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Blocking As Counter-Speech Rae Langton Forthcoming in New Work on Speech Acts, Edited by Daniel Harris, Daniel Fogal, and Matt Blocking as Counter-Speech Rae Langton Forthcoming in New Work on Speech Acts, edited by Daniel Harris, Daniel Fogal, and Matt Moss (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017) 1. Introduction What is the remedy for ‘evil’ speech? Louis Brandeis had a famous answer. If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.1 There should be no enforced silence of false, or fallacious, or otherwise ‘evil’ speech, because it can be remedied by more speech, said Brandeis. Truth will out. ‘Let [Truth] and Falsehood grapple’, said John Milton, for ‘who ever knew Truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter?’2 That hope is inspiring but implausible, given limits on capacities to fight bad speech with good. ‘Truth will out’ is an empirical hypothesis disguised as a principle, and it deserves a skeptical eye. Speakers are threatened into silence, drowned out by heckling, or by the megaphone of money, which amplifies some voices, and gags others. Tribalism walls off one group from another, in online echo-chambers that exclude dissent.3 Deliberation is policed by trolls, as well as by state agents. Attempts to squash rumours can backfire, giving falsehoods more credence than they had before.4 Words that wound, hate speech scrawled on walls and 1 Brandeis 1927, 377. 2 Milton 1644. 3 Sunstein 2001. 4 Berinksky, forthcoming. 1 side-walks—these are not invitations to conversation, but instructions to get out.5 Click-bait, fake news, flood the marketplace of ‘ideas’, in a system where money trumps truth. The ‘more speech’ doctrine deserves a skeptical eye, and it deserves a philosophical eye as well. Handicaps on speech are handicaps on doing things with words, when we bear in mind J. L. Austin’s insight that saying is doing.6 From this viewpoint, there is more to ‘evil’ speech than ‘falsehood and fallacies’, as Brandeis put it. Speech can sometimes hurt people, without hurting truth. ‘Colored’ was a short-hand for ‘Colored passengers are required to sit here’. That was true, but its truth did not improve it. When Rosa Parks responded by sitting where only whites were permitted, she didn’t refute a false assertion. She disobeyed a true rule. We should expect counter-speech to look different, when evil speech is not lacking in truth. When falsehoods are the problem, they do not always ‘grapple’ with truth in an ‘open encounter’, as Milton imagined. Often, they are not asserted, but merely presupposed. They creep into the stadium through back doors, keeping a low profile, steering clear of the official combatants, and then ascend the podium un-bloodied and untested, winners by default. We should expect counter-speech to look different, when evil speech is not open. Could the ‘exposure’ Brandeis recommends address such problems? I want to take this seriously. I have two chief goals: first, to identify blocking as a distinctive form of counter-speech; and second, to identify some handicaps on its operation. Besides the barriers just described, there are others that need closer philosophical attention. Sometimes blocking is impossible. Sometimes blocking is possible, but difficult, given epistemic, structural and normative barriers: the ‘evil speech’ can be hard to see, or seem wrong to disrupt. 5 Waldron suggests the message of hate speech is ‘get out, be afraid’, 2012; see also Matsuda et al 1993 on words that wound; Nielsen 2012 on escape as a response to hate speech; Langton 2014, 2017b, and forthcoming. 6 Austin 1962. 2 This is part of a wider project about the ‘accommodation of injustice’ (in my John Locke Lectures 2015).7 Speech acts can build unjust norms and authority patterns, helped along by hearers who do not block them. The process follows what David Lewis called a ‘rule of accommodation’: a default adjustment, that tends to make a ‘move in a language game’ count as ‘correct play’, when certain conditions hold.8 Blocking can prevent that default adjustment. I set no store by the word ‘evil’, with its air of fairytale melodrama. My topics will range from subordinating law, to mundane speech acts that are barely noticed. Attempts to block can be equally mundane, like this light-hearted and high-decibel exchange I witnessed in 1990, at a Melbourne football game: St. Kilda supporter to sluggish player: ‘Get on with it, Laurie, you great girl!’ Alert bystander: ‘Hey, what’s wrong with a girl?’ St. Kilda supporter: ‘It’s got no balls, that’s what’s wrong with it!’ In case of doubt, the sluggish player is a man, and ‘great’ is an intensifier, not a compliment.9 We shall return to this cameo in a moment. To ‘block’ something is to ‘hinder the passage, progress, or accomplishment’ of something ‘by, or as if by, interposing an obstruction’, says the dictionary.10 When you block something, you don’t ‘accommodate’ it—you don’t adjust to it, or help it along. Those ordinary senses of blocking and accommodation are alive in philosophical work on presupposition. A hearer who blocks what is presupposed, also blocks the speech act to which the presupposition contributes, I shall argue. The success of a speech act can depend on its 7 Langton forthcoming. 8 Lewis 1979. 9 Contrary to a hopeful but misguided interpretation of an audience member in the Netherlands, who had not come across this usage of ‘great’. 10 Merriam-Webster, http://www.merriam-webster.com/ 3 presuppositions, and on hearers accommodating those presuppositions. That is why blocking a presupposition can make the speech act fail. Blocking can disable, rather than refute, evil speech. It can make speech misfire, to use Austin’s label for a speech act gone wrong. It offers a way of ‘undoing’ things with words (to twist his title)—and this ‘undoing’ has, I shall suggest, a retroactive character, which Austin himself described. It offers a ticket to a modest time machine, available to anyone willing and able to use it.11 Patterns of misfire are more familiar in a negative guise of unjust silencing, ‘illocutionary disablement’, and ‘discursive injustice’.12 Our question here is turning the tables. We are asking whether evil speech could itself misfire, could itself be disabled, when hearers exploit blocking, as counter-speech. I shall suggest a special role for blocking as a response to ‘back-door’ speech acts, as we might call them: low profile speech acts, enabled by presuppositions and their ilk, that tend to win by default.13 11 The unpublished notes are discussed in Sbisà 2007. 12 ‘Illocutionary disablement’: see Langton 1993, 2009. The argument here bears on illocutionary disablement, which would have the same retroactive character. ‘Discursive injustice’: see Kukla 2014. She describes a systematic pattern of misfire, emphasizing the twisting of one force into another. There have been many related discussions of silencing; for a sample see Hornsby 1995, 2011, Hornsby and Langton 1998, Jacobson 1995, Butler 1997, Green 1998, Schwartzman 2002, West 2003, Saul 2006, Bianchi 2008, Maitra 2009, McGowan 2004, 2009, and this volume, Mikkola 2011, Dotson 2011, Simpson 2013, Davies 2016. 13 ‘And their ilk’—this hand-waving phrase expresses a hunch that back- door speech acts can be achieved via implicature and other mechanisms as well. I do not do justice to this, and ask the reader’s forbearance for riding rough shod over distinctions often regarded, for other purposes, as crucial. 4 I give ‘back-door’ speech acts a metaphorical label, since familiar ones don’t quite fit. ‘Not-at-issue content’ is close, but doesn’t capture our interest in speech acts.14 Sneaky ‘conversational exercitives’ (described by Mary Kate McGowan) covertly alter facts about what is permissible, but I have a wider range of act types in mind, including back-door testimony.15 Many speech acts are achievable by back-door methods, and there is scope for philosophy of language to shed light on this. Mark Richard wrote of slurs, ‘what makes a word a slur is that it is used to do certain things, that it has... a certain illocutionary potential’. His point generalizes from slurs to a larger toolkit of words and linguistic items: what matters is their ‘illocutionary potential’, their potential for doing certain things.16 Several back-door speech acts were performed, in the utterance of ‘Get on with it, you great girl!’ The speaker’s main ‘front-door’ purpose was presumably to urge a sluggish player, and express frustration. But regardless of his aims, there were several back-door 14 Stanley 2015, especially ch. 5. ‘Insinuation’ doesn’t quite fit either, implying deliberateness, see e.g. Camp, this volume; Pinker et al 2008; nor ‘indirect speech act’ for a similar reason (though this needs more attention). 15 See McGowan 2004, and this volume. 16 Richard 2008, 1. The thesis that presupposition contributes to force is implicit in Langton and West 1999, Langton 2012. It has a persuasive function, Sbisà 1999, Simon-Vandenbergen et al 2007. Propaganda conveys subtle, not-at-issue content that threatens the democratic process, Stanley 2015. Insinuation can be antagonistic, Camp this volume. Speech enacts conversational exercitives, covertly enacting norms, McGowan 2004 and this volume. Political ‘dog-whistles’ convey specific messages via covert mechanisms, Saul, this volume. Generics add implicit ideological content to ‘common ground’, Haslanger 2011 and 2014, cf. Anderson et al 2012. Racial slurs harm through their implicatures, Tirrell 2012, and ‘cue’ ideologies, Swanson forthcoming. Subtexts can be identified and thwarted through deconstruction, Butler 1997. 5 speech acts achieved by ‘great girl’, and what it presupposed in that context.17 The utterance implicitly ranked women, a verdictive speech act, in Austin’s scheme.
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