Valen Simpson

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.

A typical claim in anti-representationalist approaches to cognition such as ecological psychology or radical embodied cognitive science is that ecological information is sufficient for guiding behavior. According to this view, affordances are immediately perceptually available to the agent (in the so-called “ambient energy array”), so sensory data does not require much further inner processing. As a consequence, mental representations are explanatorily idle: perception is immediate and direct. Here we offer one way to formalize this direct-perception claim and identify some important limits to it. We argue that the claim should be read as saying that successful behavior just implies picking out affordance-related information from the ambient energy array. By relying on the Partial Information Decomposition framework, and more concretely on its development of the notion of synergy, we show that in multimodal perception, where various energy arrays carry affordance-related information, the “just pick out affordance-related information” approach is very inefficient, as it is bound to miss all synergistic components. Efficient multimodal information combination requires transmitting sensory-specific (and not affordance-specific) information to wherever it is that the various information streams are combined. The upshot is that some amount of computation is necessary for efficient affordance reconstruction.