Truth is Stranger than Diction
Abstract: It has been thirty years since Rae Langton published “Speech Acts and Unspeakable Acts.” In that time we have seen many theoretical developments in the areas of social philosophy of language and social epistemology, and important advancements in how we think about language and social realities. This lecture will be an appraisal and a step back. My focus will be on arguments about silencing and cognate phenomena, what they do well, and how they disappoint. I will present a fairly skeptical view of the value of philosophy of language in predicting, explaining, or remedying silencing, insofar as any phenomenon can be identified. I then turn to a reading of J.L. Austin on action, and why I think he would also be skeptical of contemporary applications of speech act theory.