Jennifer Saul

This chapter shows how it is that we can abandon the traditional picture and develop theories like those Chapters 4 and 5 show to be needed. It offers an account of simple sentence intuitions that makes no use of ‘matching propositions’, drawing instead on considerations of psychological processing. The explanation developed fits quite naturally both with widely accepted assumptions about cognitive architecture and with the relevant empirical data. It is also compatible with a wide variety of views on the semantics of names.

One popular line of thought in the media holds that academic freedom of speech is under threat from politically correct students and universities. In this chapter, it is argued that this debate is enhanced by enriching our range of concepts for thinking about freedom of speech. While silencing is an important concept, it’s a crude tool for thinking through these complex issues. Several new categories are introduced, presenting uncontroversial instances of each before working through how they apply to the more controversial instances that are the main focus. Using this new framework, it is argued that content warnings and the calling out of microaggressions do not present a significant threat to academic freedom of speech. However, there is a legitimate reason that they may appear to do so: the increasingly insecure employment structure of academia means that a wide variety of student preferences can have a damaging effect on pedagogical freedom.

This chapter begins the diagnosis of The Enlightenment Problem. It argues that theorists have tended to proceed as if they adhere to a principle that this book terms _Expressed or Implicated_ (EOI). EOI refers to an utterance of a sentence S in a context C, the truth conditional intuitions of competent, rational speakers who are relevantly well-informed must match the truth conditions of either what is (semantically) expressed or what is implicated by S in C. This chapter argues that EOI is false, and attempts to diagnose why it is that theorists have tended to proceed as though they accepted it.

This book’s purpose is to examine the source of semantic facts—broadly, to explain why our words have the meanings they do. Cresswell takes this explanation to lie in a complicated web of causal interactions on which semantic facts supervene. He makes three main claims about these causal interactions: the causation involved is best analyzed by Lewisian counterfactuals, themselves analyzed by possible worlds; they are so complicated as to preclude reduction of semantic facts to nonsemantic ones; and the lack of a reduction should not worry us. Key subsidiary discussions include arguments that makes plausible the success of possible-worlds semantics and that holds because our knowledge of semantic facts is “direct.”

There has been considerable attention in philosophy to the deliberate propagation of falsehoods, either through their assertion (as in lying); or through implicating them by way of true assertions (as in misleading). But there are other important ways that falsehoods are propagated. This chapter focuses on ways that falsehoods may be _negligently propagated_ by true utterances, with a particular focus on what happens when this occurs in communities. The kind of case the chapter is centrally interested in is one in which a collection of true utterances may together convey a falsehood: Individual news stories of crimes committed by black men may be true, but disproportionate selection of these stories for broadcast convey significant and immensely damaging falsehoods. The chapter also discusses the role of _false news_ in the US Presidential election in 2016.

This chapter reports the results of several studies designed to explore the gender stereotypes that professional philosophers and philosophy students hold about philosophy. We found that both women and men explicitly associate philosophy with maleness. However, the implicit picture was more complicated and surprising. Men tend to implicitly associate philosophy with maleness, but women tend to implicitly associate it with femaleness. We explore the implications of these findings for explanations of the underrepresentation of women in philosophy that turn on implicit bias and stereotype threat. We argue that our findings are compatible with these explanations, and that they suggest a hopeful picture for the prospects of combating stereotype threat among women in philosophy.

This paper argues that Puddifoot’s arguments in How Stereotypes Deceive Us have more radical consequences than those argued for in the book. It does this by pointing out two problems for evaluating stereotypes via Evaluative Dispositionalism, Puddifoot’s view. The first problem concerns the very large number of dispositions associated with any stereotype, and the second the difficulty of evaluating a stereotype in isolation from other elements of a person’s psychology. The paper suggests that, when we take seriously Puddifoot’s arguments, we’ll end up concluding that it’s not possible to assess the epistemic worth of any individual belief or stereotype. We could still discuss the epistemic merits of how it was formed, and discuss the epistemic consequences that this belief or stereotype has for a particular person in a particular situation. But overall epistemic evaluations of stereotypes, or even acts of stereotyping, would be something that we should try to avoid.

There is by now a well-established body of research in psychology showing that human beings are strongly influenced by a range of unconscious biases and dispositions related to categories like race, sex, age, disability, sexual orientation, etc. So far, there has been little to no empirical work on whether philosophers are influenced by these biases. But given that philosophers are human beings, it seems very likely that they are. This paper explores the effects these biases may be having in philosophy with respect to women, and proposes and explores some remedies philosophers could implement.

This paper explores a previously undiscussed type of dogwhistle which we call perspectival dogwhistles. Standard covert effect dogwhistles involve two meanings, one of which is only available to those with the right background knowledge. The more commonly known meaning serves as cover for this one. In the case of perspectival dogwhistles, what is needed to discern the less-known meeting is not background knowledge but the right perceptual perspective. In general, this also results in an absence of plausible deniability, which is commonly attributed to dogwhistles (and sometimes treated as definitional). Our central example is one of AI-generated imagery using double-image effects, used to evade moderation. We also discuss “Satanic” backwards messages in music, subliminal advertising, and some manipulative safety vests for horse riding.

Philosophers of language have tended to focus on examples that are not politically significant in any way. We spend a lot of time analyzing natural kind terms: We think hard about “water” and “pain” and “arthritis.” But we don’t think much about the far more politically significant kind terms (natural or social—it's a matter for dispute) like “race,” “sex,” “gender,” “woman,” “man,” “gay,” and “straight.” In this essay, I will try to show, using the example of “woman,” that it's worth thinking about terms like these, for at least three reasons: (1) There are some interesting puzzles. (2) Politically significant terms matter to people's lives— and it's worth spending at least some of our energy thinking about things that matter in this way. (3) Most importantly, interesting methodological issues emerge at the intersection of philosophy of language and politics.

Accounts of propositional attitude reporting which invoke contextual variation in semantic content have become increasingly popular, with good reason: our intuitions about the truth conditions of such reports vary with context. This paper poses a problem for such accounts, arguing that any reasonable candidate source for this contextual variation will yield very counterintuitive results. The accounts, then, cannot achieve their goal of accommodating our truth conditional intuitions. This leaves us with a serious puzzle. Theorists must either give up on the goal of agreement with our truth conditional intuitions, or find a different source for contextual variation.

The second section contains chapters examining implicit bias and skepticism; the effects of implicit bias on scientific research; the accessibility of social stereotypes in epistemic environments; the effects of implicit bias on the self-perception of members of stigmatized social groups as rational agents; the role of gender stereotypes in philosophy; and the role of heuristics in biased reasoning. Volume 2: Moral Responsibility, Structural Injustice, and Ethics is comprised of three sections. 'Moral Responsibility for Implicit Bias' contains chapters examining the relationship of implicit biases to concepts that are central to moral responsibility, including control, awareness, reasons-responsiveness, and alienation. The chapters in the second section--'Structural Injustice'--explore the connections between the implicit biases held by individuals and the structural injustices of the societies in which they are situated.

Donald Trump and Boris Johnson are notoriously uninterested in truthtelling. They also often appear uninterested even in constructing plausible falsehoods. What stands out above all is the brazenness and frequency with which they repeat known falsehoods. In spite of this, they are not always greeted with incredulity. Indeed, Republicans continue to express trust in Donald Trump in remarkable numbers. The only way to properly make sense of what Trump and Johnson are doing, we argue, is to give a greater role to audience relativity - and in some cases, audience participation - in notions like bullshitting and bald-faced lying. In this paper, we develop a new understanding of bullshitting, one that includes bald-faced lying, and recognizes that different communicative acts may be directed at different audiences with a single utterance. In addition, we argue for recognition of the category of bald-faced bullshitting, a particular speciality of both Trump and Johnson, and one especially useful to authoritarian leaders.

At the University of Sheffield between 2011 and 2012, a leading group of philosophers, psychologists, and others gathered to explore the nature and significance of implicit bias. The two volumes of Implicit Bias and Philosophy emerge from these workshops. Each volume philosophically examines core areas of psychological research on implicit bias as well as the ramifications of implicit bias for core areas of philosophy. Volume II: Moral Responsibility, Structural Injustice, and Ethics is comprised of three parts. “Moral Responsibility for Implicit Bias” contains chapters examining the relationship of implicit biases to concepts that are central to moral responsibility, including control, awareness, reasons-responsiveness, and alienation. The chapters in the second part—“Structural Injustice”—explore the connections between the implicit biases held by individuals and the structural injustices of the societies in which they are situated. And finally, the third part—“The Ethics of Implicit Bias: Theory and Practice”—contains chapters examining strategies for implicit attitude change, the ramifications of research on implicit bias for philosophers working in ethics, and suggestions for combating implicit biases in the fields of philosophy and law.

Jennifer Saul is Waterloo Chair in Social and Political Philosophy of Language at the University of Waterloo. Originally American, she spent twenty-four years at the University of Sheffield in the United Kingdom. Her current focus is manipulative political language, which she explores in Dogwhistles and Figleaves: Linguistics Tricks for Racist and Conspiracist Discourse (forthcoming, Oxford, 2024). She has also written books and articles on feminism, lying and misleading, and implicit bias. She founded the blogs What is it Like to be a Woman in Philosophy and Feminist Philosophers, and was Director of the Society for Women in Philosophy UK 2009–19. Along with Helen Beebee, she published two reports (in 2011 and 2021) on the state of women in philosophy in the UK and drew up good practice guidelines which have been adopted by dozens of departments. She’s also proud of having been a philosophical consultant on a zombie movie.