Experimental Philosophy of Language: Perspectives, Methods, and Prospects

✍ Scribed by David Bordonaba-Plou

• Publisher: Springer
• Year: 2023
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 296
• Series: Logic, Argumentation & Reasoning, 33
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

This book presents the current state of experimental philosophy of language, drawing attention to corpus methods. The volume highlights new trends in experimental philosophy of language, thus exploring the future’s discipline. It includes cross-linguistics studies that reveal the differences and similarities in how speakers of different languages use specific terms, and scrutinizes methodological advances used in experimental philosophy of language. The book also includes politically engaged experimental philosophy of language studies focusing on slurs, pejoratives, and hate speech. The topic’s interdisciplinary nature makes the volume of interest to a broad range of scholars across disciplines including philosophy, linguistics, philology, psychology, and computational linguistics.

✦ Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Contents
1 Introduction: 20 Years of Experimental Philosophy of Language
1.1 Experimental Philosophy
1.2 Experimental Philosophy of Language
1.3 The Purpose of This Volume
References
Part I The Experimental Philosophy of Language Methodology
2 A Bibliometric Analysis of Experimental Philosophy of Language
2.1 Introduction
2.2 Experimental Philosophy of Language
2.3 Methodology
2.3.1 Data Collection
2.3.2 Bibliometric Techniques
2.4 Results and Discussion
2.4.1 Main Information
2.4.2 Sources
2.4.3 Authors and Countries
2.4.4 Documents
2.5 Conclusions
References
3 Experimental Philosophy and Ordinary Language Philosophy
3.1 Introduction: Experimental Philosophy and Ordinary Language Philosophy
3.2 Argument from Cross-Linguistic Diversity
3.3 Argument from Intra-Linguistic Divergence
3.4 The Supplementary Picture of X-Phi
3.5 X-Phi Defends OLP
3.6 OLP as a Target of Negative X-Phi
3.7 OLP Helps X-Phi
3.8 What Does X-Phi Do?
3.9 Concluding Remarks
References
4 Does Scientific Conceptual Analysis Provide Better Justification than Armchair Conceptual Analysis?
4.1 Introduction
4.2 Armchair Conceptual Analysis and Scientific Conceptual Analysis
4.3 The Argument from Uniformity of Agreement
4.3.1 Argument from Uniformity of Agreement
4.3.2 Argument from Uniformity of Agreement – Complex Version
4.4 The Expertise Defence
4.4.1 The Expertise Defence
4.5 The Study
4.5.1 Design of the Study
4.5.2 Results and Discussion
4.6 Conclusion
Appendix
References
5 Distributional Theories of Meaning: Experimental Philosophy of Language
5.1 Introduction
5.2 Distributional Semantics and the Distributional Hypothesis
5.3 Constructing DSMs: An Overview
5.4 The Success of the Approach
5.5 Objections to DSMs as Theories of Meaning
5.5.1 No Understanding
5.5.2 No Compositionality
5.5.3 No Cognitive Plausibility
5.5.4 No Granularity of Meaning
5.6 DSMs as Holistic Theories of Meaning
5.7 Conclusion
References
Part II Experimental Philosophy of Language and Corpus Methods
6 Are Moral Predicates Subjective? A Corpus Study
6.1 Introduction
6.2 Moral Predicates and Subjectivity: A Snapshot of a Long-Standing Philosophical Debate and the More Recent Empirical Turn
6.2.1 The Vexed Issue of Moral Subjectivity
6.2.2 Tracking Subjectivity Semantically
6.3 The Corpus Study
6.3.1 Corpus Used and Raw Data Collection Method
6.3.2 Initial Results and Data Filtering
6.3.3 Observations on the Corpus Data
6.3.4 Discussion
6.4 Conclusion
References
7 Linguistic Corpora and Ordinary Language: On the Dispute Between Ryle and Austin About the Use of Voluntary',Involuntary', Voluntarily', andInvoluntarily'
7.1 Introduction
7.2 Ryle on Voluntary' andInvoluntary'
7.3 Further Claims: Austin's `Special Circumstances' and Beyond the Received View of Ryle
7.4 Categorizing Uses
7.5 Conclusion
References
8 Light in Assessing Color Quality: An Arabic-Spanish Cross-Linguistic Study
8.1 Introduction
8.2 Indexical Theories on Color Terms
8.3 What's with the Light?
8.4 Methods and Materials
8.5 Analyses
8.6 Discussion
8.7 Conclusions
References
Part III Politically-Engaged Experimental Philosophy of Language
9 Experimentally-Informed Philosophy of Hate Speech
9.1 Introduction
9.2 The Expressive Nature of Slurs
9.3 The Effects of Slurs
9.4 Reporting Slurs
9.5 Reclaiming Slurs
9.6 Conclusion
References
10 Slurs in the Rio de la Plata
10.1 Introduction
10.2 Pilot Study
10.2.1 Desgin of the Pilot Study
10.2.1.1 Participants
10.2.1.2 Design
10.2.2 Results
10.2.3 Discussion
10.3 A Corpus Analysis of Slurs and Swearwords
10.3.1 Slurs and Swearwords Are Not Pure Expressives
10.3.1.1 Differences Between Pure Expressive Adjectives and Descriptive Adjectives
10.3.1.2 Slurs and Swearwords
10.3.1.3 A Note on Some Non-syntactic Behaviour of Slurs
10.4 The Experiment
10.4.1 Desgin of the Study
10.4.1.1 Participants
10.4.1.2 Design
10.4.2 Results
10.4.3 Discussion
10.5 A Remark on Epithets
10.6 Final Remarks
Appendix: The Syntactic and Semantic Representation of Slurs and Swearwords
References
11 Who Has a Free Speech Problem? Motivated Censorship Across the Ideological Divide
11.1 Introduction
11.1.1 Background
11.1.2 Moral Conviction and the Contours of Speaker Identity Norms
11.1.3 Speaker Identity Norms as Effects of Inverse Planning
11.2 Methods
11.2.1 Power Analysis
11.2.2 Participants
11.2.3 Materials
11.2.4 Procedure
11.2.5 Measures
11.3 Results
11.3.1 Part 1: Offensiveness
11.3.2 Part 2: Attributions of Intent
11.3.3 Part 3: Mediation Analyses
11.3.4 Part 4: Active Versus Inactive Debates
11.4 Discussion
11.4.1 Symmetry and Asymmetry in Offensive Speech Norms
11.4.2 Cognitive Mechanism: The Role of Intent
11.5 Conclusion
References
Part IV Experimental Philosophy of Language and Psychology
12 How Understanding Shapes Reasoning: Experimental Argument Analysis with Methods from Psycholinguistics and Computational Linguistics
12.1 Experimental Argument Analysis: Motivation and Key Ideas
12.2 Example: A Philosophical Argument
12.3 Example: A Comprehension Bias
12.4 Methods from Psycholinguistics
12.5 Methods from Computational Linguistics
12.6 Conclusion
References
13 From Infants to Great Apes: False Belief Attribution and Primitivism About Truth
13.1 Introduction
13.2 Alethic Primitivism
13.2.1 Conceptual vs. Metaphysical Primitivism
13.2.2 Asay's Conceptual Primitivism
13.3 False-Belief Data
13.3.1 False Belief Attribution in Young Children
13.3.2 False Belief Attribution in Infants
13.3.3 False Belief Attribution in Non-human Primates
13.4 Alethic Primitivism and the False-Belief Data
13.4.1 FundamentalityA
13.4.2 Explanatory IndispensabilityA
13.4.3 OmnipresenceA
13.4.4 AbilityA
13.5 Conclusion
References
Author Index
Subject Index