Abstract Some speakers have their linguistic agency unfairly restricted. Here I explore one way in which silencing can be countered. Instead of individual speakers, I focus on group political action, a strategy successfully employed by feminist movements. I argue that protests have the power to update our normative landscape and, in particular, to amend silencing linguistic practices. To this aim, I apply the presupposition framework introduced by Langton and West, as well as Langton’s view on blocking and counterspeech, to the analysis of feminist movements. In this framework, silencing is the result of the presence of silencing presuppositions. I then argue that some feminist slogans can be understood as blocking silencing presuppositions and therefore promoting more just linguistic practices. Importantly, collective speakers can avoid some of the problems that individual speakers face in their attempts to undo silencing.

Abstract In "Knowing What Things Are", A. Abath’s account of knowledge has two main features. Firstly, it is inquiry-based or erotetic: knowledge is to be understood in terms of answers to questions of the form “What is x?” Secondly, it is contextualist: answers to questions of the form “what is x?” are dependent on contextual factors, as they should be evaluated as true and satisfactory given the specific purposes (or goals) of an inquiry. Here I focus on the contextualist component of Abath's account. I argue that there is a tension between the descriptive account Abath advocates in chapters 1-5 and the normative account developed in chapters 6-7. I argue, in particular, that Abath's contextualism faces trouble when applied to knowledge of strongly social kinds and moral/political obligations, which are inherently normative.

Abstract Process metaphysics is both internally coherent and coherent with what we know about the basic ‘what there is’ of the world, whereas a particle-as-particular metaphysics is neither. One consequence of a process metaphysics is that metaphysical emergence becomes explicable, and, in turn, normative emergence. This point is developed with models of the emergence of normative function and of representation. These are steps toward an integrated naturalistic understanding of the world.

It is often argued that constitution and causation are different kinds of metaphysical relations. Constitution, like other grounding relations, is assumed to be synchronic (it happens at a time), while causation is diachronic (it happens over time). It is this synchronic-diachronic division that, more than other difference-makers, is argued to distinguish grounding relations such as constitution from causation. This paper develops an account of a species of constitution that happens over time. We call this type of constitution, diachronic constitution. We show how diachronic constitution is a consequence of a common type of causation, often ignored in metaphysical discussions of causation: continuous reciprocal causation. Hence, constitution is not only sometimes like causation; it can also be a form of causation. We argue that temporalising the constitution relation is neither as remarkable nor as problematic as it might initially seem. It is inevitable, given local interactions between microscale and macroscale states in dynamical systems.

Foreword The reasons that encouraged me to propose a Special Issue for Manuscrito on processual thought in the philosophical-scientific perimeter are primarily rooted in the naturalist spirit intrinsic to process models. The appeal these models have had on my academic and research journey stems largely from their emphasis on the dynamism and relationality of entities, their mutual interdependence, and their contingency, which simultaneously allows for avoiding both reductionist and/or foundationalist approaches and those uncomfortable dualistic fragmentations or “bifurcations” of nature, as Whitehead (1920) would put it. Furthermore, in my view, processual thought revives the original core of the philosophical and scientific approach to understanding natural reality, which is essentially transient, transformative, and evolutionary.1 Today, this kind of theoretical model plays an important role in the ongoing debate across many scientific disciplines, from physics (Rovelli, 2016) to biology (Dupré, 2012; Landa et al., 2024), chemistry (Stein, 2004; Córdoba et al., 2024), and cognitive and psychological sciences (Bickhard, 2024), to name just a few examples. In short, the processual approach is increasingly recognized as a capable and suitable conceptual framework for describing complex and inherently dynamic, interactive natural phenomena. For these reasons, together with the entire Editorial Board of Manuscrito, and in collaboration with all the authors who participated in the Call for Papers for this Special Issue, as well as all the reviewers involved- to whom I extend my heartfelt thanks and my apologies for my inexperience and any mistakes-we aimed to offer a modest contribution to the processual philosophical-scientific thought. The following thematic introduction is intended to offer some general coordinates, to provide the interested scholar with the conceptual framework necessary for a proper understanding of the contributions in this volume.2

and Universidad Nacional del Sur (PGI 24/I265), Argentina. Five anonymous referees are acknowledged for valuable comments and criticisms on this and previous versions that notably improved the work. The first author appreciates the invitation of the Department of Mathematics of the Universidad de Aveiro, Portugal, for a visit in September 2019, during which this paper was developed.

It is often claimed that the theory of function levels proposed by Frege in Grundgesetze der Arithmetik * I would like to thank Ansten Klev, Marco Panza, Marco Ruffino, Will Stafford, Göran Sundholm, Wim Vanrie, and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on early drafts of this paper. Most of the material here has been presented in different online seminars and conferences over the past three years, in particular the OCIE Seminar in the History and Philosophy of Mathematics and Logic, Logicians in Quarantine, I Colóquio NULFA-NuLFiC de Lógica e Filosofia da Matemática, and Chá das 5. I also thank Alessandro Duarte, Erich Reck, and Edward Zalta for stimulating discussions. This research was partly supported by the AFOSR grant FA9550-18-1-0120 and the Lumina quaeruntur fellowship number LQ300092101 from the Czech Academy of Sciences.

Politicians select their words meticulously, never losing sight of their ultimate communicative goal. Sometimes, their objective may be that of not being fully understood by a large portion of the audience. They can achieve this by means of dogwhistles; linguistic expressions that, in addition to their literal meaning, convey a concealed message to a specific sub-group of the audience. This paper focuses on the distinction between overt and covert dogwhistles introduced by J. Saul (2018). I argue that, even if the distinction successfully captures a genuine divide within the category of dogwhistles, the account proposed by Saul to explain the distinction is unsatisfactory. In response to this state of affairs, I illustrate how the distinction between overt and covert dogwhistle can be refined and illuminated by incorporating it into the 'Simple Theory' of dogwhistles advanced by J. Khoo (2017).

Philosophy of language and computer science, despite being very distinct fields, share a great interest in natural language. However, while philosophy has traditionally opted for a formalist approach, computer science has been increasingly favoring probabilistic models. After presenting these two approaches in more detail, we discuss some of their main virtues and limitations. On the one hand, formalist models have trouble in acquiring semantic information from corpora and learning from large amounts of data. Probabilistic approaches, on the other hand, have difficulty in operating with compositionality, in dealing with contrast sets and hierarchical relations, and in distinguishing normative and descriptive views of meaning. We argue that a more fruitful dialogue between philosophers and computer scientists may help to produce a better approach to natural language and stimulate the integration of logical and probabilistic methods.

The aim of this commentary is to underpin Duffley’s notion of a stable mental content that corresponds to the literal word meaning with a computationally plausible cognitive theory. Our approach is to investigate what these stable contents could be according to the so-called Predictive Processing architecture. We argue that recent advances in cognitive science can make at least two contributions to the debate. First, they can provide some underpinning of Duffley's ideas of a stable linguistic meaning associated with the sign. Second, they provide resources to understand how the semiological principle is compatible with a dynamic and flexible notion of "meaning".