Claudia Bianchi

Mirabile et al. (2024) provide evidence that property valence—i.e., the perceived dangerousness of the ascribed properties—affects the endorsement of generics, an effect we did not observe (Cella et al., 2022). To address this difference, Mirabile et al. re-analyzed our Study 3a data, including the responses from a sample of participants we excluded, questioning the rationale for their exclusion. They further used a Bayesian framework and suggested that the frequentist models we used cannot provide stable estimates for the parameters. This commentary addresses Mirabile et al.’s concerns regarding our methodology. We first discuss our recruitment for Study 3a; we then focus on concerns about our statistical models.

In discussing figurative speech, Lepore and Stone argue that metaphorical interpretation involves a process of _perspective taking_: metaphor invites us to organize our thinking about something through an analogical correspondence with something it is not. According to them, the same applies to slurs: some words come with an invitation to take a certain perspective, and uses of slurs are associated with ways of thinking about their targets that can harm people. My aim is to critically evaluate such a proposal, within a speech-acts framework. In the recent literature on hate speech, utterances containing slurs are conceived as speech acts in two distinct senses: 1. as perlocutionary acts that _cause_ harm to their targets; 2. as illocutionary acts that _constitute_ harm towards their targets. I will claim that Lepore and Stone’s proposal can be understood both in perlocutionary and illocutionary terms, and argue in favor of an illocutionary approach.

The debate about the determination of the illocutionary force of a speech act revolves around the notion of uptake and the role played by the audience: many scholars consider the hearer’s recognition of the force of the locution a necessary condition for the performance of an illocution. A variety of theories has been put forward. According to Langton (Philosophy and Public Affairs 22: 293–330, 1993), the hearer’s uptake determines whether a successful act has been performed. According to Kukla (Hypatia 29(2): 440–457, 2014), the hearer’s uptake constitutes the nature of the act performed. According to McDonald (The Philosophical Quarterly 72(4), 918–939, 2022), the illocutionary force of a speech act is the result of a process of negotiation between hearer and speaker. Drawing on the theoretical tools provided by Marina Sbisà’s work, I will show how the theories giving the audience a central role in fixing the illocutionary force of a speech act fall short. The topic proves relevant not only for theoretical reasons, but also for social and political ones. In particular, it has a bearing on debates about pragmatic phenomena of illocutionary distortion such as discursive injustice and silencing, where marginalized speakers have trouble performing particular speech acts they are entitled to perform.

Generics (e.g., “Ravens are black”) express generalizations about categories or their members. Previous research found that generics about animals are interpreted as broadly true of members of a kind, yet also accepted based on minimal evidence. This asymmetry is important for suggesting a mechanism by which unfounded generalizations may flourish; yet, little is known whether this finding extends to generics about groups of people (heretofore, “social generics”). Accordingly, in four preregistered studies (n = 665), we tested for an inferential asymmetry for generics regarding novel groups of animals versus people. Participants were randomly assigned to either an Implied Prevalence task (given a generic, asked to estimate the prevalence of a property) or a Truth-Conditions task (given prevalence information, asked whether a generic was true or false). A generic asymmetry was found in both domains, at equivalent levels. The asymmetry also extended to properties varying in valence (dangerous and neutral). Finally, there were differences as a function of property valence in the Implied Prevalence task and a small but consistent interaction between domain and prevalence in the Truth-Conditions task. We discuss the implications of these results for the semantics of generics, theoretical accounts of the asymmetry, and the relation between generics and stereotyping.

In this paper I characterize an unexplored category of what I call _unfinished speech acts_ (USA), intentionally designed by the speaker as incomplete, and intended to be finalised by the hearer. The speaker relies on the hearer’s contribution because she is willing to minimize conversational risk regarding a certain implicit content or a certain indirect speech act. I focus on three paradigm cases: insinuations, polite novel (as opposed to conventionalized) indirect speech acts, and flirting. I sketch a general characterization of USAs, and underline several important dissimilarities between USAs and standard implicatures and conventionalized indirect speech acts. In closing, I gesture at ways the notion of USA could clarify recent philosophical debates, from both a theoretical and a socially engaged point of view: my proposal elucidates how explicit and implicit contents manage to enter the conversational context and, more generally, how speech acts are successfully performed – with an obvious impact on how we conceptualize both the speaker’s and the audience’s conversational _responsibility_.

We investigate experimentally whether the perceived offensiveness of slurs survives when they are reported, by comparing Italian slurs and insults in base utterances (Y is an S), direct speech (X said: “Y is an S”), mixed quotation (X said that Y is “an S”), and indirect speech (X said that Y is an S). For all strategies, reporting decreases the perceived offensiveness without removing it. For slurs, but not insults, indirect speech is perceived as more offensive than direct speech. Our hypothesis is that, because slurs constitute hate speech, speakers employ quotation marks to signal their dissociation from slur use.

John Austin (1911-1960) è stato uno dei filosofi britannici più influenti del suo tempo, per il rigore del pensiero, la personalità straordinaria e il metodo filosofico innovativo. A parere di John Searle Austin era molto amato e molto odiato dai contemporanei – disorientati da un pensiero che sembrava distruggere più che costruire, sfidare l'ortodossia della filosofia tradizionale ma anche dell'allora imperante empirismo logico, senza sostituirvi nessuna confortante nuova ortodossia. L'opera di Austin è tuttavia oggi poco conosciuta e gli elementi di novità della sua riflessione non sufficientemente apprezzati. Costituiscono un'eccezione due risultati, universalmente riconosciuti e celebrati: da un lato la tecnica di analisi filosofica – quella versione della "filosofia linguistica" praticata da Austin con la pazienza, il rigore e il talento di un entomologo; dall'altro la teoria degli atti linguistici. Austin viene ricordato soprattutto per aver evidenziato la dimensione performativa che permea ogni nostro proferimento: con uno slogan diventato famoso, ogni dire è anche un fare. Una tesi con ripercussioni in aree di ricerca molto diverse, dalla filosofia del linguaggio all'etica, dalla filosofia politica al diritto, dalla linguistica alla filosofia femminista. Ci concentreremo qui sui contributi di Austin alla filosofia del linguaggio, ma faremo cenni anche estesi ai suoi contributi in epistemologia e teoria dell'azione, nonché al vivace dibattito che a partire dalla teoria degli atti linguistici si è sviluppato negli anni '60 e '70. Un dibattito che è tornato ad accendersi in tempi recentissimi nelle discussioni su libertà di espressione e censura.

In recent times, phenomena of conversational asymmetry have become a lively object of study for linguists, philosophers of language and moral philosophers—under various labels: illocutionary disablement and silencing, discursive injustice :440–457, 2014; Lance and Kukla in Ethics 123:456–478, 2013), illocutionary distortion. The common idea is that members of underprivileged groups sometimes have trouble performing particular speech acts that they are entitled to perform: in certain contexts, their performative potential is somehow undermined, and their capacity to do things with words is distorted or even annulled. In this paper I will assess this idea, focusing on Rebecca Kukla’s and Rae Langton’s accounts; in particular, I will criticize the role the notion of uptake plays in their accounts, and claim that it may ultimately undermine the very idea of discursive injustice. While, according to Kukla and Langton, members of disadvantaged groups are victims of a kind of uptake failure, leading to illocutionary disablement and even silencing, in the account I present they are victims of a kind of communicative disablement. My overall aim is to develop a notion of discursive injustice that is more plausible and more effective for our broader purposes of criticising the structures of power and oppression.

According to Mitchell Green, speech act theory traditionally idealizes away from crucial aspects of conversational contexts, including those in which the speaker’s social position affects the possibility of her performing certain speech acts. In recent times, asymmetries in communicative situations have become a lively object of study for linguists, philosophers of language and moral philosophers: several scholars view hate speech itself in terms of speech acts, namely acts of subordination. The aim of this paper is to address one of the main objections to accounts of hate speech in terms of illocutionary speech acts, that is the Authority Problem. While the social role of the speaker is the focus of several approaches, the social role of the audience has too often been neglected. The author will show that not only must the speaker have a certain kind of standing or social position in order to perform speech acts of subordination, but also the audience must typically have a certain kind of standing or social position in order to either license or object to the speaker’s authority, and her acts of subordination.

Derogatory epithets are terms such as “nigger” and “faggot” targeting individuals and groups of individuals on the basis of race, nationality, religion, gender or sexual orientation. There is no consensus on the best treatment of derogatory epithets. The aim of my paper is to evaluate a proposal recently put forward by Rae Langton, the speech acts account. Assessing SAA is far from an easy task, since the proposal is little more than an outline, deeply intertwined with Langton’s general view on hate speech and pornography. My goal is first of all to disentangle a coherent account from Langton’s observations; second, I will raise and partially address some key objections against it. I will argue that, although SAA gives us significant insights into a number of phenomena, it is in need of a clearer formulation and further investigation.

Drawing on Austin’s speech act theory, many influential scholars view hate speech in terms of speech acts, namely acts of subordination (MacKinnon 1987; Langton 1993, 2012, 2014; Hornsby and Langton 1998; McGowan 2003, 2004; Kukla and Lance 2009; Langton, Haslanger and Anderson 2012; Maitra 2012; Kukla 2014). Austin’s distinction between illocutionary and perlocutionary acts offers a way to set apart speech that constitutes subordination, and speech that merely causes subordination. The aim of my paper is to address the main objection to accounts of hate speech in terms of illocutionary speech acts, that is the Authority Problem. In particular I will claim that what is missing from previous proposals is attention to the broader social context in which ordinary instances of hate speech are embedded, and in particular, attention to the social status of both the speaker and the audience. While the social position of the speaker has been examined by several approaches, the social position of the audience has too often been neglected. I will show that not only must the speaker have a certain kind of standing or social position in order to perform speech acts of subordination, but also the audience must have a certain kind of standing or social position in order to either license or object to the speaker’s authority, and her acts of subordination.

Slurs are derogatory terms targeting individuals and groups of individuals on the basis of race, nationality, religion, gender or sexual orientation. The aim of my paper is to propose an account of appropriated uses of slurs – i.e. uses by targeted groups of their own slurs for non-derogatory purposes, as in the appropriation of ‘nigger’ by the African-American community, or the appropriation of ‘queer’ by the homosexual community. In my proposal appropriated uses are conceived as echoic, in Relevance Theory terms: in-groups echo derogatory uses in ways and contexts that make manifest the dissociation from the offensive contents. I will show that the echoic strategy has interesting advantages over alternative theories, and especially over Anderson and Lepore’s deflationary strategy.

Epistemological contextualism and semantic contextualism are two distinct but closely entangled projects in contemporary philosophy. According to epistemological contextualism, our knowledge attributions are context-sensitive. That is, the truth-conditions of knowledge ascribing sentences – sentences of the form of (1) S knows that p - vary depending on the context in which they are uttered. Contextualism admits the legitimacy of several epistemic standards that vary with the context of use of (1); it might be right to claim – for the same cognitive subject S and the same proposition p – that (1) is true in one context, and false in another. The epistemological contextualist thesis is grounded in a semantic claim about the context-sensitivity of the predicate “know”: the semantic thesisis that a sentence of the form (1) does not express a complete proposition. Different utterances of (1) can, in different contexts, express different propositions: we must add in information about the context in order to determine the proposition expressed by (1). Many scholars have tried to spell out the semantic contextualist thesis on which epistemological contextualism is grounded. Our general aim in this paper is to evaluate the plausibility of a project that takes the opposite starting point, that is establishing the semantic contextualist thesis on the epistemological one. According to semantic contextualism, virtually no sentences of a naturallanguage express complete propositions – meaning underdetermines truth conditions. In our paper, instead of assuming the traditional view of meaning in terms of truth conditions, we suggest that a theory of meaning as justification may shed new light on the contextualist approach. We thus show how the notion of justification can be contextualized, arguing that our attempt provides an interesting and quite straightforward way of contextualizing meaning.

The aim of this paper is to evaluate which context determines the illocutionary force of written or recorded utterances—those involved in written texts, films and images, conceived as recordings that can be seen or heard in different occasions. More precisely, my paper deals with the “metaphysical” or constitutive role of context—as opposed to its epistemic or evidential role: my goal is to determine which context is semantically relevant in order to fix the illocutionary force of a speech act, as distinct from the information the addressee uses to ascertain the semantically relevant context. In particular I will try to assess two different perspectives on this problem, a Conventionalist Perspective and an Intentionalist Perspective. Drawing on the literature on indexicals in written texts and recorded messages, I will argue in favor of the Intentionalist Perspective: the relevant context is the one intended by the speaker. Bringing intentions into the picture, however, requires qualification; in particular, I will distinguish my Weak Intentionalist proposal from a Strong Intentionalist one. I will show that the Weak Intentionalist Perspective is flexible enough to deal with cases of delayed communication, but not so unrestricted as to yield counter-intuitive consequences.

J. L. Austin was one of the more influential British philosophers of his time, due to his rigorous thought, extraordinary personality, and innovative philosophical method. According to John Searle, he was both passionately loved and hated by his contemporaries. Like Socrates, he seemed to destroy all philosophical orthodoxy without presenting an alternative, equally comforting, orthodoxy. Austin is best known for two major contributions to contemporary philosophy: first, his ‘linguistic phenomenology’, a peculiar method of philosophical analysis of the concepts and ways of expression of everyday language; and second, speech act theory, the idea that every use of language carries a performative dimension (in the well-known slogan, “to say something is to do something”). Speech act theory has had consequences and import in research fields as diverse as philosophy of language, ethics, political philosophy, philosophy of law, linguistics, artificial intelligence and feminist philosophy. This article describes Austin’s linguistic method and his speech act theory, and it describes the original contributions he made to epistemology and philosophy of action. It closes by focusing on two main developments of speech act theory─the dispute between conventionalism and intentionalism, and the debate on free speech, pornography, and censorship.

In the last twenty years, recorded messages and written notes have become a significant test and an intriguing puzzle for the semantics of indexical expressions (see Smith 1989, Predelli 1996, 1998a,1998b, 2002, Corazza et al. 2002, Romdenh-Romluc 2002). In particular, the intention-based approach proposed by Stefano Predelli has proven to bear interesting relations to several major questions in philosophy of language. In a recent paper (Saul 2006), Jennifer Saul draws on the literature on indexicals and recorded messages in order to criticize Rae Langton's claim that works of pornography can be understood as illocutionary acts – in particular acts of subordinating women or acts of silencing women. Saul argues that it does not make sense to understand works of pornography as speech acts, because only utterances in contexts can be speech acts. More precisely, works of pornography such as a film may be seen as recordings that can be used in many different contexts – exactly like a written note or an answering machine message. According to Saul, bringing contexts into the picture undermines Langton's radical thesis – which must be reformulated in much weaker terms. In this paper, I accept Saul's claim that only utterances in contexts can be speech acts, and that therefore only works of pornography in contexts may be seen as illocutionary acts of silencing women. I will, nonetheless, show that Saul's reformulation doesn't undermine Langton's thesis. To this aim, I will use the distinction Predelli proposes in order to account for the semantic behaviour of indexical expressions in recorded messages – namely the distinction between context of utterance and context of interpretation.