This note examines the decision of the Court of Appeal in Tabernacle v Secretary of State for Defence (2009). The court held that byelaws prohibiting camping on Ministry of Defence land adjacent to the Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston, Berkshire violated the human rights of women peace protestors under Articles 10 and 11 European Convention on Human Rights. The note argues that this decision calls into question arguments recently made, that the association of women with peace should (...) be abandoned. It also reveals the potential of law to facilitate the performative and transformative production of subject positions, as ‘woman’, which do not depend on or connect with debilitating patriarchal constructions of women as weak or vulnerable. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Aesthetics in Feminist PerspectiveJulie Van CampAesthetics in Feminist Perspective, edited by Hilde Hein and Carolyn Korsmeyer; xv & 252 pp. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993, $39.95 cloth, $14.95 paper.Has feminism been hijacked by one lock-step agenda, suppressing all dialogue and debate? Far from it, judging from this collection of seventeen essays on feminist aesthetics. The first such collection in English, it includes eleven essays previously published in Hypatia (...) (1990).This well-organized volume offers both broad theoretical considerations and applications to specific art forms, diverse methodological perspectives, and healthy debate among the contributors. The section on “The Nature of Art: Some Feminist Alternatives” considers feminist perspectives as alternatives to traditional concepts of art, motivated by considerations of the art of women. Skepticism abounds in the section on “Interpretation and Point of View” concerning a “universal” or “paradigmatic” female voice in literature, film, and visual art. “Philosophical and Critical Legacies” reveals diverse feminist readings of Kant, Nietzsche, Cartesian metaphysics, and postmodernism.Co-editor Hilde Hein proposes that aesthetics provides a promising road map for feminist philosophy and indeed philosophy generally. Aesthetics has learned to reject foundationalism and essentialism in favor of pluralism, a necessity in the face of the astonishing diversity and ever-changing landscape in contemporary art. This theoretical transition in aesthetics shows how philosophy could fruitfully shed the false security of essentialism to embrace the sometimes raucous pluralism of methods, races, cultures, and genders assaulting all humanities disciplines in recent decades. As co-editor Carolyn Korsmeyer notes, feminist scholarship challenges “the mask of universality and gender-neutrality” (p. vii). [End Page 178]The myth that feminist scholarship is merely thinly veiled political action, devoid of intellectual integrity, is shattered by this collection. Well-represented is the diversity of analytic and European methodologies that enrich contemporary philosophical dialogue. Many of the articles scrutinize the nature of “feminism” itself, as well as appropriate methodologies and questions. The interdisciplinarity of feminist research also is in welcome evidence, with seven essays by scholars from English, African-American studies, music, and psychology.Should feminist art and aesthetics be “nondominative”? Should it “endorse” female experience? Do proposals for “ideal” feminist artistic expression inadvertently retreat to the essentialism and uniformity that feminists have sought to dispel? Should feminists reject the tradition of “formalism” in favor of an approach that re-integrates art with the community and the concerns of daily life? This perspective is widespread today in postmodern thought, but feminist considerations bolster the case made elsewhere for the fall of the so-called elite object.Are there distinctive features that mark the work of female artists, such as group participation, rather than performances for passive audiences? This feature is pervasive in contemporary art, from the happenings of Andy Warhol in the 1960s to the “Messiah” sing-alongs popular for decades. Is feminist art marked by a melding of aesthetic and erotic elements? Surely that is also a trait of the art of most cultures, by men as well as women.These explorations reveal a paradox in today’s feminism. In highlighting female traits (such as the virtues of being caring and nondominating), are women being celebrated, liberated, and freed? Or are they frozen into roles which not all women consider their most important attributes as persons?Female artists and theorists deserve enormous credit for encouraging a re-thinking of the ways in which art is created and understood, but many other forces drive these developments as well. Indeed, some of the harshest critics of analytic philosophy are analytic philosophers steeped in that tradition, both male and female. It seems a pointless chicken-and-egg exercise to wonder if feminists caused this re-thinking or were one of several groups in a happy confluence of re-examination from various perspectives. Fortunately, the issue need not be resolved for scholars and students to appreciate this outstanding volume.Julie Van CampCalifornia State University, Long BeachCopyright © 1995 The Johns Hopkins University Press... (shrink)

The percentage of bachelor's degrees awarded in computer science to women has decreased almost every year over the last decade. That is, even though more women are awarded bachelor's degrees, and even though the percentages of bachelor's degrees awarded to women in disciplines similar to computer science increased, the percentage of bachelor's degrees awarded in computer science to women decreased. Thus, the pipeline, which represents the ratio of women involved in computer science from high school to graduate school, shrinks both (...) from one end to the other _and_ in the middle. Since the number of women at the bachelor's level affects the number of women at levels higher in the pipeline and in the job market, these facts are of great concern to many in the computing community.In this paper, we review the harsh facts concerning the percentage of degrees awarded in computer science to women. When we presented these facts in CACM, we requested that the community respond to the facts through an interactive survey. At this time, 120 people have responded to the survey. In this paper, we present the results we have obtained from compiling these 120 survey responses. (shrink)

"Golf day 2005 @ federal golf club, red hill." Ethos: Official Publication of the Law Society of the Australian Capital Territory, (196), pp. 7.

In 1963 the American journalist Betty Friedan published her book The Feminine Mystique, in which she identified, on the basis of an analysis of women's magazines and surveys of women, a paradox in the self- awareness of American women: in striving to achieve the ideal of femininity, they devote themselves zealously to serving the family, and at the same time they feel they are "different" human beings from men, who have access to the world at large. Friedan compared the situation (...) of the housewife with the situation of a prisoner in a concentration camp. In both, a person is deprived of self-identity, of self-respect, and of manifesting one's individuality and is isolated from the large world of ideas and events. Friedan's general conclusion was that the ideal of "femininity" that guides women is not a natural bent of their natures but an inhumane stereotype that is imposed by advertising, business, and government because it is useful to society. (shrink)

Populist-nationalist ideologies pose a threat to women’s rights. This article examines to what extent national institutionalisation of international frameworks promoting women’s rights can weather the misogynistic political climate accompanying the global rise of populist nationalism. The post-2016 situation in the Philippines offers a testing ground for this problem due to the co-existence of President Duterte’s hypermasculinist national leadership with a strong history of institutionalisation of the UN’s Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda. Drawing from an analysis of (...) WPS policy and institutions in the Philippines between 2009 and 2019 and from field research and interviews with government agencies, local civil society organisations and international partners, this article argues that the WPS agenda will likely survive in the hostile environment. But it also finds that institutionalisation alone does not guarantee successful implementation. While the WPS agenda may ostensibly remain a national priority under populist-nationalist regimes, its progression has been halted. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Introduction VIOLENCE AND INSTITUTION IN CHRISTIANITY Robert J. Daly, SJ. Boston College We need both to define our terms and to indicate whether we are using them in a normative or descriptive sense. Thus the question: "Is Christianity"—or, if you will—"Are the institutions of Christianity violent or nonviolent?" can be answered with either a Yes, or a No, or with anything in between, depending on the meaning we attach (...) to theterms "violence," "institution," and "Christianity" (Daly 1997, 321-43). When we speak normatively, or take Christianity and its institutions accordingto its best ideals, Christianity isessentially nonviolent. But when we speak descriptively, i.e., take Christianity according to what the institutions ofChristianity have actually done, and according to how those who call themselves Christian have actually acted, we can make the argument that Christianity is violent, ffanalogous distinctions can be made from within the other four traditions, this might offer a good starting point for discussion. Adapting to my purpose standard dictionary definitions, I understand violence to include in a broad way the justified or unjustified human exertion of internal or external power or force in order to achieve an injurious or abusive end, i.e., an end that is against the will, the good, or the interests of those who suffer it. (This includes all war and avoids, at least at the outset, arguments about whether a war is or can be a "just war.") I understand institution in its ordinary meaning of: any significant or established practice, relationship, structure, system, or organization in a society or culture. I understand Christianity also in its ordinary sense: the Roberti. Daly, SJ.5 religion which, derived from Jesus Christ, and based on the Bible, is professed by Eastern, Roman Catholic, and Protestant bodies. Now, to help set the background for our discussion, I will try to list and briefly describe, relative to this theme, some of the major aspects or "moments" of Christianity (or Christian History), and do this in an approximately diachronic or chronological order. Much of this will be descriptive, but I will not go out of my way to dissociate the descriptions from the effects of all normative claims. I.Violence and Institution in the History of Christianity [1] The biblical foundation of Christianity in the Hebrew Scriptures. [2]The pervasiveness of violence in the Bible. [3]The Christian Scriptures present themselves as a gospel of peace. [4]Jesus and nonviolence. [5]Early Christians and nonviolence. [6]The early Christians and the military. [7]The "Constantinian turn." [8]Caesaro-papism. [9]The relegation ofChristian pacifism to religious and monastic life. [10]The just war theory. [11]The medieval Christian taken-for-grantedness of violence. [12]The Crusades. [13]Medieval Christian peace movements [14]Christians and heretics. The Inquisition. See [11] above. [1 5]Christianity and the witches. See [U] above. [16]The Reformation. [17]The Radical Reformation and the Peace Churches. [18]St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre (August 1572). [19]The religious wars. [20]Absolutism. [21]Modernity. [22]The Quakers—Religious Society of Friends. [23]The Enlightenment and Modernity. [24]Christianity and world mission; Christianity and colonialism. [25]Slavery. [26]Christianity and the "war" against native cultures. [27]Christianity and the First World War. [28]The Second World War. [29]The Holocaust. 6 Violence and Institution in Christianity [30]Christianity and the modern peace movement. [31]Christians and the "seamless ethic of life." [32]Christianity and International Communism. [33]Liberation theology. [34]The liberation of women. [35]Christianity and the resurgence of tribal and nationalist violence. [36]Christianity and human rights. [1] The biblical foundation of Christianity in the Hebrew Scriptures. Christians and Jews have the same family origins. Since believing Christians no less than believing Jews accept and revere the Hebrew Scriptures as the inspired word of God, Christians and Jews are indeed, to paraphrase Pope John XXIII, siblings. There is, beyond this, fromJudaism to Christianity, a significant parent-child relationship. In recent years (but not early enough to have prevented the Holocaust), the main line churches ofChristianity have rejected the supersessionism (the doctrine that the Old Testament has been abrogated by the New Testament) that used to characterize Christian attitudes towards the Jews and that... (shrink)

This book evaluates the major debates around which the discipline of international relations has developed in the light of contemporary feminist theories. The three debates (realist versus idealist, scientific versus traditional, modernist versus postmodernist) have been subject to feminist theorising since the earliest days of known feminist activities, with the current emphasis on feminist, empiricist standpoint and postmodernist ways of knowing. Christine Sylvester shows how feminist theorising could have affected our understanding of international relations had it been included in the (...) three debates. She elaborates a feminist method of empathetically cooperative conversation which challenges the identity politics of IR, and illustrates that method with reference to the Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp and the efforts of Zimbabwean women to negotiate international funding for their local producer cooperatives. (shrink)

How did the events of the early modern period affect the way gender and the self were represented? This collection of essays attempts to respond to this question by analysing a wide spectrum of cultural concerns - humanism, technology, science, law, anatomy, literacy, domesticity, colonialism, erotic practices, and the theatre - in order to delineate the history of subjectivity and its relationship with the postmodern fragmented subject. The scope of this analysis expands the terrain explored by feminist theory, while its (...) feminist focus reveals that the subject is always gendered - although the terms in which gender is conceived and represented change across history. Feminist Readings of Early Modern Culture not only explores the representation of gendered subjects, but in its commitment to balancing the productive tensions of methodological diversity, also speaks to contemporary challenges facing feminism. (shrink)

In post-independence India secularism was almost taken for granted as a defining feature of the women?s movement with its rejection of the public expression of religious and caste identities. However, already by the 1980s, the assumption that gender could be used as a unifying factor was challenged, revealing that women from different social and religious backgrounds understand and sometime use their identities in ways that are not driven necessarily by some ideology, but by more immediate concerns and even opportunism. This (...) realization opened up a debate about new strategies to tackle women?s activism, especially in light of aggressive political activism of some women associated with right-wing parties in India, which has clearly shattered the perception, held by some, of women as inherently peace-loving, whose gender identity would override their caste and religious belonging. (shrink)

Melissa Klapper opère plusieurs déplacements historiographiques par son histoire de l’activisme politique des femmes juives américaines au cours du demi-siècle précédant la Seconde Guerre mondiale. Tout d’abord, elle élargit la définition du politique en y incluant l’activité des organisations de femmes juives des classes moyennes engagées pour la paix après la Première Guerre mondiale et pour le développement du contrôle des naissances. Elle défie également l’assertion de nombreux historiens...

This paper explores the spirituality of, and experienced at, Greenham Common Peace Camp, Berkshire, Southern England. Although mentioned in much of the discourse on the nuclear protest site Greenham, spirituality is, at best, marginalized in favour of socio-politics. However, there is evidence to suggest that spirituality played a significant role for many of the Greenham women, informing their protests through poetry, song and prose, as well as visually— with eco-feminist thealogy a potent theme. Through examining existing discourse and (...) by interviewing protesters, this paper concludes that spirituality at Greenham Common Peace Camp requires further attention, and should no longer be seen as a subsidiary aspect of the camp. (shrink)

I take up three puzzles about our emotional and evaluative responses to fiction. First, how can we even have emotional responses to characters and events that we know not to exist, if emotions are as intimately connected to belief and action as they seem to be? One solution to this puzzle claims that we merely imagine having such emotional responses. But this raises the puzzle of why we would ever refuse to follow an author’s instructions to imagine such responses, since (...) we happily imagine many other implausible things. A natural response to this second puzzle is that our responses to fiction are real, and so can’t just be conjured up in response to an author’s demands. However, this simple response is inadequate, because we often respond differently to people and events in fiction than we would if we encountered them in real life. Solving these three puzzles in a consistent way requires the notion of a “perspective” on a fictional world. I sketch an account of this intuitive but frustratingly amorphous notion: perspectives are tools for organizing our thinking, which can in turn alter our emotional and evaluative responses. Cultivating a perspective can be illuminating, entertaining, or corrupting — or all three at once. (shrink)

This paper examines the way that women’s relationship to peace is constructed in international institutions and international law. It identifies a set of claims about women and peace that are typically made and considers these in light of women’s experience in the conflicts in Bougainville, East Timor and the Solomon Islands.

Presents a plethora of approaches to developing human potential in areas not conventionally addressed. Organized in two parts, this international collection of essays provides viable educational alternatives to those currently holding sway in an era of high-stakes accountability.

Traditional theories of sarcasm treat it as a case of a speaker's meaning the opposite of what she says. Recently, 'expressivists' have argued that sarcasm is not a type of speaker meaning at all, but merely the expression of a dissociative attitude toward an evoked thought or perspective. I argue that we should analyze sarcasm in terms of meaning inversion, as the traditional theory does; but that we need to construe 'meaning' more broadly, to include illocutionary force and evaluative attitudes (...) as well as propositional content. I distinguish four subclasses of sarcasm, individuated in terms of the target of inversion. Three of these classes raise serious challenges for a standard implicature analysis. (shrink)

Social egg freezing has become an expanding clinical practice and there is a growing body of empirical literature on women's attitudes and the sociocultural implications of this phenomenon. Yet, its impact remains subject to ethical controversy. This article reports on a qualitative study, drawing on 18 interviews with women who had elected to initiate at least one egg freezing cycle in Belgium. Our findings, facilitated by a ‘symbiotic empirical ethics’ approach, shed light on the concerns and perceptions that accompany women's (...) decisions while supporting a more context-sensitive reading of the ethical debate. We identified three key themes: feeling overwhelmed with uncertainty and a threatening future, bodily discomfort and distress during the medical process, and the endless pursuit of peace of mind. One of the issues that emerges from these findings is the risk ritual function of social egg freezing, referring to routine actions of risk anticipation that mitigate uncertainty and express a sense of individual responsibility. While more research is needed, this conceptualisation provides a starting point to flesh out the wider context of this moral practice and its symbolic meaning for women. (shrink)

I argue that stories are ‘equipment for living’ in two senses: retrospectively, they provide ‘configurational comprehension’ of a temporal sequence of events; prospectively, they offer templates for action. Narrative conceptions of the self appear well poised to leverage these functional roles for stories into an intuitively compelling view of self-construction as self-construal. However, the narrative conception defines selves in terms of the lives they live: a self is the protagonist in a lifelong story. And narrative structure is itself defined by (...) ‘retrospective necessity’: the meaning of events within a story is given by their contribution to that story's ending. Together, this entails that life stories hold selves metaphysically, epistemically, and practically hostage to their ends. Fortunately, narratives are just one species of interpretive frame. I suggest some alternative types of frames, including identity labels and metaphors, that support configurational comprehension, action guidance, and self construction without shackling selves to their lives’ ends. (shrink)

Life among most African families and communities revolves around women. In both African religion and culture, women’s lives oscillate between two opposite extremes of being at the centre and periphery at the same time. Women are both the healers and the often wounded by the system that respects them when there are problems and displaces them whenever there are opportunities. Their central role is expressed by a Shona proverb musha mukadzi (the home is a woman). This proverb expresses how (...) women endure the pain of both religion and culture to create a decent society. Women also endure the pain of pandemics such as human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) and COVID-19 and at times succumb to the same while taking care of some family members who would have fallen victim to the epidemic. Countless married women have been made susceptible to HIV and AIDS as they try to live according to the African cultural dictates of mothering and/or motherhood. Other women and girls also contract the disease because of how religion and culture exert them to some unbearable circumstances. For example, women and girls nurse their ill relatives without protective equipment and clothing. At times they are abused by men because of some cultural beliefs that unprotected sex is a remedy for HIV and AIDS. In addition, most women and girls were also victims of COVID-19 while serving their family members. In doing all the good work to serve families, women are driven by the proverb musha mukadzi. Using desk research methodology, this paper argues that musha mukadzi is both a toolkit for women’s resilience to endure pandemics and at the same time a subtly oppressive statement often used to manipulate and abuse women to stand in places that are too difficult for their capabilities. Contribution: African women bear the brunt of pandemic burdens such as HIV, AIDS and COVID-19. Sometimes they become susceptible to the same while taking care of their family members affected by pandemics in the name of fulfilling the Shona proverb, musha mukadzi. The topic has contributed to the scope of the journal as it advocates to inculcate a peaceful society. The article also challenges African societies not to use musha mukadzi to ill-treat women as objects of African religio-cultural patriarchal ideology. (shrink)

Identity politics and citizenship are often envisaged in dichotomous terms, but cosmopolitan theorists believe commitments to “thin” universal values can be generated from divergent “thick” positions. Yet, they often gloss over the ways in which the nexus of thick and thin is negotiated in practice—a weak link in the cosmopolitan argument. To understand this nexus better, we turn to women’s rights organizations (WROs) in polarized Turkey to show that women affiliated with rival camps (e.g., pro-religious/pro-secular, Turkish/Kurdish, liberal/leftist) can mobilize (...) over issues like empowerment, violence against women, and education. However, thick readings of these issues inflect upon collaboration. This has spurred pro-religious and Kurdish women to develop strategies that flag their specific concerns. As such, mutual recognition along cosmopolitan lines appears possible—and is reinforced through iterative encounters—but is not necessarily negotiated between equally empowered agents and entails complex processes of contestation and concession-making. (shrink)

Firearm injuries are a significant public health problem. Prior studies have analyzed firearm death data or adult firearm injury data, but few studies have analyzed firearm injury data specifically among youth. To inform the current debate surrounding gun policy in the United States, this study aims to provide an estimate of the immense burden of youth firearm injury and its associated risk factors. Therefore, we performed a descriptive analysis of the Nationwide Emergency Department Sample, the largest all-payer emergency department database (...) in the United States, from January 2006 to September 2015. All patients age < 21 who presented with any diagnosis of firearm-related injuries were included. There were an estimated 198,839 incidents of firearm-related emergency department visits for patients age < 21 from 2006 through 2015. After presenting to the ED, an estimated 11,909 cases resulted in death. The population adjusted rate of firearm-related emergency department visits was highest in the South and Midwest. This study demonstrates the significant burden of firearm injury among youth. Having a reliable estimate of the number of children harmed by firearms each year is a critical tool for policymakers — and may make common-sense gun safety measures more politically possible. (shrink)

Ethical issues of justice and human rights are central to countries emerging from conflict. Yet involving women in transitional justice processes rarely is articulated in ethical terms. To make a case for an ethical commitment to improving women’s participation in these processes, the paper begins by exploring why transitional justice strategies should bother with gender. Women and men often experience conflict and injustices differently which may require different responses to redress harms suffered. Timor-Leste is used as a case study. (...) The paper explores whether hybrid traditional and formal justice systems can address women’s justice claims in principle and specifically, when applied to Timor-Leste. The paper maintains that customary justice practices can be combined with conventional ones, but only when both practices adhere to international human rights conventions, which rarely happens where patriarchal practices are entrenched. The conclusion addresses what might be done to create gender-responsive justice systems given that they are crucial in building environments that are conducive to sustainable peace and security. (shrink)

This paper foregrounds how women’s public testimony as part of a formal transitional justice initiative is shaped by the particular context in which a commission operate, including the political and security environment. While the literature has engaged with the gendered predicaments of truth commissions after peace agreements and during transitions away from non-democratic rule, the function of such initiatives in more authoritarian and in immediate post-war contexts is generally overlooked. I examine women’s testimonies from Sri Lanka’s Lessons (...) Learned and Reconciliation Commission, and contend that pervasive militarization and insecurity, and the conduct of the Commission, influenced the stories that came forth. Women’s testimonies in the war-torn areas primarily represent pleas for information about missing family members and reflect important silences about the women’s own experiences of abuse, including ongoing post-war insecurities. The analysis raises questions about what may be expected from transitional justice efforts in difficult post-war contexts. (shrink)

This comprehensive and important volume includes contributions by activists, journalists, lawyers and scholars from twenty-one countries. The essays map the directions the movement for women's rights is taking--and will take in the coming decades--and the concomittant transformation of prevailing notions of rights and issues. They address topics such as the rapes in former Yugoslavia and efforts to see that a War Crimes Tribunal responds; domestic violence; trafficking of women into the sex trade; the persecution of lesbians; female genital mutilation; and (...) reproductive rights. (shrink)

Radical innovations and practices frequentlyfind themselves in an inhospitable environment,struggling against the gravitational force ofdominant norms, practices and relations. Thispaper explores the problems radical changeconfronts in its attempts to become sustainable.Against the postmodern valorisation of thetransient and ephemeral, the paper argues forthe importance of routinisation and repetitionin the process of creating and sustainingchange. A metaphor of social pathways isdeveloped to explore how new routines arecreated through de jure (governance) andde facto (usage) means. The paper arguesthat, in contrast to governance, the (...) emergentdurability generated by usage enables routinesto outlive their conditions of existence.At the same time, routines at odds with theirsocial and institutional environment tend overtime to disappear. The second half of the paperdraws on four British attempts to introduce newpathways: lesbian and gay local governmentinitiatives, Conservative education reforms,Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp and LocalExchange Trading Systems (LETS). Through theseexamples, the paper reflects on attempts tocreate more conducive environments, and some ofthe difficulties this generates. (shrink)

In her lecture, ‘Are women peaceful?’, Professor Hilary Charlesworth outlines what she perceives to be the current orthodoxies of the international women and conflict discourse. These include assumptions that women are natural peace-builders, suffer more from conflict, have a right to participate in peace processes, and that gender should be mainstreamed. Based on Charlesworth’s analysis, the authors argue that wars and peace processes are inherently gendered affairs and as a consequence a focus on equality or mainstreaming of (...) gender remains challenging. The authors also note that although equality is a useful platform for ensuring women’s participation in peace processes, feminists should not expect equality arguments to do more than they were designed to do, that is, to ensure seats for women at decision-making tables. Ensuring that women can put forth their concerns and that they are listened to demands a different set of tools. (shrink)

Metaphors are powerful communicative tools because they produce ”framing effects’. These effects are especially palpable when the metaphor is an insult that denigrates the hearer or someone he cares about. In such cases, just comprehending the metaphor produces a kind of ”complicity’ that cannot easily be undone by denying the speaker’s claim. Several theorists have taken this to show that metaphors are engaged in a different line of work from ordinary communication. Against this, I argue that metaphorical insults are rhetorically (...) powerful because they combine perspectives, presupposition, and pragmatics in the service of speech acts with assertoric force. (shrink)

Recently, philosophers have discovered that they have a lot to learn from, or at least to ponder about, fiction. Many metaphysicians are attracted to fiction as a model for our talk about purported objects and properties, such as numbers, morality, and possible worlds, without embracing a robust Platonist ontology. In addition, a growing group of philosophers of mind are interested in the implications of our engagement with fiction for our understanding of the mind and emotions: If I don’t believe that (...) Anna Karenina exists, can I really pity her, or hope or desire that she extricate herself from her tragic situation? And why is there no “morality fiction,” analogous to science fiction? I suspect that philosophers have been especially comfortable thinking about fiction because it seems, at least prima facie, to employ the imagination in a way that conforms to a standard model of the mind. Specifically, contemporary philosophers tend to think of imagination as a form of mental pretense. Mental pretense can take two main forms: a cognitive attitude of supposing a set of propositions to be true (make-believe) or else an experiential state of imaging a scenario as if it were before one (imaging). Much of our pretense intertwines the cognitive and experiential modalities, of course. But both share a crucial common feature: all of one’s imaginative effort is invested in pretending that certain contents obtain. In this sense, we can understand imagination as the “offline” simulation of actual beliefs and perceptions (and perhaps other attitudes as well), where we analyze these in the normal way, as states individuated by their attitude and representational content. While I share the burgeoning interest in fiction, I want to suggest that we also have a lot to learn from poetry, and in particular from poetic metaphor. I will argue.. (shrink)

We should not admit categorial restrictions on the significance of syntactically well formed strings. Syntactically well formed but semantically absurd strings, such as ‘Life’s but a walking shadow’ and ‘Caesar is a prime number’, can express thoughts; and competent thinkers both are able to grasp these and ought to be able to. Gareth Evans’ generality constraint, though Evans himself restricted it, should be viewed as a fully general constraint on concept possession and propositional thought. For (a) even well formed but (...) semantically cross-categorial strings often do possess substantive inferential roles; (b) hearers exploit these inferential roles in interpreting such strings metaphorically; (c) there is no good reason to deny truth-conditions to strings with inferential roles. (shrink)

Researchers commonly use long-term average production inequalities to characterize cross-cultural patterns in foraging divisions of labor, but little is known about how the strategies of individuals shape such inequalities. Here, we explore the factors that lead to daily variation in how much men produce relative to women among Martu, contemporary foragers of the Western Desert of Australia. We analyze variation in foraging decisions on temporary foraging camps and find that the percentage of total camp production provided by each gender (...) varies primarily as a function of men’s average bout successes with large, mobile prey. When men target large prey, either their success leads to a large proportional contribution to the daily harvest, or their failure results in no contribution. When both men and women target small reliable prey, production inequalities by gender are minimized. These results suggest that production inequalities among Martu emerge from stochastic variation in men’s foraging success on large prey measured against the backdrop of women’s consistent production of small, low-variance resources. (shrink)

Mobsters and others engaged in risky forms of social coordination and coercion often communicate by saying something that is overtly innocuous but transmits another message ‘off record’. In both ordinary conversation and political discourse, insinuation and other forms of indirection, like joking, offer significant protection from liability. However, they do not confer blanket immunity: speakers can be held to account for an ‘off record’ message, if the only reasonable interpreta- tions of their utterance involve a commitment to it. Legal liability (...) for speech in the service of criminal behavior displays a similar profile of significant protection from indirection along with potential liability for reasonable interpretations. Specifically, in both ordinary and legal contexts, liability depends on how a reasonable speaker would expect a reasonable hearer to interpret their utterance in the context of utter- ance, rather than on the actual speaker’s claimed communicative intentions. (shrink)

Metaphor is a pervasive and significant feature of language. We use metaphor to talk about the world in familiar and innovative ways, and in contexts ranging from everyday conversation to literature and scientific theorizing. However, metaphor poses serious challenges for standard philosophical theories of meaning, because it straddles so many important boundaries: between language and thought, between semantics and pragmatics, between rational communication and mere causal association. ;In this dissertation, I develop a pragmatic theory of metaphorical utterances which reconciles two (...) apparently incompatible intuitions. The first is that metaphors are vehicles for undertaking speech acts with a propositional content distinct from their conventional sentence meaning. The second is that metaphors are tools for inducing the essentially non-propositional effect of 'seeing things in a new light' or under a new aspect. These intuitions seem to be incompatible because it is assumed that only one can capture the essential function of metaphor. I propose instead that non-propositional 'seeing-as' or aspectual thought serves as the means by which speakers intend to accomplish their end of communicating content. This does not imply that speakers are not interested in and even committed to the effects of aspectual thought as well, only that it is not their sole, ultimate intention. ;In order to substantiate this proposal about how metaphor works, I develop an account of the psychological structures on which aspectual thought operates and the changes it engenders; I then show how the content of the speaker's intended speech act is determined by the aspect the sentence generates. By bringing propositional content and non-propositional aspectual thought together in this way, my account can treat the full range of metaphors, from 'ordinary' to 'poetic', within a unified theory. Armed with this account, we have the explanatory resources necessary to acknowledge both that ordinary conversational metaphors are efficient and sometimes essential vehicles for communicating determinate propositional contents, and also that rich, poetic metaphors are invitations to an open-ended contemplation of the subject under discussion. These apparently very different effects turn out to be manifestations of the same basic process of comprehension. (shrink)