Esben Nedenskov Petersen

While direct assertions of hateful propositions by means of declarative utterances may be the examples of hate speech that come to mind most readily, hate speech is not restricted to such utterances. To contribute to the understanding of non-declarative types of hate speech this paper discusses hateful questions. The paper examines how various types of written utterances with interrogative marking may be used to communicate hateful content by exploiting pragmatic dynamics. A corpus harvested from the comment threads of the Danish pages of a global social media platform serves as the source of empirical examples. Through analysis of a broad variety of question types the paper shows that a wide range of different pragmatic dynamics contribute to how questions communicate hateful content. Hateful questions may communicate derogatory content by virtue of presuppositions or implicatures but may also be categorized based on various other characteristic properties, e.g., as questions with slurs or biased questions. Understanding fully how questions may be used for hate speech requires an understanding of the distinct pragmatic properties of all these different question types.

Despite general agreement within philosophy that peer review is indispensable, its fairness and reliability is often questioned. This article suggests that such worries can to a large extent be met by adopting the practice that reviews as well as earlier versions of papers are made publicly available when the final version of a paper is published. This suggestion combines the advantages of transparency with the merits of anonymity of reviewers. While there are obstacles to this suggestion, the article argues that it would be worthwhile to implement it because it can help map patterns of conduct and secure confidence in the fairness and reliability of review procedures and journal editing within philosophy.

It is an influential and often repeated objection to external world skepticism that skeptical theories lead to implausible predictions about the patterns of ordinary epistemic discourse and thought. Since skepticism entails that we know nothing, or only very little, about the external world, the skeptic seems unable to explain why competent speakers constantly ascribe such knowledge to both themselves and others. Uncontroversial facts about every day communication hence appear to present a strong reason to reject skeptical conditions on knowledge. In this paper, however, I argue that this objection to skepticism underestimates the means that a skeptic has available to account for people’s anti-skeptical assertions and judgments. A modest and highly plausible error theory enables the proponents of a familiar type of skeptical underdetermination principle to provide a compelling explanation of our linguistic and doxastic behavior. So there is a type of skepticism with a powerful response to the charge that skeptical theories lead to unacceptable predictions.

Various theoretical approaches have sought to account for the derogatory impact of ethnic slurs, paradigmatically exemplified by nouns such as ‘Kike or ‘Spic’. Content-based accounts of this derogatory impact hold that it owes to a slur’s conventional content, e.g., semantic content or conventional implicature. Alternatives to such content-based accounts instead argue that the source of a slur’s derogatory impact resides outside its content. According to one family of such alternative approaches, a slur’s derogatory effect derives from facts about its use history, especially facts relating to its use by speakers with hateful views of the slur’s targets. According to prohibitionism, another alternative to content-based accounts, the derogatory impact of using a slur arises from the presence of a social taboo prohibiting the term’s use. This paper discusses how slurs denigrate, focusing primarily on certain multimorphemic slurs in Danish. These multimorphemic slurs, I argue, pose a previously unrecognized problem for history of use accounts. I also briefly argue against prohibitionism and accounts which hold that a slur’s derogatory impact owes to its semantic content. After concluding that the derogatory impact of multimorphemic slurs in Danish cannot owe to history of use, taboo or semantic content, I argue that the evidence supports a conventional implicature account of how these terms denigrate.

This article discusses the place of thematic coherence in various approaches to educational dialogue and proposes a unifying approach to the analysis of thematic coherence of classroom conversations based on research in educational dialogue, philosophy of language and recent advances in linguistic research on discourse structure. Addressing the same main question is crucial to preserving thematic coherence in a conversation and is considered a key criterion of quality in classroom dialogues across the field of research in dialogic teaching, e.g., in Alexander’s Dialogic Teaching, Michaels and colleagues’ Accountable Talk, and Mercer’s Interthinking. Nonetheless, a shared definition of thematic coherence is missing in the field. In order to provide such a conception, we propose a question centered approach to evaluating the thematic coherence of educational discourse. On this proposal, the thematic coherence of a conversation depends on how a conversational contribution relates to a conversation’s overall question under discussion. We show how this approach may be used to examine thematic coherence and incoherence and argue that the proposal’s focus on utterance level features of discourse has an advantage in helping researchers track how specific linguistic features of dialogue shape classroom conversations.

In both philosophical and linguistic research, the explicit cancelability test is widely used to distinguish semantic contents from conversational implicatures. Assuming a straightforward relation between semantic content and explicit cancelability, a researcher might think that: if the proposition _p_ is expressed semantically by an utterance, then _p_ is not explicitly cancelable. In this paper, however, I argue for two amendments to this assumption. First, following Jerrold Sadock, I argue that the semantic content of an ambiguous utterance may be explicitly cancelable. Against this widely accepted view, a recent paper by Arthur Sullivan argues that the ambiguity problem should be rejected. I respond to Sullivan’s arguments and argue that the ambiguity problem remains despite Sullivan’s objections. Second, I argue that there is also another type of case complicating the relation between semantic content and explicit cancelability. In some cases where an utterance of a sentence _s_ semantically expresses the proposition that _p_, certain resources that speakers have available for metalinguistic communication may be employed to make _p_ satisfy a sufficient condition for explicit cancelability, although _s_ is not ambiguous. These two weaknesses of the explicit cancelability test have important implications for its diagnostic use.

While it is common in social epistemology, philosophy of education and sociology to speak of theoretical knowledge, the concept of theoretical knowledge used in ordinary discourse has not been properly examined, and its relations to other types of knowledge remain unclear. This article argues that this ordinary language notion of theoretical knowledge has a distinct meaning different from the meanings of terms for other knowledge types, for example, knowledge‐that, and meta‐cognitive knowledge, and provides an analysis that characterizes theoretical knowledge as distinguished by its indirectness. The article then discusses the implications of this view for the practical role of theoretical knowledge and suggests that a reappraisal of its epistemic significance is due.

While Moorean paradoxes with ‘know’ and epistemic ‘certain’ are distinct, sentences of both types are infelicitous to assert. Jason Stanley and Timothy Williamson both purport to explain these data based on their respective accounts of epistemically appropriate assertion. Stanley claims that his Epistemic Certainty Norm of Assertion provides a unified account of the observed infelicity, while Williamson explains it by supplementing the Knowledge Norm of Assertion with further assumptions about the relation between knowledge and certainty. In this paper, I argue that neither of these explanations succeeds. I then suggest that a unified account of Moorean paradoxes with ‘know’ and epistemic ‘certain’ may be provided by modifying Stanley’s Epistemic Certainty Norm.

The purpose of the present chapter is to survey the work on epistemic norms of action, practical deliberation and assertion and to consider how these norms are interrelated. On a more constructive note, we will argue that if there are important similarities between the epistemic norms of action and assertion, it has important ramifications for the debates over speech acts and harm. Thus, we hope that the chapter will indicate how thinking about assertions as a speech act can benefit from a broader action theoretic setting. We will proceed as follows. In Section 2, we provide a survey of epistemic norms of action and practical deliberation. In Section 3, we turn to the epistemic norms of assertion. In Section 4, we consider arguments for and against commonality of the epistemic norms of actions, practical deliberation and assertion. In Section 5, we discuss some of the ramifications of the debates over epistemic norms of assertion such as whether they may be extended to other linguistic phenomena such as Gricean implicature. In Section 6, we consider the consequences of the debate about the epistemic norms of action and practical deliberation for debates about speech and harm.

According to the widely endorsed Knowledge Account of Assertion, the epistemic requirements on assertion are captured by the Knowledge Norm of Assertion, which requires speakers only to assert what they know. This paper proposes that in addition to the Knowledge Norm there is also an Epistemic Propositional Certainty Norm of Assertion, which enjoins speakers only to assert p if they believe that p on the basis of evidence which makes p an epistemic propositional certainty. The paper explains how this propositional certainty norm accounts for a range of data related to the practice of assertion and defends the norm against general objections to certainty norms of assertion put forward by Duncan Pritchard, John Turri, and Timothy Williamson, by drawing on linguistic theories about epistemic modals and gradable predicate semantics. Together these considerations show that the prospects of a certainty account of assertion are much more promising than is usually assumed.

Intuitions about contextualist cases such as Cohen’s airport case pose a problem for classical anti-skeptical versions of invariantism. Recently, Tim Black, Jessica Brown, and Patrick Rysiew have argued that the classical invariantist can respond by arguing that pragmatic aspects of epistemic discourse are responsible for the relevant problematic intuitions. This paper identifies the mechanisms of conversational implicature and impliciture as the basic sources of hope for this explanatory strategy. It then argues that neither of these sources provides the classical invariantist with a convincing response to the airport case and its analogs.