Research

Words can harm. For example, telling a young woman, “Girls just aren’t suited for leadership” can make her feel insecure, it can cause her to believe that she’s inadequate and result in her making decisions based on that belief, and it can cause other people in the conversation to act as if the declaration were true. Fortunately, words also have the power to counteract some of this potential damage. Such counteracting words are often called counterspeech.

I give the first account of group counterspeech. I argue that groups can have more power than individuals to have their counterspeech achieve its desired outcome. This fact makes group counterspeech an especially important tool for speakers who are systematically less likely to be able to successfully use counterspeech because they are members of marginalized groups. Furthermore, the level of organization required to perform group counterspeech is fairly low. This makes it an accessible tool for the speakers who struggle to prevent or mitigate harm because of their already marginalized status.

One outcome that group counterspeech is particularly suited for achieving is combatting harmful speech in the public conversation. The public conversation consists of information, ideas, and narratives about a topic that are salient and readily available in the public sphere. I argue that one thing that harmful speech can do is add harmful content to the public conversation. Therefore, counterspeech should target the public conversation as well as conversations between smaller groups of people. I use a group protest as a paradigm example of group counterspeech to explore its effects on the public conversation.

In the past few years there have been many incidents in the news that involved seemingly well-intentioned speakers getting into hot water for uttering a slur. A quick web search focusing on university instructors alone will lead to several stories about instructors being sanctioned for uttering a slur in class. One commonality among the stories is that the instructor was not a member of the group that the slur targets. In this paper, I focus on one explanation for why many audiences have an objection to outgroup speakers uttering slurs even when it appears that the speaker has no intention to derogate, insult, subordinate, express contempt for, or otherwise harm anyone by uttering the slur. Using the n-word as the main example, I argue that one reason that can make it particularly objectionable when an outgroup speaker utters a slur is that the speaker is unfairly taking control over the terms of the slur’s use. Speakers who are members of the group to which the slur applies should have more power to control its use because they stand to be uniquely harmed by the word’s utterance. 

I connect the fact that slurs are taboo words with the notion of discourse power. There is a taboo against uttering slurs, and the taboo is stronger for people who do not belong to the group that the slur targets. I argue that one thing a speaker does when they choose to utter a slur is signal that the taboo against uttering the slur doesn’t apply to them, or isn’t active, in the context of the utterance. When a speaker does not belong to the group that the slur targets, and they choose to break the taboo, they are implicitly denying that the speakers the slur applies to should have the power to determine the boundaries of the taboo against the slur in that context. I believe that some of the objection to an outgroup member uttering a slur is an objection to the speaker claiming the power to decide the terms of use around such a fraught taboo.

The social identity of the speaker seems to matter when determining whether the very same sentence is taken as a compliment, an innocent question, an innocuous comment or a verbal microaggression. Take racial verbal microaggressions, such as “You’re so articulate,” as an example. In the literature on microaggressions, when the speaker’s social identity is specified, it is usually noted that the speaker is White. In this paper, I argue that the social identity of a speaker can partially determine whether or not their utterance is a microaggression for two reasons. 

The first reason is that a White speaker is more likely to hyper-implicate a racially microaggressive message with their utterance. A hyper-implicature is an attitude conveyed by a speaker because it is the best explanation for what they said or implied. For White speakers in the U.S., often the best explanation for why they are saying “You’re so articulate,” to a Black person will be that the speaker holds a biased attitude. I argue that this is the case for two reasons. Firstly, the utterance takes place in a context that contains a history of anti-Black bias held and acted on by White people in the U.S. Secondly, there is a perceived pattern of White speakers notably and disproportionately complimenting Black people for their command of standard English. These features of the context make it so that the best explanation for the comment will usually be that the speaker finds it notable or surprising that the Black person is skillfully using standard English. A speaker’s social identity affects the best explanation for their utterance, and therefore affects whether they hyper-implicate a microaggressive message.

The second reason that a White speaker’s utterance of “You’re so articulate” is more likely to count as a microaggression is that some locutions are now widely cited and regarded as being microaggressions when said by particular speakers to certain audiences. When these locutions are well-known as microaggressions, they come to connote the microaggressive content in certain contexts. I argue that this is because, for well-known verbal microaggressions, the repeated contexts in which they have been recognized as microaggressions have specific speakers and audiences.  While I focus on the case of racial microaggressions and White speakers, my view generalizes to microaggressions that target other groups and the speakers that are relatively privileged or dominant compared to that group.

There is a phenomenon where people in conversation use a sentence that accidentally implies something that they did not mean. H.P. Grice gave us a framework of implicature to capture messages that are communicated implicitly, i.e. messages that are not a part a what a speaker explicitly said but can nevertheless be a part of what the speaker intended to communicate. Current theories of implicature in philosophy account for cases when a speaker means to communicate the implicature , when a speaker’s audience believes that the speaker meant to communicate the implicature  or when the sentence always carries an implicature barring any special circumstances . However these theories do not account for when a speaker uses a sentence that implies a message that the speaker does not intend to convey, the audience does not believe the speaker intended to convey, and the sentence does not usually convey. In this essay, I show how each of the theories mentioned above fails to capture the cases I am interested in, then I provide a theory of implicature to account for cases when a sentence does not always carry an implicature but, because of particular features of a context, a use of a sentence carries a certain implicature regardless of the intention of the speaker.

 This theory can help to shed light on phenomena such as microaggressions. There are times when a seemingly innocuous comment by a speaker, such as “You’re so eloquent”, can register as a microaggression by the audience; this can happen whether or not the audience believes that the speaker intended to imply an offensive or degrading message. There is often a disconnect between members of marginalized groups who experience such microaggressions and the members of privileged groups who may perpetrate these microaggressions. A speaker may wonder how she can implicitly communicate a message without intending to, especially a message that is antithetical to her avowed beliefs. With this paper I hope to help to show how harmful messages can be implicitly conveyed by speakers who have no malicious intent. This result is interesting for philosophy of language as well as questions about responsibility and blameworthiness with regards to these implicit messages.