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  1.  34
    Why maps are not propositional.Elisabeth Camp - 2018 - In Alex Grzankowski & Michelle Montague (eds.), Non-Propositional Intentionality. Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press. pp. 19-45.
    A number of philosophers and logicians have argued for the conclusion that maps are logically tractable modes of representation by analyzing them in propositional terms. But in doing so, they have often left what they mean by "propositional" undefined or unjustified. I argue that propositions are characterized by a structure that is digital, universal, asymmetrical, and recursive. There is little positive evidence that maps exhibit these features. Instead, we can better explain their functional structure by taking seriously the observation that (...)
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  2. Just saying, just kidding : liability for accountability-avoiding speech in ordinary conversation, politics and law.Elisabeth Camp - 2022 - In Laurence R. Horn (ed.), From lying to perjury: linguistic and legal perspective on lies and other falsehoods. Boston: De Gruyter Mouton. pp. 227-258.
    Mobsters and others engaged in risky forms of social coordination and coercion often communicate by saying something that is overtly innocuous but transmits another message ‘off record’. In both ordinary conversation and political discourse, insinuation and other forms of indirection, like joking, offer significant protection from liability. However, they do not confer blanket immunity: speakers can be held to account for an ‘off record’ message, if the only reasonable interpreta- tions of their utterance involve a commitment to it. Legal liability (...)
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  3. Playing with labels: Identity terms as tools for building agency.Elisabeth Camp & Carolina Flores - 2024 - Philosophical Quarterly 74 (4):1103-1136.
    Identity labels like “woman”, “Black,” “mother,” and “evangelical” are pervasive in both political and personal life, and in both formal and informal classification and communication. They are also widely thought to undermine agency by essentializing groups, flattening individual distinctiveness, and enforcing discrimination. While we take these worries to be well-founded, we argue that they result from a particular practice of using labels to rigidly label others. We identify an alternative practice of playful self-labelling, and argue that it can function as (...)
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  4.  31
    A Dual Act Analysis of Slurs.Elisabeth Camp - 2018 - In David Sosa (ed.), Bad Words: Philosophical Perspectives on Slurs. Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press. pp. 29-59.
    Slurs are incendiary terms so much that many ordinary speakers and theorists deny that sentences containing them can ever be true, and utterances where they occur embedded within normally "quarantining" contexts, like conditionals and indirect reports, are still typically offensive. At the same time, however, many speakers and theorists also find it obvious that sentences containing slurs can be true; and there are clear cases where embedding does inoculate a speaker from the slur's offensiveness. I argue that four standard accounts (...)
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  5. Instrumental Reasoning in Nonhuman Animals.Elisabeth Camp & Eli Shupe - 2017 - In Kristin Andrews & Jacob Beck (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Animal Minds. Routledge. pp. 100-118.
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  6.  80
    Perspectives and Frames in Pursuit of Ultimate Understanding.Elisabeth Camp - 2019 - In Stephen R. Grimm (ed.), Varieties of Understanding: New Perspectives From Philosophy, Psychology, and Theology. New York, New York: Oup Usa. pp. 17-45.
    Our ordinary and theoretical talk are rife with “framing devices”: expressions that function, not just to communicate factual information, but to suggest an intuitive way of thinking about their subjects. Framing devices can also play an important role in individual cognition, as slogans, precepts, and models that guide inquiry, explanation, and memory. At the same time, however, framing devices are double-edged swords. Communicatively, they can mold our minds into a shared pattern, even when we would rather resist. Cognitively, the intuitive (...)
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  7.  22
    (2 other versions)Prudent semantics meets wanton speech act pluralism.Elisabeth Camp - 2007 - In G. Preyer (ed.), Context-Sensitivity and Semantic Minimalism: New Essays on Semantics and Pragmatics. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 194--215.
    Ernie Lepore and Herman Cappelen (2005) argue that contextual influences on semantic content are much more restricted than most theorists assume, by presenting three tests for semantic context-sensitivity and concluding that only a very restricted class of expressions pass them. They combine this extreme semantic minimalism with an even more extreme speech-act pluralism, according to which a speaker has said anything that she can be reported as having said. I argue that because Lepore and Cappelen refuse to distinguish what is (...)
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  8.  51
    Imaginative Frames for Scientific Inquiry: Metaphors, Telling Facts, and Just-So Stories.Elisabeth Camp - 2019 - In Arnon Levy & Peter Godfrey-Smith (eds.), The Scientific Imagination. New York, US: Oup Usa. pp. 304-336.
    I distinguish among a range of distinct representational devices, which I call "frames", all of which have the function of providing a perspective on a subject: an overarching intuitive principle or for noticing, explaining, and responding to it. Starting with Max Black's metaphor of metaphor as etched lines on smoked glass, I explain what makes frames in general powerful cognitive tools. I distinguish metaphor from some of its close cousins, especially telling details, just-so stories, and analogies, in ordinary cognition and (...)
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  9.  81
    Language: Power Plays in Communication.Elisabeth Camp - 2020 - In Melissa M. Shew & Kimberly K. Garchar (eds.), Philosophy for girls: an invitation to the life of thought. New York, NY, United States of America: Oxford University Press. pp. 167-180.
    We do many things with words. We describe, we plan and promise, we invite and command, we hint and intimate. We also use words to wound – to demean, insult, and exclude. The fact that words can have such potent, pernicious effects is puzzling, because they are, after all, just words. As the schoolyard chant goes, “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me.” Words do hurt though–not only our feelings, but our social status, even (...)
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  10.  40
    Priorities and Diversities in Thought and Language.Elisabeth Camp - 2020 - In Andrea Bianchi (ed.), Language and reality from a naturalistic perspective: Themes from Michael Devitt. Cham: Springer. pp. 45-66.
    Philosophers have long debated the relative priority of thought and language, both at the deepest level, in asking what makes us distinctively human, and more superficially, in explaining why we find it so natural to communicate with words. The “linguistic turn” in analytic philosophy accorded pride of place to language in the order of investigation, but only because it treated language as a window onto thought, which it took to be fundamental in the order of explanation. The Chomskian linguistic program (...)
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