Hello all, A reminder: in the remaining 6 weeks of Lent term, starting tomorrow (3 Feb), I will be presenting early versions of my planned John Locke Lectures, due to be given in Oxford’s Trinity Term. A general overview appears below, with details of the first, and provisional titles of the remaining five. Please let me know if you would like to be on the mailing list to receive notifications about the later ones. (This will be the last public posting.)
Rae Langton ‘Accommodating Injustice’ 1. Overview Accommodation is the process of adjustment that tends to make speech acts count as ‘correct play’. It is described by linguists and philosophers, and occurs in ubiquitous contexts, from informal presupposition introductions, to ceremonial performatives. I want to interpret and extend the idea of accommodation to explain how speech acts, from the hateful to the benign, can help to build and perpetuate injustice. Accommodation can help build unjust social norms; unjust distributions of authority; sexual subordination; and racial hatred. It can undermine knowledge, by disguising injustice and destroying credibility. In placing limits on ‘correct play’, it can silence by creating structural handicaps on speakers. If this makes injustice more visible, it also shows the possibility of something better. 2.1. Tuesday 3 Feb. 'How to do things, together, with words' Viewed through a speech act lens, what we do with words is a collective enterprise, enabled and accommodated by what others have done, will do, or will fail to do. Implications for metaphysics: a speech act’s nature at a given place and time depends non-causally on what happens elsewhere and later. Implications for silence: it includes illocutionary failure, misfire and failures of accommodation (5). Implications for politics: free speech requires more than state non-interference (6). Accommodation needs to be mapped at (at least) two levels: abstract normative structure, to track illocution, and epistemic and psychological states of participants, to track immediate perlocution. The picture of evolving common ground, with its link to shared knowledge, needs expanding to include conative and affective states, as well as cognitive. This helps model speech acts that appeal to desire and emotion: advertising, pornography, propaganda and hate speech. 2.2. Tuesday 10 Feb. 'Accommodating authority' 2.3. Tuesday 17 Feb. 'Accommodating knowers' 2.4. Tuesday 24 Feb. 'Accommodating social norms' 2.5. Tuesday 3rd March. 'Handicaps in accommodation' 2.6. Tuesday 10th March. 'Interrupting injustice' _____________________________________________________ To unsubscribe from the CamPhilEvents mailing list, or change your membership options, please visit the list information page: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEvents List archive: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEventsArchive Please note that CamPhilEvents doesn't accept email attachments. See the list information page for further details and suggested alternatives.
