Dan Zeman

Many authors writing on slurs think that they are lexically rich, in the sense that their lexical meaning comprises both a descriptive dimension and an expressive/evaluative one, the latter accounting for their derogatory character. However, more fine-grained theories of slurs have recently been proposed, drawing on frameworks from lexical semantics. My main aim in this paper is to compare three such fine-grained rich-lexicon theories—the one put forward by myself in previous work with two similar ones, Croom’s (2011, 2013) and Neufeld’s (2019, 2022). While my primary aim is to underlie the commonalities and differences between the three views, I also aim at showing that the latter views have some issues that are easily avoided in the framework I propose.

In an important paper for the literature on slurs, Robin Brontsema shows that slur-reclamation is a phenomenon that can take more than one form. One aspect underlying this variation is whether the derogatory content of a slur is preserved in reclamation or not. Brontsema (2004) shows that each of the two options is viable, and after discussing the virtues and vices of each of them, concludes that the multifaceted nature of reclamation points towards a pluralistic approach. In this paper, I engage with extant accounts of reclamation and assess how fit they are to capture the two forms of reclamation mentioned above under a unitary theory. I thus consider three of the most well-developed theories of reclamation in the literature: the Echoic View championed by Bianchi (2014), the speech act theoretic account proposed by Anderson (2018) and the general view that slurs are polysemous (Jeshion (2021), [author a]). I show that each of them has problems with accounting for one of the two forms, and is thus unsuitable to be the unitary theory sought after. Although the conclusion is negative, some of the avenues I discuss in relation to each view look promising and thus invite further exploring.

Many natural language expressions (e.g. predicates of taste, aesthetic and moral terms, epistemic modals, “know”, gradable adjectives, etc.) are perspectival, in the sense that they require a perspective (point of view, judge, or subject) to be supplied for their semantic interpretation. Although most of the time such predicates are used with the speaker’s perspective as default, the perspective can be shifted by using them from someone else’s point of view (“exocentrically”) or via explicit “for”-phases, quantifiers or attitude and speech verbs. Another phenomenon of interest is perspectival plurality: the existence of readings of sentences with two or more perspectival terms of the same kind in which appeal to two different perspectives is needed. I call the sum of all these phenomena “perspective-shifting” and in this paper I tackle the issue of what is the best way to handle it in a relativist framework, with the explicit aim of providing a unified relativistic account. To this end, I explore two possibilities: i) an intensional approach, according to which all shifters are treated as perspective-shifting operators; ii) an extensional approach according to which all shifters are treated as variadic operators. Neither of these two accounts, however, has taken perspectival plurality into consideration. Relying on previous work, I argue that the best way to account for the latter is to introduce a sequence of parameters for perspectives. I then discuss how the two approaches mentioned fit in this novel framework.

Gender terms play a crucial role in our lives, in that they allow us to categorize ourselves and others as of a certain gender, which in turn has important social, moral and legal implications. In contemporary philosophy of language, the discussion of the meaning of gender terms has been mostly conducted within ameliorative projects (Haslanger (2000)). Roughly, an ameliorative project investigates what the meaning of words should be, in opposition to a descriptive project which investigates how meanings are. The main idea is that philosophy of language should strive to provide accounts of “loaded” terms that are sensitive to social, moral, and political ideals: e.g., avoid discrimination, bring about more justice etc. In this paper, I propose a novel ameliorative account of gender terms. By focusing entirely on the case of trans people (who didn’t undergo gender-affirming medical procedures), I show that one of the main views in the semantics of natural language expressions (relativism) can be successfully appealed to in order to yield the ameliorative account sought after. However, since an orthodox version of the view is unsuitable, I propose a flexible version of relativism, one that is independently motivated by various considerations in the literature on perspectival expressions such as predicates of taste, moral and aesthetic terms, epistemic modals (e.g., problematic cases of truth-assessment, data about retraction, etc.). I base the flexibility in question on the general notion of the importance of the asserter’s situation, which in application to gender terms is replaced with the notion of the situation of the subject of the gender attribution. With this latter notion in hand, all the problematic cases for the orthodox relativist view (and for the other views on the market) are handled satisfactorily.

Many times, what we say and think proves to be wrong. It might turn out that what we thought to be a comforting remark was, in fact, making things worse. Or that a joke was inappropriate. Or that yelling out loud was rude. Perhaps more importantly, there are plenty of cases in which what we said turns out to be false: we spoke without paying attention, we were misinformed or tricked, or we realize that we made a reasoning mistake. Sometimes we “take back” the assertions we made when we realize they are no longer true. Such speech acts of taking back can be performed in various ways: more formally, as effected in a court of law or when an official speaks to the press, or more informally in our day-by-day interactions. They can also be done explicitly, as in the cases just mentioned, but also implicitly, with our interlocutors taking it for granted that we intend to take something back. These acts of taking back are known as retraction.This introduction sketches the main debates in which retraction has been appealed to, signals the issues the authors think are interesting and worth pursuing, and describes what the contributions to this volume—gathering together for the first time work from the semantics of perspectival expresisons and from Speech Act Theory—amount to.

There is no doubt that slurs harm. They do so by denigrating their targets, by putting them down, by marginalizing them. This is why in many legislations around the world, the use of slurs has been banned or penalized. But should all uses of slurs be banned? Many uses of slurs seem to be non-derogatory and to have beneficial effects. However, such uses are double-faceted: as both armchair reflection and experimental studies have shown, they are able to produce harm as well. In this paper, I approach the broad question of whether all non-derogatory uses of slurs should bebanned. I first present the main uses of slurs that have been considered to be non-derogatory and recent reactions to those. The upshot of this surveyis that uses of slurs that have been considered non-derogatory do, in fact, produce harm. I also flag what various authors have recommended in relation to the issue of banning such uses. Against this background, I engage with a recent view put forward by Alba Moreno Zurita and Eduardo Pérez-Navarro, who urge extreme caution with respect to any uses of slurs, due to their potential to normalize derogation. After presenting their view and their main argument, I raise an objection related to their treatment of neutral uses of slurs. I end with pointing out that, while theirendeavour has merit in that it pushes the discussion further, it raises certain issues – of both an empirical and a normative nature – that need to be addressed.

In the semantic debate about perspectival expressions – predicates of taste, aesthetic and moral terms, epistemic modals, etc. – intuitions about armchair scenarios (e.g., disagreement, retraction) have played a crucial role. More recently, various experimental studies have been conducted, both in relation to disagreement (e.g., Cova, 2012; Foushee and Srinivasan, 2017; Solt, 2018) and retraction (e.g., Knobe and Yalcin, 2014; Khoo, 2018; Beddor and Egan, 2018; Dinges and Zakkou, 2020; Kneer 2021; 2022; Almagro, Bordonaba Plou and Villanueva, 2023; Marques, 2024), with the aim of establishing a more solid foundation for semantic theorizing. Both these types of data have been used to argue for or against certain views (e.g., contextualism, relativism). In this paper, I discern a common thread in the use of these data and argue for two claims: i) which perspective is adopted by those judging the armchair scenarios put forward and by the participants in experimental studies crucially matters for the viability of the intended results; ii) failure to properly attend to this puts recent experimental work at risk. Finally, I consider the case of cross-linguistic disagreement and retraction and assess their importance for the semantic debate about perspectival expressions, as well as for the claim that perspective matters in putting forward the data on which decisions about the right semantic view are made.

Many authors writing on slurs think that they are lexically rich, in the sense that their lexical meaning comprises both a descriptive dimension and an expressive/evaluative one, the latter accounting for their derogatory character. However, more fine-grained theories of slurs have recently been proposed, drawing on frameworks from lexical semantics. My main aim in this paper is to compare three such fine-grained rich-lexicon theories – the one put forward by myself in previous work with two similar ones, Croom’s (2011, 2013) and Neufeld’s (2019, 2022). While my primary aim is to underlie the commonalities and differences between the three views, I also aim at showing that the latter views have some issues that are easily avoided in the framework I propose.

This book offers the first sustained investigation of the phenomenon of retraction - the “taking back” of the conventional or deontic effects of a previous speech act - bringing together issues and solutions from the semantics of perspectival expressions and from the framework of Speech Act theory. It addresses questions that have been at the center of lively debates in philosophy of language and linguistics, but also draws out some of the ramifications these questions have for certain debates in the logic of discourse, philosophy of mind or experimental philosophy. Many times, what we say on a certain occasion proves to be wrong. When we realize this, we sometimes react by retracting what was previously said – formally or informally, explicitly or not. The essays in this volume tackle issues such as what are the necessary and sufficient conditions for successfully performing a retraction, whether there is a solid empirical basis for retraction, whether the phenomenon can be used in favor or against certain semantics views, whether there is a type of retraction that is merely verbal, or what are the ethical implications of retraction. The volume brings together and puts in dialogue renowned researchers on these topics, serving both as a fixture for specialists and as an introduction into the topic of retraction.

Crispin Wright and Filippo Ferrari have accused relativism of not accounting for ‘parity’ – the idea that, when we argue over matters of taste, we take our opponents’ opinions to be ‘as good as ours’ from our own committed perspective. In this paper, I show that (i) explaining parity has not been taken to be a desideratum by relativists and thus they cannot be accused of failing to fulfil a promise; (ii) Wright’s and Ferrari’s reasons for claiming that parity should be a desideratum are unconvincing.

A recent view about disagreement (Karczewska 2021) takes it to consist in the tension arising from proposals and refusals of these proposals to impose certain commitments on the interlocutors in a conversation. This view has been proposed with the aim of solving the problem that “faultless disagreement” – a situation in which two interlocutors are intuited to be both in disagreement and not at fault – poses for contextualism about predicates of taste. In this paper, I consider whether this view applies equally well to disagreements involving aesthetic adjectives. I show, first, that it applies quite straightforwardly to predicates like “beautiful,” which presumably generate faultless disagreement. However, aesthetic adjectives like “beautiful” don’t exhaust the aesthetic sphere. A term like “balanced,” for example, while still perspectival, is said to have a more “objective” feel and usually doesn’t generate faultless disagreement: when the novice and the expert disagree on using such a term, we take it that the expert is right and the novice is wrong. I argue that Karczewska’s view has trouble explaining this difference in the profile of the two types of aesthetic predicates vis-à-vis the generation of disagreement. I also consider possible ways of coping with this problem, but I then reject them and propose a different one that is suitable for most views in the debate.

The argument from retraction (the speech act of “taking back” a previous speech act) has been one of the favorite arguments used by relativists about a variety of natural language expressions (predicates of taste, epistemic modals, moral and aesthetic claims etc.) in support of their view. The main consideration offered is that relativism can, while rival views cannot, account for this phenomenon. For some of those leading the charge, retraction is, in fact, mandatory: a norm of retraction makes it obligatory for an agent to retract a previously unretracted assertion whenever what has been asserted is shown to be currently false. This norm, it is contended, distinguishes (radical) relativism from other views on the market. Recently, several considerations—both from the armchair and based on empirical studies—have been offered to undercut the support retraction has been taken to provide for relativism. In this paper, I engage with both types of considerations and lay out two strategies the radical relativist can follow: weakening the force of the retraction norm and restricting it to certain conditions. I explore how much of the recalcitrant data can be accounted for by each strategy, and show that the best route for the relativist is to adopt a flexible version of the view. Finally, I address the objection from ad-hocness in relation to the flexibility envisaged and put forward a principle based on the notion of the importance of the context of the assertor in a given context of assessment that underlies flexibility.

This book offers a sustained, interdisciplinary examination of taste. It addresses a range of topics that have been at the heart of lively debates in philosophy of language, linguistics, metaphysics, aesthetics, and experimental philosophy. Our everyday lives are suffused with discussions about taste. We are quick to offer familiar platitudes about taste, but we struggle when facing the questions that matter--what taste is, how it is related to subjectivity, what distinguishes good from bad taste, why it is valuable to make and evaluate judgments about matters of taste, and what, exactly, we mean in speaking about these matters. The essays in this volume open up new, intersecting lines of research about these questions that cross traditional disciplinary boundaries. They address the notion of aesthetic taste; connections between taste and the natures of truth, disagreement, assertion, belief, retraction, linguistic context-sensitivity, and the semantics/pragmatics interface; experimental inquiry about taste; and metaphysical questions underlying ongoing discussions about taste. Perspectives on Taste will be of interest to researchers and advanced students working in aesthetics, philosophy of language, linguistics, metaphysics, and experimental philosophy.

This is the editor’s introduction to the book symposium on Jason Stanley’s influential book "How Propaganda Words" (Oxford University Press, 2015). After a few brief remarks situating the book in the landscape of current analytic philosophy, I offer a detailed presentation of each chapter of the book, in order to familiarize the reader with its main tenets and with the author’s argumentative strategy. I flag the issues that the contributors to the symposium discuss, and describe their main points. I end with expressing hope that the symposium will help continue the conversation around ideology and propaganda within analytic philosophy.

In this paper, I explore a range of existent and possible ameliorative semantic theories of gender terms: invariantism, according to which gender terms are not context-sensitive, contextualism, according to which the meaning of gender terms is established in the context of use, and relativism, according to which the meaning of gender terms is established in the context of assessment. I show that none of these views is adequate with respect to the plight of trans people to use their term of choice to self-identify and be referred to accordingly. I then consider an invariantist view based on self-identification and explore some of its challenges.

ABSTRACT In this paper, I present data involving the use of the Romanian slur ‘țigan’, consideration of which leads to the postulation of a sui-generis, irreducible type of use of slurs. This type of use is potentially problematic for extant theories of slurs. In addition, together with other well-established uses, it shows that there is more variation in the use of slurs than previously acknowledged. I explain this variation by construing slurs as polysemous. To implement this idea, I appeal to a rich-lexicon account of polysemy. I show how such a theory can be applied to slurs and discuss several important issues that arise.

In this paper I introduce and develop an approach to tenses and temporal expressions that is a mix between eternalism and temporalism consisting in appeal to ‘variadic operators’. The type of variadic operator I will be concerned with is the expansive variadic operator, which takes as input predicates of a certain adicity and yields new predicates with one additional degree of adicity. Appeal to variadic operators has proven useful in giving the semantics of several types of expressions: adverbs ), prepositional phrases ), relational terms ), etc. The focus of this paper is on tenses and temporal expressions, with the aim of showing how these are treated by appeal to temporal variadic operators. First I define the temporal variadic operator and then show how it can be used to account for simple tensed sentences. I also give a rough sketch of how it can accommodate more complex phenomena like sequence of time, interaction between tenses and temporal adverbials, temporal anaphora, later-than-matrix and double-access readings, etc.

In the recent debate about the semantics of perspectival expressions, disagreement has played a crucial role. In a nutshell, what I call “the challenge from disagreement” is the objection that certain views on the market cannot account for the intuition of disagreement present in ordinary exchanges involving perspectival expressions like “Licorice is tasty./no, it’s not.” Various contextualist answers to this challenge have been proposed, and this has led to a proliferation of notions of disagreement. It is now accepted in the debate that there are many notions of disagreement and that the search for a common, basic notion is misguided. In this paper I attempt to find such a basic notion underneath this diversity. The main aim of the paper is to motivate, forge and defend a notion of “minimal disagreement” that has beneficial effects for the debate over the semantics of perspectival expressions.

In this paper, I engage with a recent contextualist account of gender terms proposed by Díaz-León, E. 2016. “Woman as a Politically Significant Term: A Solution to the Puzzle.” Hypatia 31 : 245–58. Díaz-León’s main aim is to improve both on previous contextualist and non-contextualist views and solve a certain puzzle for feminists. Central to this task is putting forward a view that allows trans women who did not undergo gender-affirming medical procedures to use the gender terms of their choice to self-identify. My goal is to investigate Díaz-León’s proposal, point out several shortcomings of the view and discuss possible replies on her part.

This is a reply to Tomas Marvan's paper "Obstacles to the Relativity of Truth", published in the same issue, in which I attempt to provide an interpretation of the relativist schema "x is true relative to y" by understanding x as ranging over propositions and y as ranging over circumstances of evaluation, as in the familiar Kaplanian picture of semantics. I then answer some of Marvan's worries and reject certain views considered relativist on the basis that they are, in fact, different views in disguise.