Research grants

The Philosophy of Hybrid Representations
Duration: 2021 - 2024
Code: PID2020-119588GB-I00
Principal Investigators
IP1: Manuel García-Carpintero (University of Barcelona)  IP2: Teresa Marques (University of Barcelona) 


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Value in language: public discourse, collective attitudes, and responsibility
Planned project duration: 2021-2025.
[NOTE: GRANT DECLINED]
Project reference: CIDEGENT/2020/033
Principal investigator: Teresa Marques

From the hardest moral dilemmas to politics, from aesthetics to matters of taste, evaluative language is essential to our lives. We use it both to compliment and to derogate; we use it in private and in public, and it shapes the social and political reality around us. Until recently, philosophy of language was pursued purely as ideal theory. In reality, speakers are not fully rational or cooperative.
The project’s guiding research hypothesis is that evaluative language is expressively normative.
The project’s main aim is to give a comprehensive account of the direct and indirect ways language communicates value. To this end, the project identifies four contributing goals, pertaining to philosophy of language, to metaethics, the philosophy of action, and the philosophy of emotions:
  1. To dissolve the riddle of moral/value disagreement.
  2. To rehabilitate metaethical expressivism and metaethical cognitivism, offering a hybrid view.
  3. To place applied, "non-ideal", philosophy of language, properly within the purview of metaethics.
  4. To rehabilitate individual moral responsibility for participation in shared actions, of which public discourse is a case, and to counter stronger anti-individualistic structural explanations.
The project is innovative and ambitious in scope. It seeks to explain what unifies different forms of value discourse as such, without losing sight of how non-ideal agents communicate. It accounts for the action-guiding roles of value talk, explains the pragmatics of its use, and its effects in structuring the social world. The results of the project will contribute to a more complete theory of value discourse than philosophers have accomplished to date.
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CONCEDIS: Shifting Concepts and Hybrid Dispositionalism
Project duration: 2017 ​- 2019
​Project number: FFI2015-73767-JIN
Principal investigator: Teresa Marques

An important  focus  of  inquiry  concerns  the  nature  of  the  properties  denoted  by  some  central concepts for human life, value concepts. What properties can they express? How is linguistic communication  about  value  possible  given  widespread  cross­personal  variation? And  how  can emotional language produce motivational effects in action? This  project  develops  Hybrid Dispositionalism  (HD).  HD  is  a  new  pluralist  theory  about normative and evaluative discourse, combined with a dispositional metaphysical theory about the  nature  of  the  properties  denoted.  The  project  argues  that  dispositional  or  response­​ dependent value  properties  are *de  nobis*  or  collective  dispositions. The  project  affords  a comprehensive account of norms and values, and combines contextualism at the level of ​semantic content with expressivism at the pragmatic level. HD promises to be a successful alternative to other extant theories, while fitting with experimental data on conceptual variability, and current research on collective intentionality. The project further promises to​ make a vital contribution to current philosophical reflection on public and political discourse,​ ​ and its impact on a multicultural and diverse society.
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COLLECTIVE ATTITUDES AND NORMATIVE DISAGREEMENT
Call:  MARIE SKLODOWSKA-CURIE
Call identifier: FP7-PEOPLE-2013-IEF 
Project number 622114.
Project duration: 2014-2016
Individual grant

The main aim of the project is to increase our understanding of legal and normative discourse in light of contemporary accounts of the semantics and pragmatics of deontic modals, and of collective intentionality. This is a highly interdisciplinary project, connecting various philosophical disciplines with jurisprudence. 
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Contextualism, Relativism and Practical Conflicts and Disagreement
Project duration: 2011 - 2014
Project number  EuroUnderstanding 0001/2010
Principal Investigator: Teresa Marques

One of the 5 European projects in the collaborative research project Communication in Context (CCCOM) in the EUROCORES scheme of the ESF. 
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Project membership