Hate speech is commonly defined with reference to the legal category of incitement. Laws targeting incitement typically focus on how the speech is expressed rather than its actual content. This has a number of unintended consequences: first, law tends to capture overt or obvious forms of hate speech and not hate speech that takes the form of ‘reasoned’ argument, but which nevertheless, causes as much, if not more harm. Second, the focus on form rather than content (...) leads to categorization errors. Hate speech taking the form of ‘reasoned argument’ is often legally characterized as either political or academic debate, and so is deemed both permissible and justified in societies where free speech principles exist. In this paper, I argue that it is important to identify instances of hate speech as hate speech, no matter how articulately or reasonably the speech is expressed. The danger in mischaracterizing an instance of hate speech by calling it academic or political debate is that it risks normalizing the views and sentiments that are expressed and accepting those views as an important part of our political and academic discourses. With reference to Habermas’ account of ‘distorted communication’, I propose different criteria for defining and understanding hate speech and suggest that there might be good reasons for interpreting the concept of incitement more broadly, so as to include these different kinds of it. (shrink)

Speech is intelligible even when the temporal envelope of speech is distorted. The current study investigates how native and non-native speakers perceptually restore temporally distorted speech. Participants were native English speakers (NS), and native Japanese speakers who spoke English as a second language (NNS). In Experiment 1, participants listened to “locally time-reversed speech” where every x-ms of speech signal was reversed on the temporal axis. Here, the local time reversal shifted the constituents of the (...) class='Hi'>speech signal forward or backward from the original position, and the amplitude envelope of speech was altered as a function of reversed segment length. In Experiment 2, participants listened to “modulation-filtered speech” where the modulation frequency components of speech were low-pass filtered at a particular cut-off frequency. Here, the temporal envelope of speech was altered as a function of cut-off frequency. The results suggest that speech becomes gradually unintelligible as the length of reversed segments increases (Experiment 1), and as a lower cut-off frequency is imposed (Experiment 2). Both experiments exhibit the equivalent level of speech intelligibility across six levels of degradation for native and non-native speakers respectively, which poses a question whether the regular occurrence of local time reversal can be discussed in the modulation frequency domain, by simply converting the length of reversed segments (ms) into frequency (Hz). (shrink)

Ignorant speech, which spreads falsehoods about people and policies, is pervasive in public discourse. A popular response to this problem recommends countering ignorant speech with more speech, rather than legal regulations. However, Mary Kate McGowan has influentially argued that this ‘counterspeech’ response is flawed, as it overlooks the asymmetric pliability of conversational norms: the phenomenon whereby some conversational norms are easier to enact than subsequently to reverse. After demonstrating that this conversational ‘stickiness’ is an even broader concern (...) for counterspeech than McGowan suggests—it applies not just to oppressive or hateful speech, but also to ordinary policy-related misinformation—I argue that a more sophisticated account of counterspeech can nevertheless overcome it. First, the stickiness objection overlooks the distinction between ‘negative’ and ‘positive’ counterspeech. Instead of directly negating a distorted proposition, positive counterspeech affirms a correct proposition that is inconsistent with the falsehoods at hand. This, I contend, allows it to counter ignorant speech without triggering the properties that render it sticky. Second, the stickiness objection presupposes an unrefined conception of counterspeech’s temporality. Counterspeech should be understood as a diachronic process, which not only follows, but also pre-empts, ignorant utterances. Drawing on speech-act theories of silencing, I argue that pre-emptive counterspeech can condition the conversational context so as to prevent subsequent ignorant utterances from enacting sticky conversational norms. Thus, this theoretically-refined conception of counterspeech helps appreciate how verbal responses might overcome the stickiness of conversational norms; and, in doing so, it reveals that this stickiness need not provide reasons to prefer legal remedies to counterspeech. (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)

This chapter focuses on one of the common fallacies in Western philosophy: free speech fallacy (FS). The FS consists in thinking one's political right to freedom of expression includes protection from criticism. Those who commit this fallacy allege that critical scrutiny is either tantamount to censorship or equivalent to the imposition of one's views on others. The error in the fallacy is that the freedom of expression includes critical expressions. The trouble with the argument is that freedom of expression (...) does not mean freedom from criticism. The first distortion concerns the logical consequences of criticism. The second distortion confuses logical implications of criticism with the criticism itself. The FS thus takes the personal implications, necessary though they may be, as the defining features of criticism, when they are merely incidental. (shrink)

Much recent philosophical work argues that power constrains speech—pornography silences women, testimonial injustice thwarts a speaker’s transmission of knowledge, bias distorts the performative force of subordinated speech. Though the constraints that power places on speech are serious, power also enables some speech. Power doesn’t just keep us from speaking—it also makes us speak. In this paper I explore how power produces, rather than constrains, speech. I discuss a kind of speech I call extracted (...) class='Hi'>speech: speech that is unjustly elicited from an agent. I discuss examples of coerced confession, intimidated “consent,” and mandatory self-disclosure as instances of extracted speech, and theorize a bit about what significance this speech has more generally for philosophy of language and political philosophy. (shrink)

This paper considers Tirrell’s analysis of toxic speech using examples epitomising speech that are misleading, outright false, and without compelling justification. They are toxic in polluting and eroding democratic functioning. However, I argue that Tirrell’s two epidemiological models (the common source model exemplified by poisons, and the propagated transmission model that viruses exemplify) fail to make good sense of my examples, which are deeply insidious without being overtly invidious. The limitations of the epidemiological models suggest that toxicity is (...) part of our default form of thinking and talking, rather than being an ‘outside’ pathology like a poison or a virus. (shrink)

Should the law punish the mere utterance of lies even if the listener has not been deceived? Seana Shiffrin has recently answered this question in the affirmative. She argues that pure lying as such harms the moral fabric of sincerity and distorts the testimonial warrants which underpin communication. The article begins with a discussion of Shiffrin’s account of lying as a moral wrong and the idea of impersonal harm to moral goods. Then I raise two objections to her theory. First, (...) it does not explain persuasively why the fabric of sincerity is so vulnerable to pure lying. Second, it underestimates the need for a causal link between the alleged harm and the speech the government suppresses. I explore the function of the causal inquiry in constitutional law and suggest that if Shiffrin’s theory were to become the standard for adjudication in freedom of expression cases, protection for speech would deteriorate. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Joseph Margolis LITERATURE AND SPEECH ACTS The trivial truth that literature employs language has been fastened on regularly and repeatedly to spawn a remarkable variety of misconceptions. Most famously, in the context of aesthetics, it has led to the untenable thesis that all art is language,1 and to the more pointed claim that works of art somehow affirm propositions that may be linguistically rendered and straightforwardly judged true (...) or false. It has also embarrassed a good deal of theorizing about the nature of aesthetic experience and the aesthetic orientation, and has led to preposterous views about the aesthetic status of the literary arts and the exaggerated importance of words in literature. These developments are reasonably well known, partly because they form a venerable portion of the history of aesthetics, partly because the doctrines at stake take so many apparently persuasive guises—even in our own time. There are other views, however, also largely based on the example of literature, that are at once useful because they are corrective of other abuses and are in their turn prone to newer mistakes that bid fair to become fashionable. The ambivalent corrective I have in mind may be marked by the thesis that a work of art is an utterance of some sort. In effect, the thesis stresses the distortion that results from pretending to address art relevantly solely in terms of the palpable properties of some object or product—more or less on the model of examining a perceptually accessible physical object. Attention is required, on the theory, to the act or agency of the artist by which the work is "uttered," in a sense quite close to that in which a forger is said to "utter" a bad check: by this simple strategem, we are led to see that biographical, historical, intentional considerations are instructive about a work of art in an essential way and that the properties of an artwork cannot possibly be restricted to its merely sensory or sensuous features (if indeed, admitting conceptual art, a particular work has any such features at all). The proposal, therefore, is at least a heuristically useful one. Whether it ought also to be enshrined as definitional of 39 40Philosophy and Literature art is another question altogether, qualified partly by its being entirely possible to save the corrections without the thesis, partly by the debatable force of definitions themselves. A rather specialized but utterly misleading and unpromising version of the utterance theory maintains that literature as such, as well as such particularly important distinctions within literature as fiction, poetry, and metaphor, may be perspicuously defined or distinguished in terms of a speech-act model. We must be careful here. The general thesis that the phenomenon of language cannot be adequately analyzed apart from contextual considerations bearing on speakers' intentions, shared assumptions and background beliefs between speakers and hearers, and the actual histories of conversations and the like has now been abundantly confirmed by a variety of theorists—including, prominently, J. L. Austin, P. F. Strawson, H. P. Grice, John Searle, Keith Donnellan, George Lakoff, and Zeno Vendler. Still, the general concession that familiar syntactic and semantic studies of the phenomenon of language omit an entire dimension of language, as Austin so ably demonstrated, has rather little to say about the distinctions normally debated in the context of literary theory and the appreciation and criticism of literature. (This may well seem paradoxical. The argument has yet to be supplied.) But since the application of the speech-act model to literary analysis shows some tendency to attract advocates, it may be useful to draw explicit attention here to the inherent limitations and difficulties of the enterprise. Obviously, if language must be analyzed at least in part in terms of the context of performing speech acts, it will be impossible to ignore altogether the speech-act dimension of literary utterances. The question remains: what can and what cannot be illuminated by means of the speech-act model? Precisely how restricted a general speech-act model is—that is, one not restricted just to literature—can be seen at a stroke simply by noting that the meanings of sentences (i) cannot be equated with what speakers... (shrink)

A growing body of evidence shows that brain oscillations track speech. This mechanism is thought to maximise processing efficiency by allocating resources to important speech information, effectively parsing speech into units of appropriate granularity for further decoding. However, some aspects of this mechanism remain unclear. First, while periodicity is an intrinsic property of this physiological mechanism, speech is only quasi-periodic, so it is not clear whether periodicity would present an advantage in processing. Second, it is still (...) a matter of debate which aspect of speech triggers or maintains cortical entrainment, from bottom-up cues such as fluctuations of the amplitude envelope of speech to higher level linguistic cues such as syntactic structure. We present data from a behavioural experiment assessing the effect of isochronous retiming of speech on speech perception in noise. Two types of anchor points were defined for retiming speech, namely syllable onsets and amplitude envelope peaks. For each anchor point type, retiming was implemented at two hierarchical levels, a slow time scale around 2.5 Hz and a fast time scale around 4 Hz. Results show that while any temporal distortion resulted in reduced speech intelligibility, isochronous speech anchored to P-centers (approximated by stressed syllable vowel onsets) was significantly more intelligible than a matched anisochronous retiming, suggesting a facilitative role of periodicity defined on linguistically motivated units in processing speech in noise. (shrink)

This article presents an overview of the single-channel dereverberation methods suitable for distant speech recognition application. The dereverberation methods are mainly classified based on the domain of enhancement of speech signal captured by a distant microphone. Many single-channel speech enhancement methods focus on either denoising or dereverberating the distorted speech signal. There are very few methods that consider both noise and reverberation effects. Such methods are discussed under a multistage approach in this article. The article concludes (...) with a hypothesis that the methods that do not require an a priori reverberation impulse response is desirable in varying the environmental conditions for DSR applications such as intelligent home and office environments, humanoid robots, and automobiles rather than the methods that require an a priori reverberation impulse response. (shrink)

Vocabulary size has been suggested as a useful measure of “verbal abilities” that correlates with speech recognition scores. Knowing more words is linked to better speech recognition. How vocabulary knowledge translates to general speech recognition mechanisms, how these mechanisms relate to offline speech recognition scores, and how they may be modulated by acoustical distortion or age, is less clear. Age-related differences in linguistic measures may predict age-related differences in speech recognition in noise performance. We (...) hypothesized that speech recognition performance can be predicted by the efficiency of lexical access, which refers to the speed with which a given word can be searched and accessed relative to the size of the mental lexicon. We tested speech recognition in a clinical German sentence-in-noise test at two signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs), in 22 younger (18–35 years) and 22 older (60–78 years) listeners with normal hearing. We also assessed receptive vocabulary, lexical access time, verbal working memory, and hearing thresholds as measures of individual differences. Age group, SNR level, vocabulary size, and lexical access time were significant predictors of individual speech recognition scores, but working memory and hearing threshold were not. Interestingly, longer accessing times were correlated with better speech recognition scores. Hierarchical regression models for each subset of age group and SNR showed very similar patterns: the combination of vocabulary size and lexical access time contributed most to speech recognition performance; only for the younger group at the better SNR (yielding about 85% correct speech recognition) did vocabulary size alone predict performance. Our data suggest that successful speech recognition in noise is mainly modulated by the efficiency of lexical access. This suggests that older adults’ poorer performance in the speech recognition task may have arisen from reduced efficiency in lexical access; with an average vocabulary size similar to that of younger adults, they were still slower in lexical access. (shrink)

While this article by Waldman and Newberg is correct in its main message, it is unfortunately fraught with inaccuracies and problems. To illustrate: (1) the statement that “Inner speech is also associated with lower levels of psychological distress” is invalid as a wide array of distressing psychological disorders are associated with distorted (e.g., ruminative) inner speech activity.

In Context and Content Robert Stalnaker develops a philosophical picture of the nature of speech and thought and the relations between them. Two themes in particular run through these collected essays: the role that the context in which speech takes place plays in accounting for the way language is used to express thought, and the role of the external environment in determining the contents of our thoughts. Stalnaker argues against the widespread assumption of the priority of linguistic over (...) mental representation, which he suggests has had a distorting influence on our understanding. The first part of the book develops a framework for representing contexts and the way they interact with the interpretation of what is said in them. This framework is used to help to explain a range of linguistic phenomena concerning presupposition and assertion, conditional statements, the attribution of beliefs, and the use of names, descriptions, and pronouns to refer. Stalnaker then draws out the conception of thought and its content that is implicit in this framework. He defends externalism about thought--the assumption that our thoughts have the contents they have in virtue of the way we are situated in the world--and explores the role of linguistic action and linguistic structure in determining the contents of our thoughts. Context and Content offers philosophers and cognitive scientists a summation of Stalnaker's important and influential work in this area. His new introduction to the volume gives an overview of this work and offers a convenient way in for those who are new to it. The Oxford Cognitive Science series is a new forum for the best contemporary work in this flourishing field, where various disciplines--cognitive psychology, philosophy, linguistics, cognitive neuroscience, and computational theory--join forces in the investigation of thought, awareness, understanding, and associated workings of the mind. Each book constitutes an original contribution to its subject, but will be accessible beyond the ranks of specialists, so as to reach a broad interdisciplinary readership. The series will be carefully shaped and steered with the aim of representing the most important developments in the field and bringing together its constituent disciplines. (shrink)

Background Speech understanding may rely not only on auditory, but also on visual information. Non-invasive functional neuroimaging techniques can expose the neural processes underlying the integration of multisensory processes required for speech understanding in humans. Nevertheless, noise (from fMRI) limits the usefulness in auditory experiments, and electromagnetic artefacts caused by electronic implants worn by subjects can severely distort the scans (EEG, fMRI). Therefore, we assessed audio-visual activation of temporal cortex with a silent, optical neuroimaging technique: functional near-infrared spectroscopy (...) (fNIRS). Methods We studied temporal cortical activation as represented by concentration changes of oxy- and deoxy-hemoglobin in four, easy-to-apply fNIRS optical channels of 33 normal-hearing adult subjects and 5 post-lingually deaf cochlear implant (CI) users in response to supra-threshold unisensory auditory and visual, as well as to congruent auditory-visual speech stimuli. Results Activation effects were not visible from single fNIRS channels. However, by discounting physiological noise through reference channel subtraction, auditory, visual and audiovisual speech stimuli evoked concentration changes for all sensory modalities in both cohorts (p<0.001). Auditory stimulation evoked larger concentration changes than visual stimuli (p<0.001). A saturation effect was observed for the audiovisual condition. Conclusions Physiological, systemic noise can be removed from fNIRS signals by reference channel subtraction. The observed multisensory enhancement of an auditory cortical channel can be plausibly described by a simple addition of the auditory and visual signals with saturation. (shrink)

The production of emotional speech is determined by the movement of the speaker’s tongue, lips, and jaw. In order to combine articulatory data and acoustic data of speakers, articulatory-to-acoustic conversion of emotional speech has been studied. In this paper, parameters of LSSVM model have been optimized using the PSO method, and the optimized PSO-LSSVM model was applied to the articulatory-to-acoustic conversion. The root mean square error and mean Mel-cepstral distortion have been used to evaluate the results of (...) conversion; the evaluated result illustrates that MMCD of MFCC is 1.508 dB, and RMSE of the second formant is 25.10 Hz. The results of this research can be further applied to the feature fusion of emotion speech recognition to improve the accuracy of emotion recognition. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:American Journal of Philology 127.4 (2006) 607-611MuseSearchJournalsThis JournalContents[Access article in PDF]Reviewed byPaul Allen Miller University of South Carolina e-mail: [email protected] Habinek. The World of Roman Song: From Ritualized Speech to Social Order. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005. x + 329 pp. Cloth, $52.It has become increasingly evident that the texts we study from ancient Rome are embedded objects, implicated in a rich field of symbolic systems and (...) corporeal practices. The image of the poem as an isolated aesthetic object has become untenable as the field has become dominated by concepts of intertextuality, performativity, social construction, and self-fashioning. The text in books like Tony Corbeill's Controlling Laughter (Princeton 1996) is less an object than an action. Thomas Habinek's The World of Roman Song represents an attempt to make good on the promise of these developments by rethinking the entirety of Roman literature as an embedded social process of "song," of marked speech, that stands at the origins of the Roman social order. Ritual hymns, funereal laudations, convivial play, and comedic performances become so many moments in the constitution of what it means to be Roman, even as conflicts between center and periphery, masculine and feminine, vir and cinaedus are both played out and resisted in the various genres that constitute the world of ritualized speech and its formal derivatives.Any such sweeping endeavor brings with it both a necessary boldness—asking us to rethink the history of Roman culture from a new perspective—and the danger of reductiveness. For the most part, these are dangers that Habinek manages skillfully to skirt through a combination of fine-grained philological analysis and a sophisticated, but never overbearing, theoretical apparatus. The World of Roman Song features close readings of the usage of words such as cano, carmen, dico, ludus, convivia, and sodalis, from their earliest attestations through their appearance in later imperial literature. It also deploys an intellectual armature that draws upon contemporary anthropology, Frankfurt-school Marxism, object-relations psychoanalysis, and the theories of Bourdieu, Bakhtin, and Bataille. Yet, as we shall see, the very methodology that makes this sweeping [End Page 607] and important survey possible—the examination not of texts but of lemmata to trace the memes of Roman self-constitution through formalized language—leads to certain unavoidable distortions. Complex textual systems become reduced to exemplary moments of embeddedness. This reduction is an enabling gesture that like any mode of analysis, however, ultimately produces its own limit.For this reader, the heart of the book is to be found in chapter 4, "Song and Play." Here Habinek traces the relation between three primary sets of terms: dico, dictum, and implicitly dictator, meaning to make an authoritative statement; cano, canto, and carmen, meaning to perform a song (carmen) of one's own (cano), or to repeat that of another (canto), so as to establish a relation between the singer and the constituted social, and ultimately cosmic, whole, via ritualized speech; and ludo, ludus, and lusus, referring to scripted or formalized movements of the body. Thus a poetic ludus, such as that described in Catullus 50 between the poet and Licinius Calvus, would refer not so much to the acts of song (carmina) to which the game of composition gave rise as to the formalized interchange and embodied practice of writing capping verses in different meters in a convivial setting. The previous chapter, "Song and Speech," had established the difference between loquor and dico, with the former referring to unmarked speech and the latter to the making of statements that the speaker asserts as authoritative and hence true. It is thus possible for the terms cano and dico to overlap and those of ludo and cano as well. Nevertheless, the ultimate dream of aristocratic Roman manhood (and, as any number of feminists would point out, of patriarchy as a whole) is for carmen—the ritualized speech that constitutes the community as a living unity—to assume the status of dictum, authoritative speech freed from the... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Politics and Eros in Aristophanes' Speech:Symposium 191E–192A and the ComediesPaul W. LudwigFor many of Plato's modern readers, Aristophanes' encomium of eros is the most memorablnvincing speech in the Symposium. Yet a key passage in the speech is not well understood. About three–fifths of the way through the speech, Aristophanes asserts that boys who are unashamed to lie with men are the most manly boys by (...) nature. A great proof of this, he says, is the fact that they alone end up in politics, where they become "real men."1 Since the same connection between sex and politics is the object of derision in Aristophanes' comedies, 2 many commentators have seen irony in this assertion.3 More have implicitly favored a straight reading, however, relying on the strength of the speech taken at face value. The type of irony at issue, dramatic or verbal, is also open to competing interpretations. Nor have the implications of either type of irony for the rest of the speech and for the dialogue as a whole been adequately treated. Does Plato make his character Aristophanes speak more wisely than he is aware of, in playful revenge for the comedian's own distorted portrait of Socrates?4 Or does Plato make use of the professional jester to clear the way for Socratic morality, on the assumption that Aristophanes' views about male homosexual eros were sufficiently well known to leave little doubt that his explicit praise of pederasty was tongue–in–cheek? [End Page 537]I. The Passage in ContextSymp. 191e–192aThe safest exegesis would first make sense of what Aristophanes professes to mean, comparing the philosophic content, which ought to stand or fall on its own merits, with the rest of the speech and with the other speeches in the dialogue, especially Socrates'. Irony could then emerge either as an alternative or as a supplement to the face–value reading. Assessment of the dialogue's own internal logic, as well as comparison with other Platonic dialogues, should precede recourse outside the authorship of Plato, viz. to the Aristophanic comedies.Aristophanes not only legitimates male–male desire, he asserts that it is best. He argues for his assertion on the grounds that male–male desire is connected to politics. This argument resonates with two themes sounded earlier in the dialogue, by Phaedrus and by Pausanias. The former praises male–male relations by saying that if by some chance a city or armed camp could come into being made up entirely of lovers and their boyfriends, their desire to refrain from all that is shameful and to seek honor in one another's eyes would result in their city's having the best possible government. If such were to fight side by side, even if their city or army happened to be small, they would well nigh conquer all mankind. For an in love would rather die than be seen in any act of cowardice () by his boyfriend (178d 4–179a 2). In other words, lovers make the best citizen–soldiers because the private aim of impressing the beloved serves the public goal of bravery in battle.Pausanias plays a variation on the same theme. He argues that barbarian tyrants outlaw pederasty because they are afraid of strong attachments arising among their subjects. Since proud thoughts are engendered by love, Pausanias reformulates the unwillingness to tolerate disgrace in battle into an unwillingness to acquiesce in tyranny. He cites the example of Harmodius and his lover Aristogeiton, who, in popular lore, dissolved the tyranny of the Peisistratids at Athens, thus clearing [End Page 538] the way for democracy (182b 6–c 7). Like Phaedrus, he mentions unmanliness as the crucial political defect that breeds tyranny (cf. 178d 4–6 with 182c 7–d 2). Like Phaedrus, he sees manliness as the willingness to take up arms, this time not in battle, but in a tyrannicide. And like Phaedrus, he sees male–male relations as the breeding ground for manliness.Unlike Phaedrus, Pausanias is especially concerned with education. The mature lover is assumed to possess already the civic virtues as well as a modicum of philosophy.5 He can initiate his younger... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:M. Tullius Cicero: The Fragmentary SpeechesJohn NicholsonJane W. Crawford. M. Tullius Cicero: The Fragmentary Speeches. An edition with commentary. 2d ed. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1994. x + 350 pp. Cloth, $39.95; paper, $24.95. (American Classical Studies 33)Here we have a manifestation of the paradox that scholarship thrives on ignorance. Scanty evidence begets profuse speculation and reconstruction, and often the less we know about something, the more we write (...) about it. Hence flows this elaborate presentation of Cicero’s fragmentary speeches, which complements the author’s previous book in the same vein, M. Tullius Cicero: The Lost and Unpublished Orations(Hypomnemata 80, Göttingen 1984). With great industry Crawford presents us 350 pages of intense erudition devoted to the explication of about 220 fragments (most rather short) from sixteen otherwise lost but identifiable Ciceronian orations; this second edition adds a brief appendix of another thirty-one fragmenta incertae sedis.But Crawford’s sprawling edition of these remnants is by no means in vain. They have been unduly neglected, and deserve to be more widely appreciated. If nothing else they remind us of how much we have lost from antiquity, even of an author such as Cicero from whom so much else has survived. This rich inheritance is nevertheless only a fraction of the original legacy, and we must remember that there are many pieces missing from the puzzle, the loss of which distorts the overall picture. This new edition represents a dedicated effort to fill in some of the neglected pieces not just from along the edges, but also from the vital center, to reconstruct their original context, and thereby to sharpen the focus of the whole. The fact that most of the speeches under view in this study date to the 60s B.C., a period not fully represented in the extant Ciceronian letters, [End Page 148]makes them all the more important as valuable evidence in the proper understanding of Cicero’s political and forensic career at its height.The fragments here range in length from single isolated words to several lines; most average one or two lines, though there are about a dozen longer fragments between five and nine lines each. Not included in this edition are orations such as Pro Scauroand Pro Tulliowhich, though incomplete, are considered essentially extant. Some of the fragments come from minor orations about which we know very little (five speeches are represented by a single fragment), while others survive in large clusters from important speeches which were well known in antiquity and whose loss to modern readers must be regretted. There are, for example, twenty-seven fragments from Cicero’s electoral oration In Toga Candida(all preserved by Asconius), thirty-three from the invective In P. Clodium et Curionem,and twenty-five from the speech De Aere Alieno Milonis(preserved in the Bobbio scholia). But the most extensively preserved are the twin defense speeches Pro C. Cornelio,together represented by eighty fragments (well over a third from Asconius) whose discussion consumes nearly a quarter of Crawford’s book. Over all, Asconius, Quintilian, and the Bobbio scholiast provide the most numerous and significant fragments, augmented by their encasing commentary which provides valuable context and discussion. Less important are the stray words and phrases picked out by some three dozen others, mostly grammarians with narrow linguistic purposes, working as late as the sixth century a.d.Crawford’s modus operandifor making sense of these fragments is logical and thorough. For each of the sixteen orations, arranged here in chronological order, she first gives a preliminary introduction rehearsing what we know of the historical facts about the case and summarizing the scholarship on the issues which surround it. Next come the ancient testimonia for each speech, both Latin and Greek, and then the fragments themselves (along with textual apparatus) arranged in their probable correct order. She does not offer translations. Finally, each fragment receives a comprehensive commentary addressing matters of date, prosopography, history, politics and law, rhetoric, style, and diction (including textual questions). Where the fragments are extensive enough, there is also a good attempt to reconstruct the overall structure and argument of the speech. At... (shrink)

Derogatory terms can be powerful mechanisms of subordination, while re-appropriating these terms can be a strategy to fight back against social injustice. I argue that projects seeking to reclaim slurs have a performative structure that raises particular hazards. Whereas more familiar forms of protest may fail to bring about their intended result, attempts to re-appropriate slurs can fail to be understood as transgressive acts at all. When attempts at reclamation fail, their force is distorted; context and convention lead the hearer (...) to give uptake to the speech act as a traditional deployment of the slur. The force of this traditional use is to validate and re-entrench the very norms the act was intended to subvert. This is the precarious structure of reclamation projects: when successful, reclamation is the subversion of powerful mechanisms of oppression, but when unsuccessful, the act has the ironic force of constituting mechanisms of oppression. (shrink)

This article suggests a model of uttering/énonciation as representational activity (Energeia) throughout the observable case of both impersonal injunctions and collaborative interaction. Being a dynamic relation at the intersection of notions, language and world, reference, this model integrates a new paradigm into the realm of discursive linguistics, the described morphodynamic language phenomenon instead of the described hypothesis emanating from “structuralized” grammars. We thus discuss one aspect of the interaction adjustment/distortion beyond mere projection (stasis of both virtual social markers and (...) uttered stable forms), considering distortion as a relevant marker of the described observable (an interaction from a translation course for instance). Henceforth, beyond the speech act frame, we present a mathematical attempt to study the variation of the pragmatic impact taking place between projection and result; this last implies two sources positions and praxical levels. As a conclusive note, we expose a brief insight into the phenomenon misunderstanding between both neurocognitive and linguistic studies. (shrink)

: The present work analyses Content Moderation, focusing on ethical concerns and cognitive effects. Starting from a general description and history of the moderation process, it stresses some ethical problems: quality of moderation, transparency, and the working conditions of human moderators. Using some of Facebook leaked slides offering examples of moderation, we define some controversial rules and principles for Commercial Content Moderation. These examples highlight a general lack of coherency and transparency, which has the potential to affect users’ cognitive attitudes, (...) their perception of reality, and their freedom of speech. Such effects are studied in comparison to other well-known online cognitive phenomena and in relation to the most recent dedicated legislation in EU countries. The current Content Moderation scheme leaves users at risk of specific cognitive distortions, highlighting the urgent need for greater transparency throughout the moderation process and better working conditions for moderators. Keywords: Content Moderation; Freedom of Speech; Epistemic Bubble; Technology Ethics Commercial Content Moderation: un oscuro labirinto per la libertà d’espressione e le opinioni degli utenti Riassunto: Il presente lavoro offre un’analisi approfondita della moderazione di contenuti, concentrandosi sulle problematiche etiche e sugli effetti cognitivi. A partire da una introduzione ai concetti chiave e alla storia della moderazione di contenuti online, si concentra su alcuni problemi etici primari: la qualità della moderazione, la sua trasparenza e le condizioni di lavoro dei lavoratori. Utilizzando dei documenti formativi interni di Facebook, pubblicati da un quotidiano e dagli esempi in essi contenuti, definiremo le controverse regole e i principi della Commercial Content Moderation. Ne emerge una generale mancanza di coerenza organizzativa e di trasparenza nel processo, che mostra potenziali effetti dannosi sulle attitudini degli utenti, sulla loro percezione della realtà e la loro libertà di parola. Tali effetti saranno studiati in confronto con i più conosciuti effetti cognitivi del mondo dei social ed in relazione alle più recenti disposizioni di leggi europee in merito. Gli schemi attualmente in uso producono degli specifici effetti di distorsione cognitiva e conseguentemente mostrano l’importanza di una maggiore attenzione alla trasparenza del processo e alle condizioni di lavoro dei moderatori. Parole chiave: Moderazione di contenuti; Libertà di parola; Bolla epistemica; Etica della tecnologia. (shrink)

La langue de bois propre aux régimes totalitaires peut être décrite avec les moyens de la linguistique comme une distorsion affectant les différentes composantes fondamentales du discours. Lorsque la langue se lignifie, il n’y a plus de sujet présent à sa propre parole ; plus de référent auquel la parole se rapporte ; plus d’interlocuteur véritable ni d’échange vivant entre les interlocuteurs ; plus de va-et-vient entre la parole et les ressources de la langue. Mais étant donné que toute communication (...) est problématique, c’est-à-dire non assurée d’avance, il n’existe aucun autre remède à la lignification de la langue qu’une pratique langagière libre qui met en œuvre ces différentes composantes.The characteristic « wooden language » of totalitarian bureaucracies can be described in linguistic terms as a distortion of the various « fundamental components of speech ». When language turns « wooden », there is no longer a « subject » or « referent » to whom or to which the words apply, no real « interlocutor », no real exchanges between interlocutors, and no shuttle movement between speech and « the resources of the language » in which it is delivered. However, given that communication is always problematic, in that it cannot be taken for granted, there is no remedy when « language turns wooden » other than freeing it to bring all its different components into play. (shrink)

The language of Seneca’s messenger speeches concentrates preceding patterns of imagery into grotesquely violent action. In three tragedies – Phaedra, Thyestes, and Trojan Women – the report of an anonymous messenger dominates an entire act. All three scenes describe gruesome deaths: the impalement of Hippolytus on a tree trunk in Phaedra, Atreus’ butchering of his nephews in Thyestes, and the slaughter of Astyanax and Polyxena in Trojan Women. In portraying violence, these messenger speeches repurpose language established in earlier scenes to (...) realize and deform a dominant theme of each play: distorted sexuality, appetite, and moral dissolution. (shrink)

As official apologies by political, corporate, and religious leaders becoming increasingly commonplace – offered in response to everything from personal wrongdoing to historical oppression and genocide – providing a plausible account of what such apologies can and cannot accomplish is of paramount importance. Yet reigning theories of apology typically conceive of them primarily as moral and not political phenomena, often modeling official apologies after interpersonal ones. This risks distorting the meaning and function of political apologies, while holding them to an (...) impossible standard. In this paper, I argue that we require a normative theory of official apologies as political practice, and that crucial resources for this theory can be found in Hannah Arendt’s account of meaningful speech and action. In the Human Condition, Arendt privileges what she calls political speech and action as the highest category of human activity, which she identifies according to the following features: i) it can only take place with others; ii) it forces the agent to risk something by disclosing him or herself; iii) it creates a meaningful narrative; and, iv) it engenders some new relationship among those involved. These features, taken together, are a very good description of a successful apology. Furthermore, Arendt’s account of political speech depends upon her account of political forgiveness and political promising, two practices closely linked to the emerging practice of official state apology. In particular, I argue, theorizing apologies as Arendtian speech draws our attention to hitherto overlooked or underemphasized features of apologies and their functions, such the role they play – both powerful and problematic – in establishing authoritative narratives. (shrink)

Lev Vygotsky has acquired the status of one of the grand masters in psychology. Following the English translation and publication of his Collected Works there has been a new wave of interest in Vygotsky, accompanied by a burgeoning of secondary literature. Ronald Miller argues that Vygotsky is increasingly being 'read' and understood through secondary sources and that scholars have claimed Vygotsky as the foundational figure for their own theories, eliminating his most distinctive contributions and distorting his theories. Miller peels away (...) the accumulated layers of commentary to provide a clearer understanding of how Vygotsky built and developed his arguments. In an in-depth analysis of the last three chapters of Vygotsky's book Thinking and Speech, Miller provides a critical interpretation of the core theoretical concepts that constitute Vygotsky's cultural-historical theory, including the development of concepts, mediation, the zone of proximal development, conscious awareness, inner speech, word meaning and consciousness. (shrink)

Testimony is of epistemic and practical significance. It is of epistemic significance because majority of what we know and believe comes from being told. It is of practical significance because our agency can be undermined, bypassed, or overridden owing to systemic prejudices sustained by oppressive social or cultural practices and subsequently our routes to knowledge are either hindered or distorted. Things get more complicated when we introduce and examine how groups and other collectives testify and are recipients of testimony. For (...) instance, group speakers are typically said to represent and reflect the view of the group they are speaking on behalf of. But sometimes because of these oppressive practices, a group speaker’s assertion may deprive or impair its members’ ability to perform certain actions through speech. This dissertation examines the intersection between testimony, collective phenomena, and epistemic harms. One aim is to argue for a view on the nature of testimony that can accommodate various ways collectives testify and are recipients of testimony. In particular, I argue and present a view of testimony as a norm-governed joint activity involving individual or collective participants that commit themselves to a common aim of collaboration. Another aim is to present an epistemology of testimony that tracks our ordinary testimonial practices. In this regard, I argue for a norm view where we have reason to believe what we’re told because of the rules or norms that govern our communicative exchanges. A final aim is to explore the mechanism by which collective speech ensues in an epistemic harm driven by social identity prejudices. I argue for a form of silencing that is distinctive of groups insofar as the silencing occurs because of group dynamics. I call the mechanism underlying this form of silencing “representational impairment”. This dissertation, I hope, will motivate and inspire others to pursue philosophical projects at these intersections and in this spirit, I end by offering suggestions on areas of further development and future direction. (shrink)

I explore how we negotiate sexual encounters with one another in language and consider the pragmatic structure of such negotiations. I defend three theses: Discussions of consent have dominated the philosophical and legal discourse around sexual negotiation, and this has distorted our understanding of sexual agency and ethics. Of central importance to good-quality sexual negotiation are sexual invitations and gift offers, as well as speech designed to set up safe frameworks and exit conditions. Sexual communication that goes well does (...) not just prevent harm; it enables forms of agency, pleasure, and fulfillment that would not otherwise be possible. (shrink)

I have become more convinced, over the years, by the truth of Wittgenstein’s characterisation of philosophy as arising through misconceptions of grammar. Such a misconception of grammar characterises a very popular approach to indexicality which has been current since the 1970s, stemming from the work of Casteñeda, and Kaplan. Gareth Evans was inclined to allow, for instance, that one could say ‘“To the left (I am hot)” is true, as uttered by x at t iff there is someone moderately near (...) to the left of x such that, if he were to utter the sentence “I am hot” at t, what he would thereby say is true’ (Evans 1985: 358). But not only does this disturb the proper relation between direct and indirect speech, it continues a Fregean tradition which these very cases show to be quite mistaken about the logic of intensions. In this paper, however, I want primarily to point out how this misconception of grammar has distorted our view of people. For some of the above thinkers have tried to make out that human motivation is related to the possession of a certain category of indexical belief, by Lewis called ‘de se beliefs’. I shall look here at how the matter arises in Hugh Mellor’s work on Time. In connection with Time, indexicality arises in McTaggart’s ‘A-series’, and Mellor treats this indexicality in parallel with Evans’ language. First, therefore, I aim to show how Mellor’s discussion of Time grammatically misconceives the situation, and leads to a misrepresentation of the motivation of human action. But a larger conclusion about Fregean intensions is also then immediately available. (shrink)

In 2004 Edouard Machery, Ron Mallon, Shaun Nichols and Stephen Stich published what has become one of the most widely discussed papers in experimental philosophy, in which they reported that East Asian and Western participants had different intuitions about the semantic reference of proper names. A flurry of criticisms of their work has emerged, and although various replications have been performed, many critics remain unconvinced. We review the current debate over Machery et al.’s (2004) results and take note of which (...) objections to their work have been satisfactorily answered and which ones still need to be addressed. We then report the results of studies that reveal significant cross-cultural and intra-cultural differences in semantic intuitions when we control for variables that critics allege have had a potentially distorting effect on Machery et al.’s findings. These variables include the epistemic perspective from which participants are supposed to understand the research materials, unintended anchoring effects of those materials, and pragmatic factors involved in the interpretation of speech acts within them. Our results confirm the robustness of the cross-cultural differences observed by Machery et al. and thereby strengthen the philosophical challenge they pose. (shrink)

Senator Fulbright has developed a similar theme, in an important and perceptive speech.2 He describes the failure of the universities to form "an effective counterweight to the military-industrial complex by strengthening their emphasis on the traditional values of our democracy." Instead they have "joined the monolith, adding greatly to its power and influence." Specifically, he refers to the failure of the social scientists, "who ought to be acting as responsible and independent critics of the Government's policies," but who, instead, (...) become the agents of these policies. "While young dissenters plead for resurrection of the American promise, their elders continue to subvert it." With "the surrender of independence, the neglect of teaching, and the distortion of scholarship," the university "is not only failing to meet its responsibilities to its students; it is betraying a public trust.". (shrink)

Conceptual engineering has strong political roots. But if conceptual engineering is to be a useful tool for promoting social justice, there must be a means by which the concepts we design can take root and propagate in dominant contexts. This is known as the implementation challenge. In this paper, I caution against movements toward a particular methodological perspective on the challenge called dialogical individualism. This perspective centres the role of speakers in speech-situations to persuade hearers to change their minds (...) about currently held concepts. This individualism has a distorting effect: it warps our perception of the size of the challenge. In particular, dialogical individualism ignores the social environmental factors that make conversation an unfriendly site for conceptual change. Moreover, it is not sufficiently attentive to the history of conceptual change in communities of practice. In the end, I argue for a methodological perspective shift: discursive strategies, such as speaker persuasion, should be decentralized in our overall thinking about the best solutions to the implementation challenge. Our attention is better focused on tailoring strategies to deal with the social environment in which concept-users are embedded. (shrink)

I explore how gender can shape the pragmatics of speech. In some circumstances, when a woman deploys standard discursive conventions in order to produce a speech act with a specific performative force, her utterance can turn out, in virtue of its uptake, to have a quite different force—a less empowering force—than it would have if performed by a man. When members of a disadvantaged group face a systematic inability to produce a specific kind of speech act that (...) they are entitled to perform—and in particular when their attempts result in their actually producing a different kind of speech act that further compromises their social position and agency—then they are victims of what I call discursive injustice. I examine three examples of discursive injustice. I contrast my account with Langton and Hornsby's account of illocutionary silencing. I argue that lack of complete control over the performative force of our speech acts is universal, and not a special marker of social disadvantage. However, women and other relatively disempowered speakers are sometimes subject to a distinctive distortion of the path from speaking to uptake, which undercuts their social agency in ways that track and enhance existing social disadvantages. (shrink)

Cicero’s first speeches as consul, de lege agraria I and II, delivered to the senate and the people respectively, are virtually identical in outline and broad argument. That allows the rhetorical technique of individual sections to be compared closely. This article uses such comparisons to probe the tactics and ideology of the speeches. In both Cicero’s choice of word and phrase might suggest that he is simply addressing his audiences as suits their stations. But a consideration of the circumstances of (...) the speeches reveals instead that Cicero is directing his audiences to alternate ways of imagining their social and political positions; in effect, Cicero propounds distinct, principled, and communalist definitions of dignitas and libertas, core values of each audience – though sometimes at the price of distorting the intent of the bill. (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)

In recent times, phenomena of conversational asymmetry have become a lively object of study for linguists, philosophers of language and moral philosophers—under various labels: illocutionary disablement and silencing, discursive injustice :440–457, 2014; Lance and Kukla in Ethics 123:456–478, 2013), illocutionary distortion. The common idea is that members of underprivileged groups sometimes have trouble performing particular speech acts that they are entitled to perform: in certain contexts, their performative potential is somehow undermined, and their capacity to do things with (...) words is distorted or even annulled. In this paper I will assess this idea, focusing on Rebecca Kukla’s and Rae Langton’s accounts; in particular, I will criticize the role the notion of uptake plays in their accounts, and claim that it may ultimately undermine the very idea of discursive injustice. While, according to Kukla and Langton, members of disadvantaged groups are victims of a kind of uptake failure, leading to illocutionary disablement and even silencing, in the account I present they are victims of a kind of communicative disablement. My overall aim is to develop a notion of discursive injustice that is more plausible and more effective for our broader purposes of criticising the structures of power and oppression. (shrink)

Two themes, the elusiveness of wisdom and the distortion of speech, are traced through three important scenes of Herodotus' Lydian logos, the meeting of Solon and Croesus , the scene where Cyrus places Croesus on the pyre , and the advice of Croesus to Cyrus to cross the river and fight the Massagetae in their own territory . The paper discusses whether Solon is speaking indirectly at 1.29–33, unable to talk straight to Croesus about his transgressive behavior: if (...) so, that illuminates the dynamics of speech at a court. At 1.86–90 Croesus may not have fully understood what Solon earlier said to him. Cyrus may understand Croesus' report of Solon's words better than Croesus does himself. Herodotus' readers will also be uncertain what the response of Delphi will be to Croesus' indignant questioning: if a reader has failed to grasp the significance of Gyges' transgression five generations earlier, that reenacts the forgetfulness of figures in the text. At 1.207 Croesus' advice to Cyrus is of questionable wisdom: Croesus too cannot speak directly, and he has anyway learned the wrong lesson from his catastrophe, extrapolating too directly from his own experience. The conclusion suggests some reasons why Herodotus should have chosen to begin his History with Lydia, the kingdom that is on the cusp between East and West, and with Croesus, a figure that resists description in the easy formulations of Greek/barbarian discourse. (shrink)

In this paper, we identify and examine an overlooked strategy to counter bigoted speech on the spot. Such a strategy we call ‘bending’. To ‘bend’, in our sense, is to deliberately give a distorted response to a speaker’s harmful move – precisely, an ameliorative response, which may turn that move into a different, less harmful, contribution. To substantiate our proposal, we distinguish two ideas of uptake – interpretation and response – and argue for the general claim that a distorted (...) response on the hearer’s part may end up transforming a speaker’s contribution. Patterns of distortion have been analyzed in the literature as unjustly undermining speakers’ agency and exacerbating oppression. Our analysis shows that, under certain circumstances, distortion can be employed to derail bigoted speech and thus serve the purposes of social justice. We close by discussing the virtues and limits of bending vis-à-vis a different, much-discussed, counterspeech strategy, i.e. ‘blocking’ (Langton 2018). (shrink)

This book shows how research in linguistic pragmatics, philosophy of language, and rhetoric can be connected through argumentation to analyze a recognizably common strategy used in political and everyday conversation, namely the distortion of another’s words in an argumentative exchange. Straw man argumentation refers to the modification of a position by misquoting, misreporting or wrenching the original speaker’s statements from their context in order to attack them more easily or more effectively. Through 63 examples taken from different contexts (including (...) political and forensic discourses and dialogs) and 20 legal cases, the book analyzes the explicit and implicit types of straw man, shows how to assess the correctness of a quote or a report, and illustrates the arguments that can be used for supporting an interpretation and defending against a distortion. The tools of argumentation theory, a discipline aimed at investigating the uses of arguments by combining insights from pragmatics, logic, and communication, are applied to provide an original account of interpretation and reporting, and to describe and illustrate tactics and procedures that can be used and implemented for practical purposes.. This book will appeal to scholars in the fields of political communication, communication in general, argumentation theory, rhetoric and pragmatics, as well as to people working in public speech, speech writing, and discourse analysis. (shrink)

ABSTRACTDeliberative and decisional groups play crucial roles in most aspects of social life. But it is not obvious how to organize these groups and various socio-cognitive mechanisms can spoil debates and decisions. In this paper we focus on one such important mechanism: the misrepresentation of views, i.e. when agents express views that are aligned with those already expressed, and which differ from their private opinions. We introduce a model to analyze the extent to which this behavioral pattern can warp deliberations (...) and distort the decisions that are finally taken. We identify types of situations in which misrepresentation can have major effects and investigate how to reduce these effects by adopting appropriate deliberative procedures. We discuss the beneficial effects of holding a sufficient number of rounds of expression of views; choosing an appropriate order of speech, typically a random one; rendering the deliberation dissenter-friendly; having agents express fined-grained views. These applicable procedures help improve deliberations because they dampen conformist behavior, give epistemic minorities more opportunities to be heard, and reduce the number of cases in which an inadequate consensus or majority develops. (shrink)

The belief that science is “a driver of growth in the knowledge economy” has led in recent decades to increasing encouragement by government of the involvement of industry and of commerce in the sponsorship and direction of research in universities, and to the increasing influence of industrial representatives on advisory panels associated with the publicly funded scientific research councils. By extending the doctrine of commercial confidentiality into university laboratories, inconvenient findings have been suppressed, and both free endeavour and free (...) class='Hi'>speech undermined. This has narrowed our scientific horizons and compromised government advisors. It is argued that scientific freedom is a guarantor of our wider liberties. Science, which tells us who we are and how we can live better, is being distorted so twisting our understanding of the ways in which we might progress, shutting off alternatives to existing models of development. Business now stands as a guard dog at the gates of perception. Only the inquiries which suit its needs are allowed to pass. (shrink)

The debate about the determination of the illocutionary force of a speech act revolves around the notion of uptake and the role played by the audience: many scholars consider the hearer’s recognition of the force of the locution a necessary condition for the performance of an illocution. A variety of theories has been put forward. According to Langton (Philosophy and Public Affairs 22: 293–330, 1993), the hearer’s uptake determines whether a successful act has been performed. According to Kukla (Hypatia (...) 29(2): 440–457, 2014), the hearer’s uptake constitutes the nature of the act performed. According to McDonald (The Philosophical Quarterly 72(4), 918–939, 2022), the illocutionary force of a speech act is the result of a process of negotiation between hearer and speaker. Drawing on the theoretical tools provided by Marina Sbisà’s work, I will show how the theories giving the audience a central role in fixing the illocutionary force of a speech act fall short. The topic proves relevant not only for theoretical reasons, but also for social and political ones. In particular, it has a bearing on debates about pragmatic phenomena of illocutionary distortion such as discursive injustice and silencing, where marginalized speakers have trouble performing particular speech acts they are entitled to perform. (shrink)

This essay explores the archive of a 1971 interview of Angela Davis by Swedish journalist Bo Holmström—recorded in Santa Clara County Jail where Davis awaited trial—to examine the relationship between Black radical thought and its social and intellectual mediation, especially when it comes to questions of violence versus nonviolence. Where Holmström invokes the “violence/nonviolence” binary in the interview, Davis pointedly resists its distortions, restoring the record of contemporary and historical conditions of racial terror that both necessitate and criminalize Black self-defense. (...) Decades later, the interview was filtered through the violence/nonviolence binary in editing for the acclaimed 2011 documentary, The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975, with Davis’s wider conversation with Holmström not only abridged but remixed into a shorter exchange on armed self-defense. Studying the interview from its conditions of possibility through its later remixing, and reading it together with her opening defense statement (1972) and later speeches and writings, the essay excavates and explicates Davis’s original theoretical interventions and indexes a cluster of forces that mediate Black radical thought, Black women’s radical thought more specifically, and prison texts. The final section historicizes Davis’s theorization of the spatial and relational contexts of Black self-defense in Dynamite Hill, Alabama, and in California, and contends that her incisive interventions into the violence/nonviolence binary in 1971 remain critical here and now. (shrink)

Many fragments and testimonies in Usener’s collection, Epicurea, come from ancient Christian sources. This essay explores Patristic interest in Epicureanism, which is often critical, and sometimes imprecise or distorted, but tangible. It shows how the fading away of the availability and use of good sources on Epicureanism, along with the disappearance of the Epicurean school itself, brought about a progressive impoverishment and hostility among Christian authors with respect to Epicurus and Epicureanism. A comparison between the representation of Epicureanism in Acts (...) or Clement, or still in Nazianzen or Ambrose, on one side, and, on the other, authors like Jerome or even Isidore of Seville is telling. Not only did appreciation for at least some sides of Epicureanism (clearly present in the author of Acts, Clement, Bardaisan, and Nazianzen) disappear, but even anti-Epicurean polemic became more and more stereotyped, crass hedonism and atheism being its main focuses, with scarce ground in Epicurean theory in both cases. The distortions surrounding the charge of hedonism were still clear to Nazianzen; as for the falsity of the charge of atheism, which was alive already in pre-Christian philosophical debate, the certainly Hellenized author of Acts was arguably aware of it, as is suggested by Paul’s Areopagus speech, which is here carefully analysed. It is suggested that both Paul’s Athenian speech in Acts and Seneca may have referred to the same tenets of Epicurean theology. (shrink)

Silence as a spiritual practice is not a negative phenomenon that cuts off speech, but enables a higher form of speech, i.e. that of ultimate reality. Hermeneutical phenomenology can illuminate this spiritual practice. Hermeneutical phenomenology does not accept the phenomena of consciousness as given, but views them in light of historical-social structures that make phenomenal objects of intentionality possible. Structures of intelligibility can either discover, or cover up phenomena, turning them into appearances that merely announce on the surface (...) what is hidden in the depths. We need to interpret our average everyday understanding, in order to bring the Being of objects fully to disclosure. Without silence, we will perpetuate the average structures of intelligibility that make communication possible, which will function as implicit distortions. I examine silence through hermeneutic phenomenology, showing how silence can give us a more primordial sense of phenomena than mere idle talk. (shrink)

Plato’s Cleitophon is the only dialogue in which Plato presents an unanswered rebuke of Socratic philosophy by an interlocutor. Consequently, most commentators have thus rejected the dialogue as inauthentic, or have otherwise explained away the bewildering Socratic silence at the dialogue’s conclusion. In this paper I explore why Socrates chooses silence as the response to Cleitophon’s rebuke of Socrates. I argue that Socratic silence is the only way of “talking” with Cleitophon: Cleitophon’s “Socratic speech” implies notions about nomos, the (...) soul, and philosophy that turn out to be uniquely anti-Socratic. The dramatic disjunctions between Cleitophon’s distorted image of Socrates and the real Socrates, and between Cleitophon himself and Socrates, not only make most poignant the tension between the philosopher and the city but also point to the very conditions of philosophical dialogue. (shrink)

In this paper, we offer some compelling reasons to think that issues relating to vulnerability play a significant – albeit thus far underacknowledged – role in Jürgen Habermas’s notions of communicative action and discourse. We shall argue that the basic notions of discourse and communicative action presuppose a robust conception of vulnerability and that recognising vulnerability is essential for making sense of the social character of knowledge, on the epistemic side of things, and for making sense of the possibility of (...) deliberative democracy, on the political side of things. Our paper is divided into four principal sections. In Section 1, we provide a basic outline of Habermas on communicative action and discourse. In Section 2, we develop an account of vulnerability and communication in the context of speaker/hearer relations. We specifically focus on distorted communication, vulnerability and speech. In Section 3, we focus on elaborating epistemic pathologies in the context of epistemic oppression and testimonial injustice. In Section 4, we focus on explaining how Habermasian resources contribute to vulnerability theory, and how introducing vulnerability theory to Habermas broadens or deepens his theory of communication action and his discourse ethics theory. (shrink)

This essay considers self-ownership as a rhetorical and political practice. Scholarly attention to the rhetoric of self-ownership, notably in feminist theory, often rejects the term for its capacity to distort and fragment notions of the self, the body, social relations, and labor. The ambiguous character of self-ownership, in this view, carries the risk of subversion of more inclusive and relational uses. Adopting a broader notion of rhetoric as creative and effective speech, I recast self-ownership from this critical depiction through (...) a revised understanding of C. B. Macpherson’s possessive individualism and then to the texts of John Locke, the Levellers, and the Putney Debates. These early-modern exemplars offer insights into the political promises and risks of the rhetoric of self-ownership that contemporary critics obscure. The ambiguity and plurality too often rendered as a liability for self-ownership instead offer conditions for its agonistic invocation for novel claims and emerging audiences. (shrink)

To fully understand human language, an evolved trait that develops in the young without formal instruction, it must be possible to observe language that has not been influenced by instruction. But in modern societies, much of the language that is used, and most of the language that is measured, is confounded by literacy and academic training. This diverts empirical attention from natural habits of speech, causing theorists to miss critical features of linguistic practice. To dramatize this point, I examine (...) data from a special population––the canal boat children of early twentieth century England––whose language developed without academic influence, but was evaluated using instruments designed primarily for academic use. These data, taken together with related research, suggest that formal instruction can convert language from a purely biological trait that was selected, to a talent that was instructed, while altering the users of language themselves. I then review research indicating that formal instruction can also mask or distort inter-sexual differences in the social applications of language, a significant handicap to evolutionary theorizing. I conclude that if biological theories of language are to succeed, they must explain the spontaneous speaking practices of naturally behaving individuals. (shrink)