Browsing by Author "Berkovski, Y. Sandy"

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Open Access
A contextualist analysis of insults
(Springer, 2017) Berkovski, Y. Sandy
For a predicate expression F contained in a sentence S (‘x is F’) to count as an insult, it should be used in a situation having a number of contextual elements. There should be an audience to whom the utterance of S is addressed. There should be a target of the insult, an individual who the speaker wishes to be shunned, excluded from certain, more or less salient, forms of social cooperation. The purpose of the utterance of S is to persuade the audience, by appeal to their emotions, to shun the target. Slurs have the canonical occasions of use structurally identical to the occasions of insults.
Open Access
Moral criticism, hypocrisy, and pragmatics
(Springer, 2022-08) Berkovski, Y. Sandy
A good chunk of the recent discussion of hypocrisy concerned the hypocritical “moral address” where, in the simplest case, a person criticises another for ϕ-ing having engaged in ϕ-ing himself, and where the critic’s reasons are overtly moral. The debate has conceptual and normative sides to it. We ask both what hypocrisy is, and why it is wrong. In this paper I focus on the conceptual explication of hypocrisy by examining the pragmatic features of the situation where accusations of hypocrisy are made. After rejecting several extant views, I defend the idea that moral criticisms are best understood as moves in an agonistic or hostile conversation, and that charges of hypocrisy are attempts to prevent the hypocrite from gaining an upper hand in a situation of conflict. I finish by linking this idea to frame-theoretic analysis and evolutionary psychology. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature B.V.
Open Access
Slurs and redundancy
(Springer, 2022-09) Berkovski, Y. Sandy
According to nearly all theorists writing on the subject, a certain derogatory content is regularly and systematically communicated by slurs. So united, the theorists disagree sharply on the elements of this content, on its provenance, and on its mechanism. I argue that the basic premiss of all these views, that there is any such derogatory content conveyed with the use of slurs, is highly dubious. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature B.V.