This article argues against the term and concept of 'hate speech' and in favour of using the concept and term 'discriminatory speech'. 'Hate speech' is a misnomer; we should name the harmful speech in question by what it in fact does: it discriminates. The article argues for this conceptual replacement claim by identifying a number of functions the concept 'hate speech' has been meant to serve and by arguing that extant concepts of hate speech have not served this function well. Roughly, they do not serve the functions well because of five properties of hate speech: hate centricity, perpetrator centricity, intention centricity, emotion centricity, and individual centricity. The article then proposes a definition of discriminatory speech and argues that it fulfils the conceptual functions better.

Many epistemologists explain the empirically attested contextual variation in knowledge ascriptions by appeal to a kind of warranted assertability maneuver (WAM) that finds the locus of variability in epistemic norms of assertion. I show that this way to WAM fails. It cannot explain the variability of embedded uses of knowledge sentences in assertoric speech acts in which the knowledge sentences are not themselves asserted.

Presuppositions—information speakers mutually take for granted in conversation—play important explanatory roles in pragmatics and semantics. This chapter argues that not all presuppositions in a conversation are equally available, or accessible, to speakers at a given stage in a conversation. Contrary to common assumption, some pieces of information may be presupposed yet not be available to speakers for conversational actions. Standard conceptions of the conversation’s common ground—the set of presuppositions—cannot account for such differences in availability. This chapter presents an account of the common ground that makes room for a notion of availability of presuppositions relative to a conversational task. The notion is implemented in a conception of a Fragmented Common Ground that draws on three independently motivated ideas: the notion of context as common ground, mental fragmentation, and questions as guiding and structuring discourse.

De se relativism claims that thought and talk about subjective matters such as personal taste or epistemic modality is best understood as a kind of de se, or first-personal, thought and talk. It says that claims about what's tasty, or what's epistemically possible, can take different truth values relative to different assessors, because such claims express de se contents that can be true of some assessors and false of others. This chapter presents the main motivations for de se relativism, its account of mental and linguistic content in terms of de se, centered-worlds propositions, the role of de se propositions in communication, and the view's similarities and differences with respect to a variety of other forms of contemporary relativisms.

How should we account for the contextual variability of knowledge claims? Many philosophers favour an invariantist account on which such contextual variability is due entirely to pragmatic factors, leaving no interesting context-sensitivity in the semantic meaning of 'know that.' I reject this invariantist division of labor by arguing that pragmatic invariantists have no principled account of embedded occurrences of 'S knows/doesn't know that p': Occurrences embedded within larger linguistic constructions such as conditional sentences, attitude verbs, expressions of probability, comparatives, and many others, I argue, give rise to a threefold problem of embedded implicatures.

The received picture of linguistic communication understands communication as the transmission of information from speaker's head to hearer's head. This picture is in conflict with the attractive Lewisian view of belief as self-location, which is motivated by de se attitudes - first-personal attitudes about oneself - as well as attitudes about subjective matters such as personal taste. In this paper, I provide a solution to the conflict that reconciles these views. I argue for an account of mental attitudes and communication on which mental content and speech act content is understood as sets of multicentered worlds - roughly, possible worlds centered' on a sequence of individuals at a time. I develop a Stalnakerian model of communication based on multicentered worlds content, and I provide a suitable semantics for personal pronouns and predicates of personal taste. The resulting picture is one on which the point of conversation is the coordination of individual perspectives.

‘Know-that’, like so many natural language expressions, exhibits patterns of use that provide evidence for its context-sensitivity. A popular family of views – call it pragmatic invariantism – attempts to explain the shifty patterns by appeal to a pragmatic thesis: while the semantic meaning of ‘know-that’ is stable across all contexts of use, sentences of the form ‘S knows [doesn’t know] that p’ can be used to communicate a pragmatic content that depends on the context of use. In this paper, the author argues that pragmatic invariantism makes inaccurate predictions for a wide range of well-known use data and is committed to attributing systematic pragmatic error to ordinary speakers. But pragmatic error is unprecedented, and it is doubtful that speakers are systematically wrong about what they intend to communicate.

There has recently been a wave of attempts to make sense of the role of de se thoughts in a linguistic communication. A majority of the attempts assume a Perryan or Lewisian view of self-location. Views with these assumptions come in four varieties: uncentering (Egan, Kölbel, Moss); recentering (Heim, Weber); multicentering (Kindermann, Ninan, Torre), and no centering (Kaplan, Perry). This chapter argues that, against common assumption, there is no real choice to make between the views. By showing that attempts to establish an advantage for some view over the others fail across the board, the case is made for neutralism regarding the varieties of centering—the claim that coverage of the empirical data is exactly the same for each view, and that the views are broadly equal in simplicity and elegance.

Relativism about knowledge attributions is the view that a single occurrence of 'S knows [does not know] that p' may be true as assessed in one context and false as assessed in another context. It has been argued that relativism is equipped to accommodate all the data from speakers' use of 'know' without recourse to an error theory. This is supposed to be relativism's main advantage over contextualist and invariantist views. This paper argues that relativism does require the attribution of semantic blindness to speakers, viz. to account for sceptical paradoxes and epistemic closure puzzles. To that end, the notion of semantic blindness is clarified by distinguishing between content-blindness and index-blindness, and it is argued that the attribution of index-blindness required by the relativist account is implausible. Along the way, it is shown that error-theoretic objections from speakers' inter-contextual judgments fail against relativism.