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115Investigating illocutionary monismSynthese 196 (3): 1151-1165. 2019.Suppose I make an utterance, intending it to be a command. You don’t take it to be one. Must one of us be wrong? In other words, must each utterance have, at most, one illocutionary force? Current debates over the constitutive norm of assertion and over illocutionary silencing, tend to assume that the answer is yes—that each utterance must be either an assertion, or a command, or a question, but not more than one of these. While I think that this assumption is intuitive, I will argue in this pap…Read more
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98Testimony and the Constitutive Norm of AssertionInternational Journal of Philosophical Studies 23 (3): 356-375. 2015.I can, given the right conditions, transmit my knowledge to you by telling you some information. If I know the time, and if all goes well, I can bring it about that you know it too. If conditions are right, all I have to do is assert to you what time it is. Paradigmatically, speakers use assertions to transmit what they know to their hearers. Clearly, assertion and testimony are tightly connected. The nature of this connection, however, is not so clear. According to many accounts, assertion has …Read more
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95Mansplaining and Illocutionary ForceFeminist Philosophy Quarterly 6 (4). 2020.In this paper I describe three kinds of mansplaining, “well, actually” mansplaining, straw-mansplaining, and speech act–confusion mansplaining. While these three kinds have much in common, I focus on speech act–confusion mansplaining and offer a speech act theoretic account of what goes wrong when people mansplain in this way. In cases of speech act–confusion mansplaining, the target of the mansplaining is not able to do what she wants with her words. Her conversational contribution is taken to …Read more
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88What Norm of Assertion?Acta Analytica 33 (1): 51-67. 2018.I argue that the debates over which norm constitutes assertion can be abandoned by challenging the three main motivations for a constitutive norm. The first motivation is the alleged analogy between language and games. The second motivation is the intuition that some assertions are worthy of criticism. The third is the discursive responsibilities incurred by asserting. I demonstrate that none of these offer good reasons to believe in a constitutive norm of assertion, as such a norm is understood…Read more
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68Epistemic VulnerabilityInternational Journal of Philosophical Studies 28 (5): 677-691. 2020.In developing her ethics of care, Eva Kittay discusses the vulnerability and voluntarism models of obligation. Kittay uses the vulnerability model to demonstrate that we have some obligations to ca...
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55Just Say ‘No’: Obligations to Voice DisagreementRoyal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 84 117-138. 2018.It is uncontroversial that we sometimes have moral obligations to voice our disagreements, when, for example, the stakes are high and a wrong course of action will be pursued. But might we sometimes also have epistemic obligations to voice disagreements? In this paper, I will argue that we sometimes do. In other words, sometimes, to be behaving as we ought, qua epistemic agents, we must not only disagree with an interlocutor who has voiced some disagreed-with content but must also testify to thi…Read more
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55Intellectual Humility and Empathy by AnalogyTopoi 38 (1): 221-228. 2019.Empathy can be terribly important when we talk to people who are different from ourselves. And it can be terribly important that we talk to people who are different precisely about those things that make us different. If we’re to have productive conversations across differences, then, it seems we must develop empathy with people who are deeply different. But, as Laurie Paul and others point out, it can be impossible to imagine oneself as someone who is deeply different than oneself—something tha…Read more
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47If You Don’t Have Anything Nice to Say, Come Sit By MeSocial Theory and Practice 42 (2): 304-317. 2016.In this paper, I argue that gossip is both an epistemic evil—it can restrict access to information—and an epistemic good—it can be a key resource for knowers. These two faces of gossip can be illustrated when we consider the effects of participating in and being excluded from gossiping groups. Social psychology has begun to study these effects and their results are useful here. Because of these two aspects, I argue, gossip holds a peculiar place in our epistemic economy. It is vicious, and emplo…Read more
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47Intellectual HumilityOxford Bibliographies in Philosophy. 2017.Intellectual humility is a concept in progress—philosophers and psychologists are in the process of defining and coming to understand what intellectual humility is and what place it has in our theories. Most accounts of intellectual humility build from work in virtue epistemology, the study of knowledge as the state that results when agents are epistemically virtuous (or, perhaps, the view that the proper object of study for epistemology is the intellectually virtuous agent). [...]
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43Just Words: On Speech and Hidden Harm, by Mary Kate McGowanMind 130 (518): 680-689. 2021.Just Words: On Speech and Hidden Harm, by McGowanMary Kate. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. Pp. xi + 209.
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39Epistemic care: vulnerability, inquiry, and social epistemologyRoutledge/Taylor & Francis Group. 2023.This book uses the framework of care ethics to articulate a novel theory of our epistemic obligations to one another. It presents an original way to understand our epistemic vulnerabilities, our obligations in education, and our care-duties toward others with whom we stand in epistemically vulnerable relationships. As embodied and socially interdependent knowers, we have obligations to one another that are generated by our ability to care-that is to meet each other's epistemic vulnerabilities. T…Read more
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33Voicing Dissent: The Ethics and Epistemology of Making Disagreement Public (edited book)Routledge. 2018.Disagreement is, for better or worse, pervasive in our society. Not only do we form beliefs that differ from those around us, but increasingly we have platforms and opportunities to voice those disagreements and make them public. In light of the public nature of many of our most important disagreements, a key question emerges: How does public disagreement affect what we know? This volume collects original essays from a number of prominent scholars--including Catherine Elgin, Sanford Goldberg, Je…Read more
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32Illocutionary relativismSynthese 202 (3): 1-18. 2023.In this paper I explain and defend a version of illocutionary pluralism called illocutionary relativism. I use this position to explain Rae Langton’s now-famous example of a woman who is illocutionarily disabled in her attempt to refuse sex. Illocutionary relativism gives us the tools to explain both why the woman refused and why she is illocutionarily disabled. I base my explanation of illocutionary relativism in background literature in speech act theory from Austin and Sbisa. Finally, I close…Read more
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20Some Varieties of Illocutionary PluralismIn Laura Caponetto & Paolo Labinaz (eds.), Sbisà on Speech as Action, Palgrave-macmillan. pp. 2147483647-2147483647. 2023.Marina Sbisà’s remarks on illocutionary pluralism suggest but do not constitute a full-blown theory. In this chapter I discuss two different attempts to build on those remarks. The first, illocutionary relativism, is my own attempt to develop the ideas presented in Sbisà’s remarks. The second, from Marcin Lewiński, differs in important ways. I then briefly compare these two varieties of illocutionary pluralism.
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1Teaching as epistemic careIn Benjamin R. Sherman & Stacey Goguen (eds.), Overcoming Epistemic Injustice: Social and Psychological Perspectives, Rowman & Littlefield International. 2019.
Moscow, Idaho, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Social Epistemology |
Feminist Epistemology |
Feminist Philosophy of Language |
Speech Acts |