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33Appraising evidence for valenceAnimal Sentience 33 (31). 2023.I make some remarks about whether evidence of valenced responses constitutes evidence of valenced states, and therefore of sentience, in organisms.
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117Slurring individualsInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy. forthcoming.This paper explores the derogatory uses of nicknames within closely-knit social settings such as villages, households, and schools. By examining ethnographic and psychological data on nicknaming practices, this paper contends that pejorative nicknames and slurs share structural and functional attributes. On the one hand, pejorative nicknames and slurs can elicit deep offence regardless of the speaker’s intentions or whether they occur within speech reports. On the other, pejorative nicknames can…Read more
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107The pragmatics of all-purpose pejorativesProceedings of the 2021 Workshop on Context. 2021.This paper argues that all-purpose pejoratives such as ‘jerk’ or ‘bastard’ are just plain vanilla descriptions of personality traits that are generally seen as impairing for the self and for interpersonal relationships across different contexts. Thus, all-purpose pejoratives derogate their referents through generalized conversational implicatures: it is common knowledge that those who use these terms accept certain kind of (negative) evaluations and that uses of those terms express such evaluati…Read more
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197Rethinking core affect: the role of dominance in animal behaviour and welfare researchSynthese 203 (5): 1-23. 2024.This paper critically examines the philosophical underpinnings of current experimental investigation into animal affect-related decision-making. Animals’ affective states are standardly operationalised by linking positively valenced states with “approach” behaviours and negatively valenced states with “avoidance” behaviours. While this operationalisation has provided a helpful starting point to investigate the ecological role of animals’ internal states, there is extensive evidence that valenced…Read more
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183The landscape of affective meaningDissertation, Institut Jean Nicod. 2022.Swear words are highly colloquial expressions that have the capacity to signal the speaker's affective states, i.e., to display the speaker's feelings with respect to a certain stimulus. For this reason, swear words are often called 'expressives'. Which linguistic mechanisms allow swear words display affective states, and, more importantly, how can such 'affective content' be characterized in a theory of meaning? Even though research on expressive meaning has produced models that integrate the a…Read more
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180Slurs' variability, emotional dimensions, and game-theoretic pragmaticsIn D. Bekki, K. Mineshima & E. McCready (eds.), Logic and Engineering of Natural Language Semantics. LENLS 2022., Springer. 2023.Slurs’ meaning is highly unstable. A slurring utterance like ‘Hey, F, where have you been?’ (where F is a slur) may receive a wide array of interpretations depending on various contextual factors such as the speaker’s social identity, their relationship to the target group, tone of voice, and more. Standard semantic, pragmatic, and non-content theories of slurs have proposed different mechanisms to account for some or all types of variability observed, but without providing a unified framework t…Read more
Münster, Northrhine-Westphalia, Germany
Areas of Specialization
Emotions |
Philosophy of Language |
Philosophy of Biology |