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Causation attributions and corpus analysis
... The use of linguistic corpora in analytic philosophy has been defended in recent years (see Bluhm, 2013Bluhm, , 2016Caton, 2020) . Besides, analytic philosophers have fruitfully used corpus methods to investigate different philosophical topics, for example, the role of intuitions (Andow, 2015a(Andow, , 2015bAshton & Mizhari, 2018;Bordonaba-Plou, 2021), the philosopher's use of "know" (Hansen et al., 2021), meta-argumentation (Hinton, 2021), causal attributions (Sytsma et al., 2019), mathematical explanation (Mejía-Ramos et al., 2019), the expression of values in obituaries (Alfano et al., 2018), or the insularity of Anglophone philosophy (Schwitzgebel et al., 2018), among others . ...
Over the past decade, there has been a growing interest in dual character concepts (DCCs). These concepts are defined by their internal structures, which consist of two distinct dimensions: a descriptive and an independent normative dimension. However, a more in-depth exploration of their internal structures is still needed. This article examines the internal structure of one DCC that has garnered significant attention in the literature, scientist. First, I analyze the components of the different dimensions of this concept. Second, I explore the interaction between these two dimensions. To do so, I investigate scientist in the enTenTen20 corpus using Sketch Engine, focusing on the expressions "good scientist" and "true scientist", as the literature suggests they interact more directly with the descriptive and normative dimensions, respectively. The findings from this investigation offer valuable insights for studying other DCCs, as the results suggest, among others, the following key points: first, that the complexity of the two dimensions of scientist is greater than previously recognized; and second, contrary to what is agreed, both the descriptive and the normative dimension interact with "good" and "true," which implies that both expressions can be used to make the two types of normative evaluation proper of DCCs.
... Sin embargo, recientemente se ha empezado a usar otra metodología, los métodos de corpus. Varios autores defienden las ventajas de aplicar esta metodología a la hora de investigar cuestiones de filosofía del lenguaje (ver, por ejemplo, Sytsma et al. 2019;Caton 2020;Ulatowski et al. 2020; Bordonaba-Plou y Torices 2021; Hansen et al. 2021;Liao y Hansen 2022). ...
El objetivo de este trabajo es doble. Primero, investigar y evaluar la situación en la que se encuentra actualmente la filosofía experimental del lenguaje. Para ello, expondré las dos metodologías predominantes en el campo: los cuestionarios y los métodos de corpus, mostrando los problemas comunes y los específicos. Segundo, defender que los métodos de corpus suponen un nuevo horizonte metodológico para la investigación en filosofía experimental del lenguaje por dos razones. Por un lado, porque cuentan con menos problemas que los cuestionarios. Por otro lado, porque tienen ciertas ventajas adicionales: i) consideran una cantidad mayor de evidencia; ii) al emplearlos tenemos la posibilidad de contar con información adicional que puede iluminar otros aspectos de la investigación; iii) cuentan con una mayor replicabilidad. Palabras clave: filosofía experimental del lenguaje, programa negativo, programa posi-tivo, cuestionarios, métodos de corpus.
... Second, the experimental setup might have interfered with getting reliable results on the meaning of the target expressions. Within the last decade, philosophers have started to use tools from corpus linguistics to examine terms within large corpora (see, e.g., Sytsma et al. 2019). These tools avoid both these shortcomings by investigating how terms like 'conspiracy theory' are used by ordinary language speakers in natural contexts. ...
In much of the current academic and public discussion, conspiracy theories are portrayed as a negative phenomenon, linked to misinformation, mistrust in experts and institutions, and political propaganda. Rather surprisingly, however, philosophers working on this topic have been reluctant to incorporate a negatively evaluative aspect when either analyzing or engineering the concept conspiracy theory. In this paper, we present empirical data on the nature of the concept conspiracy theory from five studies designed to test the existence, prevalence and exact form of an evaluative dimension to the ordinary concept conspiracy theory. These results reveal that, while there is a descriptive concept of conspiracy theory, the predominant use of conspiracy theory is deeply evaluative, encoding information about epistemic deficiency and often also derogatory and disparaging information. On the basis of these results, we present a new strategy for engineering conspiracy theory to promote theoretical investigations and institutional discussions of this phenomenon. We argue for engineering conspiracy theory to encode an epistemic evaluation, and to introduce a descriptive expression—such as ‘conspiratorial explanation’—to refer to the purely descriptive concept conspiracy theory.
Critics across the political spectrum have worried that ordinary uses of words like ‘racist’, ‘sexist’, and ‘homophobic’ are becoming conceptually inflated, meaning that these expressions are getting used so widely that they lose their nuance and, thereby, their moral force. However, the charge of conceptual inflation as well as responses to it are standardly made without any systematic investigation of how ‘racist’ and other expressions condemning oppression are actually used in ordinary language. Once we examine large linguistic corpora to see how these expressions are actually used, we find that English speakers have a rich linguistic repertoire for qualifying the degree to which and dimensions along which something is racist, sexist, homophobic, and so on. These facts about ordinary usage undermine the charge of conceptual inflation. Without awareness of facts about ordinary usage, theorists risk making linguistic prescriptions that are unnecessary or counterproductive.
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