Slurring is a kind of hate speech that has various effects. Notable among these is variable offence. Slurs vary in offence across words, uses, and the reactions of audience members. Patterns of offence aren’t adequately explained by current theories. We propose an explanation based on the unjust power imbalance that a slur seeks to achieve. Our starting observation is that in discourse participants take on discourse roles. These are typically inherited from social roles, but only exist during a discourse. A (...) slurring act is a speech-act that alters the discourse roles of the target and speaker. By assigning discourse roles the speaker unjustly changes the power balance in the dialogue. This has a variety of effects on the target and audience. We show how these notions explain all three types of offence variation. We also briefly sketch how a role and power theory can help explain silencing and appropriation. Explanatory power lies in the fact that offence is correlated with the perceived unjustness of the power imbalance created. (shrink)

Slurs are typically defined as conveying contempt based on group-membership. However, here I argue that they are not a unitary group. First, I describe two dimensions of variation among derogatives: how targets are identified, and how offensive the term is. This supports the typical definition of slurs as opposed to other derogatives. I then highlight problems with this definition, mainly caused by variable offence across slur words. In the process I discuss how major theories of slurs can account for variable (...) offence, and conclude that contempt based on group-membership doesn’t cover all the data. I finish by noting that the most offensive slurs are those that target oppressed groups. I claim it is oppression that underpins most offence, and that beyond this offensive property, some slurs are actively used to oppress. (shrink)

This paper argues that we need to re-think the semantics/pragmatics distinction in the light of new evidence from embedding of irony. This raises a new version of the old problem of ‘embedded implicatures’. I argue that embedded irony isn’t fully explained by solutions proposed for other embedded implicatures. I first consider two strategies: weak pragmatics and strong pragmatics. These explain embedded irony as truth-conditional content. However, by trying to shoehorn irony into said-content, they raise problems of their own. I conclude (...) by considering how a modified Gricean model can explain that irony embeds qua implicature. This leads us to prefer a local implicature model. This has important consequences for how we draw the semantics/pragmatics distinction. (shrink)

It’s natural for hyperbole to mix with metaphor and irony, and other figures of speech. How do they mix together and what kind of compound, if any, arises out of the mixing? In tackling this question, I shall argue that thinking of hyperbolic figures along the lines familiar from ironic metaphor compounds is a temptation we should resist. Looking in particular at hyperbolic metaphor and hyperbolic irony, I argue, they don’t yield a new encompassing compound figure with one figure building (...) on another. Instead, what we have is one dominant figure colored with hyperbolic tinges. So what does hyperbole bring to the mixing pot? I suggest we should think of hyperbole in hyperbolic figures as being an interpretive effect, modulating the working of the partner figure and thus rendering more emphatic. (shrink)

In this chapter, we focus on the simple sounding question: What is it to have sex? On the assumption that having sex is what you do with all and only your sexual part-ners, this offers a way of focusing the question: What would it take for a sex robot to be a sex partner? In order to understand the significance of the development of robots with whom (or which) we can have sex, we need to know what it is to (...) have sex with a robot. And in order to know this, we have to know what it is to have sex, period. In the bulk of the chapter, we develop an account of shared sexual agency we think is a plausible precondition of genuinely having sex. In the final section, we remark briefly on the issue of what it would take to form a sexual we (as we call it) with a robot. For if we can do this, we can probably have sex with robots; but if we can’t, we can’t. (shrink)

In this dissertation, I argue that we should be pluralists about truth and in turn, eliminativists about the property Truth. Traditional deflationists were right to suspect that there is no such property as Truth. Yet there is a plurality of pluralities of properties which enjoy defining features that Truth would have, were it to exist. So although, in this sense, truth is plural, Truth is non-existent. The resulting account of truth is indebted to deflationism as the provenance of the suspicion (...) that Truth doesn't exist. But it would be hasty to simply classify the account as deflationary. Each of the 'truth-like' properties that it recognizes is highly substantive--that is, complex and explanatorily potent. So we should deflate Truth by recognizing that it doesn't exist, but we should also recognize that one of the most vital tasks in truth theory is to discover the essences of the many truth-like properties. My aim here is to do precisely this. (shrink)

"Few thinkers have stood as squarely at both the center and the periphery of an intellectual movement as has Shao Yung (1011-1077). Ethical model and eccentric, socialite and eremite, Shao Yung is perhaps not only the greatest enigma of early Neo-Confucianism, but also one of its undisputed giants. In this impressive life-and-thought study, Don J. Wyatt painstakingly sifts through all available evidence relating to Shao Yung and his scholarship to provide a portrait that fully exposes the moral center of (...) the man and his work. Drawing on the abundant store of letters and accounts by Shao's contemporaries and his own much-neglected poetry, Wyatt has assembled a study that intimately relates Shao's life to his thought. He challenges the assumptions of previous Western scholarship by persuasively arguing against the acceptance of works traditionally ascribed to Shao - specifically, the Kuan-wu wai-p'ien (Outer Chapters on Observing Things), the Yu-ch'iao wen-ta (Fisherman and Woodcutter Dialogue), and the cryptic quasi-autobiographical essay Wu-ming kung chuan (Biography of the Nameless Lord)." "Shao is presented as an independent thinker whose philosophical lexicon functioned according to a profound interdependence that was unique among the systems of his peers. His metaphysical concepts, which appear impervious to and beyond the scope of human influence - namely, his ching-shih (world ordering), kuan-wu (observing things), and I-Ching - derived hsien-t'ien (before Heaven) methodologies - are essentially the products of a morally reflective life. Wyatt's discoveries, therefore, refute the common assertion of Shao Yung's moral indifference. Moreover, by meticulously integrating the progress of this Neo-Confucian's thought into the course of his life, the author has produced one of the most textured and accessible works on a philosopher of the Sung era."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Jean Wyatt THE CELEBRATION OF EROS: GREEK CONCEPTS OF LOVE AND BEAUTY IN TO THE LIGHTHOUSE A voracious reader all her life, Virginia Woolf stored up patterns and images which she naturally wove into the fabric of her novels.1 Integrating literature of the past into her own works was also an affirmation of her belief that "everything comes over again a little differently," as Eleanor says in The (...) Years. Acutely aware of the prevailing fluidity of human life, Virginia Woolf sought a counterbalance in the principle of eternal recurrence. The whole chain of human history forms a "gigantic pattern, momentarily perceptible." It becomes perceptible when elemental forces in human life coincide with the forms of individuals, "making them symbolical, making them representative."3 In Mrs. Ramsay, Virginia Woolf combines a personal portrait of her mother with an evocation of eternal life forces in the "symbolical outline" (p. Ill) of Aphrodite, goddess of love, beauty and marriage, that Mrs. Ramsay irradiates. Events, too, can be "symbolical, and therefore perhaps permanent," in the words of Bernard in The Waves, when they reflect the continuity of human experience. The dinner party in To the Lighthouse contains ritual elements, reminders that it is one in a series of communal feasts. The search for truth in the midst of human pleasures, by means of human love, recalls one such banquet in particular, the Symposium.'' The central concerns of the Symposium are those of To the Lighthouse: striving for knowledge through love; the desire to create that beauty arouses; the paradox of the eternal in the midst of the transitory. The figures and patterns of Greek literature were part of Virginia Woolf's mental formation. She began learning Greek at King's College in 1897, at the age of fifteen.6 For the next few years, Greek was her chief refuge from a stifling Victorian society. From 10:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. every day she read Greek: Homer, Aeschylus, Euripides, all of Sophocles, Plato. Twice a week she met for Greek lessons, first 160 Jean WyATT161 with Clara Pater, then with Janet Case. Her letters speak of Greek as "the greatest of comforts to me" (April, 1900), "my daily bread, and a keen delight to me" (June, 1900); it "has so much attraction for me... that I don't want to do anything else" (February, 1905).8 A diary entry from 1924 shows how Greek "worked its way" into her life. Upon meeting a herd of cattle, "I waved my stick and stood at bay; and thought of Homer.... some mimic battle. Grizzle grew more and more insolent and excited and skirmished about yapping. Ajax? That Greek, for all my ignorance, has worked its way into me." Seeing Grizzle as Ajax is not different in kind from transforming Mrs. Ramsay into Aphrodite, Mr. Carmichael into Poseidon. Greek was in the forefront of Virginia Woolf's mind in 1924 because she had been reading Greek steadily since 1922 in preparation for the article "On Not Knowing Greek." "The amount of reading... that went into the production of that essay... was remarkable," comments Quentin Bell. She published the essay in 1925, the year she began To the Lighthouse. "On Not Knowing Greek" shows that Virginia Woolf knew the Symposium well: she discusses it for four pages, not with the analytical lens of a literary critic, but with loving familiarity. She first read the Symposium when she was about sixteen, but her intimacy with it suggests that she must have read it more than once. At the center of the Symposium is Diotima's doctrine: man has to work through a series of human loves to arrive at the eternal. Lily pursues a similar quest for knowledge through love. She loves Mrs. Ramsay, but, unable to satisfy her love on a personal level, casts about for a way of reaching "the spirit in her, the essential thing" (p. 76). She finally finds a way of loving that takes her to the essence of things when, ten years after Mrs. Ramsay's death, she sees and loves a Mrs. Ramsay who transcends the individual to become the form of love and beauty. To understand the... (shrink)

In the May, 1960, issue of the American Bar Association Journal (vol. 499), Morton Birnbaum, a lawyer and physician, argued for a legal right to psychiatric treatment of the involuntarily committed mentally ill person. In the 18 years since his article appeared,, there have been several key court cases in which this concept of a right to psychiatric treatment has figured prominently and decisively. It is important to note that the language of the decisions have had at least an indirect (...) effect in the recently enacted mental Hygiene Law of the State of New York. While I shall not seek to establish the historical thesis that Birnbaum’s article has been efficacious in bringing about both these court decisions and changes in statutory laws, I do want to examine Birnbaum’s article and some of the opinions for three cases: Wyatt v. Stickney (1972), Wyatt v. Aderholt (1974), and O’Connor v. Donaldson (422 US 563, 1975), in an effort to understand both the significance of these changes in our laws and the underlying philosophical and ethical notions of which they are an expression. Birnbaum observed that the notable feature of the legal situation at the time was that there had not been recognized a constitutional requirement that one who had been institutionalized for mental illness according to due process must receive treatment. Birnbaum argued that the effects of an omission of such a requirement to treat were that mental institutions typically offered only custodial care, that patients who were held only under custodial care typically did not improve, and that the result was that involuntary incarceration in a mental institution was, at least from the point of view of the patient, functionally no different than would be imprisonment for an unspecified period of time. Birnbaum argued for a recognition and enforcement in the courts of the right to treatment “...as a necessary and overdue development of our present concept of due process of law,” i.e., as required by the 14th Amendment to the U.S.. (shrink)

Anti-exceptionalists about logic maintain that it is continuous with the empirical sciences. Taking anti-exceptionalism for granted, we argue that traditional approaches to explanation are inadequate in the case of logic. We argue that Andrea Woody's functional analysis of explanation is a better fit with logical practice and accounts better for the explanatory role of logical theories.

Reclamation is the phenomenon of an oppressed group repurposing language to its own ends. A case study is reclamation of slur words. Popa-Wyatt and Wyatt (2018) argued that a slurring utterance is a speech act which performs a discourse role assignment. It assigns a subordinate role to the target, while the speaker assumes a dominant role. This pair of role assignments is used to oppress the target. Here I focus on how reclamation works and under what conditions its (...) benefits can stabilise. I start by reviewing the data and describing preconditions and motivations for reclamation. Can reclamation be explained in the same basic framework as regular slurring utterances? I argue that it can. I also identify some features that must be a prediction of any theory of reclamation. I conclude that reclamation is an instance of a much broader class of acts we do with words to change the distribution of power: it begets power, but it also requires it. (shrink)

The landscape in which journalists now work is substantially different to that of the twentieth century. The rise of digital and social media necessitates a new way of considering the ethical questions facing practicing journalists. This volume considers the various individual, cultural and institutional influences that have an impact on journalistic ethics today. It also examines the links between ethics and professionalism, the organizational promotion of ethical values and the tensions between ethics, freedom of information and speech, and the need (...) to disseminate information. By comparing the theoretical underpinnings of journalistic ethics with a variety of international case studies, this volume provides a comparative global analysis of the ethical challenges faced by the media in the twenty-first century. It will be essential reading for students of journalism and practicing journalists. (shrink)

In an era of fake news, alternative truths and leaked secrets making constant headlines, we are telling stories about ourselves all the time, and we are telling them in so many different ways. From vlogs and blogs to tweets and posts, from photos and gifs to live streams. From instant updates that disappear to rash words that last for ever and data trails that chart every step we take. While people around her shake their heads and mutter bad things about (...) the new levels of day-to-day deceit, Kathleen Wyatt is busy marvelling at how society manages it. How do we do this extraordinary thing - often under the most ordinary of circumstances? How do we convince each other to suspend disbelief? And why do we do it? In this brilliant, wide-ranging study of lies and lying, Wyatt introduces us to a cast of professionals and professional liars - from scientists to investigators, from double agents to journalists, from toddler specialists to a fallen titan of industry - all to help her prove a remarkable thesis: lies hold us together as much as they push us apart and may be vital in a healthy society"--Publisher's description. (shrink)

Two rival accounts of irony claim, respectively, that pretence and echo are independently sufficient to explain central cases. After highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of these accounts, I argue that an account in which both pretence and echo play an essential role better explains these cases and serves to explain peripheral cases as well. I distinguish between “weak” and “strong” hybrid theories, and advocate an “integrated strong hybrid” account in which elements of both pretence and echo are seen as complementary (...) in a unified mechanism. I argue that the allegedly mutually exclusive elements of pretence and echo are in fact complementary aspects enriching a core structure as follows: by pretending to have a perspective/thought F, an ironic speaker U echoes a perspective/thought G. F is merely pretended, perhaps caricaturised or exaggerated, while G is real/possible. (shrink)

Analytic debates about truth are wide-ranging, but certain key themes tend to crop up time and again. The three themes that we will examine in this paper are (i) the nature and behaviour of the ordinary concept of truth, (ii) the meaning of discourse about truth, and (iii) the nature of the property truth. We will start by offering a brief overview of the debates centring on these themes. We will then argue that cross-linguistic experimental philosophy has an indispensable yet (...) underappreciated role to play in all of these debates. Recognising the indispensability of cross-linguistic experimental philosophy should compel philosophers to significantly revise the ways in which they inquire about truth. It should also prompt analytic philosophers more generally to consider whether similar revisions might be necessary elsewhere in the field. (shrink)

As we become more aware of the various problems associated with technologically mediated meat production , we also confront a variety of technologically mediated potential fixes . Rather than comparing bad and good technologies in the context of meat, I want instead to explore the dynamics of the human-animal relationships expressed within specific approaches. This method, I suggest, illustrates the technological aspects of the relationships, which reflect an orientation to the world that mediates human interaction with the environment. It also (...) helps to show that the more we try to take responsibility for those bodies—in terms of knowledge, in terms of energy—the more we require the environment to reflect our conditions and the less tolerant we become of failure. (shrink)

There is a growing body of empirical evidence which shows that infants and non-human primates have the ability to represent the mental states of other agents, i.e. that they possess a Theory of Mind. We will argue that this evidence also suggests that infants and non-human primates possess the concept of truth, which, as we will explain, is good news for primitivists about truth. First, we will offer a brief overview of alethic primitivism, focusing on Jamin Asay’s conceptual version of (...) the view. Next, we will survey relevant work on Theory of Mind which indicates that children younger than two and non-human primates are able to attribute false beliefs. Then, we will bring these false-belief data to bear on Asay’s form of primitivism, arguing that the data support two of the four distinctive theses of this view and offering some remarks about the empirical evaluability of the two remaining theses. We hope that our discussion will help to bridge the gap between psychological and philosophical inquiry and that it will encourage further empirical research on the cognitive significance of the concept of truth for humans and other thinking creatures. (shrink)

Hyperbole is traditionally understood as exaggeration. Instead, in this paper, we shall define it not just in terms of its form, but in terms of its effects and its purpose. Specifically, we characterize its form as a shift of magnitude along a scale of measurement. In terms of its effect, it uses this magnitude shift to make the target property more salient. The purpose of hyperbole is to express with colour and force that the target property is either greater or (...) lesser than expected or desired. This purpose is well suited to hyperbolic expression. This because hyperbole naturally draws a contrast between two points: how things are versus how they were expected to be. We also consider compound figures involving hyperbole. When it combines with other figures hyperbole operates by magnifying the specific effects of the figure it operates on. We shall see that sometimes hyperbole works as an input for irony; and at other times it builds on a metaphor to increase the effects of that metaphor. (shrink)

Compound figures are a rich, and under-explored area for tackling fundamental issues in philosophy of language. This paper explores new ideas about how to explain some features of such figures. We start with an observation from Stern that in ironic-metaphor, metaphor is logically prior to irony in the structure of what is communicated. Call this thesis Logical-MPT. We argue that a speech-act-based explanation of Logical-MPT is to be preferred to a content-based explanation. To create this explanation we draw on Barker’s (...) expressivist speech-act theory, in which speech-acts build on other speech-acts to achieve the desired communicative effects. In particular, we show how Barker’s general ideas explain metaphor as an assertive-act, and irony as a ridiculing-act. We use Barker’s notion of proto-illocutionary-acts to show how metaphorical-acts and ironic-acts can build one on the other. Finally, we show that while an ironic-act can build on a metaphorical-act, a metaphorical-act cannot build on an ironic-act. This restriction on how they can be composed establishes Logical-MPT via a different route. (shrink)

Harmful and dangerous language is frequent in social media, in particular in spaces which are considered anonymous and/or allow free participation. In this paper, we analyse the language in a Telegram channel populated by followers of Donald Trump, in order to identify the ways in which harmful language is used to create a specific narrative in a group of mostly like-minded discussants. Our research has several aims. First, we create an extended taxonomy of potentially harmful language that includes not only (...) hate speech and direct insults, but also more indirect ways of poisoning online discourse, such as divisive speech and the glorification of violence. We apply this taxonomy to a large portion of the corpus. Our data gives empirical evidence for harmful speech such as in/out-group divisive language and the use of codes within certain communities which have not often been investigated before. Second, we compare our manual annotations to several automatic methods of classifying hate speech and offensive language, namely list based and machine learning based approaches. We find that the Telegram data set still poses particular challenges for these automatic methods. Finally, we argue for the value of studying such naturally occurring, coherent data sets for research on online harm and how to address it in linguistics and philosophy. (shrink)

Philosophical views of language have traditionally been focused on notions of truth. This is a reconstructive view in that we try to extract from an utterance in context what the sentence and speaker meaning are. This focus on meaning extraction from word sequences alone, however, is challenged by utterances which combine different types of figures. This paper argues that what appears to be a special case of ironic utterances—ironic metaphorical compounds—sheds light on the requirements for psychological plausibility of a theory (...) of communication and thus presents a different view of communication and language to that dominant in philosophy of language. In the view presented here, the hearer does not extract the speaker’s communicative intention from the sequence of words in the utterance, but from other channels, so as to constrain the inferential space for the sentence and speaker meaning. Specifically, we examine an example of ironic metaphor discussed by Stern. He argues that ironic content is logically dependent on metaphorical content, but makes no claims about how psychologically plausible this is in terms of the processing order. We argue that a straightforward translation of logical order into temporal order makes little sense. The primary sticking point is that without a prior understanding of the speaker’s communicative intentions, it is computationally more challenging to process the sub-component meanings. An alternative solution based on communicative channels leads us to a more psychologically plausible account of the structure of communicative acts and intentions. This provides support for the psychological realism of a richer theory of communicative intent. (shrink)

We think and speak in figures. This is key to our creativity. We re-imagine one thing as another, pretend ourself to be another, do one thing in order to achieve another, or say one thing to mean another. This comes easily because of our abilities both to work out meaning in context and re-purpose words. Figures of speech are tools for this re-purposing. Whether we use metaphor, simile, irony, hyperbole, and litotes individually, or as compound figures, the uses are all (...) rooted in literal meanings. These uses invite us to explore the context to find new meanings, new purposes, beyond the literal. -/- This special issue of Philosophical Studies brings together eight papers on various aspects and applications of figurative speech including: David Hills, Mitch Green, Liz Camp, Ofra Magidor, Larry Horn, Ken Walton, Stephen Barker, and Mihaela Popa-Wyatt. (shrink)

Many Western environmental activist groups and theorists have sounded the call for the Earth’s salvation from the “global environmental crisis.” What is lacking, however, is some reflection on the ramifications of framing the problem globally and on the justifications for particular solutions. This article examines the “ecomessiah” (saviors of the Earth) phenomenon to investigate the impacts of these types of programs. Specifically, we examine the “global environmental ethic” proposed by J. Baird Callicott. His program, presented as an inclusive system that (...) incorporates non-Western belief systems, trades heavily on Western science as an authority and a justification. We contend that his ethic, although well-intentioned, rests on assumptions and uses of science that subvert both non-Western ideologies and non-Western interests rather than revere them. Consequently, the inherent flaws undermine the feel-good one-world rhetoric that he espouses. (shrink)

Our time is marked by a resurgence of hate that threatens to increase oppression. Social media has contributed to this by acting as a medium through which hate speech is spread. How should we model the spread of hate? This article considers two models. First, I consider a simple contagion model. In this model, hate spreads like a virus through a social network. This model, however, fails to capture the fact that people do not acquire hatred from a single infectious (...) contact. Instead, it builds up in a person's beliefs and attitudes through time until the infection reaches a level where the subject themselves becomes a generator of hate speech. Second, to accommodate this, I consider an alternative model known as complex contagion. I argue that not only is a complex contagion model more explanatory and predictive, but it can be used to explain why certain features of social media cause it to be a promoter of hate. I conclude by sketching some mitigation strategies. (shrink)

Contemporary African American and Black British Women Writers: Narrative, Race, Ethics brings together British and American scholars to explore how, in texts by contemporary black women writers in the U. S. and Britain, formal narrative techniques express new understandings of race or stimulate ethical thinking about race in a reader. Taken together, the essays also demonstrate that black women writers from both sides of the Atlantic borrow formal structures and literary techniques from one another to describe the workings of structural (...) racism in the daily lives of black subjects and to provoke readers to think anew about race. Narratology has only recently begun to use race as a category of narrative theory. This collection seeks both to show the ethical effects of narrative form on individual readers and to foster reconceptualizations of narrative theory that account for the workings of race within literature and culture. (shrink)

We provide a new text corpus from the social medium Telegram, which is rich in indirect forms of divisive speech. We scraped all messages from one channel of supporters of Donald Trump, covering a large part of his presidency from late 2016 until January 2021. The discussion among the group members over this long time period includes the spread of disinformation, disparaging of out-group members, and other forms of offensive speech. To encourage research into such practices of poisoning public political (...) discourse, we added automatic annotations of offensive language to all messages. We further added manual annotations of harmful language to a portion of the posts in order to enable the analysis of more implicit forms of online harm. (shrink)

The starting point for this paper is a critical discussion of claims of psychological reality articulated within Borg’s (forth.) minimal semantics and Carpintero’s (2007) character*-semantics. It has been proposed, for independent reasons, that their respective accounts can accommodate, or at least avoid the challenge from psychological evidence. I outline their respective motivations, suggesting various shortcomings in their efforts of preserving the virtues of an uncontaminated semantics in the face of psychological objection (I-II), and try to make the case that, at (...) least for a theory of utterance comprehension, a truth-conditional pragmatic stance is far preferable. An alternative from a relevance-theoretic perspective is offered in terms of mutual adjustment between truth-conditional content and implicature(s), arguing that many “free” pragmatic processes are needed to uncover the truth-conditional content, which can then warrant the expected implicature(s) (III). I finally illustrate the difficulties their accounts have in predicting the correct order of interpretation in cases of ironic metaphor, i.e. metaphor is computed first, as part of truth-conditional content, while irony is inferentially grounded in metaphorical content (IV). (shrink)

Frege’s distinction between force and sense is a central pillar of modern thinking about meaning. This is the idea that a self-standing utterance of a sentence S can be divided into two components. One is the proposition P that S’s linguistic meaning and context associates with it. The other is S’s illocutionary force. The force/sense distinction is associated with another thesis, the embedding principle, that implies that the only content that embeds in compound sentences is propositional content. We argue that (...) both the Force/Sense distinction and the principle of embedding are seriously challenged by figurative language, and irony in particular. We conclude that theorists need to go back to the drawing board about the nature of illocutionary acts. (shrink)

Grim, Mar and St. Denis frame their unusual philosophy book with a number of quotes, two of which seem particularly appropriate. The first, from Plato, illustrates nicely the degree to which the work in the book is part of a long tradition of philosophical modeling. The second, from Picasso, accurately captures the frustration which many readers will feel.

The proliferation of news and information sources has motivated a need to identify those providing legitimate journalism. One temptation is to go the route of such fields as medicine and law, namely to formally professionalize. This gives a clear method for determining who is a member, with an array of associated responsibilities and rewards. We argue that making such a formal move in journalism is a mistake: Journalism does not meet the traditional criteria, and its core ethos is in conflict (...) with the professional mindset. We thus shift the focus from whether the person is journalist to whether the work satisfies the conditions that characterize legitimate journalism. In explaining those conditions we also look at mechanisms for enhancing the power of persons doing journalism, drawing upon lessons from the labor movement. We also consider a self-declaration model while urging increased literacy from all participants in the news gathering and consuming enterprise. (shrink)

This article introduces the special issue on middle-range theory in science and technology studies, providing the background to its production and reviewing different notions of “middle.” It begins with Merton's ideas about middle-range theory as a way of moving beyond the production of either descriptions or theories of everything. Instead of seeing the middle as the space between the theoretical imagination and the detailed depiction of everyday practices, the authors outline three ways of thinking about the middle range: as an (...) adjective, the closest to Merton's conception; as a noun, the liminal place between theories, audiences, and levels; and as a verb, a process, a means of making connections across time, discipline, community, and place. A summary of each of the articles in this special issue is provided, preceding a call for further discussion about the role of case studies and the nature of the middle in STS. (shrink)

It's often said that according to deflationary theories of truth, truth is not a ‘substantial’ property. While this is a fine slogan, it is far from transparent what deflationists mean (or ought to mean) in saying that truth is ‘insubstantial’. Focusing so intently upon the concept of truth and the word ‘true’, I argue, deflationists and their critics have been insufficiently attentive to a host of metaphysical complexities that arise for deflationists in connection with the property of truth. My aim (...) is to correct several misunderstandings as to what deflationists are after here—including some harboured by deflationists themselves—and to offer an account of the commitments about truth's nature that they ought to undertake. In developing this account, I focus particularly upon the issue of what metaphysics of truth a Horwichian minimalist ought to adopt. (shrink)

Debates about the semantics and pragmatics of predicates of personal taste have largely centered on contextualist and relativist proposals. In this paper, I argue in favor of an alternative, absolutist analysis of PPT. Theorists such as Max Kölbel and Peter Lasersohn have argued that we should dismiss absolutism due to its inability to accommodate the possibility of faultless disagreement involving PPT. My aim in the paper is to show how the absolutist can in fact accommodate this possibility by drawing on (...) an account of faultless disagreement that improves upon a recent proposal due to Karl Schafer. In amending Schafer’s proposal, I put forward an empirically informed view of our beliefs regarding matters of personal taste, as well as an account of our assertions concerning such matters. I also argue that absolutists should take disagreement about these matters to be conative, rather than doxastic, in nature. The anticipated result is an independently compelling account of faultless disagreement about matters of personal taste that fits naturally with absolutism. (shrink)