Applied Issues in Current Epistemology and Philosophy of Language

APPLIED ISSUES IN CURRENT EPISTEMOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE

March 20-21, 2025
Institute of Philosophy, University of Porto
Via Panorâmica, s/n, 4150-564 Porto

[poster] [website]

DESCRIPTION

In recent years, work in analytic epistemology and philosophy of language has witnessed an increased interest in applied, or socially-relevant issues, such as various social aspects of knowledge, epistemic injustice, linguistic tools for discrimination and propaganda, non-ideal communication and reasoning, biases, etc. Such issues are tightly connected with moral, political and legal considerations and can shape our views in those areas by getting clear on the epistemic and linguistic aspects they incur. This ensemble of work thus belongs to what has come to be known as the "political turn in analytic philosophy". This workshop is part of that movement and can be seen as a small-scale illustration of the main topics such applied projects focus on. The objectives of the workshop are to bring together international researchers working on socially-relevant issues in current epistemology and philosophy of language and to introduce students and local researchers to these.

ORGANIZATION

The workshop is organized by Dan Zeman and Tim Kenyon.
The organizers acknowledge the financial and administrative support of the following:
Slurs and the Lexicon: A Rich-Lexicon Approach to Slurs and Other Evaluative Expressions - LEXISLUR (2023.05952.CEECIND project)
Mind, Language and Action Group (MLAG)
Instituto de Filosofia da Universidade do Porto – UID/00502
Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT)
Reitoria da Universidade do Porto/Caixa Geral de Depósitos

PROGRAM
(All times are in Western European Time)

Thursday, March 20, room 310
15.15: Welcome
15.30-16.45: Tim Kenyon (Brock University), "Greasy Speech"
17.00-18.15: Giulia Terzian (NOVA University Lisbon), "Illocutionary Manipulation, Plausible Deniability and Epistemic Fallout"

Friday, March 21, room 203
10.00-11.15: Dan Zeman (University of Porto), "Forms of Reclamation and Derogatory Content: In Search of a Unitary Approach"
11.45-13.00: Claudia Picazo (UNED Madrid), "Protests and Meaning Change"
Lunch
14.30-15.45: Alba Moreno Zurita (University of Santiago de Compostela/University of Porto) & Sergio Guerra (University of Granada), "The Perks of Being Fusioned"
15.45-17.00: Dima Mohammed (NOVA University Lisbon), "Political Argumentation: The Public Reason-Giving between Persuasion and Epistemic Resistance"
17.30-18.15: Domingos Faria (University of Porto), "A ‘Collective Turn’ in Religious Epistemology"

ABSTRACTS

Domingos Faria (University of Porto), "A ‘Collective Turn’ in Religious Epistemology"
TBA

Tim Kenyon (Brock University), "Greasy Speech"
I use the 'term greasy' speech to mean a cluster of problematic speech tropes like sea-lioning, mansplaining, gaslighting, silencing, and tone-policing, diagnostic concepts of which have been widely invoked over the past decade or two. Aspects of greasy speech raise challenges for the tempting idea that problems of argumentation and rhetoric are definable in relatively local and relatively structural terms. Wider social facts and moral facts matter to the ameliorative concepts of greasy speech, not just structural or schematic properties of the local reasoning and discourse. These concepts are extensions of an ethical vision that inherently includes both epistemic justice and respect for the truth-conduciveness of healthy discourse.

Dima Mohammed (NOVA University Lisbon), "Political Argumentation: The Public Reason-Giving between Persuasion and Epistemic Resistance"
The pursuit of changing a public’s mind has been at the heart of political argumentation. Ever since Aristotle’s classical rhetoric, all the way to the modern rhetorical approaches (e.g. Perelman & Olbrechts-Tyteca 1973, Zarefsky 2008), persuasion seems like a cornerstone of political argumentation. Well beyond the rhetorical point of view, the pursuit of getting a point of view accepted has been considered important also from the perspective of critical dialectical approaches. The pragma-dialectical approach (van Eemeren 2010), for example, sees the rhetorical goal of persuading a reasonable critic of the acceptability of a position a counterpart of the dialectical goal of critical testing of standpoints, both being intrinsic goals of argumentation. Furthermore, in politics, trying to get a certain position accepted is central in many political processes: in election campaigns, obviously, but also in deliberation (Fairclough and Fairclough 2012) and the exercise of accountability (e.g. Mohammed 2018). Persuasion seems central to political argumentation, yet, in fact, the place of persuasion in argumentation is not unchallenged. Leaving aside approaches that do not give prominence to the rhetorical dimension of arguing (e.g. Blair and Johnson 1977), the idea that argument has a one function that we may consider intrinsic has also been challenged (e.g. Goodwin 2008). Moreover, considering that in political argumentation it isn’t uncommon to see political actors devoting their discourse to preaching to the converted, it would be too hasty to say that political argumentation is essentially aimed at persuasion (Doury 2011).
In this talk, I look into the role that persuasion plays in political argumentation. Remaining within a communicative view of argumentation, I consider the objections to the centrality of persuasion thesis, and I propose responses to them. I discuss the multiple goals and functions of public and political argumentation (Mohammed 2016, Zenker et al. 2023), with a focus on arguments occurring in contexts where rational persuasion seems unattainable or off-the-wall. for example because of polarization (Aikin & Talisse 2020) or epistemic injustice (Fricker 2007. Medina 2023). I argue that while a pursuit of persuasion is at the heart of any argument, public political arguments may not be reduced to such pursuit.: an adequate account of political argumentation today ought to go beyond persuasion and account for the role of public reason-giving in epistemic resistance.

Alba Moreno Zurita (University of Santiago de Compostela) & Sergio Guerra (University of Granada), "The Perks of Being Fusioned"
It is not difficult to imagine a situation where we wonder why the use of certain terms is wrong. Since the terms we ask this question about often involve a non-evaluative element and an evaluative one, we have distinguished two strategies in this regard. On the one hand, the most common strategy, which we will refer to as the Disentanglement Strategy (from now on, DS), proposes that to assess evaluative vocabulary critically requires disentangling the non-evaluative element from the evaluative one (Blackburn 1998; Brandom 1998). On the other hand, the Fusion Strategy (FS), which is motivated by the shapelessness argument (McDowell 1998), proposes that the non-evaluative and the evaluative cannot be disentangled. Our purpose in this talk is to argue in favour of FS. We argue against DS by showing that it cannot accommodate some facts about thick terms. DS presupposes that for every thick term there is a co-extensional neutral counterpart that performs the same non-evaluative speech act of referring without performing its evaluative one. However, there are features of some thick terms, such as gendered slurs, that suggest that they have no neutral counterparts (Ashwell 2016). Moreover, those thick terms that seem to have a neutral counterpart behave so flexibly that it raises skepticism about their being co-extensional (Damirjian 2021). These features pose a problem for DS because they imply that in some cases no expression performs a slur’s referential speech act without involving the evaluative one. Then we argue that FS can accommodate these features. The very idea of thick terms being shapeless implies that someone lacking the relevant evaluative attitude cannot predict the future extension of a thick term, which may account for their flexibility. In addition, this may also explain why thick terms do not have neutral counterparts: if they did, someone knowing the neutral counterpart could make those predictions.

Claudia Picazo (UNED Madrid), "Protests and Meaning Change"
In their pursuit of social justice, social movements sometimes promote changes in meaning. For instance, feminist movements have advocated for revisions of the meanings of ‘rape’ and ‘consent.’ In this talk, I explore the language of protests and how they can facilitate meaning change, both by altering linguistic norms and by sparking metalinguistic imagination.

Giulia Terzian (NOVA University Lisbon), "Illocutionary Manipulation, Plausible Ddeniability and Epistemic Fallout"
In recent co-authored work, I examined the ways in which the practice of playing devil’s advocate can be (and often is) abused in real-world conversations. Diabolical devil’s advocacy, as we labelled the phenomenon, is an especially insidious discursive manoeuvre which trades, among other things, on the exploitation of shared conventions about turn-taking, cooperativeness, and epistemically virtuous inquiry. In this talk I will present the main details of our analysis, and offer some preliminary thoughts on how it may be further enriched and extended.

Dan Zeman (University of Porto), "Forms of Reclamation and Derogatory Content: In Search of a Unitary Approach"
In an important paper for the literature on slurs, Robin Brontsema shows that slur-reclamation is a phenomenon that can take more than one form. One aspect underlying this variation is whether the derogatory content of a slur is preserved in reclamation or not. Brontsema (2004) shows that each of the two options is viable, and after discussing the virtues and vices of each of them, concludes that the multifaceted nature of reclamation points towards a pluralistic approach. In this paper, I engage with extant accounts of reclamation and assess how fit they are to capture the two forms of reclamation mentioned above. I thus consider two main strands, the Echoic View championed by Bianchi (2014) and embraced by Cepollaro (2020) and the Speech Act account proposed by Anderson (2018), showing that they are not up to the task. Finally, I consider polysemy views (such as Jeshion (ms.) and Zeman (2022)), and show that their success at accounting for reclamation depends on how exactly polysemy is conceived. A rich-lexicon account of polysemy, I claim, has better chances to account for both forms of reclamation, preserving the strengths and avoiding the problems of the views previously discussed.