Stina Björkholm

A biased evaluative description represents an individual positively, but at the same time signals that the speaker relies on a prejudiced stereotype about members of a social group to which the individual belongs. Bernstein argues that this category of socially harmful language does not fit neatly into any existing category of harmful speech (such as dog whistles or slurs), nor can it be straightforwardly explained by appealing to linguistic frameworks such as Gricean implicature. This article categorizes biased evaluative descriptions as a sub-category of oppressive praise, as described by Holroyd, and argues that the pragmatic framework presented by Levinson and expanded by Björkholm can be used to linguistically analyze and understand this category of oppressive speech. It is argued that the application of the linguistic framework not only elucidates how biased evaluative descriptions relate to stereotypes and implicit bias. It also elucidates practical issues concerning what is appropriate to do in the conversational settings where biased evaluative descriptions are used and difficulties in combatting their effects through counter-speech.

The fulfillment of the right to be known is considered essential for achieving restorative justice. Victims must have the opportunity to tell their stories and be actively heard for a reparative process to be genuinely successful. The right to be known is a positive right that imposes duties on others, including the obligation to acquire knowledge about victims and their experiences of injustice. While few would deny that victims deserve to be listened to, understood, and recognized for their experiences, Lackey’s proposal remains underspecified in both content and scope of application, leaving some of its practical implications unclear. In the first part of the paper, we argue that depending on how the right to be known is interpreted, it risks imposing both epistemically and emotionally over-demanding requirements on both duty bearers and right holders. In the second part of the paper, we propose that the right to be known and the duty to know are primarily understood as group-based. Partly influenced by Lackey’s own work on collective epistemology, we argue that the group-based versions of the right and the duty avoid worries of over-demandingness and provide an overall plausible view of this essential part of epistemic reparations.

When speakers make moral claims, they often indicate that they are themselves committed to, or aim to commit their addressee to, certain actions or attitudes. The way that moral language is practical in these ways is often considered to be detrimental for any descriptivist semantics of moral language. It is argued in this article that the practicality of moral language can be accommodated by appealing to dynamic pragmatics. A dynamic descriptivist accounts for the practicality of moral language in terms of how moral utterances update and relate to a shared interpersonal dimension of communication that contains content accepted by the interlocutors of a moral conversation.

There are many ways in which a speaker might convey offensive or derogatory social norms of how it is permissible or required to behave or feel. Some argue that speakers thereby include derogatory or offensive content into the conversational context, and appeal to the influential pragmatic frameworks by Stalnaker and Lewis for how to model the structure of this context. However, since these theories are primarily designed to model mutual belief, they seem ill-equipped to accommodate the action-guiding or affective dimensions of derogatory speech. The challenge is to show how these frameworks can be expanded in a way that enables them to explain the way derogatory and offensive language presupposes norms accepted among interlocutors about what actions or attitudes are appropriate. In the first part of this paper, I propose an account that meets this challenge by offering a theory of how the shared conversational background can be updated to include norms of mistreatment that are represented as items on to-do lists (inspired by Portner’s work on the pragmatics of imperatives). In the second part of the paper, I consider whether we should also say that the conversational context includes emotions. I argue that there are ways to accommodate the impact of emotions without assuming that there is a distinct section within the context that represents mutually accepted emotions.

The key characteristic of deep disagreements is that any attempt to resolve them just reveals new points of disagreement that stem from underlying commitments. Many moral disagreements appear to be like this. Do people have a moral obligation to get vaccinated? Should women always have the right to abortion – or is abortion rarely or never permissible? People who disagree on these issues often accept very different underlying values and commitments. In this paper, I argue that when deep moral disagreements become widespread, they can constitute an obstacle for achieving or sustaining moral progress because the interlocutors of a deep disagreement fail to engage in rational conversation. I develop Fogelin’s (Informal Logic 7, 1985) thesis, influenced by Wittgenstein, that deep disagreements do not occur in normal conversational circumstances. This is primarily done by applying Robert’s (Semantics and Pragmatics 5:1–69, 2012) theory of how questions determine the direction and aim of conversation. I argue that the parties of deep disagreement are unable to include new questions in their discourse context that would provide strategies for resolving the first-order moral question (e.g., concerning abortion or vaccines) that they disagree about. I propose that a possible strategy for resolving such deep disagreements by engaging in conversational pretense, but ultimately argue that this strategy faces a number of worries.

If the extension of a moral expression varies depending on the context of utterance, as contextualism maintains, then two speakers who embrace different moral norms or come from different societies might refer to different properties when they use that expression. Contextualism therefore appears unable to accommodate the intuition that such speakers can disagree about moral matters. For instance, a progressive and a conservative might disagree about the permissibility of abortion. But if their moral predicates pick out different properties, what are they disagreeing about? Some have tried to meet this challenge by focusing on the shared assumptions between the interlocutors about their communicative exchange rather than on the semantic contents conveyed by the sentences that the interlocutors assert. This paper presents such an account of moral disagreement that appeals to the questions under discussion (QUDs) that interlocutors mutually assume to be part of the background of their conversation. According to this account, interlocutors who embrace different moral norms can disagree because they accept an opaque QUD, which they are unable to resolve. This account allows contextualists to preserve their core semantic claim that when speakers use moral expressions, the semantic contents of their claims vary across contexts of utterance. But at the mutually presupposed discourse level, the speakers presuppose a common QUD, to which the contents of both their assertions are possible answers.

Members of stigmatized social groups are often treated unjustly in conversation. Fricker's influential work on epistemic injustice addresses this topic, according to which the unjust treatment is (in part) described as the way a speakers’ utterance might be assigned less (or no) credibility because of a prejudiced stereotype about her social identity held by the listener. In this paper, I offer an account of one of the mechanisms that drive instances of epistemic injustice where the interlocutors speak and behave in conversation as if they accept a prejudiced stereotype that contradicts their explicitly endorsed beliefs. I argue that interlocutors accept pragmatic stereotypes as background assumptions in conversations and that the acceptance of such stereotypes enforce epistemic injustice that is implicitly biased. I further critically assess whether interlocutors might try to challenge such stereotypes in conversation by engaging in meta-pragmatic negotiations about which stereotypes to accept.

According to the obscuring objection against mainstream political philosophy, there has been a long-standing dominant research paradigm focusing on distributive justice. This has made it difficult to call attention to important social facts, such as discrimination and oppression. The purpose of this article is not to defend the claim that mainstream political philosophy obscures important social facts. We instead focus on how obscuring arises. There are undoubtedly several different forces at play in the development of a research field, but the focus here is to spell out mechanisms that enforce obscuring which draw from influential theories in pragmatics. The account starts with the assumption that conversations are structured around mutual assumptions among interlocutors. We argue that the contents of these mutual assumptions represent certain general norms for efficient conversation and unequal social power among interlocutors, both of which constitute an important part of how obscuring arises.

According to contextualism, a gender term such as ‘woman’ does not invariantly refer to a specific social or biological kind. Instead, gender terms have different extensions depending on the context of utterance. Contextualism accommodates that speakers are perfectly able to use gender terms in very different ways and still be coherent and successful in their communicative exchanges. However, while the flexibility of contextualism is its primary asset, it has also turned out to be its potential demise. The worry is that the view not only makes trans-including claims true but also allows that trans-excluding claims can be true and therefore, does justice to the claims of trans people only in a trivial sense. This paper defends the view that contextualists can respond to this worry by showing why trans-excluding claims are often morally problematic even in contexts where they are true. Contextualists are well-equipped to say that when speakers insist on using gender terms in trans-excluding ways, they engage in a meta-linguistic negotiation about how gender terms ought to be used – where using them trans-excluding is treated as normatively superior. This constitutes a kind of epistemic injustice.

Moral language displays a characteristic duality. On the one hand, moral claims seem to be similar to descriptive claims: To say that an act is right seems to be a matter of making an assertion, thus indicating that the speaker has a moral belief about which she can be correct or mistaken. On the other hand, moral claims seem to be different from descriptive claims: There is a sense in which, by claiming that an act is right, a speaker indicates that she is inclined to perform the act, to want others to perform it, and to react with praise towards those who do it. Hybrid theories maintain that utterances of moral sentences have both a descriptive and a practical linguistic function. In this thesis, I investigate how a hybrid theory can best accommodate the descriptive and the practical aspects of moral language. I evaluate and criticize the way that existing hybrid theories have proposed to explain the duality of moral language. The main arguments against these views are that they either: fail to accommodate the way that the practical or attitudinal import of moral claims vary across different contexts and linguistic environments; or that they fail to show how the practical or attitudinal import is reliably inferred by interlocutors in virtue of general communicative principles. I develop and defend a new hybrid theory called ‘dynamic descriptivism’. This theory accommodates the duality of moral language by appeal to the way that moral utterances affect a dimension of communication which consists of the shared assumptions that interlocutors mutually assume to mutually accept. Moreover, I discuss a problem which has affected a wide range of theories of moral language – including existing hybrid theories – which is the problem of explaining what it is that interlocutors disagree about when they disagree about matters of morality. I argue that that dynamic descriptivism offers new resources for solving this problem.

Just as we can be more or less certain that there is extraterrestrial life or that Goldbach’s conjecture is correct, we can be more or less certain about normative matters, such as whether euthanasia is permissible or whether utilitarianism is true. However, accommodating the phenomenon of degrees of normative certitude is a difficult challenge for non-cognitivist and expressivist views, according to which normative judgements are desire-like attitudes rather than beliefs. Several attempts have been made on behalf of non-cognitivism and expressivism to meet the challenge Studies in metaethics, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2007; Sepielli in Philos Stud 160: 191–207, 2012; Eriksson and Francén Olinder in Aust J Philos 94: 719–735, 2016). These attempts have all been found wanting. Michael Ridge has recently offered a quasi-realist solution, according to which expressivists can say exactly what cognitivists say about certitude, including normative certitude. In this paper, we explain the basic problem and Ridge’s quasi-realist solution. We then argue that the quasi-realist account of normative certitude faces severe difficulties that do not arise for cognitivist accounts, according to which normative judgements are beliefs.