INSTRUCTOR: David Beaver TIME: Wednesday 3-6p.m. LOCATION: RLP 4.710

DESCRIPTION

The goal of the class is to consider the problem political speech poses to philosophy of language and theoretical linguistics, and to understand political persuasion, propaganda, and the more subtle ways in which power and status is manifested and maintained in speech.

The theory of meaning in linguistics and philosophy is set up to explain cooperative information exchange. Yet, as feminist theorists, anti-colonial theorists, socio-linguists, anthropologists, sociologists, social psy-chologists, and many others have emphasized, language is often used for less than ideal purposes, e.g. to dominate and exclude. Such uses of language do not seem to fit the idealizations theorists of meaning typically assume.

But what are the idealizations, and can existing semantic and pragmatic accounts be extended to account for aspects of speech that manifest power and social status?

The class will be based on readings from sociolinguistics, philosophy of language, social psychology, political science, and semantics/pragmatics, and structured around a forthcoming book joint between the instructor and the philosopher Jason Stanley.

TOPICS Subject to interests of participants, I will organize the class around three five week topics:

Topic 1: Slurs and stereotypes, race and gender Topic 2: Propaganda and political speech Topic 3: The toolkit for analyzing political language: speech acts, accommodation, game theory, and beyond

REQUIREMENTS This is a discussion seminar with weekly readings, short discussion posts to introduce questions to be discussed in class, and a choice between writing a single final paper or two shorter papers.

LANGUAGE & POWER FALL 2019

LIN 393S / CGS 380 / PHL 391

READINGS

1 primary and 1 secondary per week to be selected from the following:

Altheide, David L., and John M. Johnson. Bureaucratic Propaganda. 1980. Bartlett, F. C. Political Propaganda. 1940. Bernays, Edward L., Propaganda, Routledge, 1928. Bolinger, Dwight. 1980. Language: The Loaded Weapon; The Use and Abuse of Language Today. Longman. Burnett, Heather, Signalling games, sociolinguistic variation and the construction of style, Linguistics and Philosophy, 1-32 Burnett, Heather. (accepted). "A Persona-based Semantics for Slurs". article accepted in Gratzer Philosophische Studien, special issue on non-derogatory uses of slurs (B. Cepollaro, & D. Zeman (eds.)) Burnett, Heather. (2017). "Sociolinguistic Interaction and Identity Construction: The View from Game-Theoretic Pragmatics." Journal of Sociolinguistics. 22:1. 238-271 Combs, James E., and Dan D. Nimmo. The New Propaganda: The Dictatorship of Palaver in Contemporary Politics. 1993. Cunningham, Stanley B. The Idea of Propaganda: A Reconstruction. Greenwood Publishing Group, 2002. Doob, Leonard W. “Goebbels’ Principles of Propaganda.” (1950) Doob, Leonard. Public Opinion and Propaganda (1966) Eckert, Penelope and Sally McConnell-Ginet, “Communities of Practice: Where Language, Gender, and Power All Live,” chap. 5 of Sally McConnell-Ginet, Gender, Sexuality, and Meaning: Linguistic Practice and Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 93–106. Ellul, Jacques. Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes. 1965 (1st published in French 1962) Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2008), (pp. 1–23.) Fricker, Miranda. 2007. Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing. Oxford. Haslanger, Sally. 2012 (2010). “Language, Politics, and ‘The Folk’: Looking for ‘The Meaning’ of ‘Race’.” In Resisting Reality: Social Construction and Social Critique. Ed. Haslanger, Sally. 429-445. Henderson, Robert and Elin McCready, Dogwhistles and the At-Issue/Non-At-Issue Distinction, in Secondary Content, The Semantics and Pragmatics of Side Issues, Current Research in the Semantics / Pragmatics Interface, Volume: 37 (2019) Herbert, Cassie and Rebecca Kukla, “Ingrouping, Outgrouping, and the Pragmatics of Peripheral Speech,” Journal of the American Philosophical Association 2:4 (2016), pp. 576–96 Herman, Edward S., and Noam Chomsky. Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. 1988 Hill, Jane H. 2008. The Everyday Language of White Racism Wiley-Blackwell Jeshion, Robin. "Slur creation, bigotry formation: the power of expressivism." Phenomenology and Mind 11 (2016): 130-139. Jowett, Garth, and Victoria O’Donnell. Propaganda and Persuasion. 2018 (7th ed; 1st ed 1986) Klemperer, Victor. Language of the Third Reich: LTI: Lingua Tertii Imperii. A&C Black, 2006. Kukla, Rebecca. 2014. “Performative Force, Convention, and Discursive Injustice.” Hypatia 29.2, 440–457. Kukla, Rebecca & Mark Lance. 2009. ‘Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’: The topography of the space of reasons. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. See esp. ch. 6, “Vocatives, acknowledgments, and the pragmatics of recognition,” ch. 7, “The essential second person,” [communication & calling] and ch. 8, “Sharing a world.” [interpellation] Langton, Rae, “Beyond Belief: Pragmatics in Hate Speech and Pornography,” in Speech and Harm, pp. 72–93.Langton, Rae, Sally Haslanger, and Luvell Anderson. 2012. “Language and Race.” In The Routledge Companion to the Philosophy of Language. Ed. Gillian Russell and Delia Graff Fara. 753-767. Langton, Rae and Caroline West, “Scorekeeping in a Pornographic Language Game,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 77:3 (1999), pp. 303–19; henceforth SPL, followed by page number. Lasswell, Harold D. Propaganda Technique in the World War. 1927. Leslie, Sarah-Jane. 2017. The Original Sin of Cognition: Fear, Prejudice and Generalization. The Journal of Philosophy 114(8). 1-29. Leslie, Sarah-Jane and Adam Lerner. Generic Generalizations. In Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Ed. E. Zalta. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/generics Maass, Anne, “Linguistic Intergroup Bias: Stereotyle Perpetuation Through Language”, Advances in Experimental Social Psychology 31 (1999): 79-212 Manne, Kate. 2016. “Humanism: A Critique.” Social Theory and Practice, April 2016, Volume 42(2): 389-415. Manne, Kate, Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018 Marlin, Randal. Propaganda and the Ethics of Persuasion. 2002. (2nd ed. 2013) MacKinnon, Catharine A., Only Words (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993) McConnell-Ginet, Sally, Gender, Sexuality, and Meaning: Linguistic Practice and Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 165–6 McConnell-Ginet, Sally, Words Matter: Meaning and Power, to appear, Cambridge University Press McGowan, Mary Kate “Oppressive Speech,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 87:3 (2009) McGowan, Mary Kate. 2012. “On ‘Whites Only’ Signs and Racist Hate Speech.” In Speech and Harm: Controversies over Free Speech. Ed. Ishani Maitra and Mary Kate McGowan. Oxford University Press. 121-147. Mills, Charles W. 2017. Black Rights/White Wrongs: The Critique of Racial Liberalism Oxford University Press. Moran, Terence P. “Propaganda as Pseudocommunication.” Et Cetera 2 (1979): 181–97. Nunberg, Geoff 2018. “The Social Life of Slurs.” In Fogal, Harris, and Moss, eds., 296-316. Olsen, Curt, 2005, "Bernay vs. Ellul: Two views of propaganda". Public Relations Tactics 12(7), p. 28 Popa-Wyatt, Mihaela, and Jeremy L. Wyatt. "Slurs, roles and power." Philosophical Studies 175.11 (2018): 2879-2906. Porter, Shanette C., Michelle Rheinschmidt-Same, and Jennifer A. Richeson, “Inferring Identity from Language: Linguistic Intergroup Bias Informs Social Categorization,” Psychological Science 27:1 (2016), pp. 94–102 Ross, “Understanding Propaganda.” (2002) Saul, Jennifer. 2017a. “Are Generics Especially Pernicious?” Inquiry. 1-18. Saul, Jennifer. 2017b. Racial Figleaves, the Shifting Boundaries of the Permissible, and the Rise of Donald Trump. Philosophical Topics. 45.2. 97-116. Saul, Jennifer. 2018. “Dogwhistles, Political Manipulation, and Philosophy of Language.” In New Work on Speech Acts. Eds. Fogal, Daniel, Daniel W. Harris, and Matt Moss. Oxford Scholarship Online. 360-383. Sidanius, Jim and Felicia Pratto, Social Dominance: An Intergroup Theory of Social Hierarchy and Oppression (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Sproule, Channels of Propaganda. (1994) Stanley, Jason. 2015. How Propaganda Works. Princeton University Press. Swanson, Eric. Forthcoming. “Slurs and Ideologies.” In Ideology, ed. by Robin Celikates, Sally Haslanger, and Jason Stanley, Oxford University Press. Tirrell, Lynne. 2012. Genocidal language games. In Ishani Maitra & Mary Kate McGowan, eds, Speech and Harm: Controversies over Free Speech. Oxford University Press, 174-221.