Feminist Philosophy of Language

Let the label binary category terms refer to natural language expressions like ‘woman’, ‘man’, ‘female’, and ‘male’. Focusing on ‘woman’ and ‘female’, I develop a novel, empirically supported theory of the meanings of English binary category terms. Given plausible assumptions about the metaphysics of sex and gender, this gender-first theory predicts that the sentence ‘Trans women are women’ expresses a truth in all contexts and the sentence ‘Women are adult human females’ expresses a truth in most ordinary contexts — thus (...) that these two sentences can and usually do express logically consistent contents. The key feature of the proposed theory is that it treats both ‘woman’ and ‘female’ as sensitive to an individual’s gender when that individual belongs to a gendered category and to an individual’s sex otherwise. The existence and plausibility of a gender-first theory of this kind opens up conceptual room for trans-inclusive positions in the philosophy of sex and gender which endorse the claim that women are adult human females, thereby both accounting for trans women’s experiences of their bodies as female and helping to disarm the sentence ‘Women are adult human females’ as a trans-exclusionary slogan. (shrink)

In Search of Womanhood by way of etymology.

P. F. Strawson famously distinguishes what a speaker presupposes from what she asserts in uttering a sentence like “The present King of France is bald”. This paper defends a claim about presupposition's epistemic significance, namely that presupposition can provide a distinctive testimony‐based way for an audience to learn about the world.

The role of language in doing gender is a very important theme in feminist movements and in the post-structuralist approach of gender by queer theorists: Butler, for example, has mobilized a concept from the ordinary language philosophy (“performativity”) to analyze gender and what she calls the “discursive construction of sex”. Her conception has been criticized by various feminist theorists for “derealizing” social relations: forgetting the materiality of the body and neglecting the concrete conditions of women’s work and life. This paper (...) explores how ordinary language philosophy, and especially Wittgenstein’s approach of language, may support butlerian perspective in developing a realistic understanding of the power of language. (shrink)

Inferentialism seems to be an unpopular theory where derogatory terms are concerned. Contrary to most theorists in the debate on the meaning of derogatory terms, I think that inferentialism constitutes a promising theory to account for a broad range of aspects of derogatory language use. In order to make good on that promise, however, inferentialism must overcome four main objections that are usually raised against Michael Dummett's and Robert Brandom's inferentialist explanations of derogatory terms. This paper aims at debunking these (...) objections and thereby further developing the inferentialist interpretation of derogatory terms. I shall first discuss and reject three of the objections by pointing to the core assumptions of Brandomian inferentialism. Overcoming the fourth objection requires adjusting Dummett's and Brandom's explanation of the meaning of derogatory terms. In order to do so, I shall elaborate on the role that the explication of implicit material inferences plays with regard to different kinds of derogatory terms. The inferentialist account I am proposing fares better in terms of its explanatory power and broadness of application than Dummett's and Brandom's sketchy and oft-criticised views. (shrink)

Through the lens of feminist speech act theory, this paper argues that artificial intelligence romance systems objectify and subordinate nonvirtual women. AI romance systems treat their users as consumers, offering them relational invulnerability and control over their (usually feminized) digital romantic partner. This paper argues that, though the output of AI chatbots may not generally constitute speech, the framework offered by an AI romance system communicates an unjust perspective on intimate relationships. Through normalizing controlling one’s intimate partner, these systems operate (...) as speakers that rank women as non-player characters and license their oppression, which is unjust even in the absence of empirical harms. Understanding AI romance systems as speakers has implications for policymakers. First, this account helps close the so-called responsibility gap in the operation of an AI system. Second, it places these systems under the purview of institutions’ policies regarding hate speech, suggesting one avenue for arguing that these systems may violate extant policies. Finally, it provides support for the pursuit of empirical research into AI romance systems’ effects on users. (shrink)

In this essay I identify a type of linguistic phenomenon new to feminist philosophy of language: biased evaluative descriptions. Biased evaluative descriptions are descriptions whose well-intended positive surface meanings are inflected with implicitly biased content. Biased evaluative descriptions are characterized by three main features: (1) they have roots in implicit bias or benevolent sexism, (2) their application is counterfactually unstable across dominant and subordinate social groups, and (3) they encode stereotypes. After giving several different kinds of examples of biased evaluative (...) descriptions, I distinguish them from similar linguistic concepts, including backhanded compliments, slurs, insults, epithets, pejoratives, and dog whistles. I suggest that the traditional framework of Gricean implicature cannot account for biased evaluative descriptions. I discuss some challenges to the distinctiveness and evaluability of biased evaluative descriptions, including intersectional social identities. I conclude by discussing their social significance and moral status. Identifying biased evaluative descriptions is important for a variety of social contexts, from the very general and broad (political speeches) to the very particular and small (bias in academic hiring). (shrink)

I provide an opinionated discussion of two recent volumes on the structure, ethics, and politics of bad conversations. In Just Words (2019), Mary Kate McGowan argues that despite our best intentions, we sometimes inadvertently bring oppressive norms to bear on our interactions. In Grandstanding (2020), Justin Tosi and Brandon Warmke argue that the human desire to cut a good moral figure before others systematically distorts moral discourse. Though their authors have different political outlooks, both books converge on a similar theme: (...) conversational bad behavior isn’t always just morally obnoxious. It can be silencing. (shrink)

The illocutionary force of our speech is not fixed forever—we can, by retracting, amending, or blocking, change the speech acts performed by past utterances. This kind of retroactive change is usually thought to be only available for our own speech acts. For example, I cannot retract a promise someone else has made. This chapter argues that ordinary conversational mechanisms allow speakers to ‘push’ new illocutionary force onto other people’s speech acts, and so changing the (conversational) past is easier than we (...) might think. These ‘illocutionary pushes’ can be reinforced by unjust social hierarchies, undermining the illocutionary independence of marginalised speakers. The exercise of illocutionary power is then often used to reinforce an oppressive status quo. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to explore some trans and feminist concerns about the gendered aspects of languages beyond English, focusing in particular on Spanish, Italian, and German. Historically, discussions about gendered language have often challenged the ways in which language can make women (in)visible by addressing the implicit and explicit androcentrism and sexism in our language. We call this the visibility project. Recently, questions surrounding trans-inclusiveness and the possibility of avoiding gender markers altogether have become more prominent, often (...) highlighting the issue of pronouns (e.g. the singular "they*). We call this the gender-neutrality project. However, anglophone philosophy offers a very limited discussion on how either gender-neutrality or visibility strategies could be applied to languages more gendered than English. To address this, we start by showing how gender expresses itself in the grammatical structure of our three sample languages, and identifying some of the specific visibility and neutrality strategies that could be (or are already) applied to them. This leads us to articulate an "innovative project which constructs nuanced and novel ways to transform gendered grammatical structures. Depending on their application, these strategies can fulfil gender-neutrality goals in some cases and visibility goals in others. This highlights, among other things, the ways in which genderqueer people have attempted to shape their linguistic resources in different linguistic contexts, while also opening up avenues for new research when it comes to discussions of gender and language. (shrink)

What role does audience uptake play in determining whether a speaker refuses or consents to sex? Proponents of constitution theories of uptake argue that which speech act someone performs is largely determined by their addressee’s uptake. However, this appears to entail a troubling result: a speaker might be made to perform a speech act of sexual consent against her will. In response, we develop a social constitution theory of uptake. We argue that addressee uptake can constitute a speaker’s utterance of (...) ‘no’ as a speech act of consent under some conditions, but that this does not prevent us from judging that an addressee committed rape. Second, we claim that addressee uptake is not the only form of uptake that matters—the uptake of other members of the discursive community matters too, and can override the addressee’s uptake, constituting the speaker’s utterance as the speech act it was intended to be. (shrink)

Rae Langton and Caroline West argue that pornography silences women by presupposing misogynistic attitudes, such as that women enjoy being raped. More precisely, they claim that a somewhat infamous pictorial, ‘Dirty Pool’, makes such presuppositions, and that it is typical in this respect. I argue for four claims. (1) There are empirical reasons to doubt that women are silenced in the way that Langton and West claim they are. (2) There is no evidence that very much pornography makes the sorts (...) of presuppositions that Langton and West's explanation of silencing requires it to make. (3) Even ‘Dirty Pool’, for all its other problems, does not make such presuppositions. (4) Langton and West misread ‘Dirty Pool’ because they do not take proper account of the fact that pornography often traffics in sexual fantasy. The broader lesson is that we need to read pornography more sensitively if we are to understand its capacity to shape socio‐sexual norms (for good or for ill). (shrink)

Epistemic Courage is a timely and thought-provoking exploration of the ethics of belief, which shows why epistemology is no mere academic abstraction - the question of what to believe couldn't be more urgent. Jonathan Ichikawa argues that a skeptical, negative bias about belief is connected to a conservative bias that reinforces the status quo.

There is a widespread phenomenon that we call linguistic imposters. Linguistic imposters are systematic misuses of expressions that misusers mistake with their conventional usages because of misunderstanding their meaning. Our paper aims to provide an initial framework for theorizing about linguistic imposters that will lay the foundation for future philosophical research about them. We focus on the misuses of the expressions 'grooming' and 'critical race theory' as our central examples of linguistic imposters. We show that linguistic imposters present a distinctive (...) phenomenon by comparing them to some adjacent phenomena, namely conceptual engineering, linguistic hijacking, and dogwhistles. We also address four objections about the extensional adequacy of our definition of linguistic imposters. Finally, we argue that, as linguistic imposters spread, they make some inferences featuring misused expressions more cognitively accessible and seemingly socially licensed to misusers and discuss four types of harms that linguistic imposters are conducive to through these effects. (shrink)

This chapter introduces readers to the empirical questions at issue in debates over gendered pronouns and assesses the plausibility of various possible answers to these questions. It has two parts. The first is a general introduction to the linguistics and psychology of grammatical gender. The second focuses on the meanings of gendered pronouns in English. It begins with a discussion of some methodological limitations of empirical approaches to the topic and the normative implications of those limitations. It then argues against (...) three simple theories of the semantics of gendered pronouns in English and proposes an alternative that fares better: the Gender-First View. Finally, it discusses the singular use of 'they' and its connection to nonbinary gender identities. (shrink)

Rae Langton and Caroline West famously argue that pornography operates like a language game, in that it introduces certain views about women into the common ground via presupposition accommodation. While this pragmatic model explains how pornography has the potential to change its viewers’ beliefs, it leaves open how pornography changes people's desires. Our aim in this paper is to show how Langton and West's discourse-theoretic account of pornography can be refined to close this lacuna. Using tools from recent developments in (...) discourse theory, we propose that pornography issues implicit directives, and thereby introduces bouletic components into the discourse. (shrink)

Analytic philosophers increasingly make reference to the concept of ideology to think about how representational structures can lead to oppression, and argue that the distinctively pernicious functioning of things like propaganda and generic generalizations need to be explained in terms of ideology. The aim of this paper is two-fold. First, it aims to serve as an introduction to (some of) the best contemporary work on ideology in the analytic tradition. Second, it proposes a novel challenge for any such theory. The (...) challenge turns on the nature of intersectionality: it is hard to see how to render consistent the claims that ideology creates or sustains oppression with the claim that oppression is intersectional, without making substantial modifications to extant theories. The conclusion will be that certain projects in contemporary philosophy of language need to further develop their theories of ideology. (shrink)

This book calls for the institution of an African feminist philosophy of language, challenging existing debates and encouraging a move away from the Western gaze. The book begins with an analysis of the philosophical context of African feminism, and a call for the decolonization of epistemological discourse. Oyeleye then goes on to consider how indigenous patriarchies play out in the cultural reality of the Yoruba in particular, ontologically unpacking the nature of woman as expressed in language, especially in myths and (...) proverbs. Challenging the derogatory language found in proverbs which entrench patriarchal oppression, the book advocates for postproverbials: new proverbs which draw on old traditions but reconstruct the space of woman in a new, egalitarian rhetorical tradition. The book concludes by outlining the conditions necessary for African feminist philosophers to consider language as a decolonizing space which can help to push through the agenda of social change. This book will be an important resource for researchers from across the fields of gender and women studies, feminist philosophy, philosophy of language, cultural studies, and African studies. (shrink)

J.L. Austin argues that ordinary language should be used to identify when it is appropriate or inappropriate to make, accept, or reject knowledge claims. I criticize Austin’s account: In our ordinary life, we often accept justifications rooted in racism, sexism, ableism, and classism as reasons to dismiss knowledge claims or challenges, despite the fact such reasons are not good reasons. Austin’s Ordinary Language Epistemology (OLE) classifies the discounting of knowledge claims in classic cases of epistemic injustice as legitimate ordinary maneuvers. (...) I provide recommendations for revision of OLE and offer a means of distinguishing between dismissals in cases of epistemic injustice and their legitimate counterparts. (shrink)

A standing presumption in the literature is that devil’s advocacy is an inherently beneficial argumentative move; and that those who take on this role in conversation are paradigms of argumentative virtue. Outside academic circles, however, devil’s advocacy has acquired something of a notorious reputation: real-world conversations are rife with self-proclaimed devil’s advocates who are anything but virtuous. Motivated by this observation, in this paper we offer the first in-depth exploration of non-ideal devil’s advocacy. We draw on recent analyses of two (...) better known discursive practices—mansplaining and trolling—to illuminate some of the signature traits of vicious devil’s advocacy. Building on this comparative examination, we show that all three practices trade on a manipulation of illocutionary force; and we evaluate their respective options for securing plausible deniability. (shrink)

Much recent work in feminist philosophy of language and epistemology has focused on how power constrains speech and testimony. This paper aims to highlight the flip side of silencing by looking at the productive power of sexist ideology in the context of the Italian gender-based violence crime trial. Building on José Medina’s performative account of epistemic injustice (2013; 2021), I argue that when sexist conceptual resources are used by the judge as an epistemic lens, they do ideological work by setting (...) unfair constraints on the communicative and epistemic agency of the complainant in the obtaining of her testimony. Moreover, I argue that the very same hermeneutical insensitivities and distorting concepts that shape patterns of silence can give rise to forms of agential testimonial injustice (Lackey 2023) in which the only witness statements believed by the Court are those elicited through oppressive questions that obscure, deny, or minimize the reported violence, constituting a form of extracted speech (McKinney 2016). In practical terms, this paper intends to offer a possible theoretical tool to detect and counteract those unjust discursive practices that prevent an unbiased constitution of testimonial evidence. (shrink)

Whenever we communicate, we inevitably have to say one thing before another. This means introducing particularly subtle patterns of salience into our language. In this paper, I introduce ‘order-based salience patterns,’ referring to the ordering of syntactic contents where that ordering, pretheoretically, does not appear to be of consequence. For instance, if one is to describe a colourful scarf, it wouldn’t seem to matter if one were to say it is ‘orange and blue’ or ‘blue and orange.’ Despite their apparent (...) triviality, I argue that order-based salience patterns tend to make the content positioned first more salient – in the sense of attention-grabbing – in a way that can have surprising normative implications. Giving relative salience to gender differences over similarities, for instance, can result in the activation of cognitively accessible beliefs about gender differences. Where those beliefs are epistemically and/or ethically flawed, we can critique the salience pattern that led to them, providing an instrumental way of evaluating those patterns. I suggest that order-based salience patterns can also be evaluated on constitutive grounds; talking about gender differences before similarities might constitute a subtle form of bias. Finally, I reflect on how the apparent triviality of order-based salience patterns in language gives them an insidious strength. (shrink)

Mary Kate McGowan’s Just Words offers an interesting account of exercitives. On McGowan’s view, one of the things we do with words is change what’s permitted, and we do this ubiquitously, without any special authority or specific intention. McGowan’s account of exercitives is meant to identify a mechanism by which ordinary speech is harmful, and which justifies the regulation of such speech. It is here that I part ways. I make three main arguments. First, McGowan’s focus on harm is misguided; (...) that ordinary speech is harmful is harder to support, and in turn does not less to support conclusions about whether it is wrong and warrants regulation, than Just Words suggests. Second, if the speech is harmful, McGowan’s account of exercitives is ill-suited to explain why; the relevant instances of ordinary speech seem to express speakers’ views about moral norms, not change social norms. Third, McGowan’s argument for why ordinary speech should be regulated because it is a form of discrimination presupposes a great deal that is controversial about what makes discrimination wrong and legally actionable, and even if it is right it may license the regulation of more speech than many, including McGowan, would deem acceptable. (shrink)

This chapter explores a case study in contemporary fanaticism. We adopt Katsafanas’s conceptualization of fanaticism to make possible an in-depth discussion of and evaluation of a diffuse but important social movement — the anglophone manosphere. According to Katsafanas, fanatics are fruitfully understood as members of a group that adopts sacred values which they hold unconditionally to preserve their own psychic unity, and who feel that those values are threatened by those who do not accept them. The manosphere includes several social (...) movements, including incels, men’s rights activists, and men-going-their-own-way. We show that many members of these groups are well-characterized by Katsafanas’s theory of fanaticism, and that they have forged their fanatical group identity using tools that philosophers have tended to associate with more benign social movements and the task of “conceptual engineering.” Indeed, we think that manosphere groups have in many cases been more successful than more palatable liberationist movements, and that this case study in the dark side of conceptual engineering may be both sobering and informative. (shrink)

Drawing on work from Marina Sbisà’s “Ideology and the Persuasive Use of Presupposition” (1999), Rae Langton has developed a powerful account of the subtle mechanisms through which hate speech and propaganda spread. However, this model has a serious limitation: it focuses too strongly on individual speech acts isolated from their wider context, rendering its applicability to a broader range of cases suspect. In this chapter, I consider the limits of presupposition accommodation to clarify the audience’s role in helping hate speakers, (...) and claim the necessary mechanisms are much more active and social than Langton suggests, with effects not capturable in the analysis of isolated speech acts. I revisit Sbisà’s work on presupposition and develop an alternative model that (1) improves upon the Langtonian model for explaining the power of hate propaganda, and (2) is more in line with Sbisà’s original approach to ideology and the normative aspects of presupposition. (shrink)

Jennifer Saul is Waterloo Chair in Social and Political Philosophy of Language at the University of Waterloo. Originally American, she spent twenty-four years at the University of Sheffield in the United Kingdom. Her current focus is manipulative political language, which she explores in Dogwhistles and Figleaves: Linguistics Tricks for Racist and Conspiracist Discourse (forthcoming, Oxford, 2024). She has also written books and articles on feminism, lying and misleading, and implicit bias. She founded the blogs What is it Like to be (...) a Woman in Philosophy and Feminist Philosophers, and was Director of the Society for Women in Philosophy UK 2009–19. Along with Helen Beebee, she published two reports (in 2011 and 2021) on the state of women in philosophy in the UK and drew up good practice guidelines which have been adopted by dozens of departments. She’s also proud of having been a philosophical consultant on a zombie movie. (shrink)

Recently, Jennifer Saul (“Racial Figleaves, the Shifting Boundaries of the Permissible, and the Rise of Donald Trump”, 2017; “Racist and Sexist Figleaves”, 2021) has explored the use of what she calls “figleaves” in the discourse on race and gender. Following Saul, a figleaf is an utterance that, for some portion of the audience, blocks the conclusion that some other utterance, R, or the person who uttered R is racist or sexist. Such racial and gender figleaves are pernicious, says Saul, because, (...) among other things, they can shift the boundaries of what is deemed acceptable to think or say. This paper expands on Saul’s picture in a threefold way: It is first argued that appeals to statistics can function as figleaves. It is then argued that—as far as figleaves go—there is reason to believe that statistics-as-figleaves are especially pernicious. Finally, the paper explores some strategies for counterspeech. (shrink)

This paper proposes that, in many cases, conversational norms permit gaslighting when socially subordinate speakers report systemic injustice. Section 1 introduces gaslighting and the kinds of cases on which I focus—namely, cases in which multiple people gaslight. I give examples and statistics to suggest that these cases are common in response to reports of race- or gender-based injustice; and I appeal to scholarship on epistemologies of ignorance to suggest that this kind of gaslighting is common because it is systematically produced (...) by dominant epistemic systems. Section 2 draws on Lynne Tirrell’s account of language games that’ve been influenced by oppression to make the case that conversational norms make gaslighting “appropriate” when socially subordinate speakers report systemic injustice. Together, these points make the case that the kind of gaslighting discussed in this paper (i) occurs systematically and (ii) is mutually reinforcing with systems of ignorance. The discussion is meant to help us understand and address the conditions that make gaslighting commonplace. If it’s true that gaslighting occurs systematically in part thanks to our warped conversational norms, then we may be able to mitigate the prevalence of gaslighting by attending to these norms. (shrink)

What is gender and on what should gender classification be based? Dembroff (2018) has recently claimed that, for reasons of social justice, gender classification should not track extant gender kinds. They further argue for ontological pluralism—the existence of many gender kinds, and recommend that we combat oppression by imitating the gender kinds and classification practices in non-oppressive communities. Contra Dembroff, I argue that the analysis is subject to a number of internal problems, including a misguided self-characterization and a tension between (...) ontological pluralism and imitation. In addition, I sketch a different perspective on the relation between gender kinds and gender classification practices that upholds Dembroff’s intended goal but ameliorates the unintended complications. (shrink)

This chapter focuses on Rorty’s two major published works on feminist theory and practice: his essay “Feminism and Pragmatism” and his essay “Feminism, Ideology, and Deconstruction: A Pragmatist View.” The first essay takes up issues about the ontological integrity of the term “woman” and defends forms of feminist discourse that are based in radical feminist political discourse, arguing that the hopes and visions projected by the prophetic nature of such discourse can be assisted by pragmatism better than by traditional philosophy. (...) “Feminism, Ideology, and Deconstruction” criticizes the project of ideological critique that Rorty thinks is unhelpful for feminist political projects and further develops his idea of philosophy as a process of “ground-clearing” contrasting it with the work of social change and activism. (shrink)

Critics across the political spectrum have worried that ordinary uses of words like 'racist', 'sexist', and 'homophobic' are becoming conceptually inflated, meaning that these expressions are getting used so widely that they lose their nuance and, thereby, their moral force. However, the charge of conceptual inflation, as well as responses to it, are standardly made without any systematic investigation of how 'racist' and other expressions condemning oppression are actually used in ordinary language. Once we examine large linguistic corpora to see (...) how these expressions are actually used, we find that English speakers have a rich linguistic repertoire for qualifying the degree to which and dimensions along which something is racist, sexist, homophobic, and so on. These facts about ordinary usage undermine the charge of conceptual inflation. Without awareness of facts about ordinary usage, theorists risk making linguistic prescriptions that are unnecessary or counterproductive. (shrink)

Philosophers of language are increasingly engaging with derogatory terms or slurs. Only few theorists take such language as a starting point for addressing puzzles in philosophy of language with little connection to our real-world problems. This paper aims to show that the political nature of derogatory language use calls for non-ideal theorising as we find it in the work of feminist and critical race scholars. Most contemporary theories of slurs, so I argue, fall short on some desiderata associated with a (...) non-ideal approach. They neglect crucial linguistic or political aspects of morally and politically significant meaning. I argue that a two-stage project is necessary to understand the perniciousness of slurs: accounting for the derogatory content of derogatory terms in general and, additionally, explaining the communicative function of slurs more specifically. I end by showing how inferentialism is well-suited to account for the content of derogatory terms whilst allowing for further explanations of the communicative functions of slurs. (shrink)

Various philosophers discuss perlocutionary silencing, but none defend an account of perlocutionary silencing. This gap may exist because perlocutionary success depends on extralinguistic effects, whereas silencing interrupts speech, leaving theorists to rely on extemporary accounts when they discuss perlocutionary silencing. Consequently, scholars assume perlocutionary silencing occurs but neglect to explain how perlocutionary silencing harms speakers as speakers. In relation to that shortcoming, I defend a novel account of perlocutionary silencing. I argue that speakers experience perlocutionary silencing when they are illegitimately (...) deprived of perlocutionary influence on a conversation in which they are active participants, where perlocutionary influence on the conversation relates to speech-related perlocutionary goals meant to influence the conversation or conversational direction. Thus, this account grounds perlocutionary silencing in linguistic phenomena and characterizes perlocutionary silencing in a way that explains why those who experience perlocutionary silencing are harmed as speakers. Moreover, this account explains how perlocutionary silencing harms speakers as conversational participants in a way that cannot be captured by illocutionary or locutionary silencing, for a speaker may be perlocutionarily silenced despite illocutionary success. Consequently, the account explains why “All Lives Matter” silences Black Lives Matter and “Not All Men” silences women sharing experiences of sexual harassment. (shrink)

Since January 2020, Canadian Chief Medical Officers (CMOs) have rapidly evolved into public figures. However, the gendered makeup of this role seems to map onto CMO communication: 10 CMOs are women and 7 use Twitter to communicate, as opposed to 7 men, of whom only 3 have Twitter accounts. Adopting the theoretical lens of language ideology, this paper explores language and gender dimensions of Canadian Chief Medical Officer (CMO) health discourse by analyzing pandemic tweets from CMOs (January 2020-June 2021, 21,389 (...) tweets, 930,0883 words) using corpus-assisted discourse studies. Results suggest that male and female CMOs have not communicated to the same extent, nor have they used the same (range of) languages. Also, there are differences with regard to expressions of authority and compassion. While a paucity of male data poses methodological challenges, it also raises questions about the specific and disproportionate communication work accorded to and undertaken by women. The paper concludes by arguing that female CMOs’ adherence to stereotypically gendered ways of speaking is a strategy for navigating volatile online and offline environments, but that this raises questions about the longer-term impacts of authority in gendered discourse. (shrink)

We apply a familiar distinction from philosophy of language to a class of material artifacts that are sometimes said to “speak”: statues. By distinguishing how statues speak at the locutionary level versus at the illocutionary level, or what they say versus what they do, we obtain the resource for addressing two topics. First, we can explain what makes statues distinct from street art. Second, we can explain why it is mistaken to criticize—or to defend—the continuing presence of statues based only (...) on what they represent. Both explanations are driven by the same core idea: the significance of statues arises primarily from what they do, and not what they say. (shrink)

Recently, there has been growing interest in methodological issues of non-ideal theoretical philosophy. While some explicitly commit to non-ideal theorising, others doubt that there is anything useful about the ideal/non-ideal distinction in theoretical philosophy. The aim of this paper is twofold. On the one hand, I propose a way of doing non-ideal theoretical philosophy, once we realise how limited certain idealised projects are. Since there is a big overlap between projects that are called non-ideal and applied, the second aim is (...) to distinguish between these categories in order to show that applied theoretical philosophy is only worth pursuing if it operates in a non-ideal framework. I argue that we should be pluralistic about possible non-ideal theories and view the ideal/non-ideal differences as a matter of degree, rather than kind. As an example, I show how my version of non-ideal theory is useful to a concrete debate in philosophy of language. My proposal allows us to identify already existing non-ideal approaches to linguistic meaning and encourages us to further engage in the debate on non-ideal theoretical philosophy. (shrink)

Our everyday practices are meaningful in several ways. In addition to the linguistic meanings of our terms and sentences, we attach social meanings to actions and statuses. Philosophy of language and public debates often focus on contesting morally and politically pernicious linguistic practices. My aim is to show that this is too little: even if we are only interested in morally and politically problematic terms, we must counteract a pernicious linguistic practice on many levels, especially on the level of its (...) underlying social meanings. Otherwise, the critique of specific words as the most salient fruits of this practice will be futile. I trace out two paths through which pernicious social meanings feed into linguistic meanings and make the case for constructive contestations of social meanings as an alternative to criticising the use of a few highly pernicious terms in which these social meanings are manifest. My investigation into how social structures shape both social and linguistic meanings sheds further light on the ways in which social meanings enter linguistic exchanges. Moreover, it reveals that what is said in specific situations is more closely connected to our non-verbal actions than the current literature on semantics and the social sciences allows. (shrink)

One way to silence the powerless, Langton has taught us, is to pre-emptively disable their ability to do things with words. In this paper I argue that speakers can be silenced in a different way. You can let them speak, and obscure the meaning of their words afterwards. My aim is to investigate this form of silencing, that I call retroactive distortion. In a retroactive distortion, the meaning of the words of a speaker is distorted by the effect of a (...) subsequent speech act by a different speaker. After introducing this notion, I explore some reasons why retroactive distortions can be difficult to challenge and argue that, besides constituting a communicative injustice, they can eliminate topics from public consideration and therefore erode public debate. (shrink)

The concept of gender (male and female) is an issue that can be handled biologically, socially and individually. Whether the gender - based language production differences are linguistic, social hierarchy or culture has long been discussed and debated by different scientific circles. Studies on whether men and women produce different languages coincide with the 1970s, when the feminism movement emerged in the world. In the same period, sociolinguistic researches were carried out at scientific levels. These sociolinguistic studies are considered to (...) be the first important studies on malefemale language production differences. Looking at language and gender studies, it is seen that there is a general, intensified focus on two questions: First, do men and women use language differently (in different dimensions)? Secondly, is the language that describes the man and the language that describes the woman different from each other in written or oral modules in social life? An attempt was made to find an answer to the question “do men and women really speak differently” in this qualitative study, based on the literature. Although there are various studies on gender-based language use differences, it seems that this issue is open to discussion. It is possible to say that the difference in gender-based language use is not certain due to reasons such as the fact that most of the studies were conducted with small data and different methods, up-to-date data were not used, and most of the data were collected from the English language. (shrink)

A recurring concern within contemporary philosophy of language has been with the ways in which speakers can be illocutionarily silenced, i.e. hindered in their capacity to do things with words. Moving beyond the traditional conception of silencing as uptake failure, Mary Kate McGowan has recently claimed that silencing may also involve other forms of recognition failure. In this paper I first offer a supportive elaboration of McGowan’s claims by developing a social account of speech act performance, according to which the (...) success of an illocutionary act is not only a function of the intentions of and the conventions deployed by the speaker, but partly depends on how the act is recognized or taken up by the hearer. I then provide a comprehensive definition of illocutionary silencing and spell out what it means for it to occur in a systematic manner. (shrink)

Vocal fry is a phonation, or voicing, in which an individual drops their voice below its natural register and consequently emits a low, growly, creaky tone of voice. Media outlets have widely acknowledged it as a generational vocal style characteristic of millennial women. Critics of vocal fry often claim that it is an exclusively female vocal pattern, and some say that the voicing is so distracting that they cannot understand what is being said under the phonation. Claiming that a phonation (...) is so distracting as to prevent uptake of the semantic content of an utterance associated with it is an extreme reaction, especially when accompanied by demands for women to change their phonation. We argue that this reaction limits women's communicative autonomy. We analyze the extreme reaction to female vocal fry, which we characterize as a non-content-based response, from the perspectives of philosophy of language, feminist epistemology, and linguistics. We argue that when fry is heard as annoying and distracting, it is because the hearer interprets the speaker as echoing an utterance from a position of authority to which she is not entitled. We show that this reaction encodes conscious or unconscious sexist attitudes toward women's voices. (shrink)

We live in a world saturated in both racial and gendered divisions. Our focus is on one place where attitudes about these divisions diverge: language. We suspect most everyone would be horrified at the idea of adding race-specific pronouns, honorifics, generic terms, and so on to English. And yet gender-specific terms of the same sort are widely accepted and endorsed. We think this asymmetry cannot withstand scrutiny. We provide three considerations against incorporating additional race-specific terms into English, and argue that (...) these considerations also support eliminating the analogous gender-specific terms. With respect to these parts of speech, English should be no more gender-specific than it already is race-specific. (shrink)

Considering the short history of the feminist philosophy of language, Rae Langton’s article “Speech Acts and Unspeakable Acts” was highly influential as one of the first positive research programs in the movement. In that paper, Langton – using John L. Austin’s speech act theory – tries to interpret Catharine MacKinnon’s thesis: pornography is a speech that subordinates and silences women. Despite the importance of the subject, those unfamiliar with certain historical and contextual features of the topic would hardly understand it. (...) My paper aims to introduce some of the major accounts in this special area in the intersection of speech act theory and feminist philosophy. Rather than just reconstructing Langton’s arguments and the most common objections against it, I will take a more holistic approach, examining its surrounding literature as well. This article has six sections. In Section 1, I contrast the conservative and liberal arguments against pornography and sketch MacKinnon’s liberal critique. In Section 2, I give alternative interpretations of MacKinnon’s thesis, “pornography is harm.” In Section 3, I try to make sense of the prima facie implausible assumption that pornography is speech. In Section 4 and 5, I will analyze the Langtonian theories about subordination and silencing. Finally, in Section 6, I will mention the most challenging problems for Langton’s approach, considering the verbal nature or pornography, the limits of the protection of free speech, and the different positions on sexual consent. (shrink)

Recent pragmatic accounts of slurs argue that the offensiveness of slurs is generated by a speaker's free choice to use a slur opposed to a more appropriate and semantically equivalent neutral counterpart. I argue that the theoretical role of neutral counterparts on such views is overstated. I consider two recent pragmatic analyses, Bolinger (Noûs, 51, 2017, 439) and Nunberg (New work on speech acts, Oxford University Press, 2018), which rely heavily upon the optionality of slurs, namely, that a speaker exercises (...) a deliberate lexical choice to use a slur when they could have easily used a neutral counterpart instead. Against such views, I argue that across a range of different offensive uses of slurs, a speaker's choice to use a slur opposed to a neutral counterpart plays little to no role in accounting for why the slur generates offence. Such cases cast serious doubt upon the explanatory depth of these pragmatic analyses, and raise more general concerns for views which draw upon the relationship between a slur and its neutral counterpart. The main upshot is this: theorists should exercise caution in assuming that neutral counterparts play any fundamental or systemic role in explaining why slurs are offensive. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In ‘Scorekeeping in a Pornographic Language Game’, Rae Langton and Caroline West borrow ideas from David Lewis to attempt to explain how pornography might subordinate and silence women. Pornography is supposed to express certain misogynistic claims implicitly, through presupposition, and to convey them indirectly, through accommodation. I argue that the appeal to accommodation cannot do the sort of work Langton and West want it to do: Their case rests upon an overly simplified model of that phenomenon. I argue further (...) that, once we are clear about why Langton and West's account fails, a different and more plausible account of pornography's influence emerges. (shrink)

Despite non/minimal adversarial feminist argumentation models heavily critiquing rude, hostile, uncooperative argumentative practices, I argue that these models slip easily into instances of ‘white talk’ when white individuals are engaged with BIPOC on matters concerning racial injustices. While these models address overt aggression, a more nuanced modification is needed for the models to handle cases of white passive aggressive argumentative tactics. Moreover, I also argue that given the language and argumentative ideology within academia, ‘white talk’ cannot be addressed by BIPOC (...) without ‘argumentative smothering.’ Building heavily from Dotson’s conception of ‘testimonial smothering,’ I argue argumentative smothering occurs when an interlocutor heavily modifies their argumentative practices due to an oppressive environment in an attempt to situate their argument in such a way that it will be receptive and ‘acceptable’ to the other interlocutor and/or audience. (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)

For over four decades feminist linguists and philosophers of language have addressed the semantic, cognitive, and political factors associated with gender asymmetries in nominal and pronominal choice. The sociolinguistic spotlight has focused on the history, extent, and implications of the prescriptively sanctioned use of man and he for sex-neutral reference—he/man language in Martyna ’s term. Bare singular and simple indefinite man in exemplify this use, while the bare singulars in yield the male-specific meaning exhibited by the man or that man.

The paper examines the relationship between the sexual and linguistic and their mutual influence within the fields of political philosophy, linguistics, and theory of text, in selection from Adriana Cavarero’s work. First, we begin from the knowledge of poststructuralist text theory, psychoanalytic feminism and psycholinguistics, which are later expanded with the results from political philosophy with special emphasis on ancient texts. Cavarero’s texts are being analysed to describe the features through which the relationship between gender, sex and text is established. (...) Through a critical exploration of Cavarero’s texts and previous theoretical discussions and the analysis results, a conclusion about the influence of the sexual on language and culture and the influence of language and cultural symbols on social and gender roles is reached. (shrink)