AAP 2026 CONFERENCE

Abstract from our paper published in Synthese (2025): Recently, non-realist cognitivism has been charged with failing to meet various semantic challenges. According to one such challenge, the non-realist cognitivist must provide a non-trivial account of the meaning and truth conditions of moral claims. In this paper, we discuss the various strategies proposed to overcome this challenge. Our aim is to propose a new semantics, a Meinongian referential semantics that is based on truthmaker theory. The consequences of our proposal are two-fold. First, it alleviates objections raised against previous Meinongian semantic approaches. Second, adopting the novel semantics highlights the great theoretical flexibility of non-realist cognitivism.

Romantic culture has long been a topic in gender studies when it comes to analysis of socialization and social construction of gender. It has been critiqued as leading to normalization of abuse and harassment of women and consequent silencing of women enduring IPV (Intimate Partner Violence) (Radway 1991). In Chinese context, romantic fictions and multi-media adaption of the stories have impacted readership in the last 50 years (or longer) (Liu 2008), among them Chiung Yao contributed 40 years of active writing. Since 1962, Chiung Yao’s stories have been made into more than 100 TV series and films. However, her impact is undertheorized compared to female writers in her era.

Feminist epistemologists theorize the inability to communicate one’s critical social experience as hermeneutical injustice and made further inquiry into the collective hermeneutical resources (Berenstain 2020; Clanchy 2023; Dular 2023; Falbo 2022; Fricker 2007; Mason 2011; Medina 2012, 2013, 2017; Mills 2013; Jenkins 2017, 2021; Simion 2019). I argue that Chiung Yao’s romances, among other stories, constitute an important part of Chinese romantic culture and serve as hermeneutical resources when people draw concepts about love. The endorsement of IPV exhibited in her plots induces hermeneutical injustice of her readers, who fail to express discomfort in a toxic relationship due to normalization of abuse in Chiung Yao’s description of love. This paper contributes to the vivid discussion of hermeneutical injustice, IPV, toxic relationships and intersectional feminism.