Abstract
In recent times, phenomena of conversational asymmetry have become a lively object of study for linguists, philosophers of language and moral philosophers—under various labels: illocutionary disablement and silencing (Langton in Philos Public Affairs 22:293–330, 1993; Hornsby and Langton in Legal Theory 4:21–37, 1998), discursive injustice (Kukla in Hypatia 29(2):440–457, 2014; Lance and Kukla in Ethics 123:456–478, 2013), illocutionary distortion (Green in The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy, Stanford University Press, Palo Alto, 2014, Oxford handbooks online, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2017). The common idea is that members of underprivileged groups sometimes have trouble performing particular speech acts that they are entitled to perform: in certain contexts, their performative potential is somehow undermined, and their capacity to do things with words is distorted or even annulled. In this paper I will assess this idea, focusing on Rebecca Kukla’s and Rae Langton’s accounts; in particular, I will criticize the role the notion of uptake plays in their accounts, and claim that it may ultimately undermine the very idea of discursive injustice. While, according to Kukla and Langton, members of disadvantaged groups are victims of a kind of uptake failure, leading to illocutionary disablement and even silencing, in the account I present they are victims of a kind of communicative (neither illocutionary nor perlocutionary) disablement. My overall aim is to develop a notion of discursive injustice that is more plausible and more effective for our broader purposes of criticising the structures of power and oppression.
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Notes
Note that some authors interpret Langton’s silencing cases as cases of distortion, where the speech act of refusal is transformed into a different speech act (the “no” becomes a “yes”; the refusal becomes a coy invitation) rather than into no speech act at all: see Wieland (2007); for criticism of Wieland (2007), see Maitra and McGowan (2010). In this interpretation of Langton’s cases, cases A. and B. would collapse into one and my criticism of Kukla’s account would extend to Langton’s.
Langton (1993), Hornsby (1993), and Hornsby and Langton (1998). It is notoriously difficult to define pornography: the authors working on silencing usually refer to a subset of pornographic materials that present, endorse and eroticize hierarchical sexual relationships. Note that sources other than pornography may silence women—for instance hate speech, and, more generally, all materials relying on or reinforcing dangerous gender stereotypes, e.g. representing women as apparently declining sexual proposals when in fact longing for them and meaning to accept them.
Two remarks are in order. First, the silencing occurs only if it is brought about in a systematic manner. Second, the literature on silencing seems to implicitly adopt a consent model of sexuality—according to which refusals concern permission to proceed: the model presupposes that the man is usually the initiator or proposer of the sexual activity and the woman accepts or declines the proposal. The model is more than problematic, but for the purposes of this paper I won’t challenge it. For criticisms of the consent model see McGowan (2017, p. 44) and Kukla (2018, p. 78).
According to Kukla, orders and requests have two different pragmatic structures: “Both typically involve an attempt by a speaker to bring it about that the target… performs an action F… The output of a successful imperative is an obligation on the part of the person ordered to do what the speaker ordered her to do. The output of a successful request is that the target now has a specific sort of reason to do what was requested, but it is essential to the notion of a request that this reason is not an obligation” (Kukla 2014, pp. 445–446); and ibidem: “the pragmatically required response to a request being granted is always and distinctively gratitude… On the other hand, gratitude is not only not called for but is in fact inappropriate when someone obeys my order”; cf. Lance and Kukla (2013, pp. 460–461). What is more, gratitude upon an order being fulfilled may prompt a reinterpretation of what appeared to be an order, and a downgrading of it to a request.
Note that while two contradictory assertions cannot both be legitimate, contradictory expressions of emotions or feelings can (cf. Kukla 2014, p. 451). In the Austinian taxonomy, while truth claims are Verdictives, expressions of emotions or feelings are Behabitives (Expressives, in the Searlian taxonomy). Behabitives “include the notion of reaction to other people's behaviour and fortunes and of attitudes and expressions of attitudes to someone else's past conduct or imminent conduct”, p. 160). More precisely, Austin (1962) classifies assertions as Verdictives (“the delivering of a finding, official or unofficial, upon evidence or reasons as to value or fact”, p. 153) or as Expositives (“used in acts of exposition involving the expounding of views, the conducting of arguments, and the clarifying of usages and of references”, p. 161); for an assessment of Austin’s taxonomy, cf. Kissine (2013). In discussing silencing and muting, Green analyses how putative assertions performed by members of underprivileged groups get transformed into other members of the assertive family, such as conjectures or guesses: Green (2017, § VIII).
Cf. Kukla (2014, p. 452): “Here are two potential examples: A female employee claims that her boss is inappropriately flirtatious; a female professor claims that her department members systematically devalue other female job candidates’ talks. In both cases, the speaker intends to make, and is in a position to make, a truth-claim… she is attempting to put forth a claim about objective events in the external world, which seeks uptake in the form of agreement or rational challenge from others. But often… these sorts of speech acts, when women perform them, are taken as expressives rather than as claims about the world—more like ‘ouch’ or ‘congratulations’ than like a truth-claim”.
The example is Austin’s: cf. Austin (1962, p. 33).
Austin includes elements such as the explicit performative formula (such as “I promise to”); performative comments to the speech act (illocutionary glosses such as “This is an order”; “That’s a promise”); the content of the locution; syntactic devices, such as mood; prosodic devices, such as tone of voice, cadence, emphasis; adverbs (such as “probably”, “without fail”) or connecting phrases (such as “therefore”, “although”, “hereby”); gestures or ceremonial non-verbal actions (such as a bow); along with “the circumstances of the utterance” (Austin 1962, pp. 67–76).
As will be seen in § 4.1, I do not agree with standard interpretations of Austin and Strawson on this point, but I leave the philological assessment of their accounts to another occasion.
According to Kukla, the audience’s uptake includes understanding and response: "The uptake of the speech act is how it gets recognized and responded to in practice" (Kukla 2014, p. 453); "Speech acts call for uptake, and this uptake itself takes the form of a concrete social response" (Lance and Kukla 2013, p. 465).
Cf. Hornsby and Langton (1998, p. 80): “Conditions for performing an illocution typically include a hearer’s recognition of a speaker’s intention to perform an illocution”. The same interpretation is given by Maitra and McGowan: cf. Maitra (2009, p. 313n): “I gloss [Austin] as follows: uptake requires both understanding of the content expressed by the utterance, and recognition of the speaker’s illocutionary intention(s)”; and McGowan (2017, p. 45): “Austin, Langton and Hornsby regard uptake (i.e. the hearer’s recognition of the speaker’s illocutionary intention) to be a necessary condition for illocution (Austin 1962, pp. 22, 116, 139)”.
Austin (1962, p. 39). The first Γ condition is defined as follows: “Γ. 1: where, as often, the procedure is designed for use by persons having certain thoughts, feelings, or intentions, or for the inauguration of certain consequential conduct on the part of any participant, then a person participating in and so invoking the procedure must in fact have those thoughts, feelings, or intentions, and the participants must intend so to conduct themselves” (ibidem).
This seems in line with Austin: “Unless a certain effect is achieved, the illocutionary act will not have been happily, successfully performed […] I cannot be said to have warned an audience unless it hears what I say and takes what I say in a certain sense […] the performance of an illocutionary act involves the securing of uptake” (Austin 1962, pp. 116–117). But see infra, § 4.1.
And, Kukla maintains, “The audience members who witness her performing the speech act will take it as an entitled speech act of type A and respond accordingly, and thereby help finish making it so, giving it an output that is conventionally matched to its input”: Kukla (2014, p. 444) (emphasis mine); cf. Lance and Kukla (2013, p. 467).
Kukla (2014, p. 444): “She has become the victim of a kind of pragmatic breakdown, from her point of view. She cannot marshal standard conventions in the standard way, in order to act autonomously as a discursive agent” (emphasis mine).
Cf. Langton (2018, p. 151, fn. 44): “There are limits to what hearers can do, in my view. A hearer may weaken what would have been an order into a mere request, if an order requires a certain hearer-dependent felicity condition. But a hearer cannot e.g. twist sexual refusal into sexual consent, since consent requires a certain speaker-dependent felicity condition—the speaker’s decision or intention to consent”.
Cf. Haslanger (2000, p. 35): “if our goal is to identify a concept that serves our broader purposes, then the question of terminology is primarily a pragmatic and sometimes a political one: should we employ the terms of ordinary discourse to refer to our theoretical categories, or instead make up new terms?”.
On the notion of standing as opposed to authority, see Hesni (2018).
My account makes an additional distinction between communicative and perlocutionary failure. Indeed, while in most cases a communicative failure brings about a perlocutionary one, in some circumstances, no perlocutionary failure may occur: Celia’s objectives (moving the boxes, having the workers take their break at 1 p.m.) may well be fulfilled as desired as perlocutionary effects of the illocutionary act of request (the employees are fulfilling a perceived request, not an order). In a similar vein, the woman refusing may successfully perform the perlocutionary act of avoiding an unwanted sexual intercourse: the man could stop his advances due to lack of consent (and not as a consequence of a refusal).
Cf. Strawson (1964, p. 449): “the aim, if not the achievement, of securing uptake is essentially a standard, if not an invariable, element in the performance of the illocutionary act”.
Strawson (1964, p. 454). Cf. Strawson (1964, p. 451): “the [first-person performative] verb serves not exactly to ascribe an intention to the speaker but rather, in Austin's phrase, to make explicit the type of communication intention with which the speaker speaks, the type of force which the utterance has”. According to Strawson, “the illocutionary force of an utterance is essentially something that is intended to be understood. And the understanding of the force of an utterance in all cases involves recognizing what may be called broadly an audience-directed intention and recognizing it as wholly overt, as intended to be recognized” (Strawson 1964, p. 459).
Cf. Sbisà (2007, 2009) and Sbisà (2013, pp. 31–32): “Austin claims that the securing of uptake is required in order for the illocutionary act to have been actually performed. But he is not thoroughly clear about whether what is required includes actual uptake or just the speaker’s reasonable effort to produce it… One position that may plausibly be attributed to Austin is that uptake is secured when the speaker manages to make it possible for the audience to understand. This indeed is already an achievement, as implied by Austin in the case of warning, and therefore an effect brought about by the speaker in issuing the utterance. But it does not follow from this that the audience actually pays attention nor that any actual interpretation, even when it is indeed misinterpretation, should count as uptake and contribute to validating the corresponding illocutionary act as well as its attribution to the speaker”.
Cf. Donnellan (1968, p. 212): "if intentions were sufficient, then a speaker could mean anything by any word at any time or refer to anything using any definite description at any time".
The distinction between Weak and Strong Intentionalism was originally drawn by Stokke (2010) as regards the semantic interpretation of indexicals.
For a different opinion, cf. Bird (2002, p. 3): “(iv) uptake is not necessary for illocution in general, nor (v) is it necessary for refusal in particular”; Maitra (2009, p. 313n): “even if it is right, contra Austin, that an illocutionary act can be performed without uptake, there is clearly a sense in which that act is less than fully successful—or happy”; and McGowan (2017, p. 45): “I do not regard uptake as necessary for illocution, but it is necessary for communication”.
The Belief Constraint is in line with Keith Donnellan’s approach to intentions and expectations. As is well known, Donnellan views intentions as “essentially connected with expectations” (Donnellan 1968, p. 212), and more specifically as limited by reasonable expectations. As he famously puts it, a subject in normal circumstances cannot flap his arms with the intention of flying, nor he can say out of the blue “There’s glory for you” and mean “There's a nice knock-down argument for you” (as in Humpty Dumpty’s exchange with Alice). Donnellan introduces this point for meaning and referring; I have extended this point to domains of quantification in Bianchi (2006) and to speech acts in Bianchi (2014).
Dealing with demonstratives, Stokke (2010, p. 388) introduces a similar Uptake Constraint.
On this point, see King (2014, p. 228). Note that in my framework it is essential to underline the distinction between “addressee” and “competent hearer”: it is part of the speaker's communicative responsibilities to put that particular addressee (and not just any competent hearer, such as a bystander) in a position to recognise her intentions.
Thanks to Stefano Bacin for suggesting a requirement along these lines.
There is a third case: the Belief Constraint is not satisfied, but the Availability Constraint is. This case may account for examples of unintentional speech acts—essentially conventional acts (namely ritual or institutional) like the Strawsonian “Redouble”. Strawson allows for this possibility but deems such cases “essentially deviant or nonstandard”: “I do not mean that such an act could never be performed unintentionally. A player might let slip the word "redouble" without meaning to redouble; but if the circumstances are appropriate and the play strict, then he has redoubled (or he may be held to have redoubled). But a player who continually did this sort of thing would not be asked to play again, except by sharpers. Forms can take charge, in the absence of appropriate intention; but when they do, the case is essentially deviant or nonstandard” (Strawson 1964, p. 457).
Cf. King (2014, p. 225): “the value of a use of a demonstrative in a context is that object o that meets the following two conditions: (1) the speaker intends o to be the value; and (2) a competent, attentive, reasonable hearer would take o to be the object that the speaker intends to be the value”.
This point strongly differentiates my account from Maitra’s: Maitra (2009) develops an idea of silencing as “communicative disablement”, adopting a Gricean understanding of communication and radically departing from the Austinian framework.
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Acknowledgements
Thanks to Stefano Bacin, Federica Berdini, Laura Caponetto, Bianca Cepollaro, Mitch Green, Rae Langton, Marina Sbisà, Achille Varzi and an anonymous reviewer for helpful comments and suggestions on previous versions of this article.
Funding
Financial support for my work was provided by the PRIN, Italian Government, Bando 2017, Prot. 2017P9E9NF.
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Bianchi, C. Discursive Injustice: The Role of Uptake. Topoi 40, 181–190 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-020-09699-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-020-09699-x