How should we conceive of conflicts that seem intractable? Is there any hope of a resolution? We observe impasses between various groups concerning the Israeli and Palestinian conflict, the Movement for Black Lives and racial conservatives, and Indigenous voices versus settler colonial states. Some aspects of these impasses can surely be explained by an unwillingness by one or more parties to the conflict to yield any ground. Might there also be room for misunderstanding generated by radically different ways of conceiving (...) the world? According to the different worlds thesis, people come to radically different understandings of the world because they inhabit incompatible conceptual realities. In this article, I endeavor to explore possible ways of understanding the thesis and its potential impact on certain normative practices we tend to take for granted. (shrink)

Recently, several philosophers have argued that there is a political necessity to alter certain important concepts, such as WOMAN, in order to give us better tools to understand and change oppressive conditions. I argue that conceptual change of this sort is impossible. But I also argue that it is politically unnecessary – we can effect progressive change using the same old concepts we've always had.

In asserting something I incur certain kinds of liabilities, including a responsibility for the truth of the content I express. If I say ‘After leaving the EU, the UK will take back control of c. £350 million per week’, or I tell you that ‘The number 14 bus stops at the British Museum’, I become liable for the truth of these claims. As my audience, you could hold me unreliable or devious if it turns out that what I said is (...) false. Yet this socio-linguistic practice – of acquiring and ascribing ‘linguistic liability’ – is complicated, especially given philosophical distinctions between the various different kinds of contents people can express (am I liable, for instance, for the claim that the number 14 bus stops at the British Museum today or only usually?). This paper explores the different kinds of contents speakers might be taken to express, arguing that our practices around linguistic liability (including in legal disputes) reveal a crucial role for a notion of context-independent, literal meaning attaching to words and sentences. These practices thus vindicate what philosophers tend to term ‘minimal semantic content’. (shrink)

I argue that stories are ‘equipment for living’ in two senses: retrospectively, they provide ‘configurational comprehension’ of a temporal sequence of events; prospectively, they offer templates for action. Narrative conceptions of the self appear well poised to leverage these functional roles for stories into an intuitively compelling view of self-construction as self-construal. However, the narrative conception defines selves in terms of the lives they live: a self is the protagonist in a lifelong story. And narrative structure is itself defined by (...) ‘retrospective necessity’: the meaning of events within a story is given by their contribution to that story's ending. Together, this entails that life stories hold selves metaphysically, epistemically, and practically hostage to their ends. Fortunately, narratives are just one species of interpretive frame. I suggest some alternative types of frames, including identity labels and metaphors, that support configurational comprehension, action guidance, and self construction without shackling selves to their lives’ ends. (shrink)

I argue that the absence of some of the ‘greatest hits’ of Western philosophy in Classical China can be explained by a Wittgensteinian take on the role of language in philosophy. One is the ‘Idea Theory’ of meaning which anchors Western Mind-Body dualism. Its attraction is removed when the writing reminds us that a picture does not by itself ‘give life to’ our language even while it plays a role of cross-linguistic communication. Another is the centrality of a law-command theory (...) of normativity which combines with mind-body dualism to give a natural push toward monotheistic supernaturalism. Western attempts to make the ‘God’ impulse logical (e.g., the Ontological Argument) fail because of differences in Chinese syntax. The upshot is we need not deny Chinese thinkers the status of philosophers for their failure to share our philosophical presuppositions and resultant agenda. (shrink)

Many of the good things which make human life worthwhile are essentially social, cannot be enjoyed by one person unless they are enjoyed together with others. And it is obvious that thinking in terms of the first-person plural, we/us, plays a large part in everyday life as people consider puzzlements (‘What should we do?’) and remark on the success of what they decided on (‘That worked out really well for us!’). Analytic philosophers should accept this at face value, recognising that (...) human beings are often co-subjects with each other, that there is irreducible plural intentionality. The paper explores how the existence of plural intentionality manifests itself in our concepts and ways of proceeding and how attempted ‘analysis’ of what goes on as the assemblage of many interlocking instances of singular intentionality distorts and misleads. (shrink)

Today, the tone of discussion in the public sphere is dominated by misunderstanding. A common assumption is that misunderstanding comes from a failure of understanding. This article argues that misunderstanding is in fact a type of meaning change. To fully understand the contrast between misunderstanding as a failure of understanding and misunderstanding as a type of meaning change, the article uses Ludwig Wittgenstein and Hans-Georg Gadamer as a starting point to tease out an unthought assumption. Both thinkers challenge traditional preconceptions (...) of how language shapes understanding and they make prominent use of the concept of misunderstanding to do so. Yet both rely on a de facto model of misunderstanding as a failure of understanding. To consider an alternative notion of misunderstanding, the article looks at examples from thinkers influenced by Wittgenstein's and Gadamer's philosophy. Finally, the article concludes by positing a new definition of misunderstanding. (shrink)

This is a paper is about a particular subclass of pejoratives, namely, slurs. These are epithets that denigrate a group on the basis of membership alone, e.g., on the basis of race, ethnicity, origin, religion, gender, or ideology. They carrry a characteristic sting, prone to cause outrage and even injury. As to the source of their characteristic sting, the predominant position invokes some aspect of meaning. Some of the few who reject this assumption locate the source of the sting in (...) the taboo status of pejoratives. Others think slurs can sting because of negative associations they carry across time. We challenge both approaches and defend an alternative, for which negative associations are triggered not by every token of a pejorative, but rather by certain of its articulations. (shrink)

This paper discusses potential responses to harmful prejudicial speech. More specifically, it considers how different types of prejudicial speech merit different responses. The paper distinguishes hate speech, discriminatory speech, and toxic speech as different types of speech that are prejudicial or oppressive – they are not of the same kind diverging only in their severity and explicitness. As these sorts of problematic speech are categorially distinct, the paper holds, they also demand differential remedies. The task of this paper is to (...) consider such remedies, their potential effectiveness, and compatibility with the liberal value of free speech. (shrink)

A body of work proposes that social-norm change can be explained in terms of game theory. These game theoretic models, however, don't fully account for how and why utterances are used to change social norms. This paper describes the problem and some of the solution elements. There are three existing, relevant, game-based models. The first is a game theoretic model of social norm change (Bicchieri, 2005, 2016). This accounts for how individuals make decisions to adhere to or violate norms, based (...) on empirical expectations of how others will behave. The second is the idea of a conversational game (Lewis, 1979) and its extensions. This posits that speech acts are accommodated in a conversation to make what is said correct play. This feature can explain how some speech acts, such as slurring utterances, change the dynamics of a conversation. The third is a theory of pragmatic inference, known as Rational Speech Act theory (Goodman and Frank, 2016). This is a computational theory of pragmatics, of how listeners interpret utterances and how speakers construct utterances that can be understood. This paper proposes, without setting out the full formal model, that elements of these three theories need to be incorporated together into a game theoretic model of how utterances change long-term social norms. (shrink)

The ‘Only connect!’ that serves as epigraph to Forster's Howards End tolerates a variety of interpretations; but the very idea of a connection, or a relating of one thing with another, is conceptually deep. One form of connection is when something is about a thing, representing or symbolizing that thing. When we think of someone, or discuss something, we connect to them, or to it.In his Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein asks, ‘What makes my image of him into an image of him? (...) […] Isn't my question like this: “What makes this sentence a sentence that has to do with him?”’ Wittgenstein thus notes the ramifications of his question: what makes her name hers? In virtue of what is this thought about them a thought about them? The issue he highlights has been with us since Plato's Cratylus and its history is unified by a presupposition: whatever makes it that (i) a bit of language (like a name or a sentence or any linguistic symbol) is about something is, fundamentally, also what makes it that (ii) a thought (or idea or image) is about a thing. The story of aboutness will be uniform, simplex, or so the presupposition has it.But the history of the issue has been one of failure: we still don't adequately understand the nature of representation. I will propose and develop a perspective that rejects the presupposition and explains the failure: there is more than one way for a thing to be about something. Representation comes, ultimately, in varieties. (shrink)