Manuel Almagro

The increasing presence of mental health-related language in everyday conversations gives rise to a worth-exploring tension: while it can enhance mental health literacy and provide individuals with hermeneutical resources to understand and articulate their experiences, it also risks distorting or trivializing these resources, ultimately contributing to hermeneutical injustice. This paper examines this tension from a practice-focused approach to meaning. We argue that the widespread use of mental health-related language stems from two distinct linguistic practices: mental health-speak, which aims to promote mental health awareness and provide people with resources to resist hermeneutical injustice, and therapy-speak, which aims to reframe interpersonal or morally complex situations in terms of psychological needs, often without genuine concern for mental health. Moreover, we show how the linguistic practice of therapy-speak can blunt key mental health-related concepts, depriving those with mental health conditions of the hermeneutical tools necessary to accurately express their experiences.

Therapy-speak is the imprecise and superficial integration of psychotherapy language into everyday communication, especially by privileged or wealthy people. Despite the advantages of normalizing psychotherapy language, such as resisting epistemic injustice and enhancing awareness of mental health issues, therapy-speak raises important concerns. On the epistemic front, therapy-speak is susceptible to the erosion of the meaning and relevance of psychotherapy terms, pathologizing, and the risk of self-diagnosis. Regarding its ethical concerns, therapy-speak might be used to discredit individuals, evade responsibilities, and even signal social status, by taking an objective stance. Beyond these epistemic and ethical concerns, therapy-speak can also be weaponized to promote and perpetuate some forms of epistemic injustice, and to generate affective injustice. In particular, we argue that the weaponization of therapy-speak exploits the epistemic authority and the credibility excesses of medical evidence, the conflation between the descriptive and the normative, and the linguistic strategy of deniability to impose a specific way to manage emotions in challenging, and unjust, situations.

Recent work has focused on the ordinary concept of hate speech. Yet, there remains little consensus on how to define it. Given this lack of agreement in the literature, a seemingly reasonable strategy for understanding hate speech, particularly prevalent in the philosophy of language, is to analyze what is often taken as its paradigmatic case: slurs. However, this strategy might lead us to idealize the nature of hate speech by inheriting certain assumptions present in influential approaches to slurs. Resisting such an idealization, we argue, is crucial not only for intervention, but also for revealing and identifying more subtle cases of hate speech. Thus, in the first part of this paper, we argue against what we call the idealized view of hate speech. In the second part, we explore the phenomenon of hate narratives, and present two cases. Hate narratives are often obscured by the idealized view, so we must resist it.

The notion of deep disagreement was originally introduced by Fogelin to describe situations where disagreement about the truth-value of a proposition proceeds from a clash of viewpoints (Fogelin, Informal Logic 7, 1985). Fogelin and others conceived of this notion in a Wittgensteinian fashion, i.e., as disagreements generated by a clash of what Wittgenstein called “hinge propositions” and “forms of life”. Thus, the notion of deep disagreement has inherited the theoretical traits that some scholars of Wittgenstein’s work attribute to the notion of hinge propositions and forms of life. In this paper, we take inspiration from Wittgenstein’s remarks to explore whether genuine moral disagreements align with the inherited definition of deep disagreements. The purpose of this paper is to explore the possible tension between the notion of deep disagreement inspired by later Wittgenstein, and a conception of moral disagreements, conceived as not straightforwardly factual disagreements, that can be tracked in Wittgenstein’s work from the Tractatus to On Certainty.

A population can be ideologically or affectively polarized. Ideological polarization relates to people’s political beliefs, while affective polarization deals with people’s feelings toward the ingroup and the outgroup. Both types of mental states, beliefs and feelings, are typically measured through direct self-report surveys. One philosophical assumption underlying this way of measuring polarization is a concrete version of the first-person authority thesis: the speaker’s sincerity guarantees the truth of their mental self-ascriptions. Based on various empirical studies, the first part of this paper argues that we are particularly bad at spotting our own mental states regarding political issues. This, in turn, raises doubts about the accuracy of direct self-report surveys in measuring polarization. In the second part, I introduce Michael Lynch’s notion of political meaning to argue that traditional surveys can still provide valuable information for detecting polarization. However, I suggest that this information pertains not to participants’ beliefs and feelings, but rather to their level of commitment to the core beliefs of the political groups they identify with, which is a relevant aspect of pernicious polarization.