Hitler used to make speeches. This shows speech is totes Nazi. Guess who else makes speeches? Joe Biden! What more proof do you need that he is an anti-Semitic mass murderer? The fact is, even the demand for proof is itself proof that you have already chosen the wrong side. Don't fool yourself that there is any 'neutral' umpire or judge who can weigh the evidence. There is only the truth on the one hand- which is what we say it is- and there is an evil ideology on the other such that everybody else is a Nazi.
In 'The Politics of Language', David Beaver and Jason Stanley Princeton University Press take a round about route to make this point- or one more foolish yet.
The begin with a pair of quotations-
The point of a discourse—at least one central kind of discourse—is the exchange of information. -Robert Stalnaker, “On the Representation of Context”
Information can be exchanged without discourse. Discourse may contain no information. Indeed, it may be wholly obfuscatory.
Words can be like tiny doses of arsenic: they are swallowed unnoticed, appear to have no effect, and then after a little time the toxic reaction sets in after all. -Klemperer, The Language of the Third Reich
When we swallow our words, we are admitting we were wrong. This may make us feel very bad. What Klemperer means is that incessant exposure to evil ideas may cause those ideas to lodge securely in our minds.
In Book 3 of Thucydides’ The Peloponnesian War, the Athenian Cleon represents Mytilene’s revolt against Athens in the most extreme possible terms, claiming “Mytilene has done you more injury than any single state.” Without justification, Cleon claims that were the tables turned, Mytilene would slaughter every Athenian citizen.
Cleon hoped to cash in on the mood of the moment. But, the Athenians decided to be merciful. Cleon had damaged himself by coming across as a hot-head or a blow-hard. However, the prejudice against him perpetuated by Thucydides and Aristophanes had a class origin.
Cleon’s speech is political propaganda.
No. It represents a strategy which the State can choose to embrace. Cleon was considered a persuasive speaker. He was not considered an eulogist who could improve the image of a particular person. Propaganda is like advertising. It aims to propagate a favourable view of the person or institution paying for it. The Catholic Church introduced the term to describe the dissemination and spread of their religious doctrine. Protestants, at one time, considered the Pope very evil. So the word came to have an evil connotation.
It stokes irrational fears while simultaneously presenting itself as a reasonable contribution to discourse.
Thus this stupid book is evil propaganda. It stokes an irrational fear that we might be being brainwashed by Biden- that genocidal Nazi swine.
It justifies murdering the entire adult population of Mytilene not because of what they did, but because of a hypothetical situation Cleon gives no reason to think would be realized.
No. To understand what a guy is saying we need to look at the context. Was it the case that Mytilene was at peace with Athens? Did Cleon stand up and say 'I've just learned that the Mytilene want to kill every single Athenian. Though they can't achieve this at the moment, it would be wise for us to kill them all before they gain an opportunity to kills us.'? No. The context was one where Mytilene had broken its alliance with Athens. There was a danger that the balance of power could shift against Athens. Should the Athenians make an example of it? Or should they treat it mercifully so as to show it was so powerful that it had no reason to fear a hostile combination?
Athens did have propagandists who praised particular Cities or disparaged others. But to persuade people to follow a particular strategy requires something very different from propaganda. You must show people have a rational motive to take a costly type of action.
Cleon then uses the savagery the Mytileneans hypothetically would do if the tables were turned to evoke a desire for revenge, to override reason in motivating mass murder. In Cleon’s speech, he does not represent his own city, Athens, as greater or more exceptional in its value system and history than its enemies. However, his speech is decidedly also not neutral, as he represents Athens’ interests as vastly more important - with a hypothetical future threat to its citizens ranked of far greater importance than the actual threat to the lives of innocent Mytilineans. The speech completely takes the side of Athens, while masquerading as some kind of aperspectival reason.
This is utterly foolish. Cleon was Athenian. He was expected to place its interests above that of any other City. One may as well say 'Cleon was a very unjust man. He would wipe his own bum rather than devote himself to wiping the bums of all the people he met.'
Cleon’s speech centers the interests of Athens so completely that the interests of the Mytileneans are not even visible.
Just as you put your own interests first when you wipe your own bum rather than go around wiping the bums of everybody you meet.
Cleon’s speech is layered with emotion, values, perspective, and interests. It seeks to mobilize its audience towards action. One way to mobilize an audience is by providing information about the world. This book centers other ways in which language impacts audiences: by emotion, values, perspectives, interests, identity, and shared practices. We build a model of speech that incorporates these aspects as central from the very beginning.
But non-linguistic practices can transmit emotions, values, and information. Pointing at a person and holding your nose signifies that they are smelly. We already have a good model of speech. No doubt, the guys who designed Siri or Alexa have an even better structural causal model. These two Professors are stupid, useless and are merely engaging in propaganda of a paranoid and puerile kind.
One way in which speech impacts a group of people is by harming them.
Sticks and stones...
One kind of harmful speech, omnipresent in popular and academic discussions, is slurs - terms that target a group with an ideology that derogates its members.
Jason is constantly denouncing all sorts of people as Nazis or Fascists.
But the category of harmful speech is vastly broader than slurs. For example, Victor Klemperer describes a form of the linguistic process he calls objectification as follows: why does a palpable and undeniable brutality come to light when a female warder in Belsen concentration camp explains to the war crimes trial that on such and such a day she dealt with sixteen “Stück” Gefangenen [prisoner pieces]? . . . Stück . . . involves objectification. It is the same objectification expressed by the official term “the utilization of carcasses (Kadaververwertung),” especially when widened to refer to human corpses: fertilizer is made out of the dead of concentration camps.
Klemperer did well enough in East Germany. He doesn't seem to have written a book on the Communist abuse of language. Indeed, but for his Jewish ancestry, he may have been an admirer of Hitler who appeared to be leading the Germans to a great destiny.
Linguistic objectification is a characteristic feature of various kinds of harmful speech.
Jason goes in for it a lot. His speech is harmful to his profession. People assume all Philosophers are paranoid fools.
Here is another illustration, this time from the United States, of how speech attunes people to practices. John Jr. DiIulio’s 1996 magazine article “My Black Crime Problem, and Ours” begins by acknowledging that “violent crime is down in New York and many other cities.” DiIulio proceeds to predict “270,000 more young predators on the streets . . . [in] the next two decades.” He adds, “as many as half of these juvenile super-predators could be young black males.” DiIulio’s prediction was far off; violent crime continued to plummet. But the introduction of the term “superpredator” into criminal justice discourse led (in difficult to quantify yet hard to dispute ways) to the adoption of ever-harsher laws concerning juvenile offenders. Describing juvenile offenders as “super-predators” suggests that the proper practices towards juvenile offenders are the ones that are reasonable to take against enormous threats to humankind - death, or complete permanent isolation. Use of the term “super-predator” to describe juvenile offenders rationalized treating them with practices that would only be reasonable to use against deadly enemies.
The good news was that super-predators prey on each other. Anyway, it turns out anybody can grab a knife and run amok. Predators very quickly turn into endangered species. It is safer to be a parasite.
In the 1990s in the United States, criminal justice policy had become a proving ground for politicians to demonstrate their putative toughness. Debate was dominated by an ethos that frowned on expressions of empathy for perpetrators.
Which is how come a prosecutor is now Veep. Biden's 1994 Crime Bill turned out to be a great career move. I suppose what these two nutters are getting is that Sleepy Joe and Comatose Kamala are actually Adolph and Eva.
Dehumanizing vocabulary targeting those caught up in the criminal justice system was commonplace, and many of the words were racially coded. Rehabilitation is hard to envisage for those described as “thugs,” “super-predators,” or “gangsters.” During this period where these terms were part of the political discourse, criminal justice practices became considerably harsher, and sentences longer. Although the precise mechanisms continue to be a matter of debate, it is widely agreed that the culture surrounding crime policy had an extreme and rapid effect on criminal justice practices. The incarceration rate in the United States hovered around the norm for liberal democracies of 100 per 100,000 for many decades until the late 1970s. Then it started to rise. The Bureau of Justice Statistics’ current rate of 810 for every 100,000 adults (18 years and older) in prison is by far the highest in the world. The United States has also developed a culture of policing marked by a level of fear and lack of empathy that is without parallel in liberal democracies (a 2015 headline of an article in The Guardian states “By the Numbers: U.S. Police Kill More in Days than Other Countries Do in Years”). However, the unprecedented two decade decrease in crime from 1991 until the early 2010s was not strictly due to the intensely punitive criminal justice path the United States chose to take in the 1990s. Canada experienced a similarly unprecedented drop in crime during this same time period, without following the United States’ path into mass incarceration. How does one investigate the way in which violent language about a targeted group affects attitudes?
One doesn't. It is obvious that language doesn't matter in the slightest. Economic factors determine how much policing there will be and how many people will be incarcerated. Sadly, increased affluence can mean increased 'incentive incompatibility' leading to more dysfunction in the criminal justice system.
As we will argue in Part III, focusing on a case like this brings out the limitations of a model of conventional meaning that just theorizes in terms of a connection between words and things. To explain harmful speech, one must recognize conventional connections between words and practices, as well as words and emotions.
People who refer me as a fat, black, cunt tend to have affection for me. The arresting officer may address me as 'Sir', but his testimony in Court tends to be very harmful to me. It really wasn't me who took a shit on the steps of Number 10. I think it was Rishi Sunak. All us Pakis look alike- right?
The examples of harmful speech
weren't harmful at all. It was Government policies which were harmful. But those had an economic foundation- even if the economics was utterly wrong.
we discussed in the last section involved expressions that attune their audiences to harmful practices in ways that are overt. Calling young Black American men “super-predators”, or, to use an example we will discuss later, calling Rwandan Tutsi “cockroaches” or “snakes”, directly attunes audiences to violent practices towards these populations.
Only the violence mattered. But violence is economic in nature. Criminals may kill or maim for free when they start their career. But, soon enough, they won't even knife their own grandmother save for a wad of cash.
These examples highlight the need for a theory of meaning that connects speech not just with information, but with practices.
That theory is called magic. If you put a curse upon a person, that person suffers great harm. If you call them a cockroach, they turn into a cockroach and get stomped.
But speech does not just impact an audience directly. It can and often does impact audiences indirectly. Why would someone choose to impact an audience indirectly with their words, rather than overtly attempting to attune them in the desired manner? The reason is because the speaker might not wish to be held responsible for their words. The speaker may want to convey something in a way that allows for plausible deniability that they intended to convey it. Plausible deniability is a symptom of what we call hustle - speech that functions non-transparently. When speech is not transparent, a speaker has latitude to deny that they intended the non-transparent features. Hustle is a large and diverse category, including insinuation (itself a broad category). One of the goals of the book is to show just how large it is.
Why bother? The fact is you can insinuate anything you like without saying a word. Memphis, the mime, could convey the whole of the Pythagorean philosophy with a twitch of his butt cheek. Deeds are all that matter.
To illustrate it with an example, we’re going to focus in this section on one quite specific mechanism of hustle, the mechanism of the dog-whistle. Dog-whistling involves employing speech that appears on the surface to be transparent, but, when married to a hearer’s background frame and value systems, communicates a message not obvious to those without that background (i.e. it functions non-transparently).
The problem here is that you can accuse anybody- including those who accuse you of dog-whistling- not just of dog whistling but also of devouring dog poo. If language really has magical power, ranters of various types would be the richest people on the planet.
Dog-whistling is a mechanism specifically designed to allow plausible deniability.
And accusing people of dog-whistling is a mechanism for advertising your paranoia.
Though it is far from the only such method, it is useful to focus on in this introduction as it is most obviously a kind of hustle with a linguistic trigger. In 1981, Lee Atwater, later to lead George H.W. Bush’s 1988 presidential campaign (featuring the notorious Willie Horton ad, funded allegedly by an independent PAC), had an anonymous interview with a journalist that remains one of the clearest expressions of the strategic value of code words to signal allegiance to ideologies that have been explicitly repudiated. In it, he famously said (although we’ve censored the original for obvious reasons): You start out in 1954 by saying, [N-word, N-word, N-word] By 1968 you can’t say [Nword] —that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites. . . . “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than [N-word, N-word].
Atwater was saying that Reagan won on economic and national security issues. Race no longer mattered. ' Reagan goes out and campaigns on the issues of economics and of national defense. The whole campaign was devoid of any kind of racism'. The Questioner, an academic, then asks if Reagan hadn't got the Wallace vote because some of his budget cuts would hurt blacks more than whites. Atwater foolishly agrees after saying 'don't quote me on this'. However, his point was that White voters no longer hankered for repeal of the Voter Rights Act. Still, with Thatcher and Reagan, you suddenly have Black or other coloured people suddenly feeling they can move to the Right of the spectrum. However, people like Sowell and Clarence Thomas got there first. Welfare was destroying African American families as the man who coined the term 'woke' discovered for himself on returning to America.
Subsequent research by the Princeton political science professors Martin Gilens and Tali Mendelberg has confirmed the success of the strategy of linking certain discourse to negative racial stereotypes. Their research shows that expressions like “welfare,” “the poor,” “food stamps,” and “homeless” all contribute to priming the thought that Black Americans are lazy.
Thank you Lefty Professor for saying blokes who like me are shiftless scroungers! There's a reason so many of us moved to the Right.
Gilens finds that “the belief that blacks are lazy is the strongest predictor of the perception that welfare recipients are undeserving”.
No. The strongest predictor is having a strenuous but low paid job. If people keep telling you you'd be better off on the dole, you start to feel that the only reason you keep working is because you have a superior work ethic. This may well be true.
There is a large amount of additional evidence that the word “welfare” has been connected with a flawed ideology of race, in addition to the studies Gilens himself has carried out.
Why did African Americans like Clinton's 'workfare'?
Gilens reports similar results from the “welfare mother” experiment from the National Race and Politics Study of 1991: Respondents are asked their impressions of a welfare recipient described as either a black or white woman in her early thirties, who has a ten-year-old child and has been on welfare for the past year. Respondents are first asked how likely it is that the woman described will try hard to find a job, and second, how likely it is that she will have more children in order to get a bigger welfare check. (AHW 97–8) The largest predictor of opposition to programs described as “welfare” was one’s bias against Black American mothers receiving various state benefits, where the study found that “nonblack respondents with the most negative views of black welfare recipients are 30 points higher in opposition to welfare than are those with the most positive views of black welfare mothers” (AHW 99). But why, one might ask, are these facts linguistic?
The word 'welfare' is also used in England. Initially it was associated with 'Pakistani' scroungers but that is no longer the case. Thus, there is no linguistic 'fact' here. There is a well developed theory of Welfare economics. These two nutters are ignorant of it. They prefer to believe that words have magical powers.
Perhaps we can explain the political effects of describing a term as “welfare” merely by talking about the social programs that are so described, together with false beliefs, including the ones associated with racist ideology. Why are properties of language at issue here?
Magic ones- right?
What fuels Americans’ obsession with programs called “welfare”?
Voodoo.
Is it background commitments to individual responsibility? Is it Americans’ supposedly fierce opposition to “big government,” in the form of government programs? Is it background racist beliefs and false empirical beliefs about poverty in the United States?
Nope. It is Voodoo. Study Philosophy at Yale and get a lucrative job naming and shaming dog-whistlers.
Can we explain the political force of describing a program as “welfare” just by discussing the social programs themselves, without discussing the meaning and use of words? Or do we need some explanation that invokes properties of the word “welfare” itself? Americans are fond of, and committed to, what are by far the United States’ largest social welfare programs—Medicare and Social Security (AHW 30).
Which don't have a disincentive effect on work effort.
Jennifer Saul’s paper “Dogwhistles, Political Manipulation, and Philosophy of Language” is an investigation of the speech act of dog-whistling. On Saul’s analysis, a dog-whistle’s message is a function of the ideology of the audience.
Nonsense! Insinuating a guy is a lunatic or a crook affects people regardless of their ideology. Just hinting they guy is unlucky- a veritable Jonah- is enough.
The function of using a term like “welfare” to describe a program is to make that program less popular in the minds of those with racist ideology (such a description will be less pejorative to those who lack a racist ideology).
Hitler had a Racist ideology. Initially opposed to any sort of welfare program, his regime set up the highly racist Nationalsozialistische Volkswohlfahrt. Racists want welfare too. They just don't want those they don't like from getting any benefit whatsoever.
Descriptions of programs as “welfare,” or persons as “on welfare,” are paradigm examples of dog-whistling in this sense.
So is describing them as people as opposed to cuddle-bunnies. I have explained this very carefully to the various Magistrates who have passed sentences on me.
Describing a program as a “welfare program” gives rise to a strongly negative reaction to that program among one audience (those with at least some racial bias), and considerably less negative reactions among a different audience (composed of members with few indicators of racial bias).
This is junk Social Science. The results can't be replicated if proper protocols are observed.
Racial bias is a value system;
No. It is merely a bias. I am biased in favour of my baby and think spending time with him is utterly delightful. I don't value babies per se and wouldn't consider taking a job as baby wrangler.
it is a way of valuing things—or, in this case, persons—on a metric of value at least partly determined by race.
No. A bias may simply be an association of ideas. I am biased against Scottish people because when I was a baby I was bitten in the ankle by the Duke of Edinburgh. Whenever I hear a Scottish accent, that old wound begins to throb. This does not change my value system which is based on hatred of everybody regardless or race or religion.
Saul makes an important distinction between different categories of dog-whistles.
Ones which dogs can hear and ones which don't exist.
The category of overt intentional dog-whistles is the most straightforward to define, but perhaps least politically central.
Sometimes, not using the word everybody has heard you use often enough and substituting a euphemism increases the impact of your words. Thus, if these nutters stopped talking of dog-whistles and said their target was probably unaware that his words might be interpreted as a signal of support by people he despised, they might be taken seriously. Pretending the other guy is an honourable man causes people to think you yourself are honourable.
Kimberly Witten defines an overt intentional dog-whistle as a speech act designed, with intent, to allow two plausible interpretations, with one interpretation being a private, coded message targeted for a subset of the general audience, and concealed in such a way that this general audience is unaware of the existence of the second, coded interpretation.
But this is true of any communication on an open channel. When a mathematician speaks, other suitably qualified mathematicians decode much more of what he is saying. A bloke like me thinks 'inaccessible Cardinal' means a prelate whom it is difficult to get hold of.
An overt intentional dog-whistle is the clearest example - it is one that works, as the label suggests, overtly. Overt dog-whistles are meant to be understood as such by their target audiences. Saul introduces another category of dog-whistles, covert intentional dog-whistles (see DPM 364– 7). Overt dog-whistles are meant to be understood as such by their target audiences. Covert intentional dog-whistles are not meant to be recognized as delivering hidden messages. An example Saul provides is “inner city”: this expression is meant to be seen as a race neutral expression, but hearing it triggers negative responses in those disposed to racial bias (DPM 367).
In America perhaps. Not in Nigeria. But this isn't a 'dog-whistle'. It is merely how language works. Words have associations. These may differ in different parts of the world or in different pragmatic contexts.
Something in the vocabulary triggers value systems that involve degrees of racism (ibid.).
Words have certain associations for certain people. So what? Where is the 'philosophy' here? One person says 'stinky shithead' another speaks of a person with special educational needs and serious issues with personal hygiene.
In the 1990s, Bill Clinton appropriated the Republican racial rhetoric with his call to “end welfare as we know it,”
The working class liked 'workfare'. It was good for self-esteem and family values.
thereby attracting white voters who otherwise would have been loath to vote for a party connected to the attempt to lift Black American citizens to equality, which might be seen as helping “the undeserving.”
These guys don't get that Clinton was taking on board ideas put forward by African American intellectuals and religious leaders. Toni Morrison called him the first Black President.
Demonizing poor Black Americans has been a successful electoral strategy for both the Democrats and the Republicans in the decades following the Civil Rights Movement,
No it hasn't. Otherwise any nutter could get to be POTUS by getting a swastika tattooed on his face.
and covert racist dog-whistles have been central to this practice.
No. It's tough to get elected. Any nutter can wolf or dog or pig whistle.
Currently, the Republican campaign against “Critical Race Theory” continues these strategies.
No. CRT is stupid, evil, shit. Voters don't like it.
Covert and overt dog-whistles function communicatively by drawing on an ideological background. To understand dog-whistles, we must incorporate into our theory of speech the ways in which different ideological backgrounds affect what is communicated by a speech act.
No. To understand the notion of 'dog-whistle' you have to understand that dog's can hear sound frequencies we can't. The idea is that some people are sub-human. The dog-whistler is appealing to a bunch of rabid nutters because he is 'on their frequency'. When speaking to a group of people we might drop in words designed to appeal to particular people by showing we share something in common with them. Thus, when I meet a Hindoooo, I say 'Namaste!' This annoys the fuck out of them.
The concept we will use to explicate dog-whistles, as well as some other kinds of hustle, is presupposition. On our analysis, dog-whistling functions by presupposing certain ideologies.
That is foolish. It is the job of the politician to try to inculcate an ideology even in people who have never had any use for the thing. Dog whistles work even on dogs which have never used that particular frequency before.
The example of dog-whistles brings out this more general feature of hustle - hustling is characteristically dependent on presupposed narratives, ideology, prejudice, values, and frames.
You can hustle a guy without knowing anything about him. Emotional manipulation is important. He may have strong presuppositions and it may be worth finding out what they are. But, more often than not, you needn't bother.
A theory of meaning adequate to explaining hustle must develop and elucidate a novel notion of presupposition that could explain how such notions could be presupposed in a way that enables speakers to hustle their audiences.
No. A theory that explains hustling must figure out how and when it came make a profit. Behavioural econ shows how some 'heuristics' which are normally reliable enough can make some of us vulnerable to exploitation.
The task of explaining dog-whistling with presupposition faces an immediate objection, one that will help us to elucidate early on some of the ways our project rethinks the terrain. Dog whistling is a paradigm of a speech act that allows for plausible deniability.
Not if it is used repeatedly for a criminal purpose. This is because it is merely a 'code' which can be broken and if there is sufficient correlation with particular outcomes then it is not plausible to deny that the thing is intentional. Thus, a person who habitually refers to the Rector as the Rectum and continues to do so despite repeated complaints, can't plausibly deny that he is suggesting that the clergyman in question is an asshole.
As Justin Khoo has pointed out, this contrasts starkly with standard examples of presupposition, which cannot be plausibly denied. For example, “I am picking up my sister” presupposes that I have a sister,
No. That is an inference drawn by the person hearing or reading the sentence. But we understand that 'sister' may be code of something else.
but I cannot say: (1) I am picking up my sister from the airport, but I do not have a sister.
Yes you can. Try it. If a Hindu says this on Raksha Bandhan, we understand he means that he is going to pick up the wife of a friend who will tie 'raakhe' on him so that she can feed him. On this day, men can only be fed by the sister, not the wife or even their own mother.
In contrast, one can say: (2) That program is nothing other than a welfare program, but I don’t mean to suggest anything negative about Black Americans.
That would be a bizarre thing to say. I think these two nutters have got it into their heads that African Americans are illiterate scroungers.
The worry is: if the negative racist message associated with “welfare” is presupposed, then one cannot explain plausible deniability, the very property that a theory of hustle must explicate.
Plausible deniability refers to actions, not words. To 'hustle' is to cheat. Somebody loses money. At that point there is no deniability. This does not mean the culprit is obliged to incriminate himself.
Responding to this central objection helps us, from the beginning, elucidate the centrality of speech practices to our model. It is familiar from the work of Saul Kripke that words are embedded in speech practices, which give those words meaning; according to Kripke, speech practices explain why proper names have the references they do.
But why do things have names in the first place? Why do 'speech practices' exist? Kripke gives a causal theory of reference such that the extension of an 'intension' changes in a protocol bound manner. This is useful for some purposes. But it is useless when it comes to cyphering or finding focal solutions to 'discoordination' games.
We agree with Kripke on this point, but think of speech practices as imbuing significance to words that goes well beyond their referential properties.
Because Paranoia imbues all sorts of shit with great significance. The neighbour's invisible cat is looking at me again. This proves that President Putin has been stealing my toothpaste and replacing it with a product only 97 percent as effective in fighting plaque.
Every time one uses a word, one presupposes (and manifests) a speech practice, one that is connected to a variety of resonances, emotional and otherwise. The word “welfare” belongs to a racist speech practice, that casts a negative shadow on anything so-described.
Welfare Economists like Amartya Sen are totes Racist.
Using this word in this way presupposes this speech practice. But most words belong to multiple speech practices - and to understand what speech practice its use presupposes, one must often know the social location, point, and purpose of the speaker.
One must presuppose those things or just drink the Kool Aid.
In a paper that has deeply affected us, Anne Quaranto argues that dog whistles function by exploiting the presence of multiple speech practices governing a single word. In using a dog-whistle, one presupposes one speech practice, while taking advantage of the fact that the word can also be used in other ways.
That's what happens when you make a pun.
If one is challenged, one claims that one was using it in this other way.
No. If challenged you call the other guy a fucking Racist bastid with the IQ of a chipmunk.
What’s needed to complete this analysis is an account of presupposition that can make sense of the claim that using a word can presuppose something like a practice.
That account is paranoid shite about how Language speaks us. Society has brainwashed us into thinking that shoving radishes up our backside and running around naked is not what a normal, well adjusted, actuary would do.
We need an account of speech practices, and how they relate to the resonances of words.
only in the sense that we need a radish up our bum.
And we need a much broader account of the impact of speech than one that is limited to the transmission of information.
Speech can cause harm. Call a person a shithead and shit will actually start bubbling out of his ears.
There are clear difficulties in making sense of the multifarious ways in which speech impacts audiences in the terms of the philosophical tradition of semantic analysis which dominate analytic philosophy and linguistic semantics. Let us briefly sketch the problem, and where it led us. We start with the tradition that forms the background. It runs through Gottlob Frege at the end of the 19th century, the early Ludwig Wittgenstein in the first part of the 20th Century, and Richard Montague in the 1960s, and onward into what is now a rich, well-articulated, and diverse academic enterprise, that of compositional formal semantics.
Which turned out to be completely and utterly useless. Language games are game theoretic. They aren't about following a rule.
In this enterprise, meanings of words are understood in terms of the bits of the world they refer to and in terms of functions on those bits, and the bits are composed to calculate what the sentence says about the world. Adherents of this approach, ourselves included, see an austere beauty in the smooth way these meanings can be composed, as if they were physical building blocks engineered to slide into place.
That 'austere beauty' has caused these two nutters to babble paranoid nonsense.
We place early Wittgenstein
who was wrong. There are no 'atomic propositions'.
at the heart of the tradition in which we were trained because the approach we are describing can be seen as a realization of what he termed in the Tractatus the picture theory of meaning. On this view, a sentence functions like a panel in the pictorial instructions accompanying a prefabricated furniture kit: an elongated T-shape with a series of slightly diagonal parallel lines at one end depicts a particular type of bolt, a long rectangle depicts a table leg, and the spatial relationship of these elements together with an arrow depicts an action that the assembler of the furniture must perform. The idea is that the conventions of language determine how arbitrary symbols can be mapped onto real world objects in the way that pictorial elements are mapped onto real world objects via iconic similarity.
Nowadays there are only pictures, no words, in those furniture kits.
The Frege-Montague line of work makes precise how language can represent in this way, but creates a quandary (a quandary perhaps not unrelated to the evolution seen in Wittgenstein’s own later work): how can a picture theory of meaning like that we have just caricatured possibly help us understand phenomena like harmful speech?
Speech isn't harmful. Actions are. Some speech acts are directly linked to actions. Most aren't. Nutters may want to prosecute people on the basis that when they said 'I need to take a pee' what they were really saying was 'We must all rape darkies to death on a more intensive basis'.
While we will not make direct use of Wittgenstein’s picture metaphor in presenting the account these worries eventually led us to, it might be said that we still presuppose a depiction theory of meaning. But don’t think of a construction manual; think of a picture (from the front page of the October 1936 edition of the Nazi prapaganda newspaper Der Stürmer) depicting a rich Jew with vampire teeth eating tiny “ordinary” people whole.
Or think of Jason calling Donald Trump an anti-semite because he promises to purge the radical left. Incidentally, Stalin was very good at killing Commies. On the other hand, a whole bunch of Communists saved Capitalism in the Thirties while the Cowles Commission stood around with its dick in its hands.
He has a Star of David on his forehead, in case other aspects of the caricature were insufficient to indicate his identity, and a masonic symbol on his lapel for good measure. Or think of Picasso’s Guernica, also expressly created and exhibited to support a political cause. There are certainly pictorial elements in the Guernica which can be mapped onto things and events in the real world: a bull, a horse, faces and grimaces, a broken sword. Yet what makes the painting so rich is not simply the existence of symbols that stand for things. It is the extraordinary way the elements are chosen, portrayed and composed so as to immediately evoke powerful emotional reactions, and the way they collectively and holistically bring to salience a peculiarly rich web of social and historical associations, of interwoven half-told narratives, and of practices of war and killing.
Franco saw the painting, shat his pants and joined the Young Socialists' League. Picasso didn't become very very rich. He shared what he earned with the poor.
Although we neither offer nor presume an analysis of artistic representation, what we seek in this book is a theory of how language can bring forth similar emotional reactions, social and historical associations, narratives, and practices.
That theory is Voodoo.
Once one begins to look at language in this way, we begin to see even the simpler cases that have been the mainstay of semantic theory in a very different light, such as the relation between “dog” and “cur”, which the logician and philosopher Gottlob Frege used to motivate the notion of meaning at the heart of the formal semantic tradition..
But 'restricted comprehension' means that the 'formal semantic tradition' is useless. There is only 'e-language'. Pragmatics is everything. Semantics is nothing in itself.
The view we develop in this book will bring out how even the Ikea instruction manual was never just simple static mapping from 2-d representations to the 3-d furniture of the world, but embodied a complex set of consumer-societal, industrial and constructional practices.
Ikea ran away from the high taxes of Social Democratic Sweden. Thus it is totes Fascist.
So it is, we will argue, with every piece of language that was ever reduced in a class on semantics or philosophy of language to a sequence of logical symbols.
Stalin's Philosophy of Language was actually quite helpful in ridding the Bolsheviks of nutty reductionism of this sort. It isn't true that if you use 'Feudal' language you will become a reactionary. Language is relatively autonomous of the 'substructure'. There is now need for an Orwellian 'Newspeak'.
We are not against the practice of performing such formalization. But we will argue that what must be made precise is not a simple mapping from expressions to things.
Why settle for a simple mapping to nonsense when you can have a complicated mapping to utter shite?
What must ultimately be made precise, if we are to understand how meaning functions, is rather a set of language practices, practices that are enmeshed in complex webs of association.
How do functions function? What is the extension of the 'set of language practices'? Because of recursion, we know some must feature impredicativity. Thus, there is no fucking set since its elements are not well defined.
This is Logic 101. Why are these two professional philosophers babbling such nonsense? The answer is that are stupid, their colleagues are stupid, and know that their students are even stupider.
We believe that this is as true for the simplest sentence in a learn-to-read storybook as it is for the more complex and subtle ways in which speech mobilizes audiences towards action.
They believe a tautology viz 'language practices are language practices'.
Here is the plan of our book. In Part I, we introduce the foundational notions of our model. Words are employed in communicative practices, which lend to these words resonances.
No. Resonances arise from expressive practices. The cry of a breaking heart has resonances. The autopsy report on a person who died of a heart attack is communicative. But the technical words used have no resonances.
Groups of people form communities of practice, which shape these resonances.
No. They form expressive communities or task oriented associations which, however, may not be communities at all.
This is the topic of Chapter 1. The use of words by a community of practice attunes its members to these resonances.
No. An association of practitioners may have a common agenda. They may have esprit de corps. There may bond closely together. But this has nothing to do with 'resonances'.
The work of Chapter 2 is to motivate and explain how attunement functions within such a community.
Where there is a coordination game there will be hedging and 'income effects' arising from a discoordination game. But mimetics involve no 'attunement'.
In Chapter 3, we analyze the process by which attunement changes at both an individual and group level, or, equivalently, the way people and groups adapt to each other in communicative interactions. We refer to this process as harmonization. What we seek is a model of how speech can affect people in the short-term, but a model that allows us to make sense of the process by which ideas and ideologies spread and transform over the larger timescales at which political change occurs.
The problem here is that there are very abrupt 'saltations'. Today everybody is cheering for the Beloved Leader. Tomorrow they laugh heartily as his corpse is dragged through the streets. Even in the Sixties, there were people who thought that the kids brainwashed by the Nazis would start goosestepping down the street sooner rather than later.
In Part II, we use the notions we develop in Part I to redefine the central concepts of formal pragmatics,
useless shite
presupposition and accommodation. Presuppositions reflect the background of communicative practices, the things that are normally so evident to interlocutors that their significance need not be made explicit. In justification of a tradition of philosophers pioneered chiefly by Rae Langton,
Porn is inherently harmful. P. Chidambaram's flaunting of his shapely haunches have ruined many a marriage.
we argue that presupposition plays a special role in ideological transfer. In our terms, this is because people tend to harmonize with presuppositions non-deliberatively.
This is also the reason that Voodoo is so effective. If some evil man wants to be President, all he needs to do is say 'I like cats'. This is a 'dog whistle'. He is actually saying 'Let's kill all the wops, wogs and nignogs'. This causes everybody to vote for him because of resonances and attunement and harmonization. As a result every POTUS ever was actually Hitler.
This both reflects the positive role of presupposition in helping people coordinate and build common ground, and introduces a danger, since a propagandist can take advantage of presupposition in order to persuade covertly.
e.g. by saying 'Cats are so cute. I like them.' Do you know who else liked cats? Adolph fucking Hitler!
In Chapter 5, we generalize standard models of presupposition using the notions introduced in Part I.
Everybody is a fucking Fascist. That's how Propaganda works. Otherwise, everybody would be running around naked with a radish up their bum.
We use this to make sense of the idea that a communicative action can presuppose a practice, so that, for example, telling sexist jokes can presuppose sexist ideologies.
Lots of people with a sexist ideology don't like jokes of any kind. Some Feminists find sexist jokes funny. Everything depends on the way you tell 'em.
Accommodation refers to the way people adapt to the communicative situation. We suggest in Chapter 6 and 7 that accommodation be modeled as a special case of harmonization, as introduced in Part I.
Speaking generally, accommodation is about money. The question is how to pay the rent for taking up brain space.
Accommodation is harmonization to a group with which people identify. This move helps us to understand a range of complex phenomena, such as the ones that undergird political polarization and the formation of echo chambers.
Complex phenomena don't undergird things. They are undergirded by something much simpler and 'noumenal'. Polarisation is a 'Nash equilibrium'. There may be a superior 'correlated' or cooperative equilibrium.
Our model of speech is more realistic than extant ones in linguistics and philosophy of language.
It is still shit.
In Part III, we step back to look at theoretical issues involving idealization, in particular the issue of how idealizations about speech can serve as ideological distortions. For the sake of perspicuity, we focus on two idealizations standardly made in linguistic and philosophical work on meaning, which we call neutrality and straight-talk. We use these to exhibit two different ways in which idealizations characteristically distort. First, they can distort by being incoherent, as we argue in Chapter 8 to be the case with the idealization of neutrality. Words are embedded in practices, and as such are vehicles for ideology. There is no such thing, then, as a neutral word in a human language. The pretense of neutrality functions to mask the way speech functions to transmit ideology.
The psychiatrists are all crazy! They keep saying it is unhealthy to eat your own shit when everybody knows this is a myth being pushed by Big Food. I bet they eagerly devour their own poo when nobody is looking.
No speech act is neutral. It is nothing but the expression of the great truth that only your own shit should be eaten by you. Big Food may have the Doctors on their payroll but even they admit as much when they speak. You just need to be perspicuous enough to properly decode what they are saying.
Secondly, they can distort by limiting attention to a small and unrepresentative subset, as we argue in Chapter 9 to be the case with straight-talk.
That small and unrepresentative set is sciencey stuff to do with why eating your own shit is bad for your health.
In Chapter 10, we situate our project within the broader ambit of attempts across philosophy to critique idealizations.
By eating their own shit.
Finally, in Part IV, we turn to the question of the power of speech to harm and liberate.
Which is linked to super-powers you gain when you only eat your own shit.
How do we theorize these together?
By shitting into their cupped hands and then eagerly devouring that 'chocolate cake'.
Chapter 11 concerns harmful speech, focusing on several different categories, such as slurs, and bureaucratic speech, which harms by objectifying and masking.
and discouraging people from eating their own shit.
In our final chapter, we turn to the question of the liberatory potential of speech.
It can cause you to eat your own shit.
How do we best think of free speech in a democracy, given its power to harm? We argue, drawing on the central conclusions of our book, that defense of free speech that base it on the democratic ideal of liberty fail.
Because liberty only means eating nothing but your own shit.
But this does not mean that there is no robust defense of a free speech principle that is possible. Democracy has two ideals, liberty and equality. The correct defense of free speech is based around the other democratic ideal, that of equality.
Equality can only be achieved when everybody eats their own shit. Big Food and the Toilet industry are brainwashing you into flushing away your invaluable poo. It is laughable to speak of America as a democratic country when even its President isn't eagerly devouring his own turds at public banquets.
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