Category: Philosophy of Language

Linguistic Hermeneutical Injustice

On By BIAP Research & Outreach ManagerIn Diversity, Epistemology, Feminist Philosophy, Philosophy of Language, Social Epistemology, Stereotypes

This is a post by Martina Rosola (University of Barcelona).

Referring to non-binary people in heavily gendered languages like Italian, German or Spanish is difficult because of structural features of the language itself. As a result, non-binary people are systematically misgendered: they are referred to either in the masculine or in the feminine despite non identifying as either men or women. This puts them at an unfair disadvantage and gives rise to a distinctive type of injustice, namely to an instance of what Miranda Fricker calls “hermeneutical injustice”.

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I Know How to Withstand the Skeptic

On By BIAP Research & Outreach ManagerIn Epistemology, Philosophy of Language, Philosophy of Mind

This is a post by Andrés Soria-Ruiz (University of Barcelona).

Think of the following: for all you know, you could be living in a computer simulation. Your friends might be so-called “Non-Player Characters”; your home, your surroundings might all be part of a sophisticated illusion. All of that is possible, and more worryingly, you—we—have no way of telling whether that’s actually the case.

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What Is This Thing Called Propaganda?

On By BIAP Research & Outreach ManagerIn Epistemology, Philosophy of Language, Political Philosophy, Propaganda, Social Epistemology
Image attribution: Christopher Michel, CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

This is a post by Constant Bonard (University of Bern), Filippo Contesi (University of Cagliari) and Teresa Marques (University of Barcelona).

Propaganda is so ubiquitous a phenomenon in contemporary societies of all types that there would seem to be no problem in us understanding what it is. Still, we apparently continue to fall for it so often that perhaps we are not very good at recognizing it. It may be because we don’t really understand what propaganda is. Can the philosophical debate about how to define propaganda provide any help?

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Falsity and Retraction: New Experimental Data on Epistemic Modals

On By BIAP Research & Outreach ManagerIn Assertion, Contextualism, Epistemic Modals, Epistemology, Philosophy of Language, Relativism, Retraction, X-Phi

This is a post by Teresa Marques (University of Barcelona).

Imagine the following scenario: My husband and I go to the supermarket. When we get home, we bring the shopping bags from the car to the kitchen and as we start to put things away in the fridge, I notice that the eggs are missing. I wonder if we left them in the car. And so, I ask my husband for the car keys, to which he replies:
– The keys might be on the table.
He says ‘might’ because he is not completely certain if they are on the table, in his backpack, or in the pocket of his jacket.

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Chatting with a Chatbot

On By BIAP Research & Outreach ManagerIn Artificial Intelligence, Large Language Models, Philosophy of Language

This is a post by Patrick Connolly (University of Barcelona).

Tech innovation generally arrives on a predictable wave of hype and hyperbole, we’re used to this by now. It serves the economic interests of the companies proclaiming their latest developments to spread the idea that what they have created is a revolutionary development that will lead us towards utopia. Indeed, the overriding economic model of tech is based upon generating publicity in order to encourage investment and the creation of multi-billion-dollar stock market valuations for companies that lose billions of dollars every year.

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