•  44
    Epistemic Virtues Versus Ethical Values in the Financial Services Sector
    Journal of Business Ethics 155 (1): 17-27. 2019.
    In his important recent book, Ethics and the Global Financial Crisis: Why Incompetence is Worse than Greed, Boudewijn de Bruin argues that a key element of the global financial crisis of 2007–2008 was a failure of epistemic virtue. To improve matters, then, de Bruin argues we need to focus on the acquisition and exercise of epistemic virtues, rather than to focus on a more ethical culture for banking per se. Whilst this is an interesting suggestion and it is indeed very plausible that an increas…Read more
  •  10
    This chapter contains sections titled: What are the Constraints on Formal Representations? What is the Relationship between a Natural Language Sentence and its Formal Representation?
  •  15
    Reviews (review)
    Mind and Language 18 (5). 2003.
    Books reviewed in this article: Michael Tye, Consciousness, Color and Content J. C. King, Complex Demonstratives: A Quantificational Account.
  •  171
    Questions under discussion and the semantics/pragmatics divide
    Philosophical Quarterly 69 (275): 418-426. 2019.
    The ‘question under discussion’ (or ‘QUD’) framework is a pragmatic framework that draws on work in the semantics of questions to provide an appealing account of a range of pragmatic phenomena, including the use of prosodic focus in English and restrictions on acceptable discourse moves (Roberts 1996). More recently, however, a number of proposals have attempted to use the framework to help to settle issues at the semantics/pragmatics boundary, fixing the truth-conditions of what is said by a sp…Read more
  •  38
    Pain priors, polyeidism, and predictive power: a preliminary investigation into individual differences in our ordinary thought about pain
    with Sarah Fisher, Nat Hansen, Rich Harrison, Tim Salomons, Deepak Ravindran, and Harriet Wilkinson
    Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 42 (3): 113-135. 2021.
    According to standard philosophical and clinical understandings, pain is an essentially mental phenomenon (typically, a kind of conscious experience). In a challenge to this standard conception, a recent burst of empirical work in experimental philosophy, such as that by Justin Sytsma and Kevin Reuter, purports to show that people ordinarily conceive of pain as an essentially bodily phenomenon—specifically, a quality of bodily disturbance. In response to this bodily view, other recent experiment…Read more
  •  14
    Introduction
    Ratio 33 (4): 203-205. 2020.
    Ratio, EarlyView.
  •  22
    Correction to: Pain priors, polyeidism, and predictive power: a preliminary investigation into individual differences in ordinary thought about pain
    with Harriet Wilkinson, Tim V. Salomons, Deepak Ravindran, Richard Harrison, Nat Hansen, and Sarah A. Fisher
    Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 44 (1): 101-102. 2021.
    According to standard philosophical and clinical understandings, pain is an essentially mental phenomenon. In a challenge to this standard conception, a recent burst of empirical work in experimental philosophy, such as that by Justin Sytsma and Kevin Reuter, purports to show that people ordinarily conceive of pain as an essentially bodily phenomenon—specifically, a quality of bodily disturbance. In response to this bodily view, other recent experimental studies have provided evidence that the o…Read more
  •  169
    What is hate speech? The case for a corpus approach
    Criminal Law and Philosophy 1-34. forthcoming.
    Contemporary public discourse is saturated with speech that vilifies and incites hatred or violence against vulnerable groups. The term “hate speech” has emerged in legal circles and in ordinary language to refer to these communicative acts. But legal theorists and philosophers disagree over how to define this term. This paper makes the case for, and subsequently develops, the first corpus-based analysis of the ordinary meaning of “hate speech.” We begin by demonstrating that key interpretive an…Read more
  •  11
    It is common in philosophy of language to recognise two different kinds of linguistic meaning: literal or conventional meaning, on the one hand, versus communicated or conveyed meaning, on the other. However, once we recognise these two types of meaning, crucial questions immediately emerge; for instance, exactly which meanings should we treat as the literal (semantic) ones, and exactly which appeals to a context of utterance yield communicated (pragmatic), as opposed to semantic, content? It is…Read more
  •  3
    It is common in philosophy of language to recognise two different kinds of linguistic meaning: literal or conventional meaning, on the one hand, versus communicated or conveyed meaning, on the other. However, once we recognise these two types of meaning, crucial questions immediately emerge; for instance, exactly which meanings should we treat as the literal (semantic) ones, and exactly which appeals to a context of utterance yield communicated (pragmatic), as opposed to semantic, content? It is…Read more
  •  15
    IX—In Defence of Individual Rationality
    Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 122 (3): 195-217. 2022.
    Common-sense (or folk) psychology holds that (generally) we do what we do for the reasons we have. This common-sense approach is embodied in claims like ‘I went to the kitchen because I wanted a drink’ and ‘She took a coat because she thought it might rain and hoped to stay dry’. However, the veracity of these common-sense psychological explanations has been challenged by experimental evidence (primarily from behavioural economics and social psychology) which appears to show that individuals are…Read more
  •  310
    Is Pain “All in your Mind”? Examining the General Public’s Views of Pain
    with Tim V. Salomons, Richard Harrison, Nat Hansen, James Stazicker, Astrid Grith Sorensen, and Paula Thomas
    Review of Philosophy and Psychology 13 (3): 683-698. 2022.
    By definition, pain is a sensory and emotional experience that is felt in a particular part of the body. The precise relationship between somatic events at the site where pain is experienced, and central processing giving rise to the mental experience of pain remains the subject of debate, but there is little disagreement in scholarly circles that both aspects of pain are critical to its experience. Recent experimental work, however, suggests a public view that is at odds with this conceptualisa…Read more
  •  30
    During the COVID-19 pandemic governments across the globe have provided unparalleled support to private sector firms. As a result, new oversight mechanisms are urgently needed, to enable society to assess and, if necessary, redress, moves by firms which have taken government aid. Many jurisdictions have seen the introduction of ‘piecemeal’ conditionality on different pots of aid. This paper argues that a better response would be to adopt a more unified approach. In particular, the paper explores…Read more
  •  11
    The thesis of “doux commerce” and the social licence to operate framework
    Wiley-Online-Library: Business Ethics: A European Review 30 (3): 412-422. 2020.
    Business Ethics: A European Review, EarlyView.
  •  38
    Meaning and communication
    Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2021.
    Communication is crucial for us as human beings – much of what we know or believe, we learn through hearing or seeing what others say or express, and arguably part of what makes us human is our desire to communicate our thoughts and feelings to others. A core part of our communicative activity concerns linguistic communication, where we use the words and sentences of natural languages to communicate our ideas. But what exactly is going on in linguistic communication and what is the relationship …Read more
  •  1
    Exploring Linguistic Liability
    In Ernest Lepore & David Sosa (eds.), Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Language Volume 2, Oxford University Press. 2022.
    There is a well-established social practice whereby we hold one another responsible for the things that we say. Speakers are held liable for the truth of the contents they express and they can be sanctioned and/or held to be unreliable or devious if it turns out what they say is false. In this paper chapter we argue that a better understanding of this fundamental socio-linguistic practice – of ascribing what we will term (following Borg (2019)) ‘linguistic liability’ – helps to shed light on a c…Read more
  •  47
    It is common in philosophy of language to recognise two different kinds of linguistic meaning: literal or conventional meaning, on the one hand, versus communicated or conveyed meaning, on the other. However, once we recognise these two types of meaning, crucial questions immediately emerge; for instance, exactly which meanings should we treat as the literal (semantic) ones, and exactly which appeals to a context of utterance yield communicated (pragmatic), as opposed to semantic, content? It is…Read more
  •  13
    Language and context
    In S. Finn, D. Edmonds & N. Warburton (eds.), Women of Ideas, . forthcoming.
    Emma Borg discusses the relationship between linguistic meaning and context, and talks about her own view, called 'Semantic Minimalism', in this Philosophy Bites interview, conducted by David Edmonds and Nigel Warburton.
  •  174
    My aim in this note is to address the question of how a context of utterance can figure within a formal, specifically truth-conditional, semantic theory. In particular, I want to explore whether a formal semantic theory could, or should, take the intentional states of a speaker to be relevant in determining the literal meaning of an uttered sentence. The answer I’m going to suggest, contrary to the position of many contemporary formal theorists, is negative. The structure of this note is then as f…Read more
  •  40
    Meanings of Pain: Volume 2: Common Types of Pain and Language
    with Marc A. Russo, Joletta Belton, Bronwyn Lennox Thompson, Smadar Bustan, Marie Crowe, Deb Gillon, Cate McCall, Jennifer Jordan, James E. Eubanks, Michael E. Farrell, Brandon S. Barndt, Chandler L. Bolles, Maria Vanushkina, James W. Atchison, Helena Lööf, Christopher J. Graham, Shona L. Brown, Andrew W. Horne, Laura Whitburn, Lester Jones, Colleen Johnston-Devin, Florin Oprescu, Marion Gray, Sara E. Appleyard, Chris Clarke, Zehra Gok Metin, John Quintner, Melanie Galbraith, Milton Cohen, Nathaniel Hansen, Tim Salomons, and Grant Duncan
    Springer Verlag. 2019.
    Experiential evidence shows that pain is associated with common meanings. These include a meaning of threat or danger, which is experienced as immediately distressing or unpleasant; cognitive meanings, which are focused on the long-term consequences of having chronic pain; and existential meanings such as hopelessness, which are more about the person with chronic pain than the pain itself. This interdisciplinary book - the second in the three-volume Meanings of Pain series edited by Dr Simon van…Read more
  •  587
    The meaning of pain expressions and pain communication
    with Tim Salomons and Nat Hansen
    In Simon van Rysewyk (ed.), Meanings of Pain, Springer. pp. 261-282. 2017.
    Both patients and clinicians frequently report problems around communicating and assessing pain. Patients express dissatisfaction with their doctors and doctors often find exchanges with chronic pain patients difficult and frustrating. This chapter thus asks how we could improve pain communication and thereby enhance outcomes for chronic pain patients. We argue that improving matters will require a better appreciation of the complex meaning of pain terms and of the variability and flexibility in…Read more
  •  113
    Is the folk concept of pain polyeidic?
    with Richard Harrison, James Stazicker, and Tim Salomons
    Mind and Language 35 (1): 29-47. 2020.
    Philosophers often assume that folk hold pain to be a mental state – to be in pain is to have a certain kind of feeling – and they think this state exhibits the classic Cartesian characteristics of privacy, subjectivity, and incorrigibility. However folk also assign pains (non-brain-based) bodily locations: unlike most other mental states, pains are held to exist in arms, feet, etc. This has led some (e.g. Hill 2005) to talk of the ‘paradox of pain’, whereby the folk notion of pain is inherently…Read more
  •  38
    Millikan, meaning and minimalism
    Theoria 84 (3): 242-258. 2018.
    Across a series of seminal works, Ruth Millikan has produced a compelling and comprehensive naturalised account of content. With respect to linguistic meaning, her ground breaking approach has been to analyse the meaning of a linguistic term via the function it performs which has been responsible for securing the term’s survival. This way of looking at things has significant repercussions for a number of recent debates in philosophy of language. This paper explores these repercussions through th…Read more
  •  39
    On deflationary accounts of human action understanding
    Review of Philosophy and Psychology 9 (3): 503-522. 2018.
    A common deflationary tendency has emerged recently in both philosophical accounts and comparative animal studies concerned with how subjects understand the actions of others. The suggestion emerging from both arenas is that the default mechanism for understanding action involves only a sensitivity to the observable, behavioural (non-mental) features of a situation. This kind of ‘smart behaviour reading’ thus suggests that, typically, predicting or explaining the behaviour of conspecifics does n…Read more
  •  118
    Explanatory roles for minimal content
    Noûs 53 (3): 513-539. 2019.
    A standard objection to so-called ‘minimal semantics’ (Borg 2004, 2012, Cappelen and Lepore 2005) is that minimal contents are explanatorily redundant as they play no role in an adequate account of linguistic communication (those making this objection include Levinson 2000, Carston 2002, Recanati 2004). This paper argues that this standard objection is mistaken. Furthermore, I argue that seeing why the objection is mistaken sheds light both on how we should draw the classic Gricean distinction b…Read more