Discrimination and Hate: Over-Criminalization or New Normativity?

Hate Crimes Laws: Progressive Politics or Balkanization?

Infinitism, finitude and normativity

I evaluate two new objections to an infinitist account of epistemic justification, and conclude that they fail to raise any new problems for infinitism. The new objections are a refined version of the finite-mind objection, which says infinitism demands more than finite minds can muster, and the normativity objection, which says infinitism entails that we are epistemically blameless in holding ...

Normativity, Necessity and Tense: A Recipe for Homebaked Normativity

A reductive analysis of a concept decomposes it into more basic constituent parts. Metaethicists today are in almost unanimous agreement that normative language and concepts cannot be reductively analyzed into entirely nonnormative language and concepts. Basic normative concepts are widely thought to be primitive or elemental in our thought, and therefore to admit of no further (reductive) expl...

Hate Me, Hate Me Not: Hate Speech Detection on Facebook

While favouring communications and easing information sharing, Social Network Sites are also used to launch harmful campaigns against specific groups and individuals. Cyberbullism, incitement to self-harm practices, sexual predation are just some of the severe effects of massive online offensives. Moreover, attacks can be carried out against groups of victims and can degenerate in physical viol...

Translation and Normativity

So much has been written in the last twenty years about norms and their relevance to translation that it is reasonable to assume at least a certain familiarity with the concept of norms as such (cf. Baker 1998 for a concise statement and references). Allow me therefore to preface my remarks with no more than a brief reminder, in the form of a quotation from Thomas Merton’s 1942 essay ‘The Norma...