Published
- Almagro, M. y Guerra, S. (2023). There’s a certain slant of light: Three attitudes toward the political turn in analytic philosophy. Metaphylosophy, 54(2-3), 324-340. https://doi.org/10.1111/meta.12619 [Preprint]
We discuss the characterization of the political turn proposed by Bordonaba-Plou et al. (2022) in terms of political activism. Although philosophical practice can sometimes be considered a form of activism, we believe that not all philosophy associated with the political turn deserves such a classification. In our view, what is distinctive about the political turn is its critique of the idealistic and ideologically harmful nature of traditional theories, alongside the proposal of non-idealized theories aimed at understanding and addressing situations of injustice. In the final section, we focus on discussing what attitude is desirable when dealing with disagreements about which situations should be considered unjust.
Unpublished
- Almagro, M. y Guerra, S. (undereview). Non-cognitivism, normativity and political judgements.
We propose a non-cognitivist approach to the meaning of political judgments, such as ‘not all men.’ Non-cognitivism is characterized as the family of theories of meaning that distinguish between evaluative and descriptive uses of language. Assuming that political judgments contain both a descriptive and an evaluative component, we argue for a variety of non-cognitivism in which it is not possible to isolate the descriptive component from the evaluative one. Finally, we discuss how to resolve disagreements about the evaluation expressed in particular uses of a political judgment. Against positions that claim there is an objective fact that settles such disagreements, we argue for a position in which the meaning of political judgments depends on how they are assessed in specific situations.
- Guerra, S. y Moreno-Zurita, A. (in progress). Paying the costs: On (not) reporting a slur.
We explore a dilemma concerning the occurrence of slurs in the context of propositional attitude attributions. On the one hand, empirical evidence shows that the derogatory effect of slurs persists in such contexts, meaning their use could carry a moral cost. On the other hand, avoiding the use of slurs in propositional attitude attributions might result in an inability to accurately convey the commitments of speakers who are willing to use them. A possible solution to the dilemma could involve using neutral counterparts of slurs in attributions. However, we argue, first, that even if neutral counterparts existed, there would be contexts in which they could not satisfactorily replace the slur; and second, that there are reasons to doubt whether slurs have true neutral counterparts.