Berlin Workshop on Speech and Harm

Fraunhoferstraße FH420

Fraunhoferstraße  33–36

10623 Berlin, DE

Each session will have 45 minutes for presentation,  25 minutes for discussion.

Title: "Dynamics of Social Meaning"

Chair: Quill R Kukla

Abstract: Our bodies, words and other social displays have a distinctive kind of meaning. Our social groups and practices are cohered by norms which dictate what people like us do in situations like the one we’re in. This means that social interaction depends crucially on interpreting bodies, words, and other displays as indicating what kind of agents we are, what kind of situation we’re in, and what activity we’re undertaking — that is their social meaning. This work explores the limitations of modeling the social meaning of various signals in a static framework where they have a specific content. I will argue instead that they have only a probabilistic potential to activate social norms. I apply this model to slurs, protest, and contested social kind terms. Building on work by many others, I illustrate how a dynamic account of these social meanings is both more empirically adequate and politically valuable than a static one centered on content, or even affect, transmission.

Title: "Normative generics in the Rational Speech Act framework"

Chair: TBD

Abstract: TBA

Participants will organize into smaller groups and visit one of the many nearby restaurants. 

Title: "Strategizing Scientific-Society Speak"

Chair: TBD

Abstract: Scientific societies occasionally issue decrees or guidelines aimed at governing member behavior or influencing individuals in related communities.  Such statements can move beyond the mere articulation of existing norms or conventions and seek to establish new ones.  But normative engineering projects can also come with special risk, relative to other governance organizations, to perceived legitimacy of scientific societies.  Here I examine an ongoing project by the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology (SVP) to engineer compliance by their members with a moratorium on publication using amber specimens sourced from Myanmar before 2017.  The SVP’s moratorium requires cooperation from both specialist and generalist journal editors for its enforcement.  The case exposes a difficult position from which scientific organizations may be operating during normative engineering projects like this one.  Examination of the case also suggests some strategies for scientific-society speak that could reduce the risk of said speech harming via delegitimization with members or the public.

Title: "Nonverbal Communicative Habits of Resistance"

Chair: Willow Starr

Abstract: In this paper, I identify a particular use of nonverbal communication in marginalized communities as a form of everyday resistance. I utilize Merleau-Ponty to show how nonverbal resistance can occur habitually and often without conscious attention. Furthermore, I argue that these communicative habits of resistance are beneficial in building the groundwork for collective action. To illustrate this phenomenon, I use the case of side-eyeing in black communities. Side-eyeing in response to racist microaggressions, slurs, stereotyping, and more, is a communicative act of resistance as it refuses racial subordination, but need not require cognitive deliberation. Ultimately, communicative habits of resistance can function as community-building practices of protest and are worthy of consideration within philosophy of language and philosophical discourse on resistance.

Title: "Hermeneutical injustice via social meaning"

Chair: TBD

Abstract: Landmark work by Fricker (2007) defines epistemic injustice as a kind of wrong done to someone in their capacity as a knower. In that work, she discusses two subtypes: (i) testimonial injustice, which concerns decreasing the credibility of an interlocutor, and thus their contributions, in virtue of prejudice or bias, (ii) hermeneutical injustice, in which a society's shared interpretive resources disadvantage a person in terms of their ability to understand their experiences.

Against this backdrop, we take up recent work by Flores, which, through the example of "trauma narratives" by expelled colonists, establishes that hermeneutical injustice does not only flow from lacunas or the prevalence of bad interpretive resources. Facially neutral (i.e., not bad) and accessible (i.e., no lacuna) conceptual frames like "X was a victim in event E and traumatized by it" can be deployed in a way that leads to hermeneutical injustice. Utiilizing work by McCready and Henderson on the reliability of testimonial evidence in a social meaning setting (Henderson and McCready 2025), we build a formal pragmatic model of hermeneutical injustice applicable to the Flores case, which produces an improved account of its pragmatic source. The model also links hermeneutical injustice to testimonial injustice, making the latter prior to the former in this case. This is an important result because it contradicts previous literature, which takes hermeneutical injustice to lead to testimonial injustice, rather than the reverse.

Concluding Remarks