The purpose of this study was to investigate experimentally the extent to which children’s novel word learning and story comprehension from eBooks depends on the relevance of interactive eBook features. A story was created in the lab to incorporate novel word-object pairs. The story was read to preschoolers (3-5 years old, N = 103) using one of the three books: noninteractive control, interactive-relevant, interactive-irrelevant. Novel word learning and story comprehension were assessed with posttests in which children picked target objects from (...) an array and sorted story events into sequences, respectively. Findings indicate that word learning and story comprehension were similar across all three books, suggesting that simple interactive features – whether relevant or irrelevant to the story – had little impact on learning in this controlled experiment. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:(P)rescription Narratives: Feminist Medical Fiction and the Failure of American Censorship. by Stephanie Peebles TaveraEtta M. MaddenStephanie Peebles Tavera. (P)rescription Narratives: Feminist Medical Fiction and the Failure of American Censorship. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2022. Hardback, xii + 220 pp. ISBN 978-1-4744-9319-2.Utopian Studies readers first saw Stephanie Peebles Tavera’s work in print in her 2018 essay on reproductive health in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland. More recently, in (P)rescription (...) Narratives, she gives readers a view of the much broader historical scope of her scholarship in literary and cultural studies. Tavera’s analysis of what she labels “feminist medical fiction” considers not only novels and short stories but also literary reviews, dramas, and documentary films, many of which will be unfamiliar to readers of utopian and dystopian literature. Yet the book contextualizes the ways in which these works capture the “utopian possibilities” of women writers who pushed for breaking the boundaries of the dystopian strictures of embodied life. The literary works “rescript” what had been prescribed by others as “normalized behavior,” from the latter-nineteenth century through the Progressive Era (5, 37). As Tavera illustrates through her detailed analysis, these women’s narratives provide “interventions that... interrupt the dissemination of false [End Page 612] narratives of the female body” and “alter the course of cultural development toward greater inclusivity” (5).To establish the temporal boundaries for the project, Tavera emphasizes the Comstock Law, established in 1873, and the death of its author Anthony Comstock in 1915. While Comstock’s work often has been understood as restricting pornography, she explains the Comstock Law as more than merely that. Comstock sought to control what he and others saw as sexual deviation, which included birth control in any form. Tavera also bookends the project with lawsuits associated with Victoria Woodhull and Margaret Sanger, both women who advocated for abortion and birth control as means of allowing women to avoid the strictures over their bodies. Additionally, she explains, Comstock’s racism caused him to completely overlook Black women, ironically allowing a space in which Black women’s feminist medical fiction especially rescripts “normalized behavior” (37)—a topic she pursues in two parts of the book.The book follows a roughly chronological path as it examines four topics related to women’s health, brilliantly organized into “(p)rescriptions,” indicated by Rx, rather than chapters with numbers. Rx1, “Crip Medicine,” illustrates how authors such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman pointed to the socially constructed status of “hysteria” in a patriarchal culture that saw women as deviant by nature. Instead, these authors advocated for a more holistic examination of women’s health, impacted by the environments in which they lived. Drawing from Lyman Tower Sargent’s widely accepted view of utopianism as dreaming of a place “considerably better than the society in which the author lived,” she underscores “the utopian impulse underlies much of the work of feminist medical fiction” (39). In particular, writers of feminist medical fiction were “driven by failure.”Perhaps most familiar to illustrate this point is Gilman’s work, such as “The Yellow Wallpaper,” which illustrated how the culture failed certain characters. The narrator of that story suffers postpartum depression and is made worse by Dr. S. Weir Mitchell’s rest cure. Consequently, Gilman proceeded to write other works, such as Moving the Mountain (1911) and then Herland (1915), which push readers to envision “alternative societies” without such destructive patriarchal medical practices (39). But Tavera also explains how Louisa May Alcott’s Eight Cousins, or the Aunt-Hill (1875) critiques contemporary culture by providing a “domestic utopia” in the female domain of Aunt-Hill, wherein the male Dr. Alec Campbell demonstrates “a better way... of caring for the female body” (55). And another key example is Rebecca Harding [End Page 613] Davis’s Kitty’s Choice: A Story of Berrytown (1875). Berrytown is described as “the Utopia in actual laths, orchards, and bushel-measures of the advance guard of the reform party in the United States” (qtd. in Tavera 55). Through its two physicians, Dr. Muller and Dr. McCall, who represent homeopathic and allopathic practitioners, readers see that the society... (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis play is based on the author’s ethnographic and archival research on the French philosopher Henry Corbin’s years in Tehran, Iran. Corbin taught in Tehran between 1947 and 1978 at the Institute of Philosophy, which he founded. The play is a dialogue between a fictional university student, Ali, and his mentor, the French philosopher Henry Corbin, with interjections from the angel of history. Ali is trying to come to grips with his love of Islamic mystical philosophy and its dangerous appropriation (...) by political actors of the time, as well as with a deeply personal mourning. This year marks the 40th anniversary of the Iranian Revolution. (shrink)

Simple claims with the verb ‘seem’, as well as the specific sensory verbs, ‘look’, ‘sound’, etc., require the speaker to have some relevant kind of perceptual acquaintance (Pearson, 2013; Ninan, 2014). But different forms of these reports differ in their perceptual requirements. For example, the copy raising (CR) report, ‘Tom seems like he’s cooking’ requires the speaker to have seen Tom, while its expletive subject (ES) variant, ‘It seems like Tom is cooking’, does not (Rogers, 1972; Asudeh and Toivonen, 2012). (...) This contrast has led some theorists to hold that the matrix subject in CR constructions is uniformly interpreted as the perceptual source (p-source) (Asudeh and Toivonen, 2012; Rett and Hyams, 2014). Others, based on examples of CR reports that seem not to require perception of the referent of the matrix subject, have taken the p-source interpretation instead to be non-uniform across CR reports (Landau, 2011; Doran, 2015). We reconsider these theoretical approaches to copy raising in light of new experimental work probing the sensitivity of these requirements to the matrix verb, the embedded ‘like’-clause, and the context. While we find some motivation for a non-uniform p-source analysis, it comes from importantly different cases than those others have relied on. Furthermore, our findings cast doubt on the prevalent assumption that the perceptual requirements of CR reports are to be captured solely by the presence or absence of the p-source interpretation. We suggest that the data motivating a non-uniform p-source view are better captured by an alternative approach, which makes use of a more minimal evidential source role, in place of the perceptual source role. We close by considering the relationship between English copy raising and evidential constructions cross-linguistically. (shrink)

This article examines the relationship between feminist theologies and women’s poetry and fiction. Using Sheila Hassell Hughes’ work on this same relationship as a point of departure, I contend that feminist theologians rely on literature by women for a variety of reasons, and I focus on how literature by women offers feminist theologies a multitude of examples of women’s experience, embodied experience in particular. If women’s experience is the starting point for a truly feminist theology, women’s writing seems an obvious (...) source of the theologian’s materialist and semiotic quest. (shrink)

The weight of trace, that drips from structure. A memory encased in material – the constant desire to contain, to orchestrate the transient. Is memory. Flesh against the hardest material. What becomes of the energies that move against form?

In Conceiving People: Genetic Knowledge and the Ethics of Sperm and Egg Donation (Oxford University Press, 2021), Daniel Groll argues why people who use donated sperm or eggs to have children ought to use a known donor. His main argument for this position is that a child conceived in this way will have a foreseeable, significant interest in acquiring genetic knowledge. However, Groll addresses issues that are of interest to anyone who thinks about the nature of families and parent‐child relationships. (...) For example, what obligations or responsibilities does a parent have to their child? What makes someone a parent? And what is the significance to one's identity of knowing about one's genetic origins? While a claim about access to genetic knowledge lies at the heart of Groll's book, he is all too aware of the social forces that influence people to care about their genetic origins. His prescriptions, ultimately, reflect this reality. (shrink)

Endocrine-disrupting chemicals have been identified as posing risks to reproductive health and may have intergenerational effects. However, responses to the potential harms they pose frequently rely on medicalised understandings of the body and normative gender identities. This article develops an intersectional feminist framework of intergenerational justice in response to the potential risks posed by endocrine-disrupting chemicals. We examine critiques of endocrine disruptors from feminist, critical disability and queer standpoints, and explore issues of race and class in exposures. We argue that (...) responding to the risks posed by endocrine disruptors such as brominated flame retardants (BFRs) and phthalates requires developing a theory of intergenerational justice that recognises relationality and transcorporeality, and that also recognises harm in terms of suffering, not in terms of difference. (shrink)

The Iran–Iraq war, which took place from 1980 to 1988, was one of the longest and bloodiest conventional wars in the history of the last century. The war was also the largest mobilization of the Iranian population and was achieved primarily by producing and promoting a culture of martyrdom based on religious themes found in Shi'i Islam. It was the war that created and consolidated what we know today as the Islamic republic of Iran. For years there have been two (...) popular public discourses in post-war Iran: the secular discourse, which is to evade, to ignore, to escape to the Caspian; and then the state's discourse, of the strong, mourning women and the heroic martyrs. It is the group of women who exist betwixt the dominant discourses of the secular versus the religious and the idea of womanhood versus motherhood that I am interested in exploring here by looking at the most recent work of a secular female filmmaker, Rakhshan Bani-Etemad. (shrink)

In the 1980s, identity was a key concept in historical political debates in the Federal Republic of Germany. But this identity discourse comprised not only the publicly fought Historikerstreit and the discussion of plans by the federal government to establish two major history museums, but also the conflict with the,,new history movement“, which developed as a counterpoint to the field of history at the universities.

Although nostalgia is a much-maligned orientation to the world, feminist scholars including Heather Hillsburg (2013) and Kate Eichhorn (2015) have argued that it might be recuperated for feminist ends. This article mobilises the call to rethink nostalgia through an analysis of the feminist stories and storytelling in Joan Braderman’s 2009 film, The Heretics. A documentary about a feminist collective founded in New York City in the 1970s, The Heretics sets up a way of thinking about feminism’s past that is steeped (...) in nostalgia. Throughout the film, Braderman maintains that the 1970s were ‘a time when everything seemed possible’. By contrast, she assesses the moment in which she makes the film as a time in which ‘fear corrodes even the young’. As feminist viewers of the film who did not (indeed by virtue of age could not) experience feminism in the 1970s, we initially read the nostalgic narrative of loss framing the film with suspicion. By drawing on feminist scholarship on nostalgia and feminist storytelling, however, we argue that nostalgia can function in what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (2003) would call a reparative mode that enriches the relationships that feminist scholars, activists and cultural workers bear to feminisms’ pasts. (shrink)

The first chapter of Diet and the Disease of Civilization may be familiar to readers of Utopian Studies. An earlier version of it won Adrienne Rose Bitar the Society for Utopian Studies' Eugenio Battisti Award for the best essay published in the society's journal in 2015. "The Paleo Diet and the American Weight Loss Utopia, 1975–2014" was among several in a special issue that featured essays and book reviews on utopian foodways.The book chapter that emerged from that award-winning essay is (...) even richer within the context of Bitar's engaging longer study. The project places caveman or "paleo" diets alongside what Bitar labels "devotional" or "Eden" diets, "primitive" or "precolonial" diets, and "detox" diets. Books... (shrink)

How does an object persist through change? How can a book, for example, open in the morning and shut in the afternoon, persist through a change that involves the incompatible properties of being open and being shut? The goal of this reader is to inform and reframe the philosophical debate around persistence; it presents influential accounts of the problem that range from classic papers by W. V. O. Quine, David Lewis, and Judith Jarvis Thomson to recent work by contemporary philosophers. (...) The authors take on the question of persistence by examining three broad approaches: perdurantism, which holds that change over time is analogous to change over space; exdurantism, according to which identity over time is analogous to identity across possible worlds; and endurantism, which holds that ordinary objects persist by enduring. Each of these approaches appears to be coherent, but each also has its own metaphysical problems. Persistence includes papers that argue for perdurantism, exdurantism, or endurantism, as well as papers that explore some metaphysical difficulties challenging each account. In this way the collection allows readers to balance the trade-offs of each approach in terms of intuitiveness, theoretical attractiveness, and elegance.Contributors:Yuri Balashov, William Carter, Graeme Forbes, Sally Haslanger, Katherine Hawley, H. S. Hestevold, Mark Hinchliffe, Mark Johnston, Roxanne Marie Kurtz, David K. Lewis, Ned Markosian, D. H. Mellor, W. V. O. Quine, Theodore Sider, Richard Taylor, Judith Jarvis Thomson, Peter van Inwagen, Dean Zimmerman. (shrink)

This reflective essay describes and discusses numerous nudges Lyman Tower Sargent has given me during our interactions, dotting a timeline from my first Society for Utopian Studies conference in Memphis in the late 1990s through a recent e-mail about a conference on food utopias at Porto in April 2019. These moments—linked by their impact upon me—speak to his exemplary behaviors with both quantity and quality of scholarship. In the fields of communal as well as literary utopias, in genres as distinct (...) as book reviews are from bibliographies, in providing definitions and classifications for others in the field, and finally, by demonstrating an openness to new ideas and to younger scholars, Sargent has influence that reaches far wider than anyone first touched by his gentle nudges would ever suspect. I am fortunate to have been one of those recipients. (shrink)

George Perkins Marsh (1801-1882), first US Minister to the Kingdom of Italy, is also known as a father of environmentalism, due to his book, Man and Nature; or, Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action (1864). The book includes environmental changes George witnessed during his New England years and as he and his wife Caroline lived and traveled abroad. Caroline’s diaries written in Italy attest to her partnership in the book’s composition and to its role among their ambassadorial duties.

Care has increasingly been promoted as an element of successful management practice. However, an ethic of care is a normative theory that was initially developed in reference to intimate relationships, and it is unclear if it is an appropriate normative standard in business. The purpose of this review is to bridge the social scientific study of care with philosophical understandings of care and to provide a theoretical justification for care as a managerial value. We review the three different forms of (...) care advanced by the ethics literature: caring relations, organizational care, and care as a virtue. We compare these forms of care to the management litertature. In doing so, we integrate what has previously been a scattered, yet growing, body of research on care. Our review of the literature reveals that care has increasingly been studied in management in relation to an ethic of care. Yet, many of the properties of care have also played a role in other established research domains (e.g., leadership). We discuss and critique the management and ethics literatures on care, paying attention to areas of agreement or disagreeement between the two. We go on to provide a normative justification of care as a value in business. Finally, we close by suggesting directions for future research. (shrink)

Faultless disagreement and faultless retraction have been taken to motivate relativism for predicates of personal taste, like ‘tasty’. Less attention has been devoted to the question of what aspect of their meaning underlies this relativist behavior. This paper illustrates these same phenomena with a new category of expressions: appearance predicates, like ‘tastes vegan’ and ‘looks blue’. Appearance predicates and predicates of personal taste both fall into the broader category of experiential predicates. Approaching predicates of personal taste from this angle suggests (...) that their relativist behavior is due to their experience-sensitivity, rather than their evaluative meaning. Furthermore, appearance predicates hold interest beyond what they can teach us about predicates of personal taste. Examination of a variety of uses of appearance predicates reveals that they give rise to relativist behavior for a variety of reasons—including some that apply also to other types of expressions, such as epistemic modals and comparative terms. This paper thus serves both to probe the source of relativist behavior in discourse about personal taste, as well as to map out this kind of behavior in the rich and under-explored discourse about appearances. (shrink)

Objective To document the legal guardian-related barriers to consent procurement, and their stated reasons for non-participation in a paediatric critical care research study.Study design A multicentre, prospective, cohort study.Participants Legal guardians of children who participated in a multicentre study on adrenal insufficiency in paediatric critical illness. Data were collected on all consent encounters in the main study.Methods Screening data, reasons for consent not being obtained, paediatric risk of mortality scores and age were collected on all 1707 patients eligible for participation (...) in the Adrenal Insufficiency Study.Results The main barriers to approaching legal guardians for consent were lack of availability of the legal guardians and language barriers . Legal guardians of 917 patients were approached with an overall consent rate of 42% . 81% of the 528 legal guardians who declined consent provided an unsolicited reason for refusal. The three most commonly stated reasons were: being overwhelmed , not wanting anything else done to their child and not wanting an additional medication . In addition, 14.2% cited research-related concerns as the reason for their non-participation.Conclusions Barriers to consent procurement in a non-therapeutic paediatric critical care study appear to occur at many levels with lack of availability of legal guardians, and legal guardians feeling overwhelmed, being the most commonly recorded reasons. Further research into the impact of these findings on the validity and generalisability of the results of such studies is necessary prior to the development and study of future consent models. (shrink)

La vida de Siháb al-Din al-Suhrawardi es oscura. Datos aislados referentes a sus estudios, viajes y contactos se encuentran en breves noticias de los diccionarios biográ-ficos de los siglos xn y xm. Estas noticias permiten esbozar una biografía de al-Suhrawardi desde sus comienzos hasta la oposición de que fue objeto por parte de los Memas de Alepo y su trágica muerte, interpretada en el marco y el contexto de la ciu-dad. Todo este material de los diccionarios biográficos es sólo relativamente (...) fidedigno e incluso los textos contemporáneos incluyen datos erróneos. = Shiháb al-Din al-Suhrawardi's life is obscure. Some clues regarding his studies, travels and encounters are found in short biographical notices of the 12th and 13th centuries. These notices can provide the means to sketch al-Suhrawardi's biography: his early life, his coming to Aleppo, the mounting opposition of the Memas of Aleppo, and the final moments that led to his tragic death. The sociopolitical context of Aleppo provides a good framework for the interpretation of the data provided by the biographers. All these biographical works are, however, of relative reliability. Even the most contemporary texts are in fact not devoid of erroneous elements. (shrink)

Bioethics, Volume 36, Issue 3, Page 305-312, March 2022.

Over the course of the past few decades, comparative political theory has acquired a measure of institutional legitimacy and intellectual recognition as part of the ongoing, interdisciplinary challenge to prevailing academic categories, coordinates, and borders. This arrival has been accompanied by a conspicuous focus on methodology both by those who claim the mantle of comparative political theory and those who reject it. The following reflections read this focus symptomatically, as revealing intellectual, institutional, and professional exigencies rather than as distinct to (...) any particular scholar, argument, or publication. Neither a “state of the field” nor a proprietary defense of what comparative political theory is or should be, these observations toggle back and forth between reflections on my own engagement and disengagement with the topic of comparative political theory on the one hand and, on the other, concerns about how this preoccupation with method simultaneously expresses and exacerbates the displacement of politics in the very field that aims to understand it. Among the questions I raise are: What might be driving this disproportionate focus on methodological arguments in and about comparative political theory? What are the stakes of such a focus, particularly for younger scholars in political science departments decreasingly hospitable to political theory? Finally, what does this augur for the future of the study of politics broadly understood within disciplines dedicated to the scientific study of human behavior? (shrink)

Some assertions give rise to the acquaintance inference: the inference that the speaker is acquainted with some individual. Discussion of the acquaintance inference has previously focused on assertions about aesthetic matters and personal tastes (e.g. 'The cake is tasty'), but it also arises with reports about how things seem (e.g. 'Tom seems like he's cooking'). 'Seem'-reports give rise to puzzling acquaintance behavior, with no analogue in the previously-discussed domains. In particular, these reports call for a distinction between the specific acquaintance (...) inference (that the speaker is acquainted with a specific individual) and the general acquaintance inference (that the speaker is acquainted with something or other of relevance). We frame a novel empirical generalization -- the specific with stage-level generalization -- that systematizes the observed behavior, in terms of the semantics of the embedded 'like'-clause. We present supporting experimental work, and explain why the generalization makes sense given the evidential role of 'seem'-reports. Finally, we discuss the relevance of this result for extant proposals about the semantics of 'seem'-reports. More modestly, it fills a gap in previous theories by identifying which reports get which of two possible interpretations; more radically, it suggests a revision of the kind of explanation that should be given for the acquaintance behavior in question. (shrink)

Shihàb al-Dîn al-Suhrawardfs life is obscure. Some clues regarding his studies, travels and encounters are found in short biographical notices of the 12th and 13th centuries. These notices can provide the means to sketch al-Suhrawardfs biography: his early life, his coming to Aleppo, the mounting opposition of the ulemas of Aleppo, and the final moments that led to his tragic death. The ociopolitical context of Aleppo provides a good framework for the interpretation of the data provided by the biographers. All (...) these biographical works are, however, of relative reliability. Even the most contemporary texts are in fact not devoid of erroneous elements. (c) Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas. (shrink)

This paper will explore the gender discourse of contemporary Egyptian Islamists and argue that their gender discourse is not merely a religious and traditional discourse, but that this politico-religious Islamic ideology articulates a quite modern construct of gender equality. The gender discourse of a number of important Egyptian Islamists, al-Banna’, Qutb, al-Ghazali, al-Qaradawi and Ezzat will provide illustrations of these modern developments. Modern elements incorporated in today’s Islamist revivalist approaches create new understandings, neither purely traditional, nor purely modern, that are (...) ‘modern constructs’ that attempt to remain traditional, while integrating specifically modern components. The presence of these two seemingly opposing and contradictory elements may account for the present popularity that Islamist discourses enjoy in many Muslims countries. (shrink)

Avicenna (d. 1037) bequeathed the Arabic philosophical tradition with an aporia : self-knowledge is conceived, at times, in terms of intellection, at other times, in terms of apperception. In his Book of Discussions and Book of Notes, Avicenna has lengthy discussions on apperception, defined as a direct ontological mode of knowledge. Heir to this tradition, Shihāb al-Dīn al-Suhrawardī (d. 1191) moved away from the first conception of self-knowledge as intellection to adopt the second conception of an apperception of the self (...) as a direct, intuitive and "presential (hcombining dot belowudcombining dot belowūrī)" perception, and which he defended with four types of arguments. (shrink)

Achieving gender equity in clinical trials requires that women be included in sufficient numbers to carry out analysis, that sub-sample analyses be performed, and that results be communicated in such a way as to expand medical knowledge, inform policy decisions, and educate patients. In this article, we examine the extent to which Canada promotes gender equity through its laws and guidelines, viewed within the context of its drug safety system and its research ethics board structure. We analyze the structuring of (...) information by the pharmaceutical industry and consider the impact of its promotional activities on the state of gender knowledge and health. In the final section, we propose ways to improve the structuring of health information to promote gender equity. (shrink)

Islamist rhetoric about the humiliation of Islam and American rhetoric about national humiliation have been energized by disparate events in recent years, from the photographs of American soldiers in Mogadishu, Somalia to the invasion of Iraq, the “Innocence of Muslims” video to the attacks on 9/11. At the same time, there’s been an explosion of scholarship on humiliation as a driver of international conflict and political violence in general, and in relation to the bodies and minds of Muslims in particular. (...) The link between humiliation and Muslims is thus a co-production between Islamists who continually invoke it and scholars from various disciplines and regions who regularly posit it. Yet there’s been very little analysis of humiliation in Islamist discourse; minimal effort to anatomize the ways in which this experience of humiliation is constructed to necessitate particular kinds of retaliatory action; and no attempt to theorize more broadly about patterns and discontinuities in how different rhetorics construct humiliation. This article takes up the following questions: What is the substantive content of humiliation in such rhetoric and analysis? Do these different rhetorics of humiliation articulate the same understanding of it, as an act and an experience? What does close analysis of Islamist discourse on humiliation in comparative perspective reveal about the political stakes and affective resonances articulated and energized by it in this particular moment in history? Finally, what do the answers to these questions say about the reach and limits of the dominant account of humiliation as the violated dignity or injured self-respect of a generic individual? (shrink)

Conceptual engineering involves revising our concepts. It can be pursued as a specific philosophical methodology, but is also common in ordinary, non-philosophical, contexts. How does our capacity for conceptual engineering fit into human cognitive life more broadly? I hold that conceptual engineering is best understood alongside practices of conceptual exploration, examples of which include conceptual supposition (i.e., suppositional reasoning about alternative concepts), and conceptual comparison (i.e., comparisons between possible concept choices). Whereas in conceptual engineering we aim to change the concepts (...) we use, in conceptual exploration, we reason about conceptual possibilities. I approach conceptual exploration via the linguistic tools we use to communicate about concepts, using metalinguistic negotiation, convention-shifting conditionals, and metalinguistic comparatives as my key examples. I present a linguistic framework incorporating conventions that can account for this communication in a unified way. Furthermore, I argue that conceptual exploration helps undermine skepticism about conceptual engineering itself. (shrink)

Assertions about appearances license inferences about the speaker's perceptual experience. For instance, if I assert, 'Tom looks like he's cooking', you will infer both that I am visually acquainted with Tom (what I call the "individual acquaintance inference"), and that I am visually acquainted with evidence that Tom is cooking (what I call the "evidential acquaintance inference"). By contrast, if I assert, 'It looks like Tom is cooking', only the latter inference is licensed. I develop an account of the acquaintance (...) inferences of appearance assertions building on two main previous lines of research: first, the copy raising literature, which has aimed to account for individual acquaintance inferences through the "perceptual source" semantic role; second, the subjectivity literature, which has focused on the status of acquaintance inferences with predicates of personal taste, but hasn't given much attention to the added complexities introduced by appearance language. I begin by developing what I take to be the most empirically-sound version of a perceptual source analysis. I then show how its insights can be maintained, while however taking anything about perception out of the truth conditions of appearance sentences. This, together with the assumption that appearance assertions express experiential attitudes, allows us to capture the acquaintance inferences of bare appearance assertions without making incorrect predictions about the behavior of appearance verbs in embedded environments. (shrink)

In theoretical work about the language of personal taste, the canonical example is the simple predicate of personal taste, 'tasty'. We can also express the same positive gustatory evaluation with the complex expression, 'taste good'. But there is a challenge for an analysis of 'taste good': While it can be used equivalently with 'tasty', it need not be (for instance, imagine it used by someone who can identify good wines by taste but doesn't enjoy them). This kind of two-faced behavior (...) systematically arises with complex sensory-evaluative predicates, including those with other appearance verbs, such as 'look splendid' and 'sound nice'. I examine two strategies for capturing these different uses: one that posits an ambiguity in appearance verbs, and one that does not. The former is in line with an approach to 'look'-statements prominent in work in philosophy of perception, and I consider how the motivation given in that tradition carries over to the present context. I then show how the data used to support the verbal ambiguity approach can equally be captured on the second strategy, which appeals only to independently-motivated flexibility in adjective meaning. I close by discussing some considerations that are relevant for choosing between the two options. (shrink)

To explore 3- to 7-year-old children's developing understanding of human and non-human minds, a battery of "background knowledge" tasks was administered to 51 American children. The children were asked to speculate about how three other intentional agents would understand various visual displays. First, children answered when they themselves did not understand the displays, then they answered after they had been given information necessary to understand the displays. Results revealed that children begin to understand the role of background knowledge around the (...) same age that they pass false-belief tasks; and that before thoroughly understanding the role of background knowledge they already begin to discriminate between different types of minds. By age four, children began to show some understanding that because of having different minds than people, God is more able and dogs are less able to understand some visual displays even with full visual access. (shrink)

The text consists of essays that revolve around the question of the nature and meaning of philosophy, even as it demonstrates philosophy's significance and relevance to some fundamental human problems and issues. The essays present diverse views of what philosophy might be and might aspire to be, with contributors being influenced by a wide range of philosophical approaches and traditions. The conversations also cut across disciplinary boundaries to interrogate and utilize ideas taken from ethics, epistemology, metaphysics, literary studies, cultural studies, (...) and the sociology of science. Traversing regional boundaries, the essays show philosophical analysis at work in exploring some issues pertinent to African, Caribbean, European, and American experiences, even while not ignoring Asian traditions. The collection presents interesting and intriguing views on how philosophical inquiry can illuminate various pressing problems: development, conflict, the discriminating preservation of worthwhile traditions, and the prevalence of apathy. It also reflects the vitality and multifaceted nature of philosophical discourse in grappling with live issues. The edited text is a comprehensive, balanced, and unique anthology of readings capturing the diversity of philosophical investigation. (shrink)

We offer a novel account of metalinguistic comparatives, such as 'Al is more wise than clever'. On our view, metalinguistic comparatives express comparative commitments to conventions. Thus, 'Al is more wise than clever' expresses that the speaker has a stronger commitment to a convention on which Al is wise than to a convention on which she is clever. This view avoids problems facing previous approaches to metalinguistic comparatives. It also fits within a broader framework—independently motivated by metalinguistic negotiations and convention-shiftingexpressions— (...) that gives linguistic conventions a role in the semantics. (shrink)

In ordinary conversation, speakers disagree not only about worldly facts, but also about how to use language to describe the world. For example, disagreement about whether Buffalo is in the American Midwest, whether Pluto is a planet, or whether someone has been canceled, can persist even with agreement about all the relevant facts. The speakers may still engage in “metalinguistic negotiation”—disputing what to mean by “Midwest”, “planet”, or “cancel”. I first motivate an approach to metalinguistic negotiation that generalizes a Stalnakerian (...) theory of communication by including linguistic commitments in the conversational common ground. Then, I turn to cases where the very status of a disagreement as metalinguistic or factual is unclear or contested. For example, after the publication of the New York Times Magazine’s 1619 Project, some responses claimed to identify factual errors, while others took those same “errors” to be matters of interpretation. I’ll consider how to extend our theorizing about metalinguistic negotiation to this type of (even more) “meta” disagreement, using the discussion following the 1619 Project as a case study. On my view, in most such cases, there will be a metalinguistic negotiation going on. Still, I explain several ways in which, despite a dispute being metalinguistic, the factualist side can sometimes receive important vindication. I also discuss why it can make sense for speakers to contest the status of a dispute. (shrink)

Conventional wisdom has it that truth is always evaluated using our actual linguistic conventions, even when considering counterfactual scenarios in which different conventions are adopted. This principle has been invoked in a number of philosophical arguments, including Kripke’s defense of the necessity of identity and Lewy’s objection to modal conventionalism. But it is false. It fails in the presence of what Einheuser (2006) calls c-monsters, or convention-shifting expressions (on analogy with Kaplan’s monsters, or context-shifting expressions). We show that c-monsters naturally (...) arise in contexts, such as metalinguistic negotiations, where speakers entertain alternative conventions. We develop an expressivist theory—inspired by Barker (2002) and MacFarlane (2016) on vague predications and Einheuser (2006) on counterconventionals—to model these shifts in convention. Using this framework, we reassess the philosophical arguments that invoked the conventional wisdom. (shrink)