Esercizi Filosofici 10, 2 (2015)

Derogatory epithets are terms such as “nigger” and “faggot” targeting individuals and groups of individuals on the basis of race, nationality, religion, gender or sexual orientation. There is no consensus on the best treatment of derogatory epithets. The aim of my paper is to evaluate a proposal recently put forward by Rae Langton, the speech acts account (SAA). Assessing SAA is far from an easy task, since the proposal is little more than an outline, deeply intertwined with Langton’s general view on hate speech and pornography. My goal is first of all to disentangle a coherent account from Langton’s observations; second, I will raise and partially address some key objections against it. I will argue that, although SAA gives us significant insights into a number of phenomena, it is in need of a clearer formulation and further investigation.

In this paper I offer a brief introduction about what derogatory epithets (or “slurs”) are, how we use them and why they should ever interest philosophers of language and lin-guists; I will present three kinds of possible analyses of slurs, focusing on what kind of intui-tions they account for and what kind of problems they encounter. In the last session, I sketch the theory I defend: an analysis of slurs’ derogatory content in terms of presuppositions. Be-sides presenting the explanatory advantages of such approach, I briefly present the challenges this strategy faces and propose possible solutions to the main objections.

Il presente contributo presuppone alcune definizioni preliminari e fondanti; queste sono imprescindibili, da un lato, per indicare la cornice interdisciplinare di riferimento, e, dall’altro, per impostare una forma di embedded analysis: un’analisi contestuale in chiave ermeneutica che sia interna alla stessa cornice di riferimento cognitivo e di indagine scientifica. Questo frame è l’‘Occidente’, termine indicante una costellazione categoriale, simbolica e storica insieme, e da declinarsi al plurale (cosa che vale, peraltro, per il lemma ’Oriente’). Dapprima, verrà compiuta, attraverso le lenti di alcune discipline pertinenti, una chiarificazione, per quanto minima, dei principali concetti in questione – pragmatica, alterità, identità, asimmetria, cartografia; solo tramite l’esplicitazione dei nessi semantici derivante dalla precedente fase, potranno in seguito delinearsi alcune riflessioni metodiche, con cui auspicabilmente si possano (in futuro) “mettere in esercizio” i cinque lemmi, e allo scopo di definire con maggior rigore le sfide sociali e politiche per una coesistenza non violenta entro l’Occidente ‘europeo’, in particolare.

Peirce’s intellectual debt to Kant’s transcendentalism has been long recognized. In this essay I investigate Kant’s thoughts on “what is pragmatic” (das Pragmatische) as a source of inspiration for him. Peirce was well acquainted with this often neglected facet of Kant’s philosophy, that influenced both the core idea and the lexical coinage of his pragmatism. Both thinkers drew attention to the consequences of cognition for human actions. Pointing at the definition of the meaning of a defined notion, however, Peirce narrows remarkably the domain of Kant’s “pragmatic horizon”. Accordingly, Kant cannot be truly considered a forerunner of Peirce’s pragmatism.

On the one hand, Austin appreciates truth as the aim not only of science, but also of philosophy. On the other hand, truth in his works is demythized, contextualized, or even relativized. I analyze this ambivalence by considering some aspects of Austin’s thought which may appear close to pragmatism: his claims that the bearer of truth is assertion as a speech act, that speech acts are to be assessed as felicitous and infelicitous before being assessed (if pertinent) as true or false, and that the truth/falsity judgment is concerned with assertions in their contexts, including the participants’ goals and knowledge. These claims are, however, argued for in full coherence with a corrispondentist conception of truth. At a closer examination, Austin’s conception of truth appears to be an independent, “heretic” development of that of Frege. In taking distance from Frege, albeit on a Fregean basis, Austin went some length in the direction in which pragmatists too had gone, without actually sharing any properly pragmatist assumption.

The continuities as well as the differences between Wittgenstein’s late work and pragmatism received a number of readings, and it is relevant to consider that, while the Austrian philosopher concentrates his analysis on language, classical pragmatists have experience as a key element of their conceptual toolkit. Yet, it is worth acknowledging that the opposition between experience and language appears flimsy when one pays attention to the classical pragmatists’ treatment of the notion of experience, according to which no experience can be outlined a part from the linguistic/semiotic tools that constitute human abilities and performances. Reminding that for pragmatist philosophers “language is the tool of the tools”- as Dewey asserts – allows one to appreciate the ‘family resemblance’ between Wittgenstein’s, Peirce’s and James’ respective attempts to overcome the realist-antirealist opposition. First of all, it will be possible to point out the ‘therapeutic’ feature of their philosophy as the cornerstone of their common intent to show that our assertions about reality are embedded in the inter-actions of human communities.

In this paper, I examine and then criticize the two main assumptions underlying Stephen Stich’s Epistemic Pragmatism and its resulting consequentialist approach to reasoning strategy assessment, that is, (1) the rejection of truth as our main epistemic goal and (2) the relativity of any assessment of reasoning strategies. According to Epistemic Pragmatism, indeed, any evaluation of reasoning strategies is to be made in terms of their conduciveness to achieving what their users intrinsically value. However, since, as I will try to show, neither Stich’s argument supporting the dismissal of truth as our main epistemic goal nor his relativistic view on reasoning strategies’ assessments are well supported, I will conclude that Epistemic Pragmatism cannot provide by itself an adequate consequentialist framework for comparatively assessing people’s reasoning strategies and their epistemic merits.

This is a preface to the contributions gathered in the issue. They are the outcome of two workshops held at the University of Trieste in 2014 and 2015 on the subject of pragmatics and pragmatism. Besides the obvious lexical affinity, pragmatics and pragmatism share the basic belief that practice and human action play a crucial role in the explanation of meaning and truth, but also in the solution of ethical questions, etc. The text highlights some philosophical questions related to these fields of research.

In this paper I argue against John MacFarlane’s (2014) radical relativist semantics. By developing an argument of Ross & Schroeder (2013) I claim that belief in this relativist theory is incompatible with being a rational agent that acts in accordance with the norms of assertion and retraction. My conclusion is therefore that MacFarlane's semantics is committed to postulating that competent speakers are ignorant of the very theory that provides a – putative – correct account of their linguistic behaviour.