No abstract

No abstract

This paper argues that there is a class of terms, orusesof terms, that are best accounted for by an expressivist account. We put forward two sets of criteria to distinguish between expressive and factual (uses of) terms. The first set relies on the action-guiding nature of expressive language. The second set relies on the difference between one's evidence for making an expressive vs. factual statement. We then put those criteria to work to show, first, that the basic evaluative adjectives such as ‘good’ have expressive as well as factual uses and, second, that many adjectives whose primary meanings are factual, such as ‘powerful’, also have expressive uses.

En este artículo analizamos oracio-nes que, sin constituir explícitamente discurso de odio, no obstante transmiten un mensaje de odio. Por ejemplo, en el titular “Refugiado iraquí es condenado en Alemania por violar y asesinar una chica adolescente”, la presencia de “refugiado iraquí” no parece arbitraria. Al contrario, invita una inferencia racista en contra de los refugiados iraquíes. Argumentamos que estas inferencias no pueden ser descritas como slurs, términos neutros utilizados como insultos, dogwhistles o implica-turas conversacionales. En cambio, proponemos caracterizar estas inferencias como insinuacio-nes, concretamente insinuaciones provocativas, debido a que ninguna respuesta parece efectiva a la hora de bloquearlas. In this paper we analyse utterances that, without explicitly constituting hate speech, nevertheless convey a hateful message. For example, in the headline ‘Iraqi Refugee is convicted in Germany of raping and murdering teenage girl’, the presence of ‘Iraqi refugee’ does not seem arbitrary. To the contrary, it is responsible for inviting a racist inference against Iraqi refugees. We defend that these inferences cannot be described as slurs, ethnic or social terms used as insults, dogwhistles or conversational implicatures. Rather, we propose that these inferences are insinuations, specifically provocative insinuations, as no conversational response seems effective at blocking them.

The present chapter concerns arguments whose conclusions take the form of a prescription such as you ought to do such-and-such, which have driven much public discussion and policy since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. We aim to tackle a hitherto under-explored characteristic of many such normative arguments, namely, the relationship between evaluative and deontic propositions, depending on whether they occur as premises or conclusions in such arguments. In order to investigate how willing people are to argue from what is good to what one ought to do, and the other way round, we conducted an Inferential Judgment Experiment. Participants were presented with arguments involving deontic and evaluative propositions, and had to judge whether they could infer conclusion from premise. The stimuli that we used are tightly related to the argumentation surrounding the pandemic, regarding the measures of preventing the spread of COVID-19. The results of the study show that there is a robust inferential connection between evaluatives and deontics, but at the same time, a significant asymmetry as well. We explore several theoretical approaches to the relationship between the deontic and the evaluative realm, and test their predictions against the results of our study.