Metasemantics and Intersectionality in the Misinformation Age: Truth in Political Struggle

ISBN-13: 9783030733384 / Angielski / Twarda / 2021 / 338 str.

Derek Egan Anderson

Spis treści

Chapter 1: Introduction: Truth in Political Struggle

Chapter 2: Politically Contested Terminology

Chapter 3: On the Possibility of Semantic Corruption

Chapter 4: Toward a Conception of Misinformation as Epistemic Violence

Chapter 5: Model-Theoretic Semantics for Politically Contested Terminology

Chapter 6: Toward an Intersectional Metasemantics

Chapter 7: Power and Regimes of Truth

Chapter 8: An Analytic Philosopher’s Unified Theory of Intersectionality

Chapter 9: Intersectional Metasemantic Adequacy

Chapter 10: A Metasemantics for Intersectionality

Chapter 11: Situated Knowledge and the Regime of Truth

O autorze

Derek Egan Anderson is a lecturer in the philosophy department at Boston University, USA.

Blurb

“I am extremely excited to see this book. Debates about language—words like

‘woman’ and ‘racism’—have been absolutely central to vital political issues for

some time. They have also been weaponised, used to argue that important issues

are “just about language.” This book takes these debates seriously—both

politically and linguistically. It is wonderfully wide-ranging, deeply grounded in

both intersectional theory and analytic philosophy of language. We’ve been

needing a book like this for a long time!”

—Jennifer Saul, University of Waterloo, Canada.

“This timely work draws together various themes—knowledge and oppression,

truth and misinformation, language and power—and grounds them in a

discussion of practical issues that should concern us all. Bridging conversations

in linguistics and politics, this book is a long overdue and necessary complement

to debates that examine the intersection of the political with other philosophical

sub-disciplines, like epistemology and ethics. To come across a work that reveals

something you have understood but have been unable to express, that examines

how language can empower and disempower, is both exciting and will speak to

many who have felt themselves silenced without fully understanding why.”

—Briana Toole, Claremont McKenna College, USA

“A truly impressive melding of hard-core analytic philosophy and serious politics.”

—Naomi Scheman, University of Minnesota, USA

This book investigates the impact of misinformation and the role of truth in

political struggle. It develops a theory of objective truth for political controversy

over topics such as racism and gender, based on the insights of intersectionality,

the Black feminist theory of interlocking systems of oppression. Truth is defined

using the tools of model theory and formal semantics, but the theory also

captures how social power dynamics strongly influence the operation of the

concept of truth within the social fabric. Systemic ignorance, propagated through

false speech and misinformation, sustains oppressive power structures and

perpetuates systemic inequity. Truth tends to empower marginalized groups

precisely because oppressive systems are maintained through systemic ignorance.

If the truth sets people free, then power will work to obscure it. Hence, the rise of

misinformation as a political weapon is a strategy of dominant power to