Evidentiality In Romance Languages. Explanatory Potential of a Concept and Its Applications In Pragmatics

Defined narrowly, evidentiality pertains to the sources of knowledge or evidence whereby the speaker feels entitled to make a factual claim. But evidentiality may also be conceived more broadly as both providing epistemic justification and reflecting speaker’s attitude towards the validity of the communicated information, and hearer’s potential acceptability of the information, derived from the degree of reliability of the source and mode of access to the information. Evidentiality and epistemic modality are subcategories of the same superordinate category, namely a category of epistemicity. Since the first seminal works on evidentiality (Chafe and Nichols 1986), studies have for the most part centred on languages where the grammatical marking of the information source is obligatory (for example Willett 1988; Aikhenvald 2004). Recent years have witnessed a growing interest in the study of the domain of evidentiality in European languages, which rely on strategies along the lexico‐grammatical continuum. Assuming a broad conception of evidentiality and defining it as a functional category, we study linguistic means that fulfil the function of indicating the source of information for the transmitted content of a certain proposition in Romance languages.

And Justice for All

There is a strong sentiment in the general population that we need to put an end to the hate crisis in our society. Politicians and policymakers have it in their power to prevent this crisis from escalating further by regulating not only (physical) hate crimes but also hate speech. This has already been done in many European countries, where hate speech typically is considered a form of group libel that defames members of the targeted group. Law professor Jeremy Waldron has offered an argument for this perspective on hate speech. Hate speech, he argues, is criminal group libel. This chapter argues that Waldron’s argument doesn’t accomplish what he says it does, because most hate speech doesn’t make, or imply, any factual claim and therefore fails to be defamatory. The chapter then offers an argument for curtailing hate speech that is premised on the political philosopher Jürgen Habermas’ notion of communicative rationality. Finally, other solutions to the hate crisis are considered.

Breast Cancer Prevention and Treatment: Misinformation on Pinterest, 2018

Objectives. To quantify and describe the incidence of misinformation about breast cancer on the social media platform Pinterest, a leading source of women’s health (e.g., breast cancer) information. Methods. We performed a hand-coded content analysis on 797 Pinterest posts (“pins”) mentioning the terms “breast cancer” or “breast” and “cancer,” collected in November 2018. Results. From the original sample of 797, 178 (22.3%) made a factual claim about what social media users could do to prevent or treat breast cancer. Of these, more than half—91 (51.1%)—contained misinformation. Therefore, 11.4% of the sample overall contained misinformation related to breast cancer prevention or treatment. Conclusions. Pinterest is a significant vector of misinformation about breast cancer, especially given the platform’s overwhelmingly female composition and its visual means of conveying information. Public Health Implications. Health practitioners should be aware of the myths circulating about breast cancer prevention and treatment and be prepared both to dismantle misinformation and to stress reliable health guidance. Meanwhile, Pinterest may wish to widen the criteria it uses for identifying health misinformation on its platform.

Wages, Talents, and Egalitarianism

This paper compares Joseph Heath’s critique of the just deserts rationale for markets with an earlier critique due to Frank Knight, Milton Friedman, and Friedrich Hayek. Heath shares their emphasis upon the role of luck in prices based on supply and demand. Yet he avoids their claim that the inheritance of human capital is on a moral par with the inheritance of ordinary capital, as a basis for unequal shares of the social product. Heath prefers to argue that markets do not tend to reward talent as such. The paper raises some doubts about this factual claim, and argues that sweeping the issue of talent under the rug threatens to make our theory of justice less egalitarian than it would otherwise be. The paper also addresses the objection that claims of unfairness based on the arbitrariness of the distribution of innate abilities will undermine self-respect.

A Response to John Rawls’s Critique of Loyola on the Human Good

In this paper we shall consider whether John Rawls’s treatment of Ignatius of Loyola is a fair one. Rawls claims in A Theory of Justice that Catholic theology (and Ignatius’s theology in particular) aims at a “dominant end” of serving God that overrides other moral considerations. Rawls argues that dominant end views lead to a disfigured self and a disregard for justice. We do not question Rawls on the normative issue of whether dominant end conceptions are untenable, but rather on his factual claim that Ignatian spirituality and Catholic theology in general presupposes a dominant end view as he defines it. The Loyola whom Rawls attacks in Theory of Justice is a straw-man. Ignatian spirituality and Catholic theology in general embraces something closer to an inclusive end view, since it argues that several different ways of virtuous living can lead to happiness.

Kant's retributivism and the death penalty

The paper deals with Kant's notion of punishment in general, as well as one specific form of punishment, namely, the death penalty. In the first part of the article we will exmine, Kant's views on punishment as well as an extent to which it is retributive. According to Kant's view, offenders should be punished exclusively for having committed an offense (retribution), and proportionally to the crime commited (ius talionis). In recent literature, there are interpretations that indicate Kant's criminal theory is not completely retributive, but rather combined, so that it contains elements of retribution and intimation. If we clearly outline the goal, justification and extent of punishment, the purpose and justification of forming the state (time and punishment), we will make sure that these interpretations are incorrect. The paper shows that Kant retribution determines the goal and justification of punishment, that the reason and justification of the state (and punishment) is the achievement of justice, that is, the preservation of individual freedoms of citizens on an equal footing, while the control of crime should be understood as the achievement of this goal. Also, one needs to bear in mind the distinction between the factual and the normative level - Kant claims that a person should be punished exclusively for having committed the offense, although her punishment simultaneously intimidates or deters the offense of another citizens, which is a factual claim. The theory of punishment prescribes the goal and justification of punishment, which falls within the normative domain, and in Kant?s opinion, it is fundamentally retributive. It is also necessary to take into account another distinction that Kant introduces, which is the distinction between the noumenal and phenomenal spheres of existence. Justice is a noumen or an idea, that the state pursues to achieve, while it is realized or made into a phenomenon when the state applies laws and penalties in a particular community. Intimidation or control of crime is part of the realization of justice in the empirical world. The second part deals with Kant's affirmation of the death penalty, objections to this affirmation, and ultimately, an alternative to this punishment is proposed. The alternative to the death penalty stems from incoherence in the application of the ius talionis principle. That could be one Kantian approach to punishment. A lifetime imprisonment argument avoids the objection of irreversibility of punishment (the argument from the irrevocability of the death penalty) and is in line with the basic principles of Kant's ethics.

Rationalizing Economic Values

The argument from productivity alleges that privatizing public lands would make them—and the resources now committed to their management—more productive. I have spent the last two chapters interpreting and evaluating this factual claim. In my view, there is no sense of “more productive” for which it is both interesting and clearly true. But if there were, it would not immediately follow that public lands should be privatized. In order to reach normative conclusions, we need normative premises. In the argument from productivity, these are essentially that situations are better as resources are more productively employed and that we should arrange for the best possible situation. In this chapter I consider how such assumptions might be rationalized. One of the attractions of productivity, I suspect, is that it seems to offer a way of evading this task, a way of taking values into account without taking sides. People disagree about ends, for example, about whether old-growth forest is best reserved for spotted owl habitat, or cut on a sustained-yield basis, or liquidated to improve quarterly reports to stockholders, or carved into woodland estates. It would be nice to resolve such disagreements by demonstrating the superiority of some particular end. But a demonstration would be an argument from normative principles, and such principles themselves are disputable. How, then, can policies or institutions designed to promote some particular end, such as preserving spotted owl habitat, be defended? Though they might be rational relative to that end, how is the end itself to be rationalized? Better to sidestep the problem by letting individual consumers rank ends (I prefer other consumption plans to those I characterize as “poor”), seeking only arrangements (such as private property rights) that serve whatever preferences they might have. While there are certainly difficulties here, it is a delusion to think we can avoid them by deferring to the desires of consumers. When privatization advocates claim that public lands and resources would be more productive under private management, they aren’t merely describing what they take to be facts.

The Confirmation of Scientific and Theistic Hypotheses

The idea that there might be empirical evidence for the existence of God has been largely discredited these days. Even among theists there are many who hold that it is not a fruitful idea and that there is no point in searching for evidence for theistic beliefs. Some who regard themselves as theists go to the extreme of denying that there is any possibility of there being empirical evidence to support a religious world-view since that view implies no factual claim, as it is essentially a commitment to a given set of values and a way of life and not to the existence of any physically real entity. Others are willing to assert that theism implies the belief in some special facts but that these are so far removed from the mundane experiences upon which physical science is based, that the latter could not possibly support such a belief. Yet others merely say that there is no need at all for confirmatory evidence of the kind employed in science since their beliefs are grounded in something much firmer and more immediate, like religious experience.

On Believing—a Reply to Professor R. W. Sleeper

I am very grateful to Professor R. W. Sleeper for his critical comments on my article, as also for the kind way in which he has expressed them. I should now like to make a few comments on his comments.(1) May I first say that I have no objection to being metaphysical? I do not like the word ‘metaphysics’ very much, and wish that we could find a less provocative one. But still, I do think that the difference between the reducible and the irreducible belief-in is a difference which there really is (‘metaphysically really’, if you like). Moreover, I fully admit that when we believe in God we are making a factual claim. It is, of course, a factual claim of rather a special kind. If it is a fact that there is a supreme Being, ‘The Lord of All’, this is not just one fact among others. It is not quite like the fact that there is a stormy north-westerly wind this morning. One could not just give a list of facts and add at the end, ‘There is also another fact which I had forgotten to mention: there is a God’. All the same, this factual claim, like others, does need to be justified; and how is it to be justified? I am afraid that the brief hint which I offered elsewhere on this subject is indeed ‘not good enough’ as it stands (Sleeper p. 79). To be even half good enough, it needs much more elaboration, and I agree that there is much force in Mr Gunderson's criticisms.