Andrés García Orozco

Grammatical gender languages mark gender on every noun and agreement target such as adjectives and pronouns. While the norm for personal nouns provides that the term’s grammatical gender corresponds to its referent’s gender, in certain circumstances, a discrepancy arises between the term and its referent’s gender. Taking Italian as a case study, I identify four such circumstances: reference to non-binary people, women and non-binary professionals in traditionally male-dominated fields, generic or unknown individuals and mixed-gender groups. Among these, I distinguish between usage discrepancies, which depend on how speakers (mis)use language, and structural discrepancies, which depend on structural features of the language. The latter is the case for reference to non-binary people as Italian lacks a grammatical gender corresponding to non-binary gender identities. I focus on this case and argue that it conveys a problematic representation of gender, giving rise to a specific instance of hermeneutical injustice: structural discrepancies depend on a gap in collective interpretative resources (namely, the lack of an appropriate grammatical gender) and put non-binary people at an unfair disadvantage in making sense of their social experiences. As I show, the effects of structural discrepancies possess all the hallmarks of hermeneutical injustice.

The authors survey some debates about the nature and structure of physical theories and about the connections between our physical theories and naturalized metaphysics. The discussion is organized around an “ideal view” of physical theories and criticisms that can be raised against it. This view includes controversial commitments regarding the best analysis of physical modalities and intertheory relations. The authors consider the case in favor of taking laws as the primary modal notion, discussing objections related to alleged violations of the laws, the apparent need to appeal to causality, and the status of probability. The “ideal view” includes a commitment that fundamental physical theories are explanatorily sufficient. The authors discuss several challenges to recovering the manifest image from fundamental physics, along with a distinct challenge to reductionism based on acknowledging the contributions of less fundamental theories in physical explanations.

There are many- not just one- periodic laws in chemistry. These laws correspond to non-accidental regularity relations about physical and chemical properties of (sets of) chemical elements. I support this by showing how these regularity relations can be understood from the perspective of a philosophical analysis of laws. Specifically, I show that these relations instantiate standard features associated with laws; they can be spelled out in terms of two standard accounts of laws; and, they can coherently figure in debates about the reality of laws as plausible candidates of ceteris paribus laws.

This paper discusses a wide range of anti-naturalistic argument from reason due to Balfour, Haldane, Joad, Lewis, Taylor, Moreland, Plantinga, Reppert, and Hasker. I argue that none of these arguments poses a serious challenge to naturalists who are identity theorists. Further, I argue that some of these arguments do not even pose prima facie plausible challenges to naturalism. In the concluding part of my discussion, I draw attention to some distinctive differences between Hasker’s anti-naturalistic arguments and the other anti-naturalistic arguments mentioned above.