Self-Identity and Its Social Metaphysical Underpinnings

ex aequo, 2022

This article aims to show that Ludwig Wittgenstein's ordinary language philosophy provides an adequate framework to approach the feminist debate over the meaning of 'woman'. I begin by clarifying the philosophical problems that are at the basis of the debate. I then expound Wittgenstein's later conception of meaning and briefly survey some of the most relevant Wittgensteinian feminist descriptive analyses of 'woman'. I argue that such analyses must be at the basis of an ameliorative approach to the debate, while the latter should be understood as a practice of conceptual delimiting in view of a special purpose.

2016

What does ‘woman’ mean? According to two competing views, it can be seen as a sex term or as a gender term. Recently, Jennifer Saul has put forward a contextualist view, according to which ‘woman’ can have different meanings in different contexts. The main motivation for this view seems to involve moral and political considerations, namely, that this view can do justice to the claims of trans women. Unfortunately, Saul argues, on further reflection the contextualist view fails to do justice to those moral and political claims that motivated the view in the first place. In this paper I argue that there is a version of the contextualist view which can indeed capture those moral and political aims, and in addition, I use this case to illustrate an important and more general claim, namely, that moral and political considerations can be relevant to the descriptive project of finding out what certain politically significant terms actually mean.

Journal of Social Ontology, 6(1), 69-83, 2020

In this reply paper, I engage with a recent contextualist account of gender terms (particularly, 'woman') proposed by Esa Díaz-León 2016. Díaz-León's main aim is to improve both on previous contextualist and non-contextualist views and solve a certain puzzle for feminists. Central to this task is putting forward a view that allows trans women who didn't have gender affirming surgery to use the gender terms of their choice to self-identify. My goal is to investigate Díaz-León's proposal, point out (what I take to be) several shortcomings of the view and discuss possible replies on her part.

Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal, 2018

The point of a discourse-at least one central kind of discourse-is the exchange of information. 1 Words can be like tiny doses of arsenic: they are swallowed unnoticed, appear to have no effect, and then after a little time the toxic reaction sets in after all. 2 -Victor Klemperer now classic essay "'Ideal Theory' as Ideology," which shaped the contemporary discussion in political philosophy and political science, Charles Mills critiques the idealization of "an idealized cognitive sphere." 3 Mills singles out for special disdain the idealization of a "general social transparency," which will be presumed, with cognitive obstacles minimized as limited to biases of self-interest or the intrinsic difficulties of understanding the world, and little or no attention paid to the distinctive role of hegemonic ideologies and groupspecific experience in distorting our perceptions and conceptions of the social order. 4 Theorists of meaning too assume a "general social transparency." It is a standard assumption in the Gricean program that speaker intentions are transparent, for example-no one has devious, hidden intentions. The fact that there are parallel ideals in Anglo-American liberal political philosophy and Anglo-American philosophy of language raises questions and challenges. It suggests the promise of analogous critiques. And it raises the question of non-ideal philosophy of language. Anglo-American theory of meaning (understood broadly, to include, e.g., contributions of many continental European semanticists working in the same tradition) differs from Anglo-American political philosophy in having a longer tradition of singling out ideals for critique. It is easy to read Frege and Russell and think that truth-conditional content, or informational content, is the central notion in the theory of meaning. J.L. Austin begins How to Do Things with Words critiquing the assumption that description of the world, "fact-stating," is the main business of statements. 5 This is a theme to which Austin returns throughout the work. 6 How to Do Things with Words is a critique of the idealization that capturing the informational content of an utterance is the main aim of a theory of meaning. Similarly, although it is easy to read many traditions in philosophy of language as ignoring the communicative importance of speech practices, as idealizing away from them, in the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein emphasizes their centrality. 7 This is perhaps one reason why the specific contours of the debate in political philosophy were not simultaneously reflected in the theory of meaning. Non-ideal critique is more familiar in philosophy of language, as traditions initiated by Austin and Wittgenstein are squarely within the mainstream today.

Society, 2019

Whether it is backlash from the publication of controversial papers or calls for no-platforming, the question of freedom of expression in academia seems to be more pertinent than ever. The conflict here seems to then be one of freedom and responsibility: Freedom to engage in new and perhaps contrary ideas and responsibility to those whom these ideas impact. I address these themes by analyzing recent paper, by Emily Chamlee-Wright that questions when it might be appropriate to resist pressure from the status quo and speak despite the potential for negative feedback. I wish to supplement her account with the need to temper this question of appropriate deference with one of social responsibility. Like Chamlee-Wright, I argue that these have “both positive and negative effects on the quality of public and academic discourse”, but for different reasons. Stereotype and bias inherent in some speech and scholarship may harm the discursive environment and encourage self-censorship as well. These expanded threats in turn require a different solution that would urge deference when scholarship pertains to and impacts certain marginalized identity categories. Self-Censorship does not necessarily mean a lowered quality academic or public discourse, but a necessary element in balancing the concerns of power and perspective.

Bordonaba Plou D., V. Fernández Castro, J. R. Torices Vidal (eds.): The Political Turn in Analytic Philosophy – Reflections on Social Injustice and Oppression, 2022

Our everyday practices are meaningful in several ways. In addition to the linguistic meanings of our terms and sentences, we attach social meanings to actions and statuses. Philosophy of language and public debates often focus on contesting morally and politically pernicious linguistic practices. My aim is to show that this is too little: even if we are only interested in morally and politically problematic terms, we must counteract a pernicious linguistic practice on many levels, especially on the level of its underlying social meanings. Otherwise the critique of specific words as the most salient fruits of this practice will be futile. I trace out two paths through which pernicious social meanings feed into linguistic meanings and make the case for constructive contestations of social meanings as an alternative to criticising the use of a few highly pernicious terms in which these social meanings are manifest. My investigation into how social structures shape both social and linguistic meanings sheds further light on the ways in which social meanings enter linguistic exchanges. Moreover, it reveals that what is said in specific situations is more closely connected to our non-verbal actions than the current literature on semantics and the social sciences allows.

Feminismo/s

Feminist theory has extensively explored the sexualization of women’s images across time. Women are sexually objectified in music videos, TV series, ads, cinema, video games, and other types of audiovisual content. Scholarship has acknowledged, for instance, that women’s visual objectification in news, publicity, and cinema can lead to discrimination and gender-based violence. Audiovisual content is especially impactful, while digital content has a broader and more immediate reach than other types of content. On the one hand, the consumption of music videos and other digital content among minors is rising. On the other hand, music videos influence the normalization of gender violence and gender stereotypes in girls and boys. Despite its importance, until now, there is no conceptual framework of the sexualization of women in music videos. What elements compose the sexual objectification of women in music videos? What dimensions does it encompass? Can they be operationalized to serve ...

2019

In the philosophy of language and epistemology, debates often centre on what content a person is communicating, or representing in their mind. How that content is organised, along dimensions of salience, has received relatively little attention. I argue that salience matters. Mere change of salience patterns, without change of content, can have dramatic implications, both epistemic and moral. Imagine two newspaper articles that offer the same information about a subject, but differ in terms of what they headline. These articles can be said to adopt different linguistic salience perspectives. Making different things salient in language is a way of making different things salient in an audience's mind: it is a way of encouraging the audience to adopt a particular cognitive salience perspective. Building on Elisabeth Camp's work on perspectives, and Sebastian Watzl's work on attention, I suggest that one has a certain cognitive salience perspective in virtue of better notic...

Atlantis: Critical Studies in Gender, Culture & Social Justice, 2018

After considering some ways of assessing argumentation, I present an ethical assessment of Tuvel's argument in her article “In Defense of Transracialism.” My claim is that some transgender women engaging with Tuvel are exposed to certain kinds of injustice associated with argumentational work, namely, disproportionate burdens and risk of psychological harm.