Louise Antony

Meta-Linguistics: Methodology and Ontology in Devitt's Ignorance of Language

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use of the Content.

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

Degraded conditions: confounds in the study of decision making.

I raise a consideration complementary to those raised in the target article. Many of the most widely cited studies on decision making involve introspection in degraded conditions, namely, conditions in which agents have no reason for the decisions they reach. But the fact that confabulation occurs in degraded conditions does not impugn the reliability of introspection in non-degraded conditions, that is, in cases in which a subject actually does make a choice for a reason.