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Moral Agency: A Philosophical Inquiry Into Its Scientific Foundations, Makensey Sanders

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

There is a longstanding discussion of what the criteria are to distinguish science from non-science. In section one of this paper, I will focus on four demarcating criteria of a scientific theory: (1) value neutrality; (2) verifiability; (3) falsifiability; and (4) reproducibility. Keeping these criteria in mind, I will turn to the notion of moral agency (focusing on psychopathy, autism, and personal identity) and the question of whether the current way we conceptualize and research it can be deemed as scientific according to the four criteria.

In section two, I will discuss the role psychopathy and autism play in understanding …

Fictionalist Truth Conditions For An Expressivist Semantics Of Slurs, Celine J. Geday

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

There are broadly two kinds of accounts of slurs: ones that place the derogation in the content of what is said or some concept associated with the words themselves or those that argue derogation takes places in the expression of some state of the slur-user – that derogation is part of the use of the slurring words. In this paper I argue that an expressivist account of slurs can be combined with a semantic account in which the truth conditions of the semantic account are fictional.