Saray Ayala

The present work has two main motivations. On the one hand, resisting the recent focus on implicit bias in the literature in our explanations of social injustice. On the other, resisting the vagueness and complication of appeals to structural explanations. Expanding on previous work (Ayala & Vasilyeva 2015), the present work proposes a structural explanation of discursive injustice that meets two goals. First, it satisfactorily accounts for the specific features of this particular kind of injustice; and second, it articulates a structural explanation that overcome both the vagueness and the complication. Therefore, this work contributes to both the literature on discursive injustice, and the current debate on explanations of social injustice. With regards to the latter contribution, it is my intention to provide the debate with an articulation of structural explanation that could serve as a model to develop concrete structural explanations of other types of social injustice.

Is there a choice in sexual orientation? Wilkerson (2009) argues that sexual desires require interpretation in order to be fully constituted, and therefore sexual orientation is at least partially constituted by choice. Díaz-León (2017) critically assesses Wilkerson’s argument, concluding that we still lack a good argument for the claim that choice plays a role in sexual orientation. Here I examine Díaz-León’s response to Wilkerson. I introduce what I call the conceptual act theory of sexual orientation, and argue that even if interpretation were not necessary to constitute sexual desires, it is a necessary element to constitute what we call sexual orientation. However, I conclude that even if we agree that interpretation is involved in sexual orientation, it does not follow that there is a choice involved.

Individuals can do a broad variety of things with their words and enjoy different degrees of this capacity. What moderates this capacity? And in cases in which this capacity is unjustly disrupted, what is a good explanation for it? These are the questions I address here. I propose that speech capacity, understood as the capacity to do things with your words, is a structural property importantly dependent on individuals’ position in a social structure. My account facilitates a non-individual- istic explanation of cases in which speech capacity is undermined due to speaker’s perceived social identity, e.g. episodes of silencing. Instead of appealing to interlocutors’ implicit bias against speaker’s identity, a structural approach refers to the positions interlocutors occupy in the social structure and the discursive conventions operating upon those positions. I articulate my proposal drawing on the notion of affordances. Each position within a social structure is associated with its own range of speech affordances. Thus, speech capacity is a function of the probability distribution of speech affordances across positions in the structure.

We propose an externalist understanding of sex that builds upon extended and distributed approaches to cognition, and contributes to building a more just, diversity-sensitive society. Current sex categorization practices according to the female/male dichotomy are not only inaccurate and incoherent (attributing nonreproductive properties to differences in vaguely defined reproductive roles), but they also ground moral and political pressures that harm and oppress people. We argue that a new understanding of sex is due, an understanding that would acknowledge the variability and, most important, the flexibility of sex properties, as well as the moral and political meaning of sex categorization. We propose an externalist account of sex, elaborating on extended and distributed approaches to cognition that capitalize on the natural capacity of organisms to couple with environmental resources. We introduce the notion of extended sex, and argue that properties relevant for sex categorization are neither exclusively internal to the individual skin, nor fixed. Finally, we spell out the potential of extended sex to support an active defense of diversity and an intervention against sex-based discrimination.

In this note my aim is to point out a phenomenon that has not received much attention; a phenomenon that, in my opinion, should not be overlooked in the professional practice of philosophy, especially within feminist efforts for social justice. I am referring to the way in which being a non-native speaker of English interacts with the practice of philosophy.  There is evidence that non-native speakers are often perceived in prejudiced ways. Such prejudiced perception causes and constitutes wrongdoing. As in other cases of prejudiced perception and biased behavior, it would be pretentious and misguided to expect philosophers and the philosophy profession to be free from this vice. There are good reasons to think that this prejudiced perception is bad not only for the persons who are perceived in such a way, but also for the profession, for it might make us miss important things that could improve philosophy in general. I claim we should be more sensitive to this phenomenon, both for justice concerns, and for the sake of doing better philosophy.

This paper argues that certain conversational contributions addressing foreigners are problematic in ways that are relevant to the philosophy of language and social epistemology. With foreigners I refer to people living or temporarily staying in a country different from the one they were born and/or raised. I focus on two kinds of conversational contributions: asking “where are you from?”, and commenting on someone’s (e.g. foreign) accent (accent-triggered comments from now on). I address two questions: First, what do these contributions do to the conversation? Second, what do they do to the addressee? In order to explore the first question I elaborate on the work of Mary Kate McGowan (2004; 2009) and Rae Langton (2014), and draw a parallelism between instances of accent-triggered comments and speech acts that have the potential to discriminate in virtue of how they change the course of the conversation. I argue that accent-triggered comments spoil the conversation by changing the conversational score and enacting what is permissible to do in that conversation thereafter. In particular, they make interlocutor’s foreignness salient and make it permissible to treat that person as an outsider in that conversation thereafter. The second question will lead us to the notions of epistemic injustice (Collins, 2000; Fricker 2003), testimonial quieting (Dotson 2014), linguistic profiling (Lippi-Green 1997; Baugh 2016), and stereotype threat (Steele & Aronson 1995). I argue that accent-triggered comments have high epistemic costs for both the addressee and the speaker.

This paper builds upon Mary Kate McGowan’s analysis of the mechanisms of harm in conversations (McGowan 2004; 2009). McGowan describes how a speaker’s intervention might constitute harm by enacting what is permissible to do in the conversation thereafter. We expand McGowan’s analysis in two ways: first, we use her account to argue for the potential of interlocutor’s silence, not only speaker’s intervention, to enact harm;  second, we introduce a new party into the picture: observers of the conversation. We propose that not only interlocutors who contribute to harm through action, but also those who do so by omission are morally responsible for that harm. We focus on one aspect of conversations: introduction of presuppositions. We argue that when the presupposition is morally problematic (e.g., sexist, ableist, racist, homo-, trans- or xeno-phobic),  interlocutors have a moral responsibility to block it. This responsibility comes in degrees, and, importantly, depends on whether the interlocutor’s speech capacity is diminished by the harmful presupposition (i.e. whether the interlocutor is being silenced). Unlike common approaches to harm in speech, which take the unit of analysis to be the speaker-interlocutor relationship, we take as unit of analysis the relationship between the pair speaker-interlocutor and an observer. Problematic presuppositions introduced in conversations can harm observers overhearing these conversations (as well society as a whole), and prevention of such harm motivates our proposal for attribution of responsibility to interlocutors.
We proceed as follows. First we review the dynamics of presupposition introduction. Second, we briefly introduce McGowan’s analysis of conversational pragmatics, subscribing to her account that some conversational moves constitute a special type of harm related to oppression, and outline a taxonomy of the pathways through which harm can be inflicted upon observers and the society as a whole. In the third part we articulate our argument that in the cases of presupposition introduction considered here, interlocutors are not merely allowing harm, but actively doing it, and put forward our proposal for responsibility attribution. Finally, we address potential objections, and situate our proposal within a broader project to fight oppressive speech.

In the debate around the extended mind, the special alliance that the extended thesis often has with functionalism usually plays in favor of the former, with functionalism providing support for the extended thesis. Here I want to consider this alliance in the opposite direction: does the extended thesis provide support for functionalism by promoting the need of a level of explanation that is independent of implementational (in particular neural) details? In spite of a seemingly promising line of reasoning for an affirmative answer, I show here that a commitment to the extended thesis or any version of externalism neither paves the way for a functionalist (or any other anti-reductionist) position nor is incompatible with an explanatory reductionism about the mind. I arrive to that conclusion after analyzing an argument by van Eck et al. (2006) meant to conclude the opposite, and showing why it is unsound.

... What does embodiment mean? Questioning the autonomy of psychology. Autores: Saray Ayala López; Localización: Actas del VI Congreso de la Sociedad de Lógica, Metodología y Filosofía de la Ciencia en España (SLMFCE): 18 - 21 de noviembre / coord. ...

may ever be carried dangerously near to the point where it becomes a dereliction of plain duty. The responsibility of each member of the honorary and resident medical staff at the present time is not free from difficulty, and calls for splendid discipline, but discipline as represented by silence may be carried a great deal too far. Discretion is a great virtue which too few possess in these days, and abstinence from speech mayoften be hoth prudent and wise. There is a silence, however,

This paper critiques a recent study on the placental microbiome and specifically its recommendations to women for preventing premature births, which were exaggerated and embellished in the media coverage it received. We contend that these preventive recommendations contribute to a pernicious, growing trend of policing women's bodies and argue that the study provides no empirical evidence to justify them. We emphasize how the recommendations ignore important social and environmental risk factors for preterm birth that lie beyond individual choices and bodies and suggest that research on the placental microbiome, and especially media reports about it, should take these problems into account.

The goal of this paper is to problematize the use of sex categories in medical contexts. We question the benefits of categorizing all individuals as either male or female in medical contexts and argue that we should focus instead on the relevant sex-related properties of patients. Contrary to what many people believe, the classificatory system by which sexed bodies are neatly divided into male and female is anything but clear. An abundance of evidence shows that a binary sex system does not accurately describe the reality of human bodies. Given the complexity of sex with its many markers, variations, and combinations, why is medicine still based on the assumption that there are only two sexes? Why is binary sex still systematically used as a proxy in medical contexts, even when it doesn’t help, but can actually hinder diagnoses, care, and treatments? The complexity and heterogeneity of sexed bodies is critical in medical contexts. We argue that the use of female/male categories over...

Is there a choice in sexual orientation? Wilkerson (2009) argues that sexual desires require interpretation in order to be fully constituted, and therefore sexual orientation is at least partially constituted by choice. Díaz-León (2017) critically assesses Wilkerson’s argument, concluding that we still lack a good argument for the claim that choice plays a role in sexual orientation. Here I examine Díaz-León’s response to Wilkerson. I introduce what I call the conceptual act theory of sexual orientation, and argue that even if interpretation were not necessary to constitute sexual desires, it is a necessary element to constitute what we call sexual orientation. However, I conclude that even if we agree that interpretation is involved in sexual orientation, it does not follow that there is a choice involved.