Class 3: Silencing

One kind of action is speech, and one kind of participant response is listening.  So over-projecting noise onto speech creates a distinctive kind of silencing – attributive silencing.  Today we’ll explore the concept of silencing and how attributive silencing is like and unlike more familiar philosophical models for understanding silencing.  We’ll also discuss why understanding the kinds of mistakes that we make about the signal/noise distinction can illuminate what that distinction really is, by analogy to the way that illusions are used in the science of perception.

The main assigned reading for today’s class is chapters 3 and 4 from When Things Get Personal. These chapters split parts one and two of the book - chapter 3 wraps up part one and sets the argumentative agenda of part two, and chapter 4 is the first of the applied chapters in part two and shows where the cumulative argument of part two is going and illustrates how the overall argument is supposed to take us there.

For this week I also suggest, if you haven’t read them before, doing some background reading on silencing. The ordering between my “suggested” options and my “also recommended” options is not strong, except that the “suggested” items are more closely connected to the kind of silencing discussed in When Things Get Personal and the others are more in the way of background reading on the kinds of ways that philosophers have theorized about silencing before this.

My “also recommended” readings for this week provide some of the backdrop for the discussion of silencing in analytic feminist philosophy, much of which has been part of the philosophy of language, though there is also a substantial literature about silencing that is downstream from thinking about testimonial injustice as a form of epistemic injustice. Langton’s ‘Speech Acts and Unspeakable Acts’ is the article that launched this literature (though Jennifer Hornsby independently developed the same line of thought at about the same time), and Maitra’s ‘Silencing Speech’ is I think particularly helpful.