RESUMO
Tracing the boundaries of freedom of expression is a matter of wide societal and academic import-especially, as these boundaries encroach on the politics of inclusion. Yet, the elements that constitute offensive speech and determine its legal status remain poorly defined. In two studies, we examined how lay judges evaluate the offensiveness of apparently descriptive statements. Replicating prior work, we found that non-linguistic features (including speaker intent and outcomes on the audience) modulated the statements' meaning. The speaker's identity-and, in particular, their membership in the target group-independently influenced evaluations of offensive speech among conservatives and progressives alike. When asked to disclose their abstract principles, or jointly evaluate two contrastive cases, participants tended to deny the relevance of identity while primarily endorsing the intent principle. Taken together, our findings confirm that assessments of offensive speech are governed by contextual features, some of which are not introspectively deemed relevant.
Assuntos
Percepção da Fala , Fala , HumanosRESUMO
The purpose of this paper is to show that, pace (Field, 2009), MacFarlane's assessment relativism and expressivism should be sharply distinguished. We do so by arguing that relativism and expressivism exemplify two very different approaches to context-dependence. Relativism, on the one hand, shares with other contemporary approaches a bottom-up, building block, model, while expressivism is part of a different tradition, one that might include Lewis' epistemic contextualism and Frege's content individuation, with which it shares an organic model to deal with context-dependence. The building-block model and the organic model, and thus relativism and expressivism, are set apart with the aid of a particular test: only the building-block model is compatible with the idea that there might be analytically equivalent, and yet different, propositions.
