METAPHILOSOPHY最新文献

Philosophers ponder on how to do philosophy and how to do it well. This pondering has divided metaphilosophers' concern about philosophical methodology into two groups, which we could label “pro-history” and “pro-intuition.” The claim (and belief) of philosophers who are in the “pro-history” group can be found in this sentence by Robert Pasnau (2011): “The discipline of philosophy benefits from a serious, sustained engagement with its history.” Those in the “pro-intuition” group believe that for philosophy not to slide into the realm of irrelevance it must rely on intuitions to make sense of our present ontologies, rather than study history of philosophy. This paper argues that both proponents of the pro-history and those of the pro-intuition approach are wrongheaded. It argues for what it calls protohistory. Protohistory here refers to the method of doing philosophy in which the intuitions of philosophers are informed by the history of philosophy (though not directly influenced by it but indirectly informed by it).

Many of the most influential theorists of linguistic justice make arguments on the basis of comparisons between language and religion. They claim either that (1) language, by contrast with religion, cannot be separated from the state or that (2) unequal official linguistic recognition, just like unequal official religious recognition, is morally problematic. This article argues that careful attention to debates about liberalism and the place of religion in public life invites us to question the two above-mentioned liberal assumptions about religion underlying many arguments concerning linguistic justice based on (dis)analogies between language and religion. The hope is that such critical scrutiny is likely to shed some light on normative questions of linguistic justice, more precisely on questions about the legitimacy of granting more recognition to certain languages, usually those of national native groups (as opposed to groups resulting from more or less recent immigration).

Linguistic justice is concerned with the just way of politically regulating linguistic diversity. Today, the linguistic-justice debate may be differentiated into three different domains: interlinguistic justice, intralinguistic justice, and global linguistic justice. Each of these domains has, to a significant extent, attracted different authors and debates, although the normative system underlying them is structurally similar. This introductory piece aims to provide context for our symposium dedicated to linguistic justice and migration by, first, giving an overview of linguistic justice, second, linking linguistic justice to migration, and, finally, providing an overview of the various papers in the symposium, situating them against the background developed in the first two sections.

This paper develops a concept of structural linguistic injustice. By employing the so-called structural-injustice approach, it argues that individuals' seemingly harmless language attitudes and language choices might enable serious harms on a collective level, constituting what one could call a structural linguistic injustice. Section 1 introduces the linguistic-justice debate. By doing so, it establishes linguistic diversity as the context in which phenomena such as individuals' language attitudes, language choice, and language loss occur. Moreover, the paper illustrates why employing the structural-injustice approach might be beneficial for the linguistic-justice debate. Section 2 conceptualizes individuals' (certain types of) language attitudes and language choice as (objectionable) social structures. Section 3 provides a concept of structural linguistic injustice. Section 4 suggests one possible remedy for structural linguistic injustice. Section 5 concludes the paper.

Leading expressivist proposals characterize the mental state expressed in the making of a normative judgment solely in terms of intrinsic, psychological dispositions. As a result, they fail to capture a subset of the normative judgments that agents can and do make; they miss the way that external factors can influence what the making of a normative judgment looks like. This problem can be seen most plainly in the context of systemic oppression. Intuitively, one can make a normative judgment that conflicts with the oppressive ideas one has previously been conditioned to endorse, but expressivism seems to deny that this is possible. The expressivist's inability to count these avowals made under oppression as genuine normative judgments makes expressivism deficient as a metaethical theory.

This paper makes explicit the basic problem perfect hallucinations pose for perceptual naive realists, more fundamental than the well-trodden Screening-off Problem. The deeper problem offers the basis for an overarching classification of the available naive- realist-friendly approaches to perfect hallucinations. In the course of laying out the challenges to the different types of response, the paper makes a case for the superiority of a particular approach to perfect hallucinations, on which they would be understood as a special kind of perceptual anomaly—arising from a secondary mode of perceptual processing.

This paper argues that pre-departure language requirements for family reunification are unjustified. Such requirements are assumed to safeguard (1) the non-instrumental cultural interests of citizens of the receiving society and (2) the instrumental language interests of both citizens and immigrants, for democratic life and political participation. The paper explores nationalist and multiculturalist arguments for implementing post-arrival integration to ensure a shared public language but contends that such arguments cannot justify pre-departure language requirements. In addition, instrumental language interests for democratic political life fall empirically short and place undue burdens on immigrants. The case of family reunification poses a unique moral problem, given the vital interest in living with one's family. The paper argues that the linguistic interests of the receiving state, in general, do not outweigh the claim to family reunification.

Discursive pluralism, recently fostered by anti-representationalist views, by stating that not all assertions conform to a descriptive model of language, poses an interesting challenge to representationalism. Although in recent years alethic pluralism has become more and more popular as an interesting way out for this issue, the discussion also hosts other interesting minority approaches in the anti-representationalist camp. In particular, the late stage of contemporary expressivism offers a few relevant insights, going from Price's denunciation of “placement problems” to Brandom's inferentialism. This paper attempts to show how these expressivist ideas combine well together, composing a unitary and metaphysically sober metaphilosophical framework.

How do we get into trouble in philosophy, and what do pictures have to do with it? This article addresses Frank Ebersole's thoughts on (Wittgenstein's remarks on) pictures in philosophy. It identifies the puzzlement generated for Ebersole by what Wittgenstein says and also considers some puzzling aspects of Ebersole's own renderings of pictures. It distinguishes between the philosophical picture and the pictorial form in which it may be crystalized and shows how philosophy's reliance on situationally disembedded grammatical stories (pictorial or not) leads us into trouble. Accordingly, responding to such trouble consists not in recovering the picture, in the sense of a single “object” or image we had before our mind's eye, but in—what is better described as Ebersole's strategy of—supplying a grammatical example (pictorial or otherwise) to go with our thinking, an example that makes what we think and say clear to ourselves.