An Essentialist Theory of the Meaning of Slurs

In this paper, I develop an essentialist model of the semantics of slurs. I defend the view that slurs are a species of kind terms: Slur concepts encode mini-theories which represent an essence-like element that is causally connected to a set of negatively-valenced stereotypical features of a social group. The truth-conditional contribution of slur nouns can then be captured by the following schema: For a given slur S of a social group G and a person P, S is true of P iff P bears the “essence” of G—whatever this essence is—which is causally responsible for stereotypical negative features associated with G and predicted of P. Since there is no essence that is causally responsible for stereotypical negative features of a social group, slurs have null-extension, and consequently, many sentences containing them are either meaningless or false. After giving a detailed outline of my theory, I show that it receives strong linguistic support. In particular, it can account for a wide range of linguistic cases that are regarded as challenging, central data for any theory of slurs. Finally, I show that my theory also receives convergent support from cognitive psychology and psycholinguistics

Chicano/Mexican Culture as a Rational Instrument in the Human Sciences

The use of culture as an analytical category by social scientists presents an opportunity to examine how professional discursive formations are used to make empirical assertions. The social fact of culture is neither uniform nor unitary. Traditionally, culture has been thought of as a product of disciplinary research, not necessarily a variable for empirical study. When culture is used as a tool or instrument of scientific methodology, it loses its fluid nature as a disciplinary discourse. In this essay, I examine the specific discussion of the epidemiologic health paradox that states that the Chicano/Mexican immigrant culture serves as a protective factor against many maladies that afflict other U.S. populations. Since the 1970s, this discussion of culture as a protective factor provides an interesting exposition of the uses of culture by empirical scholars

Disseminative Collapse: A Derridean Critique of the Sex/Gender Distinction

In many strains of contemporary feminist theory, the sex/gender distinction is an elementary conception. Across its decades of paradigmatic prevalence within the discipline, the distinction consistently contextualizes the category of gender as segregating by a dynamic of psychology/culture and the category of sex as segregating by a dynamic of biology. The sex/gender distinction, however, is ultimately untenable a conceptual structure. While other scholars have previously asserted this claim, this particular project puts forth an original critique incorporative of French poststructuralist Jacques Derrida’s notion of dissemination. In a general sense, dissemination prevents the meaning of signifiers from being restrained to an insular context. Accordingly, dissemination disrupts any conceptual schema that operationally requires contextual stabilization. The sex/gender distinction, being such a schema, falls into disarray as effected by disseminative disruptions. Disruption occurs in two ways. First, dissemination causes segregative conflation between the dynamics of both gender and sex, resulting in these categories coming to divide indistinguishably from each other. Second, dissemination conflates the individuated positions of gender and sex (e.g. man, woman, male, female) into a dual occupancy under both categories, resulting in an indistinguishability of categorized positional specificity. By the factor of both of these disruptions, the sex/gender distinction collapses

Decoding Babel: “Ungrieved Futility” and the Unrecognized Order of the Depression Research Field

The field of depression research and theory is a preparadigmatic potpourri of different orientations without a central, consensus definition of depression. This study attempted to address these issues by investigating the depression sub-literatures (cognitive–behavioral, psychoanalytic, evolutionary, biomedical, phenomenological, existential–humanistic, cybernetic, environmental, and religious–spiritual theories) using a comparative analytic methodology, which allows for comparing disparate fields that do not share a common definitional set by relating them to a third concept, in this study the construct of “ungrieved futility” (UF) as a dynamic model of depression. UF defines the objective and/or subjective experience of the permanent loss of an attachment object that initiates the normal grief process, but which is blocked by other factors. As such, UF is one entity with two components. The results showed that UF does describe the core definitional statement about depression of most of the literatures, with the exceptions being the biomedical, behavioral, as well as parts of the environmental and spiritual sub-literatures. It also distinguishes those literatures that frame depression as an entity possessing inherent structure and dynamics from those that see it as an epiphenomenon. Finally, the analysis points to an inherent dynamic in depression which has implications for transpersonal psychology. Thus, this study shows that even without overt integrative theorizing, the field itself already has a wide inherent agreement about the structural dynamics of depression that has not been clearly recognized in existing literature

On the Impossibilities of Advancing Racial Justice in Higher Education Research Through Reliance on the Campus Climate Heuristic

Campus climates are often described as “hostile” for racially minoritized populations. However, growing recognition of complexities associated with intersecting and interwoven systems of social oppression compel the field of higher education to move away from overly simplistic portrayals of postsecondary environments as “welcoming/chilly” or “positive/negative.” More than this, there is a need to engage in a broader discussion of the field’s reliance on the metaphor of meteorological climate itself as a heuristic for characterizing the nature of college learning environments. The central argument presented in this theoretical article is that racial justice is impossible when operationalized through a lens of campus climate because this lens offers no theory of power or race to accomplish this purpose and instead, embodies logics and assumptions that fundamentally delimit the centralizing of students’ ontological experience of the race. We propose that the field move away from the campus climate heuristic to generate new frames that can engage with physiosocially situated subjective experiences of race and more complexly interrogate the dimensions of race, ethnicity, power, and culture that differentially shape students’ experiential realities

Religion and the "Light of Reason": The Plasticity of ‘Aql [Reason] in the Shi‘i Logosphere

This thesis engages the problematic of the modal status of reason (its essentiality versus contingency) through the lens of discourses on the definition, ontology, and operation of reason (‘aql) in Shi‘ism. The premise of the project conceives of Shi‘ism as a “logosphere”—a site of enduring conversations moored to a body of unitive vocabularies—wherein debates over the proper signification of ‘aql have been catalytic to Shi‘i identity formation and to methodological and substantive divisions of Shi‘i scholars. A close, conceptual study of the category of reason in Shi‘ism is instructive for the modal status debate: namely, does reason exhibit essential markers, characteristic dynamics, and teleologies, or does the use of reason merely reflect culturally conditioned sensitivities and/or reduce to rhetorical performance? The analytic path of this thesis spotlights invocations of the category of reason in Shi‘i hadith texts, by Safavid jurists and philosophers, and among contemporary Iranian-Shi‘i thinkers. Taken together, this diachronic analysis demonstrates ‘aql to be a fluid and malleable facultative category. This finding contributes to scholarship which destabilizes a positivist strand of Enlightenment and “New Atheist” accounts of reason as an epistemic “light,” stable in its essence, which is teleologically oriented towards irreligion.Master of Art

Media do not exist : performativity and mediating conjunctures

Collection : Theory on demand ; 31Media Do Not Exist: Performativity and Mediating Conjunctures by Jean-Marc Larrue and Marcello Vitali-Rosati offers a radically new approach to the phenomenon of mediation, proposing a new understanding that challenges the very notion of medium. It begins with a historical overview of recent developments in Western thought on mediation, especially since the mid 80s and the emergence of the disciplines of media archaeology and intermediality. While these developments are inseparable from the advent of digital technology, they have a long history. The authors trace the roots of this thought back to the dawn of philosophy. Humans interact with their environment – which includes other humans – not through media, but rather through a series of continually evolving mediations, which Larrue and Vitali-Rosati call ‘mediating conjunctures’. This observation leads them to the paradoxical argument that ‘media do not exist’. Existing theories of mediation processes remain largely influenced by a traditional understanding of media as relatively stable entities. Media Do Not Exist demonstrates the limits of this conception. The dynamics relating to mediation are the product not of a single medium, but rather of a series of mediating conjunctures. They are created by ceaselessly shifting events and interactions, blending the human and the non-human, energy, and matter

Undisciplining the study of religion:Critical posthumanities and more-than-human ways of knowing

Recent discussions about other-than-human agency and relationality across species and lifeforms are closely tied to theoretical reconsiderations within, and beyond, the humanities. Scholars in the study of religion have only reluctantly picked up these considerations. Theoretical work that includes nonhuman animals in conceptualisations of religion often still operates in binary structures of nature/culture and body/mind. The author reviews recent naturalistic approaches to concepts of religion and combines them with discussions in critical animal studies and biosemiotics, as well as with Karen Barad’s theory of agential realism, which forms the basis of a robust analytical frame of nonhuman agency. The author proposes a critical posthumanities study of religion, transforming and ‘undisciplining’ the humanities into a form of scholarly engagement that creates a transversal field of knowledge, consisting of human and other-than-human intra-actions—a study of religion that intentionally leaves behind the regimes of mastery and exploitation that are still operative today