TOMASZ ZYGLEWICZ

Reclamation of a slur involves a creation of a new, positively-valenced meaning that gradually replaces the old pejorative meaning. This means that at a critical stage, the slur is ambiguous. It has been claimed that this ambiguity is polysemy. However, it is far from clear whether the view can explain why the introduction of the new meaning forces the old one out of existence. I argue that this datapoint can be explained by invoking the mechanism of homonymic conflict, and, therefore, that the ambiguity involved in reclamation is homonymy. One generalization that follows from my account is that conventionalized verbal irony, unlike conventionalized metonymy and metaphor, begets homonymy. Along the way, I criticize the standard ways of drawing the distinction between polysemy and homonymy in terms of semantic and etymological relatedness. If the notions of polysemy and homonymy are to be invoked in explanations, they should be understood in terms of how meanings are stored in the mental lexicon. My account also provides an elegant way of conceptualizing the difference between two types of conceptual engineering, namely reclamation and amelioration.

keywords: polysemy, homonymy, ambiguity, slurs, reclamation, homonymic conflict

Experimental philosophers routinely rely on the truth-value judgment task (TVJ), in which participants indicate whether a statement in question is true or false. In this paper, we present a novel critique of the task. The truth-value judgment presupposes that people are correspondentists, that is, that they classify a statement as true if and only if the proposition it expresses corresponds to the reality. However, recent studies have shown that this assumption is questionable. In particular, folk truth-value judgments seem to be sensitive to the evidence available to the speaker (Reuter, forthcoming; Reuter & Brun, 2022), their intentions (Handley-Miner et al., 2023), and the modal status of the proposition expressed (Johnson-Laird et al., 2023). In this paper, we present an experiment that takes a cue from this finding and demonstrates how the correspondentist assumption has confounded studies on contextualism about color predicates. Not only do our findings challenge the empirical standing of linguistic contextualism, they also serve as a cautionary tale about the uncritical use of TVJ. We conclude by presenting some interventions that nudge people towards applying “is true” in a correspondentist fashion.

keywords: truth-value judgments, semantics, contextualism, color predicates, experimental philosophy

It is a truism among scientists that there is only one objective reality, which is the same for everyone and whose properties are independent of how people perceive it. Call this truism “ontological realism.” We present the results of a series of experiments suggesting that the majority of philosophically untutored people embrace the opposite view, ontological relativism, which not only distinguishes between my reality, your reality, etc., but also attributes different properties to these realities.

keywords: truth-value judgments, semantics, contextualism, color predicates, experimental philosophy