Claudia Picazo: Meaning manipulation

Tuesday October 8 2024 @11:30 (CEST)
Sala B, Edificio de Humanidades, UNED & online

Abstract
One of the things we do with words is to manipulate the meaning of other people’s speech acts. We can do so to counter hate speech, as part of a project of linguistic amelioration, and also with the purpose of silencing some speaker, among others. In this talk, I explore post hoc meaning manipulation and its consequences for standard views on utterance meaning and the role of speakers’ intentions. I argue that interlocutors sometimes have semantically relevant intentions and propose a view in which different participants in a conversation can activate different meanings for a given utterance.

Bio
Claudia Picazo is a philosopher of language. Her work focuses on linguistic communication and how speakers exploit conventional meaning in context. She is also interested in speech and epistemic injustice and the ways to resist it. She is associate professor at the department of Logic, History and Philosophy of Science, UNED, and PI of the project ‘Active forms of Hermeutical Injustice’.