How feasible are conceptual engineering projects of social concepts that aim for the engineered concept to be widely adopted in ordinary everyday life? Predominant frameworks on the psychology of concepts that shape work on stereotyping, bias, and machine learning have grim implications for the prospects of conceptual engineers: conceptual engineering efforts are ineffective in promoting certain social-conceptual changes. Specifically, since conceptual components that give rise to problematic social stereotypes are sensitive to statistical structures of the environment, purely conceptual change won’t (...) be possible without corresponding world change. This tradition, however, tends to ignore that concepts don’t only encode statistical, but also causal information. Paying attention to this feature of concepts, I argue, shows that conceptual engineering is not only possible. There is an imperative to conceptually-engineer. (shrink)

In this paper, I develop an essentialist model of the semantics of slurs. I defend the view that slurs are a species of kind terms: Slur concepts encode mini-theories which represent an essence-like element that is causally connected to a set of negatively-valenced stereotypical features of a social group. The truth-conditional contribution of slur nouns can then be captured by the following schema: For a given slur S of a social group G and a person P, S is true of (...) P iff P bears the “essence” of G—whatever this essence is—which is causally responsible for stereotypical negative features associated with G and predicted of P. Since there is no essence that is causally responsible for stereotypical negative features of a social group, slurs have null-extension, and consequently, many sentences containing them are either meaningless or false. After giving a detailed outline of my theory, I show that it receives strong linguistic support. In particular, it can account for a wide range of linguistic cases that are regarded as challenging, central data for any theory of slurs. Finally, I show that my theory also receives convergent support from cognitive psychology and psycholinguistics. (shrink)

Psychological essentialism is the hypothesis that humans represent some categories as having an underlying essence that unifies members of a category and is causally responsible for their typical attributes and behaviors. Throughout the past several decades, psychological essentialism has emerged as an extremely active area of research in cognitive science. More recently, it has also attracted attention from philosophers, who put the empirical results to use in many different philosophical areas, ranging from philosophy of mind and cognitive science to social (...) philosophy. This article aims to give philosophers who are new to the topic an overview of the key empirical findings surrounding psychological essentialism, and some of the ways the hypothesis and its related findings have been discussed, extended, and applied in philosophical research. (shrink)

One of the core insights from Eleanor Rosch’s work on categorization is that human categorization isn’t arbitrary. Instead, two psychological principles constrain possible systems of classification for all human cultures. According to these principles, the task of a category system is to provide maximum information with the least cognitive effort, and the perceived world provides us with structured rather than arbitrary features. In this paper, I show that Rosch's insights give us important resources for making progress on the 'feasibility question' (...) in conceptual engineering: the question of how we can implement conceptual engineering projects in ways that are practically feasible. Specifically, I show that one overlooked upshot of Rosch's work is that naming practices play an extremely important role in the construction of perceived similarities within and dissimilarities between categories, and, correspondingly, the dissemination of social stereotypes that serve as markers between different categories that are otherwise similar. Thus, naming practices will be a crucial constraint for the feasibility of certain ameliorative projects. (shrink)

In two recent papers, Rose and Nichols present evidence in favor of the view that humans represent category essences in terms of a telos, such as honey-making, and not in terms of scientific essences, such as bee DNA. In this paper, I challenge their interpretation of the evidence, and show that it is directly predicted by the main theory they seek to undermine. I argue that their results can be explained as instances of diagnostic reasoning about scientific essences.

In this paper, I defend Non-Inferentialism about mental states, the view that we can perceive some mental states in a direct, non-inferential way. First, I discuss how the question of mental state perception is to be understood in light of recent debates in the philosophy of perception, and reconstruct Non-Inferentialism in a way that makes the question at hand—whether we can perceive mental states or not—scientifically tractable. Next, I motivate Non-Inferentialism by showing that under the assumption of the widely-accepted Principle (...) of Cognitive Economy, any account that treats mental state perception as an inferential process commits itself to an unrealistically inefficient picture of our cognitive architecture. Drawing on research in cognitive science, I will then show that my Non-Inferentialist view receives direct support by the available empirical evidence. I conclude that there is no psychologically relevant sense in which perception of mental states differs from paradigmatic cases of perception, such as the perception of ordinary objects. (shrink)

The objective of this paper is to show that pornography dehumanizes women through essentialization. First, I argue that certain acts of subject-essentialization are acts of subject-dehumanization. Second, I demonstrate, by reviewing evidence about the linguistic material that we find in and around pornography, that pornography systematically deploys content that essentializes women in the ways identified as problematic. It follows that pornography dehumanizes women.

Rae Langton and Caroline West famously argued that pornography operates like a language game, in that it introduces certain views about women into the common ground via presupposition accommodation. While this pragmatic model explains how pornography has the potential to change its viewers’ beliefs, it leaves open how pornography changes people’s desires. Our aim in this paper is to show how Langton and West’s discourse theoretic account of pornography can be refined to close this lacuna. Using tools from recent developments (...) in discourse theory, we propose that pornography issues implicit directives, and thereby introduces bouletic components into the discourse. (shrink)

Social stimuli grab our attention: we attend to them in an automatic and bottom-up manner, and ascribe them a higher degree of saliency compared to non-social stimuli. However, it has rarely been investigated how variations in attention affect the processing of social stimuli, although the answer could help us uncover details of social cognition processes such as action understanding. In the present study, we examined how changes to bottom-up attention affects neural EEG-responses associated with intentional action processing. We induced an (...) increase in bottom-up attention by using hypnosis. We recorded the electroencephalographic µ-wave suppression of hypnotized participants when presented with intentional actions in first and third person perspective in a video-clip paradigm. Previous studies have shown that the µ-rhythm is selectively suppressed both when executing and observing goal-directed motor actions; hence it can be used as a neural signal for intentional action processing. Our results show that neutral hypnotic trance increases µ-suppression in highly suggestible participants when they observe intentional actions. This suggests that social action processing is enhanced when bottom-up attentional processes are predominant. Our findings support the Social Relevance Hypothesis, according to which social action processing is a bottom-up driven attentional process, and can thus be altered as a function of bottom-up processing devoted to a social stimulus. (shrink)

In paradigmatic cases of subtweeting, one Twitter user critically or mockingly tweets about another person without mentioning their username or their name. In this chapter, we give an account of the strategic aims of subtweeting and the mechanics through which it achieves them. We thereby hope to shed light on the distinctive communicative and moral texture of subtweeting while filling in a gap in the philosophical literature on strategic speech in social media. We first specify what subtweets are and identify (...) the central features that give rise to their strategic mechanics. Next, we draw attention to problematic aspects of subtweeting and consider conditions under which subtweeting can be justified on moral and prudential grounds. The chapter concludes by discussing practical upshots and noting avenues for future work. (shrink)

Generic statements (‘Tigers have stripes’) are pervasive and early-emerging modes of generalization with a distinctive linguistic profile. Previous experimental work found that generics display a unique asymmetry between their acceptance conditions and the implications that are typically drawn from them. This paper presents evidence against the hypothesis that only generics display an asymmetry. Correcting for limitations of previous designs, we found a generalized asymmetry effect across generics, various kinds of explicitly quantified statements (‘most’, ‘some’, ‘typically’, ‘usually’), and variations in types (...) of predicated properties (striking vs. neutral). We discuss implications of these results for our understanding of the source of asymmetry effects and whether and in which ways these effects might introduce biased beliefs into social networks. (shrink)

This dissertation defends the view that concepts encode causal information and, for the first time, applies this view to a range of topics in the philosophy of language and social philosophy. In my first chapter (“Cognitive Essentialism and the Structure of Concepts”), I survey the current empirical and theoretical literature on causal-essentialist theories of concepts. In my second chapter (“Meaning Externalism and Causal Model Theory”), I propose an account of natural kind concepts according to which they encode statistical information of (...) features of a natural kind, and represents these features as causally related to each other. I show that this internalist model of concepts correctly predicts intuitions about Putnam’s twin earth scenario and Kripke’s conceivability cases that historically motivated philosophers of language to accept externalist accounts of meaning. The defended theory of concepts also informs topics that go beyond traditional issues in philosophy of language. In my third chapter (“An Essentialist Theory of the Meaning of Slurs”), I defend the view that slurs are, too, a species of kind terms: slur concepts encode mini-theories which represent an essence-like element that is causally connected to a set of negatively-valenced stereotypical features of a social group. This explains both the peculiar linguistic behavior of slurs and slurs’ dehumanizing effects. In my fourth chapter, I build on this insight, showing that the explicit language in and around pornography depicts women as ‘kinds’ or ‘breeds’ that are naturally made to enjoy certain sexual acts, and argue that this deterministic picture of women dehumanizes them. (shrink)

Recent work in the philosophy of religion has broken through disciplinary boundaries and ventured into new areas of inquiry. Examining aspects of the rationality of faith or bringing philosophical techniques to bear on particular religious texts or doctrines, this collection deepens our understanding of the connections between faith and reason.

Any interpretation of the doctrine of the atonement has to take account of relevant biblical texts. Among these texts, one that has been the most difficult to interpret is that describing the cry of dereliction from the cross. According to the Gospels of Mathew and Mark, on the cross Jesus cries, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?‘ In this paper, I give a philosophical analysis of the options for understanding the cry of dereliction, interpreted within the constraints (...) of orthodox Christian theology; and I show the suggestiveness of this analysis for interpretations of the doctrine of the atonement. (shrink)

During a period of great religious upheaval Anglican philosopher and ecclesiastic Henry Longueville Mansel (1820-1871) became famous for his 1858 Bampton Lectures, which sought to defend traditional faith by employing a skeptical philosophy. Understanding Mansel and the passionate debate that surrounded his career provides insight into the current struggle for ancient religions to articulate their traditions in a modern world. In Scripture, Skepticism, and the Character of God Dane Neufeld explores the life and thought of the now forgotten nineteenth-century (...) theologian. Examining the ideological differences between this philosopher and his contemporaries, Neufeld makes a case for the coherence of Mansel's position and traces the vestiges of his thought through the generations that followed him. Mansel found himself at the centre of an explosive debate in the church, concerning the Christian scriptures and the moral character of the God they described. Though the rise of science is often credited with provoking a crisis of doubt in the nineteenth century, shifting ideas about humanity and God were just as central to the spiritual unrest of the era. Mansel's central argument, that the entire Bible must be read as a unified witness to the reality of God, provoked disagreement among theologians, churchmen, and free thinkers alike who were uncomfortable with certain aspects of the scriptural portrayal of God's activity and character. Mansel's attempt to reconcile theological skepticism with scripturalism was misunderstood. He was branded a hopeless fideist by the free thinkers and a dangerous skeptic by high, broad, and evangelical churchmen alike. Many of the controversies in contemporary Christianity concern the collision between modern morality and biblical renderings of God. Neufeld argues that Henry Mansel, while a deeply polarizing figure, brought clarity and precision to this debate by exposing what was at stake for Christian belief and biblical interpretation in the Victorian period. (shrink)

The major Western monotheisms, and Christianity in particular, are often supposed to be committed to a substance dualism of a Cartesian sort. Aquinas, however, has an account of the soul which is non-Cartesian in character. He takes the soul to be something essentially immaterial or configurational but nonetheless realized in material components. In this paper, I argue that Aquinas’s account is coherent and philosophically interesting; in my view, it suggests not only that Cartesian dualism isn’t essential to Christianity but also (...) that the battle lines between dualism and materialism are misdrawn. (shrink)

We formulate a distinctly ‘political liberal’ conception of mutual respect, which we call ‘civic respect’, appropriate for governing the public political relations of citizens in pluralist democratic societies. A political liberal account of education should aim at ensuring that students, as future citizens, learn to interact with other citizens on the basis of civic respect. While children should be required to attend educational institutions that will inculcate in them the skills and concepts necessary for them to be free and equal (...) citizens, parents should be granted as much freedom as is compatible with the requirements of civic respect to raise their children in accordance with their respective ‘comprehensive doctrines’ (systems of beliefs and values, including religious doctrines). We consider an objection to our position drawn from the account of upbringing recently advanced by Matthew Clayton, namely, that the conception of civic respect that we advance rests on an implausible view about the limited scope of the requirements of political justice. We develop an account of the ‘basic structure of society’ as the appropriate subject of political justice that can overcome this objection. (shrink)

This new Companion to Aquinas features entirely new chapters written by internationally recognized experts in the field. It shows the power of Aquinas's philosophical thought and transmits the worldview which he inherited, developed, altered, and argued for, while at the same time revealing to contemporary philosophers the strong connections which there are between Aquinas's interests and views and their own. Its five sections cover the life and works of Aquinas; his metaphysics, including his understanding of the ultimate foundations of reality; (...) his metaethics and ethics, including his virtue ethics; his account of human nature; his theory of the afterlife; his epistemology and his theory of the intellectual virtues; his view of the nature of free will and the relation of grace to free will; and finally some key components of his philosophical theology, including the incarnation and atonement, Christology, and the nature of original sin. (shrink)

Intersectionality has been adopted as the preferred term to refer to and to analyze multiple axes of oppression in feminist theory. However, less research examines if this term, and the political analyses it carries, has been adopted by women’s rights organizations in various contexts and to what effect. Drawing on interviews with activists working in a variety of women’s rights organizations in France and Canada, I show that intersectionality is only one of the repertoires that a women’s rights organization might (...) use to analyze the social experience and the political interests of women situated at the intersection of several axes of domination. I propose a typology of four repertoires that activists use to reflect on intersectionality and inclusiveness. Drawing on a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the interview data, I show that hegemonic repertoires about racial or religious identity in one national context shape the way activists and organizations understand intersectionality and its challenges. The identity of organizations, as well as their main function, also shape their understanding of intersectional issues. (shrink)

In the series of essays collected in this book, Eleonore Stump offers reflections that illustrate the nature and importance of learning from the Christian heritage in its development over the ages of the Christian tradition and its continued development in interaction with contemporary philosophy, theology, and science. The essays show the power of this heritage in philosophical theology and in philosophical biblical exegesis. Central to the concerns they address is the Christian conviction that at the foundation of all reality (...) is a God, who is love in a welcoming personal relationship offered to all human beings. The essays explore the nature of God and some puzzles about God's interactions with human beings; they also examine the nature of human knowledge of God and argue that it can be achieved not only through propositional truths but also through knowledge of persons, and even through apprehension of beauty in nature or the arts. The book closes with an examination of what it is to will in accordance with the will of God for those who long for him. (shrink)

L’écriture n’est pas mon médium privilégié. Ma « médiumnité » suit d’autres logiques, celles du poème vidéosonique dans lequel l’image percute le son et vice-versa à la manière d’un cri ou d’un silence qui peut mener à la stupéfaction. Ici, je livre troubles et fulgurances suite à la disparition d’une personne exceptionnelle, Dominique Malaquais.

The ways in which the decisions we make for others differ from the ones we make for ourselves has received much attention in the literature, although less is known about their relationship to our p...

In the event that a patient has lost their decision-making capacity due to illness or injury, a surrogate is often appointed to do so on their behalf. Research has shown that people take less risk when making treatment decisions for other people than they do for themselves. This has been discussed as surrogates employing greater caution for others given the accountability they are faced with. We tested the prediction that making accountability salient reduces risk- taking for others relative to the (...) self by manipulating the information shown to participants while they made treatment choices. One group was asked to focus on the consequences for the recipient’s family, another on the legal implications of their decisions, and another was not given additional information. Participants reduced their risk-taking for others compared to themselves, irrespective of the condition they were in. Although participants in each condition reported thinking about these factors to different extents, there were no clear differences in risk-taking between groups. However, we did find that, across all participants, thinking about legal consequences reduces risk-taking. We suggest that future research investigates how the effect of thinking about accountability on surrogate choices is mediated by feelings of accountability, in order to further examine the explanations suggested in the literature. (shrink)

Car sickness is a major concern for car passengers, and with the development of autonomous vehicles, increasing numbers of car occupants are likely to be affected. Previous laboratory studies have used EEG measurements to better understand the cerebral changes linked to symptoms. However, the dynamics of motion in labs/simulators differ from those of a real car. This study sought to identify specific cerebral changes associated with the level of car sickness experienced in real driving conditions. Nine healthy volunteers participated as (...) front passengers in a slalom session inducing lateral movements at very low frequency. They were continuously monitored via EEG recordings and subjectively rated their level of symptoms after each slalom, using a 5-point likert scale. Car-sickness symptoms evolved concomitantly with changes in theta and alpha power in the occipital and parietal areas. These changes may reflect altered sensory integration, as well as a possible influence of sleepiness mitigating symptoms. (shrink)

Black feminist theory and theorizations by feminists of colour have identified and explored emotions linked to race and racism in feminist movements, especially in the US context. Building on this literature, this article explores the changes in feminist emotional dynamics linked to race which have been brought up by the relatively recent adoption of intersectionality in feminist movements’ discourses in two European countries, France and Switzerland, which are both often described as ‘colour-blind’ contexts. Drawing on Hochschild’s concept of feeling rules, (...) we argue that intersectionality has changed the ways feminists are legitimately expected to feel about race and racism within feminist movements in both contexts. As feeling rules vary according to the members’ positions within the movement, we contend that these changes in emotional dynamics contribute to redefine feminists’ relations and feminist membership along racial lines. Based on interviews with young feminist activists in France and Switzerland during mobilization processes characterized by a prominent use of intersectionality, we observe how intersectionality discourses bring about new feeling rules in relation to race and racism. These feeling rules differ for white and non-white feminists: while intersectionality has led young white feminists to self-education and self-critique, racialized feminists often expressed mixed feelings about intersectionality and its use, in particular by white feminists. Importantly, these changes in feeling rules have allowed racialized feminists to renegotiate their relations with white feminists and their emotional content, as well as their position within the movement. (shrink)

The promotion of knowledge economies and societies, equated with the mobile subject as bearer of technological, managerial and cosmopolitan competences, on the one hand, and insecurities about social order and national identities, on the other, have in the past few years led to increasing polarisation between skilled migrants and those deemed to lack useful skills. The former are considered to be bearers of human capital and have the capacity to assimilate seamlessly and are therefore worthy of citizenship; the latter are (...) likely to pose problems of assimilation and dependency due to their economic and cultural ‘otherness’ and offered a transient status and partial citizenship by receiving states. In the European context this trend has been reinforced by the redrawing of European geopolitical space creating new boundaries of exclusion and social justice. The emphasis on the knowledge economy also generates gender inequalities and stratifications based on skills and types of knowledge with implications for citizenship and social justice. (shrink)

It has been over a decade since the first edition of The Cambridge Companion to Augustine was published. In that time, reflection on Augustine's life and labors has continued to bear much fruit: significant new studies into major aspects of his thinking have appeared, as well as studies of his life and times and new translations of his work. This new edition of the Companion, which replaces the earlier volume, has eleven new chapters, revised versions of others, and a comprehensive (...) updated bibliography. It will furnish students and scholars of Augustine with a rich resource on a philosopher whose work continues to inspire discussion and debate. (shrink)

Given the difficulties of defining “machine” and “think”, Turing proposed to replace the question “Can machines think?” with a proxy: how well can an agent engage in sustained conversation with a human? Though Turing neither described himself as a philosopher nor published much on philosophical matters, his Imitation Game has stood the test of time. Most understood at that time that success would not come easy, but few would have guessed just how difficult engaging in ordinary conversation would turn out (...) to be. Despite the proliferation of language processing tools, we have seen little progress towards doing well at the Imitation Game. Had Turing instead suggested ability at games or even translation as a proxy for intelligence, his paper might have been forgotten. We argue that these and related problems are amenable to mechanical, though sophisticated, formal techniques. Turing appears to have taken care to select sustained, productive conversation and that alone as his proxy. Even simple conversation challenges a machine to engage in the rich practice of human discourse in all its generality and variety. (shrink)

For half a century René Girard’s theories of mimetic desire and scapegoating have captivated the imagination of thinkers and doers in many fields as an incisive look into the human condition, particularly the roots of violence. In a 1993 interview with Rebecca Adams, he highlighted the positive dimensions of mimetic phenomena without expanding on what they might be. Now, two decades later, this groundbreaking book systematically explores the positive side of mimetic theory in the context of the multi-faceted world of (...) creativity. Several authors build on Adams’ insight that loving mimesis can be understood as desiring the subjectivity of the other, particularly when the other may be young or wounded. With highly nuanced arguments authors show how mimetic theory can be used to address child and adult development, including the growth of consciousness and a capacity to handle complexity. Mimetic theory is brought to bear on big questions about creativity in nature, evolutionary development, originality, and religious intrusion into politics. (shrink)

Résumé On associe généralement la figure de Satan à une signification indigente ou mesquine. Dans la Philosophie de la révélation, Schelling tente au contraire d’en donner une interprétation différente, selon laquelle la « mauvaiseté positive » de Satan n’est pas seulement assumée, mais également revalorisée. Cependant, le rôle de Satan demeure ambigu, incarnant à la fois le tentateur universel et le maillon nécessaire à la révélation de Dieu lui-même. Dans cette étude, il s’agit donc de montrer à la fois la (...) nature amphibolique du Diable, et de rendre compte des multiples endossements qu’il recouvre. Une tâche qui implique précisément la mise en évidence du rôle incontournable de Satan dans la victoire finale du bien, et qui se manifeste, en termes schellingiens, par l’incompatibilité de l’homme avec le feu dévorant du principe de lumière, laquelle nécessite un principe obscur qui hâte la séparation, pressent le mal et le provoque. (shrink)