Eduardo Pérez-Navarro

Although slurs are conventionally defined as derogatory words, it has been widely noted that not all of their occurrences are derogatory. This may lead us to think that there are “innocent” occurrences of slurs, i.e., occurrences of slurs that are not harmful in any sense. The aim of this paper is to challenge this assumption. Our thesis is that slurs are always potentially harmful, even if some of their occurrences are nonderogatory. Our argument is the following. Derogatory occurrences of slurs are not characterized by their sharing any specific linguistic form; instead, they are those that take place in what we call uncontrolled contexts, that is, contexts in which we do not have enough knowledge of our audience to predict what the uptake of the utterance will be. Slurs uttered in controlled contexts, by contrast, may lack derogatory character. However, although the kind of context at which the utterance of a slur takes place can make it nonderogatory, it cannot completely deprive it of its harmful potential. Utterances of slurs in controlled contexts still contribute to normalizing their utterances in uncontrolled contexts, which makes nonderogatory occurrences of slurs potentially harmful too.

As part of her argument that relativism and contextualism are nothing but notational variants of each other, Stojanovic holds that contextualism is flexible enough to achieve whatever relativism might do if the matter is what truth-value is assigned to each pair of sentence and context. In this paper, I reply to this statement by arguing that contextualism cannot be made as flexible as relativism without in fact turning it into a version of relativism. The key to my response to Stojanovic is that, while relativism relativizes utterance truth, contextualism does not, so parameters that are not fixed at the context of utterance will be accessible for the relativist, but not for the contextualist. Although the relativity of utterance truth follows as soon as propositional truth is relativized to contexts of assessment, as the relativist does, it is easy to lose sight of this fact if we identify the context of assessment with the assessor’s context. Hence, the point of this paper is that the difference between relativism and contextualism is not one as to whose parameters play a role in determining the sentence’s truth-value. If it were, contextualism could indeed be made just as flexible as relativism.

A central debate within the philosophy of psychiatry revolves around the nature of mental disorders. Positions in this debate have traditionally been divided into two distinct camps: naturalism and normativism. Naturalist views identify the presence of mental disorders with a set of value-free facts, while normativist views consider mental disorders as irreducibly normative and thus dependent on certain social norms or values. The naturalist camp presents some general objections against normativism that we could, following Miller Tate and Davies, group into three problems. The first two revolve around absurd consequences that are thought to result from normativism’s alleged commitment to an unwanted relativism: first, the idea that a mental disorder could be cured with a change in the attitudes of the community where the subject is immersed, and second, the idea that certain repugnant past diagnoses should be “true back then”. In the third place, it is considered that normativism falls into a vicious circle when trying to explain what allows us to justify a medical intervention based on the identification of a mental disorder. The aim of this paper is to argue that a variety of normativism articulated in terms of MacFarlane’s assessor relativism could avoid the aforementioned problems while retaining what we take to be its central virtue: its accounting for the contingency of our attributions of mental disorder.

As part of her argument that relativism and contextualism are nothing but notational variants of each other, Stojanovic holds that contextualism is flexible enough to achieve whatever relativism might do if the matter is what truth-value is assigned to each pair of sentence and context. In this paper, I reply to this statement by arguing that contextualism cannot be made as flexible as relativism without in fact turning it into a version of relativism. The key to my response to Stojanovic is that, while relativism relativizes utterance truth, contextualism does not, so parameters that are not fixed at the context of utterance will be accessible for the relativist, but not for the contextualist. Although the relativity of utterance truth follows as soon as propositional truth is relativized to contexts of assessment, as the relativist does, it is easy to lose sight of this fact if we identify the context of assessment with the assessor’s context. Hence, the point of this paper is that the difference between relativism and contextualism is not one as to whose parameters play a role in determining the sentence’s truth-value. If it were, contextualism could indeed be made just as flexible as relativism.

The aim of this paper is to explore what the different answers that might be given to the question about the role of perspective in language – indexical contextualism, nonindexical contextualism, and assessor relativism – amount to, using Perry’s work about thought without designation and thought without representation as our point of departure. In particular, I argue that Perry’s discussion of the possibility of making explicit the parameter on which the truth-value of a certain sentence depends provides us with a useful criterion to distinguish between indexical and nonindexical contextualism. Then, I show that some of MacFarlane’s insights can be seen as a continuation of Perry’s discussion. The most salient outcome of the comparison between Perry’s and MacFarlane’s frameworks will be the distinction between the superficial perspectivality that can be found in sentences like “It is raining” and the irreducible perspectivality that we find in sentences like “Licorice is tasty.” The apparently paradoxical conclusion will be that language is truly perspectival precisely when it does not encode a perspective.

The aim of this paper is to defend moral relativism from the accusation that it would make it irrational to classify past changes in public opinion as instances of moral progress, for they would constitute an improvement only from our current point of view. The argument is this. For our assessment of a change in public opinion as an instance of moral progress to be rational, we need to take the moral claims made before the change to be false simpliciter while being open to the possibility that we ourselves change our minds at some point. These two things can be made compatible if we construe moral relativism as taking the truth of moral claims to be relative to the context of assessment. Thus understood, moral relativism is in fact the only view that makes room for talk of moral progress, as the rest of candidate positions make it irrational.

The particular behavior exhibited by sentences featuring predicates of personal taste such as “tasty” may drive us to claim that their truth depends on the context of assessment, as MacFarlane does. MacFarlane considers two ways in which the truth of a sentence can depend on the context of assessment. On the one hand, we can say that the sentence expresses a proposition whose truth-value depends on the context of assessment. This is MacFarlane’s position, which he calls “truth relativism” and, following Weatherson, I rebrand as “nonindexical relativism”. On the other hand, we can say that what proposition a sentence expresses depends on the context of assessment. MacFarlane calls this position “content relativism” and rejects it on the grounds that it leads to implausible readings of certain sentences and is unable to account for the speaker’s authority over the content of her assertions. In this paper, I too argue against content relativism, which, again following Weatherson, I rebrand as “indexical relativism”. However, my arguments against the theory are different from MacFarlane’s, which I prove unsound. In particular, I show that any version of indexical relativism will be unable to account for at least one of the phenomena that have been standardly used to motivate nonindexical relativism—faultless disagreement and retraction—in most of the ways in which it has been proposed to understand them.

A popular accusation against moral relativism is that it goes too far in its vindication of tolerance. The idea behind accusations like this can be summarized in the slogan, frequently attributed to relativism, that “anything goes”. The aim of this paper is to defend moral relativism from the accusation that it is an “anything goes” view; from the accusation that it forces us to suspend our judgment in cases in which we do not think we should even be allowed to. In the end, relativism is not an “anything goes” view because it is not a view about what goes, but about the way things go—about what goes on when we say that something is morally right or wrong. There is indeed a view, sometimes called “relativism”, that forces us to suspend our judgment about practices that do not allow for such comfort, but it is not so much moral relativism as moral contextualism. Apparently, though, the most salient alternative to “anything goes” views such as contextualism is not moral relativism. It is moral objectivism, according to which there is a fact of the matter about moral issues. However, I show that moral objectivism too ends up being an “anything goes” view unless the objectivist takes herself to be endowed with “God’s point of view”, which I prove troublesome.

One of the most pressing issues in contemporary semantics is whether propositions are structured entities that should be individuated in terms of their components or, contrarily, they lack structure and should be individuated in terms of their inferential relations. Another one is whether propositions should always contain all the information that is needed to deem them true or false—whether they should always be Fregean propositions. The latter debate might seem to presuppose a certain position in the former. However, it is the first aim of this paper to argue that the two debates are orthogonal. Moreover, we will use Frege’s thoughts as an example of what we would contemporarily call ‘propositions’ that, though trivially Fregean, lack structure. Since it is not uncontroversial that Frege’s thoughts are unstructured, it is the second aim of this paper to show that it follows from Frege’s writings that they are.

The expressivist account of knowledge attributions, while claiming that these attributions are nonfactual, also typically holds that they retain a factual component. This factual component involves the attribution of a belief. The aim of this work is to show that considerations analogous to those motivating an expressivist account of knowledge attributions can be applied to belief attributions. As a consequence, we claim that expressivists should not treat the so-called factual component as such. The phenomenon we focus on to claim that belief attributions are non-factual is that of normative doxastic disagreement. We show through several examples that this kind of disagreement is analogous to that of the epistemic kind. The result will be a doxastic expressivism. Finally, we answer some objections that our doxastic expressivism could seem to face.