APPLIED ISSUES IN CURRENT PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE AND MIND

November 6-7, 2025
Institute of Philosophy, University of Porto
Via Panorâmica, s/n, 4150-564 Porto
Sala de Reuniões
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[poster] [website]


​​DESCRIPTION

In recent years, work in the philosophy of language and mind has witnessed an increased interest in applied, or socially-relevant issues, such as hate speech, 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 linguistic and conceptual/affective aspects they incur. This ensemble of work can thus be grouped under what has come to be known as the "political turn in analytic philosophy". This second workshop (see here the first) aims to bring together international researchers working on socially-relevant issues in current philosophy of language and mind, and to introduce students and local researchers to these.
 

ORGANIZATION

The workshop is organized by Dan Zeman, Alba Moreno Zurita 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 Western European Time)

Thursday, November 6
15.00 - 16.00 Tim Kenyon (Brock University), "Quoting as Retelling: How News Media Reports Speech and Why It Matters"
coffee break
16.30 - 17.30 Laura Delgado (University of Lisbon), "Gaslighting and Discursive Injustice"
17.30 - 18.30 Marcin Lewiński (NOVA University of Lisbon), "Authority via Metalinguistic Appeals"

Friday, November 7
10.00 - 11.00 Andreea Popescu (The Bucharest University of Economic Studies) & Dan Zeman (University of Porto),
​"A Polysemy Descriptive/Ameliorative Account of Gender Terms"
coffee break
11.30 - 12.30 Anna Klieber (Cardiff University), "Are Trans Name-Changes Subversive?"
lunch break
15.00 - 16.00 Neftali Villanueva (University of Granada), "Lynch on Political Meaning"
coffee break
16.30 - 17.30 Mattia Riccardi (University of Porto), "Resentment and Contemporary Politics: An Analysis"
17.30 - 18.30 Michelle Liu (Monash University), "Mental Imagery and Harmful Language"


ABSTRACTS

Laura Delgado (University of Lisbon), "Gaslighting and Discursive Injustice"
I explore the connection between discursive injustice and gaslighting, arguing that certain forms of systematic misinterpretation are species of discursive injustice and also operate as species of gaslighting that specifically undermines the target’s confidence in their own linguistic competence or discursive agency. Discursive injustice occurs when a speaker’s discursive agency is undermined, preventing them from successfully performing their intended speech acts (Kukla 2014). A core idea is that a speaker can be both entitled to perform a certain speech act and following the relevant linguistic conventions, yet due to identity prejudice or other forms of bias, their utterance is misinterpreted or assigned a different illocutionary force. Much of the existing literature focuses on distortions in the force of an utterance (e.g., an order treated as a request (Kukla 2014)) rather than distortions in content. However, I argue that discursive injustice can also manifest in failures of uptake or distortions of content, including semantic content, explicatures, and implicatures. Such distortions are particularly relevant in cases of intentional misinterpretation, where the hearer’s does not merely fail to properly uptake but actively reshapes the meaning of an utterance. These distortions can constitute basic discursive wrongs, regardless of whether they are tied to identity prejudice. A particularly pernicious form of unwarranted interpretation is the systematic misinterpretation that can occur with gaslighting intent, wherein a speaker is made to doubt their own linguistic competence or discursive agency. Gaslighting in discourse would thus be a form of discursive injustice, that operates through covert reinterpretation strategies, such as systematically reframing the speaker’s utterances within an alternative interpretative framework, subtly imposing new contextual assumptions, or overriding the speaker’s authority over their own meanings. In sum, the paper examines the mechanisms of gaslighting in discourse within broader discussions on communication, interpretative duties, and discursive injustice.

Tim Kenyon (Brock University), "Quoting as Retelling: How News Media Reports Speech and Why It Matters"
Reporting someone’s speech through direct or indirect quotation is an interesting case of retelling their testimony. It maximizes what Sandy Goldberg calls “epistemic buck-passing,” but offers no overt endorsement of what the speaker said. Something that reported speech has in common with other cases of testimony, however, is that the things that are left out of the retelling have the power to shape the natural interpretation of whatever gets left in. This raises a frequently underappreciated issue of fidelity in the use of quotation, and of professional competence and ethics in news reportage and journalism in particular. Selecting specific quotations from a longer set of utterances can be a major biasing factor in how speech and thoughts are depicted; yet this cannot be mitigated simply by reproducing speech in its entirety. In fact this latter approach, including the use of litigation to compel news media not to edit or abbreviate interviews, is sometimes weaponized to silence criticism and discourage unfavorable reporting.

Anna Klieber (Cardiff University), "Are Trans Name-Changes Subversive?"
Personal names play numerous interpersonal, legal, coordinating, cultural and social roles – names individuate, but also have the power to classify us: Consider, for instance, how names have highly gendered character in many societies. Provided this, it is no surprise that names are an important topic for trans individuals, who often change their first names as part of their transitions. In this talk, I will ask whether these trans-linguistic practices of name-changes (and name-findings) are subversive linguistic practices. In a first instance, I follow Kukla/Lance (2023) and Takaoka (2023) in arguing that gender ascriptions are speech acts that position individuals in social space, and that acts of gendered naming are gender ascription of that kind. In light of this, I theorize trans-name changes as (speech)-acts that petition for a re-positioning in social space. Next, I show that this repositioning happens in the context of explicitly rigid – or cisgenderist – naming norms: The fact that name change-uptake is often so hard to secure has to do with the structures of mainstream naming itself. I outline the “cage” these norms construct for those of us who want to change their names: Most notably, they prescribe that trans individuals both ought to change their names (that is, should always have clearly gendered and conventional names), while those name changes are, at the same time, not taken seriously and frequently weaponized against trans people. This also has the effect that trans name changes, from the interpretative framework of the cisgenderist mainstream, often look like mere submersion under those very norms. Against this I want to hold that name-changes from the perspective of the trans community itself involve a number of resistant acts that run counter the very ideological commitments cisgenderist naming forces onto us. I will outline what faces naming and re-naming takes on in trans-linguistic contexts, and suggest that this overall practice has at least the potential to be subversive – by reclaiming or assuming authority not normally granted to those named, and by providing a challenge to the constraints imposed by cisgenderist naming practices.

Marcin Lewiński (NOVA University of Lisbon), "Authority via Metalinguistic Appeals"
The goal of this paper is to isolate and analyse a class of speech acts called metalinguistic appeals. Such appeals are performed when a speaker appeals to an authoritative third party for a recognition of a specific word-concept pair, such as “marriage”, “torture”, “terrorism”, or “attacks on civilians”. The analysis contributes to the important shift from considering metalinguistic negotiations (Plunkett & Sundell, 2013; 2023) as forms of (implicit) argumentation presupposing something like an ideal speech situation, characterised by cooperative search for mutual understanding, good faith between speakers, equal access to linguistic and conceptual resources and, overall, no power imbalances. Instead, socially significant cases of metalinguistic negotiations typically happen when such conditions are not met: they are underlain by “conceptual domination” (Shields, 2021), “metalinguistic injustice” (Podosky, 2022) or any other form of linguistic abuse such as “mansplaining” (Johnson, 2020), “discursive paternalism” (Townsend, 2021) or “gaslighting” (Podosky, 2020; McDonald, 2025). Under such non-ideal conditions, the speech acts that have been taken to convey metalinguistic disagreements – arguments (Ludlow, 2014), or metalinguistic proposals and provocations (Hansen, 2021; Hesni, 2024) – often systematically fail in persuading the other party to the disagreement who, in many contested cases, might have reasons, and authority, to fiercely resist conceptual change (Gallie, 1956; Väyrynen, 2014). If so, why do rational agents continue to engage in metalinguistic disputes and, more broadly, conceptual engineering projects? To address this question, the paper combines the work on authority and on speech acts (e.g. Langton, 2018; Maitra, 2012) which presupposes a complex communicative ontology where more than two parties are involved (Lewinski, 2021; Lewinski & Aakhus, 2023; McGowan, 2023; Saul, 2024). Appeals are directive speech acts which, as understood here, require (at least) a triadic communicative situation. They are speech acts in which one party, in a dispute with another party, appeals to an authority external to the present conversation – the Forum – for or against the authoritative recognition of a certain use of the term. The speech act of appealing can be successfully performed even if the second party rejects it, as long as the Forum gives it the right uptake. Importantly, appeals are not “authoritative illocutions” requiring the position of power (Langton, 1993) – quite the opposite, they are often the speech acts of the “underdogs” who seek recognition of a powerful ally, the Forum. Two real-life cases will be analysed: Yasser Arafat’s famous “rejection of terrorism in all its forms, including state terrorism” (UN General Assembly in Geneva, 1988) and the Irish hip-hop band, Kneecap’s, “condemnation of all attacks on civilians” in 2025. Arafat and Kneecap cannot be trying to reasonably convince their direct adversaries – the government, citizens, and supporters of the State of Israel – that what Israel does against Palestinians is “included” in the extension of the concept TERRORISM of ATTACKS ON CIVILIANS. Instead, they appeal to the UN and other international bodies, governments, and citizens that this is so. This, then, serves as a premise in an argument towards a balanced approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Michelle Liu (Monash University), "Mental Imagery and Harmful Language"
Research on pernicious language tends to focus on harmful beliefs and associations transmitted by such language. In this paper, I explore the idea that pernicious language often transmits harmful mental imagery. Empirical studies suggest that mental imagery is a pervasive feature of language processing. Furthermore, mental imagery prompted by language can influence our memories and judgements in an insidious way. Focusing on language containing misinformation about witnessed events, as well as generics and metaphors about social groups, this paper argues for the importance of mental imagery for theorising harmful language and suggests ways to combat the imagistic harm.

Andreea Popescu (University of Bucharest) & Dan Zeman (University of Porto),
​"A Polysemy Descriptive/Ameliorative Account of Gender Terms"
Accounts of gender terms have been pursued within what is known as ameliorative frameworks (e.g., Haslanger (2000)), where the aim is to provide meanings of the target expressions that serve political, emancipatory goals. In this paper, we propose one such account, starting from what we take to be a suitable descriptive account of terms such as “woman”, “man”, etc. The main claim we make is that a polysemy approach is suitable for both a descriptive and an ameliorative project; and although polysemy views have been proposed in the literature (e.g., Bettcher (2009), Laskowski (2020)), we offer a substantive implementation of the claim that gender terms are polysemous by appealing to theories from the field of lexical semantics. Thus, we start by paying close attention to the various uses a term like “woman” has: it can be uses in a biological sense, in a social role sense, in a self-identificatory sense and (we submit) in an evaluative sense. While this list is not exhaustive, we claim that a suitable model for this variety of uses is what is known as “rich-lexicon theories” (e.g., Jackendoff (1990), Pustejovsky (1995), del Pinal (2018), Zeman (2022)); according to such theories, the lexical entry of a word is comprised of various interrelated meaning dimensions from which one or several are selected as the term’s sense in a certain context. We provide a tentative lexical entry for “woman” and show how the various uses mentioned above can be accounted for by the mechanisms of foregrounding and backgrounding of one or more meaning dimensions. We then show that an ameliorative proposal can be forged based on and starting from the concept just sketched. We first note, following Jenkins (2016), that amelioration need not come down to upholding a unique goal but can instead be multifaceted. The polysemy idea sits well with this plurality of purposes: if, for example, in a certain context the woman-as-class concept is the one needed for emancipatory purposes, then it is the social role dimension (perhaps suitably modified) that is foregrounded; if in a different context the woman-as-identity concept is the relevant one, then it is the self-identificatory dimension that is foregrounded; and so on. Ultimately, the aim of the various ameliorative projects pursued is to arrive at a lexical entry with less dimensions – precisely those consistent with the emancipatory goals (contextually) pursued. Lastly, we show that our approach manages to fend off some of the recent criticisms of Haslanger’s ameliorative project and its replacement with a linguistic innovation strategy proposed by Simion and Kelp (2023).

Mattia Riccardi (University of Porto), "Resentment and Contemporary Politics: An Analysis"
Resentment is said to be the emotion triggered by populist narratives and, at the same time, motivating collective claims for justice and inclusion. However, this seems puzzling, for the relevant emotions/attitudes involved in these phenomena look to be quite different. Despite this appearance, I propose a unified account of resentment and show how it can be applied to both.

Neftali Villanueva (University of Granada), "Lynch on Political Meaning"
The purpose of this paper is to explore Michael Lynch’s proposal concerning political meaning in his 2025 On Truth in Politics. We will, first, situate Lych’s approach to political meaning within a wider theoretical landscape. Second, we will take issue with the idea that the proposal contained in the book can be described in theoretically neutral terms. We will defend the thesis that an expressivist metasemantics, together with a dynamic semantics approach can best accommodate Lynch’s intuitions. Finally, we will develop what we take to be one of the best arguments in favor of this approach, its ability to improve our understanding of the strategic conflation between the evaluative and the descriptive.