyond the tools of philosophy of language. Specifically, I suspect part of the key lies in the epistemic relation between slurring speakers and their audience. By investigating slurring speech from an epistemic perspective, I think we can better understand the process of reclamation, and the (often asymmetrical) power dynamics that go with it.

Stereotype Transfer as Political Weapon: Applied Experimental Philosophy of Language

Georgia Brown, University of East Anglia

Stereotypes are psychologically real conceptual structures that shape automatic inferences in political discourse and everyday life (Hampton 2006). Political activists frequently instrumentalise stereotypes. One strategy consists in giving new uses to familiar words associated with positive or negative stereotypes (e.g., ‘gay’, ‘homophobic’; Weinberg 1973), in the hope that the relevant positive or negative features from the stereotypes associated with the established sense (e.g., attractive; mentally ill) will be automatically inferred also from new uses of the word and attach to their new referents (Rudman et al. 2001). Even where contextually inappropriate, such inferences occur and influence further judgment and reasoning, where the established sense is far more salient (i.e., frequent and prototypical; Giora 2003) than all others (Fischer and Engelhardt 2017; Fischer et al., 2019). We study factors that determine the efficacy of this strategy and affect its ethicality.

In line with the novel research programme of ‘naturalised conceptual analysis’ (Machery 2017), our experimental philosophy study investigates the relative salience of ‘phobic’-terms, the implicit theories associated with ‘homophobic’, and the interaction between two different psychologically real conceptual structures (associative stereotypes vs propositionally structured implicit theories) in shaping inferences people make from the word ‘homophobic’. We ask whether people automatically infer from ‘S is homophobic’ that S is mentally ill, whether such inferences go through in case of conflict with implicit theories about homophobia, and whether the perseverance of stereotypical inference depends upon the salience structure of the expression of interest. We use listing and familiarity-rating tasks to study salience. We combine reading time measurements with plausibility ratings in a cancellation paradigm to study automatic inferences from ‘homophobic’ and semantically related contrast expressions, and the influence of implicit theories. Results suggest that, at any rate in the absence of pronounced salience imbalances, stereotypical inferences do not manage to undercut propositional belief structures and undermine our rational autonomy.

Implicit bias in linguistic communication - the role of speaker’s voice

Anna Drożdżowicz, University of Oslo

In recent debates in philosophy of mind and language much has been said about the nature and role of conscious experience in which hearers become aware of utterance’s meaning (e.g. Fricker 2003; O’Callaghan 2011; Brogaard 2018) and about auditory experience of listening to speech sounds (O’Callaghan 2015). Auditory experience of speaker’s voice and its role in linguistic communication has, on the other hand, received relatively little attention (cf. Smith 2009). The goal of this contribution is to fill this gap. Voice is an auditory face of a speaker that carries important paralinguistic information about their identity (age, gender, social group) that can shape social interactions based on linguistic communication. First, I will try to explicate how such information carried by speaker’s voice is represented both at a conscious and subconscious level and, in particular, how it can affect our beliefs about what speakers say and their credibility. To this end, I will focus mostly on the case of foreign-accented speech and discuss empirical evidence suggesting that foreign accent, as several other paralinguistic cues retrieved from speakers’ voices, often leads to a negative bias towards non-standard accented speakers and affects how much credibility they are given (e.g. Lev-Ari & Keysar 2010, Rakić et al. 2011; Wang et al. 2013). Second, I will briefly investigate whether our extraordinary sensitivity to voices could be utilized in order to develop systematic countermeasures against such biases (e.g. Dasgupta & Rivera 2008; Hansen et al. 2014).

A Conversational Implicature Analysis Account of Synecdochical Utterances Targeting Women

Amanda K. Mcmullen, University of Miami

[Be advised that offensive language is mentioned.]

Donald Trump has said, “You know, it doesn’t really matter what [the media] write as long as you’ve got a young and beautiful piece of ass”. His utterance is a synecdochical utterance targeting women (SUTW). A synecdochical utterance is one in which the speaker uses a part to refer to a whole. In synecdochical utterances targeting women, the “whole” is a woman and the “part” is both anatomical and one to which sexist or misogynistic ideologies makes reference.

SUTWs are clearly disrespectful. How does a SUTW speaker express disrespect? I argue that the speaker conversationally implicates, by flouting the maxim of quality, some proposition(s) from a sexist or misogynistic ideology. Trump implicates that the referent is most important (in some sense) for her appearance. He also implicates (with varying degrees of plausibility) that the woman is most valuable for her sexuality, that she is a “piece of meat”, that it is appropriate to treat her in a way indicating she is most valuable for sex, etc.

SUTWs exemplify characteristic features of conversational implicature.

One is SUTWs’ plausible deniability profile. The speaker cannot claim they merely conveyed the overtly false ‘she’s a piece of ass’, on pain of failing to be a cooperative conversational participant. However, they can coherently deny any particular explication of the significance of her utterance. SUTWs are non-detachable: if we substitute a term like ‘buttocks’ for ‘piece of ass’, the utterance is still disrespectful. Furthermore, the way we grasp the SUTW’s disrespectful proposition mirrors the process by which we infer that a speaker conversationally implicates some proposition. The projection pattern for the disrespectful proposition a SUTW speaker conveys matches the pattern for the propositions conveyed in conversationally implicated utterances, too.

Intelligibility of Legal Discourse in Analytical Legal Positivism

Julio Pohl, University of Navarre

In a context of moral fragmentation the law is intended to comply with certain conditions of legitimacy, justification and objectivity that support its validity and effectiveness. In recent years, the debate over the legitimacy of judicial decisions has gained force. As a backdrop to the controversy, there is a fundamental disagreement about the legal interpretation and understanding of the meaning of legal texts in all their forms, in general, and about the role and limits to which the judicial interpreter in the judicial system should adhere. analysis of cases in all stages. Underlying this political discussion about the correct distribution of power, a conviction is not always explicit. That is, the more conventional a legal practice is, the more the legal discourse has the capacity to offer resistance to the interpreter. In order to strengthen law as a social tool that regulates human behavior through language and preserve its legitimacy, analytical positivism proposed that legal conventionalism was the most convenient way to guarantee the rule of law and, at the same time, contain the creativity of judicial interpretation within constitutional limits.

We intuit that in a legal discourse where the reference of legal concepts is purely constructed from social conventions there is not enough resistance to contain the inevitable interpretative creativity. In other words, when legal discourse renounces the real-external referent of legal concepts in order to facilitate dialogue between different moral positions and in order to guarantee the objectivity of judicial decisions, precisely the opposite is achieved . Instead of materializing one of the basic presuppositions of the rule of law of predictability of the decisions of the judge and certainty of the right, semantic conventionalism transforms judicial discretion into arbitrariness and contributes to the radicalization of the contradictory moral positions that are at the basis of contemporary society.

The Harmful Feature of Generics

Martina Rosola, University of Genova, University of Sheffield

Generics are sentences that express generalizations about a kind K or about its members Ks and where no explicit quantifier occurs, as for example “Muslims pray five times a day”. Leslie (2007) argues that generics lead to essentializing the kinds they are about, namely generics promote the belief that the members of the kind share a common nature. This is particularly problematic when it comes to social kinds since we make generalizations over essentialized kinds. Such generalizations constitute one basis for racism, sexism, and other forms of discrimination. Understanding what promotes the essentialization of social kinds is, therefore, part of the more general project of identifying the causes of discrimination.

In this paper, I address the question of what linguistic property, if any, can explain why generics lead to essentializing the kinds they are about. Haslanger (2011) hypothesized that generics convey an implicature or a presupposition that Ks have the predicated property F by virtue of being K and this can account for their ability to essentialize. To check for this hypothesis, I apply the linguistic tests for implicature and presuppositions. First, I apply the tests for presuppositions, that give negative results. In particular, the putative presupposition of generics does not project. Further, it does not pass the “Hey, wait a minute” test for pragmatic presuppositions. I proceed by testing for implicatures. The claim of generics possesses some crucial features of implicatures: non-detachability, indeterminability, and, most importantly, cancelability. Based on these results, I conclude that generics convey an implicature. Since this implicature arises in all contexts, unless defeated, I argue that it is a Generalized Conversational Implicature. I then uses Levinson (2000)’s theory, arguing that generics, due to their simple form, I-implicate that the connection between belonging to the kind and having the predicated property is causal.

How to be a good person: living up to one's names. The Confucian Conception of the Normative Implications of Language

Xuan Wang, University of Maryland

How to be a good person? This is an important moral question. In this talk, I contend that the Confucian conception of names and its normative implication offers a practical route to becoming a good person: living up to one’s names.

The conception of names in Confucian philosophy is different from that of the analytic tradition in philosophy of language. Names, in The Analects, are names of social roles. But names are not mere titles of social roles that individuals hold. Names in Confucian philosophy are both descriptive and prescriptive: they describe one’s social roles in relation to other people in the social network, and they prescribe the responsibilities that are associated with the social roles. To cultivate virtues, in the Confucian tradition, is to use practical reasoning to understand one’s social roles and to learn and perform the duties prescribed by the social roles. Therefore, the Confucian virtues are relational and rational, and to be a good person is to be virtuous by living up to one’s names through exercising reasoning and fulfil one’s responsibilities in relation to others, in order to achieve the social harmony that Confucius envisioned.

Arguably, conflicts arise among the responsibilities of different roles. Trying to be a good friend and a good citizen can sometimes lead to a moral dilemma, for instance: should you report your friend who broke the law? In cases of conflicts like this, I shall explain in details that The Analects offers us hints on what one should do: minimising the disturbance of the overall societal harmony. While the solution is seemingly utilitarian, I shall argue that the Confucian philosophy does not require one abandon individual well-being to promote a greater collective good for the society.