Works in Progress
This is a paper about how the things we do with language can alter the epistemic landscape of our communities. It should be no surprise that the way we use language can both construct and negotiate our social identities; there is a large literature about the ways identity impacts what people can do with language, who gets to do it, and about how things like race or gender can play a role in determining whether a speaker is recognized as a knower or is able to secure uptake on an intended speech act. My project here is about the other side of the coin. How does what we do with language affect identity and what is the impact this has on our social lives? Namely, I'm interested in offering a unified answer to the following two questions:
(1) How do certain demeaning speech acts come to constitute oppression?
(2) item In what can epistemic oppression consist?
I'm argue that slurs, pejoratives, and misused epithets, a class of terms that I will refer to as demeaning speech, constitute a specific kind of epistemic oppression, one that occurs not in the context of testimonial exchange, but in their mere utterance. The hope is to offer an account of these terms that properly highlights part of the badness of their use as epistemic.
(1) How do certain demeaning speech acts come to constitute oppression?
(2) item In what can epistemic oppression consist?
I'm argue that slurs, pejoratives, and misused epithets, a class of terms that I will refer to as demeaning speech, constitute a specific kind of epistemic oppression, one that occurs not in the context of testimonial exchange, but in their mere utterance. The hope is to offer an account of these terms that properly highlights part of the badness of their use as epistemic.
This is a paper about microaggressions. Specifically, it is a paper about a particular microaggression: the question, “where are you from?” This is also a paper about implicature. Namely, it’s about how, by asking one question, we are able to imply a distinct question. Consider the following two dialogues:
[Option 1] a: “Do you know where I left my wallet?” b: “Yes.”
[Option 2] a: “Do you know where I left my wallet?” b: “It’s on the coffee table.”
Something has clearly gone wrong in [Option 1]. Here’s one diagnosis: the reason Speaker B’s answer was conversationally inappropriate, given that they actually do know the whereabouts of the wallet, is that Speaker A’s question implicated a question with a different semantic value, as seen in [Option 2]: “Where is my wallet?” This is an issue because implication is a propositional connective, and questions are not propositions. In this paper I attempt to make the necessary amendments to a Gricean theory of implicature to account for what I am calling interrogative implicature, discuss how an adequate theory of interrogative implicature can help make sense of common microaggressions, and gesture towards a blurred line between moral rules and regularities of speech.
[Option 1] a: “Do you know where I left my wallet?” b: “Yes.”
[Option 2] a: “Do you know where I left my wallet?” b: “It’s on the coffee table.”
Something has clearly gone wrong in [Option 1]. Here’s one diagnosis: the reason Speaker B’s answer was conversationally inappropriate, given that they actually do know the whereabouts of the wallet, is that Speaker A’s question implicated a question with a different semantic value, as seen in [Option 2]: “Where is my wallet?” This is an issue because implication is a propositional connective, and questions are not propositions. In this paper I attempt to make the necessary amendments to a Gricean theory of implicature to account for what I am calling interrogative implicature, discuss how an adequate theory of interrogative implicature can help make sense of common microaggressions, and gesture towards a blurred line between moral rules and regularities of speech.
Broadly, I’m interested here in the role of first-personal recognition in processes of subjectivation. Slightly more specifically, the crux of this paper will be an investigation into the relationship between first-personal uptake and the normative status of second-personal address. The question, then, is roughly: what are the conditions under which second-personal addresses contain normative force? In an attempt to show how certain patterns of speech are implicated in structural oppression, I endorse what Rebecca Kukla and Mark Lance call a ``transcendental vocative"; the claim that there are latent second-personal addresses within all socially significant speech, even when made third personally. This entails, I argue, that second-personal addresses have the potential for any number of forms of uptake from any number of agents, even those not explicitly addressed, and thereby that many implicit forms of interpellation occur without any agent’s direct awareness.
The scene: it's November 9th, 2016. You're making your way downtown, walking fast. It's your morning commute, and you overhear two people on your train talking about the results of the election. Emotions are running high.
"Look what you've done! How could you have voted for that big, dumb Cheeto?" The stranger's face is turning red.
"Well," says the woman sitting across from you, ``I used to know the difference between right and wrong, but I forgot it."
This conversation seems weird, to say the least. We forget all sorts of important things all the time, but it's deeply bizarre to report that you have forgotten a moral fact. In a 1958 paper, Gilbert Ryle revives a question he'd found asked only once, in Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics: why is the idea of a person's forgetting the difference between right and wrong so absurd? Since Ryle, this question has been asked many more times over. Proposed answers include: that it is hard to forget moral truths because they are believed on the basis of intuition; that moral forgetting seems puzzling for the same reason that forgetting what you approve or disapprove of seems puzzling; that moral truths matter too much to us to be easily forgotten; and that people are never in a position to be able to truly assert that they've forgotten a moral truth so it's puzzling when they do. These are all barking up the wrong tree. In this paper, I hope to accomplish two things. First, to establish that, contra the last proposal mentioned, the puzzle about moral forgetting cannot be written off as a puzzle about infelicitous speech acts. Second, to offer a defense of a solution, offered and then quickly tabled in McGrath (2004), which claims that the reason moral forgetting is absurd is due, in part, to the way moral knowledge is acquired. The thesis of this paper is a conditional: if we learn moral truths through a certain kind of moral perception, then there is no puzzle of moral forgetting. We can account for the reason moral memory loss is absurd.
"Look what you've done! How could you have voted for that big, dumb Cheeto?" The stranger's face is turning red.
"Well," says the woman sitting across from you, ``I used to know the difference between right and wrong, but I forgot it."
This conversation seems weird, to say the least. We forget all sorts of important things all the time, but it's deeply bizarre to report that you have forgotten a moral fact. In a 1958 paper, Gilbert Ryle revives a question he'd found asked only once, in Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics: why is the idea of a person's forgetting the difference between right and wrong so absurd? Since Ryle, this question has been asked many more times over. Proposed answers include: that it is hard to forget moral truths because they are believed on the basis of intuition; that moral forgetting seems puzzling for the same reason that forgetting what you approve or disapprove of seems puzzling; that moral truths matter too much to us to be easily forgotten; and that people are never in a position to be able to truly assert that they've forgotten a moral truth so it's puzzling when they do. These are all barking up the wrong tree. In this paper, I hope to accomplish two things. First, to establish that, contra the last proposal mentioned, the puzzle about moral forgetting cannot be written off as a puzzle about infelicitous speech acts. Second, to offer a defense of a solution, offered and then quickly tabled in McGrath (2004), which claims that the reason moral forgetting is absurd is due, in part, to the way moral knowledge is acquired. The thesis of this paper is a conditional: if we learn moral truths through a certain kind of moral perception, then there is no puzzle of moral forgetting. We can account for the reason moral memory loss is absurd.
Juan G Morales was incarcerated in the state of Wisconsin in the early 1970s. When his jailers wouldn't allow him correspondence with his lover, he brought an action in federal court against the state. Judge James E Doyle, who resided over the case, had this to say:
``I am persuaded that the institution of prison probably must end. In many respects it is as intolerable within
the United States as was the institution of slavery, equally brutalizing to all involved, equally toxic to the social
system, equally subversive of the brotherhood of man, even more costly by some standards, and probably
less rational.”
But, obviously, this ruling did not mark the beginning of the end for the United States prison system. To this day, prison abolition seems unfathomable for many people. Outside of a minority group of radical leftists and activists, most people in the United States could no sooner imagine a world without prisons than a world without air. It is taken for granted that those convicted of crimes will spend (at least some of) their lives locked away in cells, while, in those countries that have not yet done away with the death penalty, those whose crimes are particularly heinous, will be sentenced to death. Resistance to the death penalty is much more widespread than that to the prison system. Many people have accepted that the death penalty is a violent and garish betrayal of human rights and advocated for its banishing on the basis thereof. Even those who still stand in favor of the death penalty are forced to deal with the difficulties such a policy faces. For very few is a world without the death penalty, without murder at the hands of the state, unimaginable. It is long past time to encourage these same conversations about prisons.
The goal of this paper is to pick apart the imaginative failing involved in this mental barrier to abolitionism; to make prison abolition not only fathomable, but appealing. To do this, I argue that the aims of the prison system, harm reduction and justice, are left unmet by its practice. I argue furthermore that the aims of the justice narrative used to motivate the existence of prisons, retributive justice narratives, are at odds with the justice they seek to promote. That is the negative thesis. The positive thesis is this: a world without prisons is not a world without justice. By developing a non-ideal, socially situated account of preventative justice, I argue that, holding fixed our goals of harm reduction and justice, abolition, not incarceration, is a better suited means to our goals.
``I am persuaded that the institution of prison probably must end. In many respects it is as intolerable within
the United States as was the institution of slavery, equally brutalizing to all involved, equally toxic to the social
system, equally subversive of the brotherhood of man, even more costly by some standards, and probably
less rational.”
But, obviously, this ruling did not mark the beginning of the end for the United States prison system. To this day, prison abolition seems unfathomable for many people. Outside of a minority group of radical leftists and activists, most people in the United States could no sooner imagine a world without prisons than a world without air. It is taken for granted that those convicted of crimes will spend (at least some of) their lives locked away in cells, while, in those countries that have not yet done away with the death penalty, those whose crimes are particularly heinous, will be sentenced to death. Resistance to the death penalty is much more widespread than that to the prison system. Many people have accepted that the death penalty is a violent and garish betrayal of human rights and advocated for its banishing on the basis thereof. Even those who still stand in favor of the death penalty are forced to deal with the difficulties such a policy faces. For very few is a world without the death penalty, without murder at the hands of the state, unimaginable. It is long past time to encourage these same conversations about prisons.
The goal of this paper is to pick apart the imaginative failing involved in this mental barrier to abolitionism; to make prison abolition not only fathomable, but appealing. To do this, I argue that the aims of the prison system, harm reduction and justice, are left unmet by its practice. I argue furthermore that the aims of the justice narrative used to motivate the existence of prisons, retributive justice narratives, are at odds with the justice they seek to promote. That is the negative thesis. The positive thesis is this: a world without prisons is not a world without justice. By developing a non-ideal, socially situated account of preventative justice, I argue that, holding fixed our goals of harm reduction and justice, abolition, not incarceration, is a better suited means to our goals.
Contact me for drafts!
