Just Words: On Speech and Hidden Harm

by Mary Kate McGowan

We all know that speech can be harmful. But what are the harms and how exactly does the speech in question brings those harms about? Mary Kate McGowan identifies a previously overlooked mechanism by which speech constitutes, rather than merely causes, harm. She argues that speech constitutes harm when it enacts a norm that prescribes that harm. McGowan illustrates this theory by considering many categories of speech including sexist remarks, racist hate speech, pornography, verbal triggers for stereotype threat, micro-aggressions, political dog whistles, slam poetry, and even the hanging of posters. Just Words explores a variety of harms - such as oppression, subordination, discrimination, domination, harassment, and marginalization - and ways in which these harms can be remedied.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Linguistics

222 pages, Hardcover

Published April 14, 2019

Reviews

[Laelia · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was interesting but I don't think I'm interested in reading about this anymore ㅠㅠ a lot of theory and while I'm familiar with all of them, this was still a lot to take in and try to understand

[Nat]

There's a lot of helpful material in here on the relationship between illocutionary acts (which are generally thought to require speaker communicative intentions to be felicitious) and neighboring types of speech acts—in particular what McGowan calls "conversational exercitives", which are changes to the normative structure of conversations brought about by speech, and which have a much lower threshold of intentional-ness than standard exercitive illocutions.

I *think* there's a way of applying some of McGowan's apparatus to the phenomenon that I care most about, namely explicit meaning claims (of the kind the ordinary language philosophers make), which usually take the form of explicit assertions, but I think mainly function to reinforce norms of use (this is something in the neighborhood of some things Cavell says). Roughly, someone can intend to make an assertion about the meaning of an expression while simultaneously having all kinds of not-necessarily-intended normative effects on what's permissible in the conversation and related norm-governed non-conversational activities. (Now that I write that out it seems kind of obvious.)

[liv mcdowell · Rating 3 out of 5]

i could never be a linguistics major and that’s okay