Diversity Reading List

This paper uses logic - a formal language with models and a consequence relation - to think about the social and political topics of subordination and subordinative speech. I take subordination to be a matter of three things: i) ranking one person or a group of people below others, ii) depriving the lower-ranked of rights, and iii) permitting others to discriminate against them. Subordinative speech is speech - utterances in contexts - which subordinates. Section 1 introduces the topic of subordination using examples from the 1979 novel Kindred by Octavia Butler. Section 2 uses these examples to clarify and illustrate the definitions of subordination and subordinative speech. Sections 3 and 4 then develop a way of modeling subordination using a system of social spheres, an adaptation of (Lewis, 1973)'s approach to modeling the relation of comparative similarity on worlds for counterfactuals. Section 4 looks at three possible applications for this work: giving truth-conditions for social quantifiers, identifying fallacies involving such expressions, and explaining the pragmatics of subordinative speech. The last section anticipates objections and raises further questions.

Abstract: "[T]he sceptical argument that Kripke attributes to Wittgenstein, and even the 'sceptical solution', are of considerable importance regardless of whether they are clearly Wittgenstein's. The naturalistically inclined philosopher, who rejects Brentano's irreducibility and yet holds intentionality to be an objective feature of our thoughts, owes a solution to the Kripke-Wittgenstein paradox." The challenge is a welcome one. Although I will argue that the Kripke-Wittgenstein paradox is not a problem for naturalists only, I will propose a naturalist solution to it. (Should the Kripke-Wittgenstein paradox prove to be soluble from a naturalist standpoint but intractable from other standpoints, that would, I suppose, constitute an argument for naturalism.) Then I will show that the paradox and its solution have an important consequence for the theories of meaning and truth. The Kripke-Wittgenstein arguments which pose the paradox also put in question Dummett's and Putnam's view of language understanding. From this view it follows that truth rules must be "verificationist rules" that assign assertability conditions to sentences, rather than "realist rules" that assign correspondence truth conditions. The proposed solution to the paradox suggests another view of language understanding, according to which a speaker can express, through his language practice, a grasp of correspondence truth rules.

Introduction: What is wisdom? Remarkably few contemporary analytic philosophers have proposed an answer to this ancient question. I think the question is interesting and deserves some careful attention. In this paper, I will present and evaluate several analyses of wisdom. I will then defend my own analysis of wisdom.

More than three decades after its first publication, Edward Said's groundbreaking critique of the West's historical, cultural, and political perceptions of the East has become a modern classic.
In this wide-ranging, intellectually vigorous study, Said traces the origins of "orientalism" to the centuries-long period during which Europe dominated the Middle and Near East and, from its position of power, defined "the orient" simply as "other than" the occident. This entrenched view continues to dominate western ideas and, because it does not allow the East to represent itself, prevents true understanding. Essential, and still eye-opening, Orientalism remains one of the most important books written about our divided world.

How does being a woman affect one’s epistemic life? What about being black? Or queer? Standpoint theorists argue that such social positions can give rise to otherwise unavailable epistemic privilege. “Epistemic privilege” is a murky concept, however. Critics of standpoint theory argue that the view is offered without a clear explanation of how standpoints confer their benefits, what those benefits are, or why social positions are particularly apt to produce them. But this need not be so. This article articulates a minimal version of standpoint epistemology that avoids these criticisms and supports the normative goals of its feminist forerunners. With this foundation, we develop a formal model in which to explore standpoint epistemology using neighborhood semantics for modal logic.