This paper proposes a new category of linguistic harm: that of illocutionary frustration. I argue against Jennifer Hornsby and Rae Langton’s notion of illocutionary silencing by challenging their claim that silencing occurs when there is a lack of uptake of the speaker’s illocutionary act. I look at two scenarios that their view treats differently and argue that these scenarios warrant the same kind of analysis; Hornsby and Langton’s notion of silencing can’t capture the purported difference they want it to capture. (...) I propose that we should look instead to standing to explain the phenomenon that illocutionary silencing intends to explain. I explicate the role of standing in terms of illocutionary frustration, then consider street harassment as an example of a linguistic interaction that is best explained by my proposed view. (shrink)

Thought: A Journal of Philosophy, Volume 10, Issue 3, Page 218-225, September 2021.

Generic claims like ‘women stay home and raise children’ and ‘boys don’t cry’ are normative generics: generic claims that express a norm. The truth conditions of normative generics are even harder to account for than those for more descriptive generics like ‘ducks lay eggs.’ Until recently, such generics were treated as deviant and thus not accounted for in standard accounts of generics. But recent work on the semantics and pragmatics of normative generics has changed that. In light of this recent (...) work, I propose that a speech act analysis of normative generics as instructions will shed light on normative generics. I end by discussing the ways in which this might allow us to use generics to counter harmful speech. (shrink)

Social scripts, like A gives a compliment, B says ‘thank you’, pervade and shape natural language discourse and social interactions. Scripts usually promote cooperation between conversational participants, but not always. For example, if A pays B a ‘compliment’ like ‘nice legs’, A puts B in a double bind of either abiding by the compliment script by saying ‘thank you’ and being humiliated, or breaking the script and risking escalation. In this paper, I take a philosophical lens to the notion of (...) a social script. I give a theoretical overview of what it would mean to disrupt a social script and explain why and when it is prudential to do so. Then I give several examples of disruptions of social scripts. This essay makes four key contributions to the philosophical literature on social scripts: (1) it introduces a new distinction between interpersonal and structural scripts; (2) it illuminates how interpersonal social scripts can be pernicious by creating a double bind; (3) it analyzes what it is to disrupt a social script; and (4) in doing so, it challenges the orthodoxy about the relationship between cooperation and disruption in political action. (shrink)

Is it harmful to make generic claims about social groups? Those who say yes cite the reinforcement of oppressive stereotypes and cognitive bias. Those who say no cite the potential of generics to do good, rather than harm, by taking advantage of the same mechanisms that perpetuate the harms. This paper analyzes generic utterances in the context of social justice efforts to weigh in on the debate about whether and how generic utterances contribute to stereotypes and oppression. We need to (...) first pay more attention to what it means to utter generics in social justice contexts. Doing so will allow us to distinguish those generic utterances that are helpful for social justice projects from those that might impede their progress. I argue that there is an important pragmatic sense in which generics can be undermined: especially generics used in service of social justice claims. I then offer an epistemic thesis for why some generics are more susceptible to being undermined by counter-examples than others. I conclude that if we are interested in using generics in the service of social justice, then there is reason to restrict the contexts in which we utter generics. In doing so, I challenge the conventional wisdom that generics are resistant to counterexamples. (shrink)

Generic statements are commonly expressed using the bare plural – ‘tigers are striped’ – or the indefinite singular – ‘a tiger is striped’. Notoriously, some generics can be expressed using the bare plural locution, but not the indefinite singular; bare plural generics and indefinite singular generics pattern differently. I explore this phenomenon as it applies to normative generic statements: expressions like boys don’t cry, women are kind and nurturing, children are seen and not heard – that convey something over and (...) above (and even distinct from) the descriptive reading. I argue that we should look to a metalinguistic theory of generics to understand indefinite singular normative generics. That is, a normative indefinite singular generic is a proposal about what to include in the extension of the generic term. This theory explains why it is more often than not that felicitous indefinite singular generics are about social kind terms. I argue that this explains a crucial way in which language shapes the social world. When we say things like (2), we propose definitions and uses for the word ‘boy’. Such proposals and their consequences actually impact the behavior of the groups they pick out, as well as the attitudes of others towards those groups. (shrink)