Bianca Cepollaro

In this paper, I bring attention to how intersectionality affects reclamation—something that is hardly explored in the social philosophy of language. The reclamation of slurs is the linguistic practice whereby speakers— typically members of the target group—employ these (otherwise derogatory) terms to express pride, foster camaraderie, manifest solidarity, fight discrimination, etc. Whether and how reclamation achieves such results is an open question, vividly discussed within academia and in the public debate. Intersectionality is the theory according to which various axes of oppression (e.g., ethnicity, class, gender, etc.) interact in a way that creates distinctive kinds of discrimination—so, for instance, white and Black women experience sexism in deeply different ways. Taking intersectionality into account when assessing reclamation means, among other things, that we cannot investigate whether and how reclamation is beneficial or detrimental without relativizing the inquiry to intersectionally different segments of the targeted group. In this work, I consider the reclamation of “slut” within SlutWalks and the intersectional concerns that it raised—roughly, the worry that the reclamation of “slut” excludes Black women and thus betrays feminism’s globalist values. I distinguish the empirical and normative questions that arise from the intersectional worry and argue that it is hardly possible to assess the latter, if the former are not settled first. I thus turn to the existing experimental studies and illustrate the ways in which they have failed to take intersectionality into account. I conclude that future experiments should adopt a more critical stance in assessing whether their research questions require an intersectional stance and interpret their findings accordingly.

Over the past few years, there has been much debate about how autistic people should be described and labeled. Two main tendencies have emerged in this discussion, usually known as the person-first approach and the identity-first approach. While the former proposes to talk about ‘person(s) with autism’, the latter claims that ‘autistic person’ is more adequate. We first discuss person-first and identity-first approaches along with the reasons that have been offered for embracing one or the other. Then we focus on the consequences that both approaches entail: first, the conception of autism as a condition, along with metaphysical conceptions of self and identity; second, linguistic emancipatory possibilities, such as reclamation. We argue that these two approaches ultimately promote a different stance on autism as a condition and that while the reclamation of ‘autistic’ is more clearly aligned with the identity-first view, the person-first approach is not entirely incompatible with some reclamation projects.

ABSTRACT A widespread thesis in contemporary philosophy of language is that certain speech constitutes, rather than merely causes, harm. McGowan develops a prescriptive account of harm constitution, according to which harm-constituting speech enacts norms that prescribe harm. Ordinary verbal bigotry, she claims, is harmful in this sense. We submit that the norms enacted by ordinary racist (or otherwise bigoted) utterances are not prescriptive. In our view, ordinary verbal bigotry enacts ‘non-neutrally’ permissive norms rendering harmful behaviours locally permitted—and indeed preferred over non-harmful options. We conclude by arguing that, although ordinary verbal bigotry enacts non-prescriptive norms, it can still constitute harm.

In this paper I spell out the conditions for a uniform analysis of thick terms and slurs, presented in Cepollaro and Stojanovic (2016). Our claim is that thick terms and slurs convey evaluations via presupposition and represent a device through which language implicitly conveys linguistically encoded evaluations. I introduce the presuppositional account (section 2) and elaborate on the conditions that need to be fulfilled for slurs and thick terms to be analyzed along similar lines (section 3) and I discuss the predictions that this approach offers about the issues of reference and extension (section 4). I conclude with some considerations about the role and functions of slurs and thick terms with respect to moral systems (section 5).

Counterspeech is communication that tries to counteract potential harm brought about by other speech. Theoretical interest in counterspeech partly derives from a libertarian ideal – as captured in the claim that the solution to bad speech is more speech – and partly from a recognition that well-meaning attempts to counteract harm through speech can easily misfire or backfire. Here we survey recent work on the question of what makes counterspeech effective at remedying or preventing harm, in those cases where it is effective, as well as work investigating when and why there is a duty to engage in counterspeech. We suggest that the most fruitful area for philosophical inquiry on this topic, currently, relates to the questions about efficacy. Specifically, we argue that there is a need for better frameworks for conceptualizing the efficacy of counterspeech. Philosophers have collaborative work to do, alongside social scientists, in developing these frameworks.

In this paper we discuss two issues addressed by Stanley in How Propaganda Works: the status of slurs (Section 1) and the notion of positive propaganda (Section 2). In particular, in Section 1 we argue contra Stanley that code words like ‘welfare’ are crucially different from slurs in that the association between the lexical item and an additional social meaning is not as systematic as it is for slurs. In this sense, slurs bring about a special kind of propagandistic effect, even if it typically concerns informal contexts rather than public debates. In Section 2, we consider positive propaganda and its relation to emotional effects. For Stanley, positive propaganda relies on the production of emotional effects, feature which risks to erode rational debates even if there is a good purpose behind. Instead, we argue that positive propaganda can work with no appeal to emotions. To this end, we focus on the use of ‘she’ as the default personal pronoun in academic writing and suggest that this measure can count as positive propaganda which rather than eroding rational debates by relying on emotional effects, closely resembles affirmative action aimed at counterbalance a pre-existing form of injustice and inequality.

In this paper, we identify and examine an overlooked strategy to counter bigoted speech on the spot. Such a strategy we call ‘bending’. To ‘bend’, in our sense, is to deliberately give a distorted response to a speaker’s harmful move – precisely, an ameliorative response, which may turn that move into a different, less harmful, contribution. To substantiate our proposal, we distinguish two ideas of uptake – interpretation and response – and argue for the general claim that a distorted response on the hearer’s part may end up transforming a speaker’s contribution. Patterns of distortion have been analyzed in the literature as unjustly undermining speakers’ agency and exacerbating oppression. Our analysis shows that, under certain circumstances, distortion can be employed to derail bigoted speech and thus serve the purposes of social justice. We close by discussing the virtues and limits of bending vis-à-vis a different, much-discussed, counterspeech strategy, i.e. ‘blocking’ (Langton 2018).