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This collection of eleven previously unpublished chapters contains the latest developments in analytic feminist philosophy on the topic of pornography. A rich feminist literature on pornography has emerged since the 1980s, and Rae Langton’s speech act theoretic analysis has dominated specifically Anglo-American feminist philosophy on pornography. Despite this literature, there are considerable disagreements and precious little agreement on many key issues, such as what pornography is, whether (following Langton) it subordinates and silences women, whether it objectifies women in harmful ways, and whether it is authoritative enough to enact women’s subordination. Given these deep disagreements, the first goal of this book is to take stock of extant debates to clarify some key feminist conceptual and political commitments when discussing pornography. However, in so doing, it aims to go beyond the prevalent speech act approach to pornography. Thus, its second goal is to highlight new issues in feminist pornography debates. The book examines newer lines of inquiry and investigates what they can tell us about still-unsettled conceptual and political questions. In doing so, it opens a space for themes and debates that have to date received surprisingly little attention (such as aesthetics and putatively feminist pornography). The book aims to make progress philosophically analyzing pornography without simply rehashing old debates while still acknowledging the value of earlier feminist work. Thus, the book’s leading idea is to go “beyond speech” but without changing the terms of the debate wholesale.

This volume collects new work on epistemic entitlement partly motivated by Tyler Burge’s and Crispin Wright’s seemingly identical distinctions between two forms of warrant: entitlement and justification. But despite nomenclature, Burge and Wright are engaged in different projects. Recognizing that we cannot provide a non-question begging evidential reply to the sceptic, Wright seeks an a priori, non-evidential, rational right to accept and claim to know cornerstone propositions. He calls these rights epistemic entitlements. Epistemic justifications are evidential warrants, contributors to knowledge. Tyler Burge does not engage the sceptic. Instead, he assumes knowledge and investigates its structure. Burge’s two core notions are warrant and reasons. Warrants are exercises of belief-forming competences that are good routes to truth and knowledge. A reason is a proposition with a mode that contributes to an explanation of the belief-worthiness of a belief for the individual. A justification is a warrant with reasons. An entitlement is a warrant without reasons. The volume begins with a substantial chapter by Burge. Burge discusses the functional structure of epistemic norms, the case against internalism, clairvoyance and demon world cases, Moore’s anti-sceptical argument, so-called “easy-knowledge”, and Bayesianism in perceptual psychology and objections from Bayesianism to moderate foundationalism. The other chapters by leading figures in epistemology further advance our understanding and possibility of both forms of epistemic entitlement and related topics central to ongoing research in epistemology.

One kind of meaning is constituted by what we need to grasp about usage to be competent participants in a community’s linguistic practices. This book proposes that this sort of meaning is primarily a matter of common knowledge about the presuppositions speakers make in using their language. It argues we should think of this as a population-level, process-like phenomenon. It’s population-level since what needs to be grasped is determined by a rough equilibrium of assumptions across speakers; it’s process-like since what needs to be grasped is a dynamic property of a practice: the competent speaker needs to track how what’s taken for granted about a community’s words fluctuates as the environment changes what is salient to all. The case for thinking of meaning in this way is a matter of its payoffs in theorizing about language. Thinking of meaning in this way reconciles Quine’s skepticism about an epistemically interesting sort of analyticity with the belief that everyday talk about meaning tracks something real, something about which we can and should theorize. It helps ground a sensible way of thinking about philosophical analysis and the role of our intuitions therein, and helps resolve a number of puzzles about relations between illocution and meaning. It helps ground a way of thinking about our practices of ascribing content to others. And it helps provide an understanding of ‘conceptual engineering’—as an attempt to add or subtract from interpretive common ground but not (necessarily) to shift reference—that makes such engineering look like a sensible, conceivably successful project.