EXPANDING THE CRITICAL PROJECT: A CRITICAL PRAGMATIC ACCOUNT OF SLURS AND METAFICTION

• Grant number: 24/05386-9
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships abroad - Research Internship - Post-doctor
• Start date: July 01, 2024
• End date: June 30, 2025
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Philosophy
• Principal Investigator: Marco Antonio Caron Ruffino
• Grantee: Eduarda Calado Barbosa
• Supervisor: Eleonora Eva Orlando
• Host Institution: Centro de Lógica, Epistemologia e História da Ciência (CLE). Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Campinas , SP, Brazil
• Institution abroad: Sociedad Argentina De Análisis Filosófico, Argentina
• Associated to the scholarship: 22/04839-4 - Towards a collaborative critical pragmatics, BP.PD

Abstract

Critical pragmatics (CP) is an intentionalist theory of how the content of utterances with referential terms is expressed and communicated. It encompasses a proficuous role-based conception of intention formation and recovery, which explains expressivity in a range of different speech situations and it has the potential to be applied to tackle various philosophical issues. A few examples include Vallée (2014), Garmendia (2005) and Genovesi (2023), who have used the CP framework to account for slurs, metaphors and irony, respectively. The present project intends to push this potential further and advance CP-based accounts of two currently popular topics: non-derogatory uses of slurs and metafictional discourse. We will advance three hypotheses. The first one is that, in using a slur, speakers intend that their audiences have a prejudiced cognitive fix on the target groups. Paradigmatically, these speech acts have an insultive force (Orlando and Saab, 2019,; 2020), but in non-derogatory uses, like reclamation, the speaker's group membership plays a role in transforming the slur in a vehicle for a resistance message. Our second hypothesis is that something similar happens when slurs are used in humoristic contexts: they can become pro-social instead of harmful. In both cases, intention recovery will depend on pragmatic inferences generated by prejudiced cognitive fixes. Finally, turning to fiction, we will investigate an expansion of de Ponte, Korta and Perry (2018) to account for metafiction and discuss how such an expansion can avoid problems regarding the number of notions required to generate the correct truth-conditions for metafictional statements with insights from Orlando (2021).