In 2013, then-graduate students Diana Acosta, Patricia Marechal and postdoc Laura Perez and I began discussing the role of English in professional philosophy in the Spanish-speaking world. At the time, Laura had recently begun translating The Contents of Visual Experience into Spanish, and I had begun expanding my fluency in Spanish. (A full list of Spanish translations of my work is below).
I first learned Spanish during college in 1990 when I lived in Mexico for the better part of a year. First I worked for an agricultural economist in Zamora, Michoacán — then the capital of strawberry cultivation. Later that year I lived in Mexico City writing about the costumed activist for housing rights, SuperBarrio. Both projects involved talking to people about their experiences working and living in areas that were far from opulent. My Spanish developed well for conversations like these, but I never took any classes in Spanish, and never studied philosophy in Spanish. Decades later, I remained fluent, but my vocabulary was as ill-equipped for philosophy as it had been back in the 20th century.
With a lot of help from Laura, Diana, Patricia, and Adriana Renero, I’ve gradually gotten better at expressing myself in Spanish in philosophical contexts. I’m deeply grateful to them for giving me new ways to inhabit the part of the world I’ve always gravitated toward most strongly — the Spanish-speaking Americas, and especially Mexico.
As I started to give talks in Spanish when visiting philosophy departments in various parts of the Spanish-speaking Americas, I found it both thrilling and productive to remove the burden of translation from my audience and take it on myself in advance of my lectures. I found that philosophical discussion improved, and all sorts of interesting questions about translating philosophy between English and Spanish came to the surface.
For example, in English, the field of epistemology includes both theories that use probabilistic formalism to model levels of confidence, called credences, and on beliefs which are analyzed without using formalism of probability. In Spanish, “belief” is often translated as “creéncia,” and this word is also the natural choice for translating the English “credence.” So we’re forced into different terminology, and we have an opportunity to say more directly what credences are. Since credences have such a vexed relationship with psychological reality as Eriksson and Hajek bring in this terrific paper, a chance to distinguish credences from beliefs with more informative terminology would be welcome. Discussing the topic in Spanish gives us that opportunity.
My experiences with speaking and writing philosophy in Spanish I became interested in both the sociological factors that determine which languages are normally used in these contexts and the effects on various communities of language choice. My experiences opened my eyes to simple sociological facts that have long been obvious to people positioned to see them, but that I hadn’t appreciated. First, when you are new to a philosophical topic, if you’re hearing about it in a language that you don’t normally inhabit, you’ll spend some cognitive resources on translation that you might otherwise use to think about what you’re hearing. In addition, if someone is translating your English writing into another language, any spots in the original that are raw or unclear will soon be highlighted. These are some of the benefits I’ve found from moving back and forth between Spanish and English in philosophy. The benefits seem to generalize to translation in general, and I think they speak in favor of conducting philosophy in multiple languages.
It is possible to fall in love with a language — its rhythms, sounds, affective nuance, and possibilities of expression. That’s more or less my relationship with Spanish. (Someone in my family who is German fell in love with English, and he frequently introduces me to locutions I had never heard before!)
There’s a heated debate about the language of publication in Analytic Philosophy, energized recently by this provocative paper. The issues it raises are complex. I don’t approach it as the kind of issue that mandates using one language or another, and I don’t think anyone else should approach it that way either. But I think the issues are well worth discussing. And so for the sheer fun of it, and in order to discuss the serious issues in the vicinity, we held a series of philosophy workshops in Spanish at Harvard starting in 2014. Talks were in Spanish, and written handouts were bilingual. I’ll probably do more of these in the future.
Here are the programs for the past workshops:
2016: 3er Taller Filosofía en Español, Departamento de Filosofía, Harvard University
2015: Segundo Taller de Filosofía en Español, Departamento de Filosofía, Harvard University
2014: Diálogo Sobre Filosofía en Español. Observatorio de la lengua española y las culturas hispánicas en los Estados Unidos
> Dialogue about Philosophy in Spanish
At the first workshop, we focused on the sociology of philosophy in Spanish. Speakers were Carla Merino, Diana Perez, Josefa Toribio, Diana Acosta and Patricia Marechal, and myself. The proceedings of the first workshop are here in English.
Some of my work in Spanish
Inferencia Sin Estimación, trans. Álvaro Pelaez. In I. Cervieri & A. Peláez (eds.) Contenido y Fenomenología de la Percepción. Aproximaciones Filosóficas. Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, Unidad Cuajimalpa-Gedisa. 2019.
(This paper is a Spanish translation of “Inference Without Reckoning”, in New Essays in Reasoning, eds. M. Balcerak-Jackson and J. Balcerak-Jackson, Oxford University Press.)
Los Problemas de la Percepción [con Laura Pérez], SEFA
Probabilidad y Perception, forthcoming in Carlos Muñoz-Suarez’s volume on predictive processing
Affordancias y Los Contenidos de Percepción, Adriana Renero y Laura Perez
Los Contenidos de la Experiencia Visual, trans. Álvaro Pelaez y Laura Perez
México: Instituto de Investigaciones Filosóficas, UNAM. Por aparecer.
Inferencia sin Estimación, trans. Álvaro Pelaez. Will be published by UAM y Gedisa.Talk at Contenido de la Experiencia Visual, UAM-Cuajimalpa, Mexico City, 2014
Watch video of my talk →Talk at SWIP-Analytic México, 2017
Watch video of my talk →Entrevista en Clarín, April 2020, sobre la pandemia