Jennifer Hornsby

Free speech and illocution

What one ought to mean by “speech,” in the context of discussions of free speech, is whatever it is that a correct justification of the right to free speech justifies one in protecting. What one ought to mean, it may be argued, includes illocution, in the sense of J.L. Austin. Some feminist writers, accepting that free speech includes free illocution, have been led to take the notion of silencing seriously in discussions of free speech.

Simple Mindedness: In Defense of Naive Naturalism in the Philosophy of Mind

Book synopsis: How is our conception of what there is affected by our counting ourselves as inhabitants of the natural world? How do our actions fit into a world that is altered through our agency? And how do we accommodate our understanding of one another as fellow subjects of experience—as beings with thoughts and wants and hopes and fears? These questions provide the impetus for the detailed discussions of ontology, human agency, and everyday psychological explanation presented in this book. The answers offer a distinctive view of questions about “the mind’s place in nature,” and they argue for a particular position in philosophy of mind: naive naturalism. This position opposes the whole drift of the last thirty or forty years’ philosophy of mind in the English-speaking world. Jennifer Hornsby sets naive naturalism against dualism, but without advancing the claims of “materialism,” “physicalism,” or “naturalism” as these have come to be known. She shows how we can, and why we should, abandon the view that thoughts and actions, to be seen as real, must be subject to scientific explanation.

Personal and sub‐personal; A defence of Dennett's early distinction

Abstract Since 1969, when Dennett introduced a distinction between personal and sub‐personal levels of explanation, many philosophers have used ‘sub‐personal’ very loosely, and Dennett himself has abandoned a view of the personal level as genuinely autonomous. I recommend a position in which Dennetts original distinction is crucial, by arguing that the phenomenon called mental causation is on view only at the properly personal level. If one retains the commit‐’ ments incurred by Dennetts early distinction, then one has a satisfactory anti‐physicalistic, anti‐dualist philosophy of mind. It neither interferes with the projects of sub‐personal psychology, nor encourages ; instrumentalism at the personal level.

Intending, knowing how, infinitives

Abstract Intellectualists tell us that a person who knows how to do something therein knows a proposition. Along with others, they may say that a person who intends to do something intends a proposition. I argue against them. I do so by way of considering ‘know how ——’ and ‘intend ——’ together. When the two are considered together, a realistic conception of human agency can inform the understanding of some infinitives: the argument need not turn on what semanticists have had to say about (what they call) ‘the subjects of infinitival clauses’.

Feminism in philosophy of language

Book synopsis: The thirteen specially-commissioned essays in this volume are written by philosophers at the forefront of feminist scholarship, and are designed to provide an accessible and stimulating guide to a philosophical literature that has seen massive expansion in recent years. Ranging from history of philosophy through metaphysics to philosophy of science, they encompass all the core subject areas commonly taught in anglophone undergraduate and graduate philosophy courses, offering both an overview of and a contribution to the relevant debates. Together they testify to the intellectual value of feminism as a radicalizing energy internal to philosophical inquiry. This volume will be essential reading for any student or teacher of philosophy who is curious about the place of feminism in their subject.

Dualism in action

We know what one dualist account of human action looks like, because Descartes gave us one. I want to explore the extent ot which presnet-day accounts of physical action are vulnerable to the charges that may be made against Descartess dualist account. I once put forward an account of human action, and I have always maintained that my view about the basic shape of a correct ‘theory of aciton’ can be combined with a thoroughgoing opposition to dualism. But the possibility of the combination has been doubted and it will remain doubtful until we have a better understanding of what makes an account objectionably dualistic. In this paper, I hope to deflect some of the criticims aimed what I shall call my account, and to show that when they are turned onto their proper path their actual target is some physicalist accounts.

Agency and actions

Among philosophical questions about human agency, one can distinguish in a rough and ready way between those that arise in philosophy of mind and those that arise in ethics. In philosophy of mind, one central aim has been to account for the place of agents in a world whose operations are supposedly ‘physical’. In ethics, one central aim has been to account for the connexion between ethical species of normativity and the distinctive deliberative and practical capacities of human beings. Ethics then is involved with questions of moral psychology whose answers admit a kind of richness in the life of human beings from which the philosophy of mind may ordinarily prescind. Philosophy of mind, insofar as it treats the phenomenon of agency as one facet of the phenomenon of mentality, has been more concerned with how there can be ‘mental causation’ than with any details of a story of human motivation or of the place of evaluative commitments within such a story. This little account of the different agenda of two philosophical approaches to human agency is intended only to speak to the state of play as we have it, and it is certainly somewhat artificial. I offer it here as a way to make sense of attitudes to what has come to be known as the standard story of action. The standard story is assumed to be the orthodoxy on which philosophers of mind, who deal with the broad metaphysical questions, have converged, but it is held to be deficient when it comes to specifically ethical questions. Michael Smith, for instance, asks: ‘How do we turn the standard story of action into the story of ‘orthonomous action?’, where orthonomous action is action ‘under the rule of the right as opposed to the wrong’.1 Smith is not alone in thinking that the standard story is correct as far as it goes but lacks resources needed to accommodate genuinely ethical beings. Michael Bratman is another philosopher who has this thought; and I shall pick on Bratman’s treatment of human agency in due course. The standard story is sometimes encapsulated in the slogan: ‘Beliefs and desires cause actions’. In the version of Smith’s that I shall consider here, it says:

Free Speech and Hate Speech: Language and Rights

Book synopsis: Quasi ogni aspetto dell’esperienza umana sembra essere legato all’idea di normativita. Ma cosa sono le norme? Che cosa le giustifica? A chi, in quale misura e perche si applicano? Che rapporto hanno con i fatti e i valori? Questo volume (corredato di un’amplissima bibliografia) affronta tali questioni dal punto di vista della filosofia del linguaggio, della teoria della conoscenza, della morale, della filosofia del diritto e dell’azione.

Subordination, Silencing, and Two Ideas of Illocution

1. It is wonderful that Rae Langton’s existing essays on pornography, on objectification, and on the links between them should be assembled and supplemented with three new ones. For some of us it is especially gratifying to have a book to recommend which is at once a compelling work of feminism and an excellent work of analytic philosophy. But one need not be a feminist or an analytic philosopher to admire Langton’s distinctive, engaging style, and to wonder at the care and rigour of her arguments. One does have to be a philosopher, perhaps, fully to appreciate the imaginative uses to which Langton puts ideas from historical figures, and from recent work in political philosophy, ethics, epistemology, philosophy of mind and philosophy of language. Langton gets difficult things across with ease, and thanks to her extraordinary clear-headedness, her writing is a special pleasure to read. I’m not going to attempt to review the overall project of Sexual Solipsism. I want to take this opportunity to say something about one aspect of Langton’s treatment of the subject of pornography. As I see it, two normative principles inform the treatment. There is a political principle: that a right to equality is fundamental, being the wellspring for rights to liberty. And there is an ethical one: that there is something wrong about treating a person as a thing. So unexceptionable does each of the principles seem to many (2011) 2(2) Jurisprudence 379–385

Arm Raising and Arm Rising

I. It is a necessary condition of the truth of ‘I raised my arm’ that my arm rose; but it is not a sufficient condition. Is there some further necessary condition which, when conjoined with the condition that my arm rose, does give a sufficient condition of the truth of ‘I raised my arm’?