Experimental Philosophy of Language: Perspectives, Methods, and Prospects

Description

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. 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', and `Involuntarily' 7.1 Introduction 7.2 Ryle on `Voluntary' and `Involuntary' 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