Research
Research Overview
My primary research program sits at the intersection of the philosophy of language, social and political philosophy, feminist philosophy, and action theory. My research explores how we perform speech acts—promises, apologies, jokes, orders, threats, compliments—with others. The Social Contestation theory of speech acts I develop aims to illuminate the ways that the speech acts we perform are not under our control—speakers can sometimes be made to perform unintended speech acts, both justly and unjustly—and builds on efforts to identify and counter forms of speech-based injustice. A second thread of my research is concerned with how power shapes our practices of knowing. I investigate whether, and under what conditions, suspending judgment is an appropriate epistemic response to a sexual violence claim and explore how participating in protests can generate moral learning.
Below, I have included abstracts for my research projects in progress (click the titles to see the abstracts).
Philosophy of Language: The Ethics and Politics of Speech Acts
Speech acts, like apologies and orders, are actions we perform with words. My research challenges us to move away from an individualistic theory of speech acts, where the focus is on the speaker and the moment at which they speak, and towards a more fully social theory of speech acts.
Some key claims I argue for are:
Speakers are not always in control of which speech acts they perform—speakers can perform unintended speech acts, including threats, urgings, and orders.
Instead of understanding speech acts, like apologies, as actions that are performed in an instant, we should instead conceptualize speech acts as temporally extended processes.
Under some conditions, a speaker who intends to refuse can be unjustly forced to perform a speech act of consent.
Publications & Works in Progress
-
Co-authored with Kai Tanter. We look at a problem case for the relationship between speaker intent and audience uptake. If a speaker says “no”, intending to refuse sex, but her addressee gives the utterance uptake as a speech act of consent, does the speaker refuse or consent? We argue that: 1) addressee uptake can unjustly force a speaker to perform a speech act of consent, and 2) this is a distinctive way speakers can be wronged. However, we also argue that the addressee’s uptake is not the only form of uptake that matters—the broader discursive community’s uptake matters too, and can override the addressee’s uptake, constituting the speaker’s utterance as the speech act it was intended to be.
-
I develop a theory of speech acts as actions which unfold over time. Within speech act theory, it is commonly accepted that speech acts are performed instantaneously, in the moment of utterance. Drawing on apologies as a case study, I argue that this assumption about the temporal structure of speech acts is ill-equipped to explain important elements of speech acts which take place after the moment of utterance, such as the addressee’s acceptance or rejection of an apology. As illustrative examples, I consider Joseph Biden’s apology to Anita Hill and the Australian national apology to the Stolen Generations of Aboriginal children. As an alternative, I propose a novel theory of speech acts as a kind of temporally extended process, which involves both the speaker and their addressee. Apologies, I argue, are best understood as actions which unfold over time, like building a house or baking bread.
Draft available on request.
-
I argue that speakers can perform unintended speech acts, including threats, urgings, and orders. Within speech act theory, it is standardly supposed that speakers can only perform speech acts they intend to perform. I examine a range of disputes over which speech act a speaker performed, including whether catcalls (like “Come over here and let me get a look at that a**!”) are compliments or threats and whether former President Trump’s call to “fight like hell” in his January 6 speech was an order or merely an assertion. I argue that these uptake disputes demonstrate that we accept the possibility that a speaker can unintentionally perform some speech acts. I then defend the idea that speakers can reasonably be held responsible for some unintended speech acts—I argue that we can hold a speaker morally accountable for an unintended illocutionary act iff the speaker should reasonably expect that their utterance will be given uptake as an unintended illocutionary act.
-
Prominent accounts of illocutionary silencing and other forms of discursive injustice (Langton 1993; Kukla 2014; McKinney 2016) have proposed that speakers can be unjustly prevented from performing some speech acts (like refusal and protest) and can be forced to perform other speech acts. Using the #MeToo Movement, Black Twitter, and transgender activism as key case studies, I argue that the creation of alternate speech communities is a key social mechanism for challenging discursive injustice. Even in contexts where dominant power structures and norms deny marginalized speakers the uptake their speech deserves, alternate speech communities can provide marginalized speakers with a crucial form of discursive agency by offering their speech just uptake. I conclude by considering the limitations of speech communities under conditions of oppression.
Social and Political Epistemology: The Epistemology of Protests & Sexual Assault Claims
Another thread of my research explores how power and oppression shape our practices of knowing. More specifically, in two papers in progress, I explore both how unjust power relations shape how we conceptualize suspending judgment in sexual violence cases and how some forms of resistance to oppression can generate moral learning about how systems of oppression function.
Works in Progress
-
I examine whether we ought to suspend judgment in response to sexual violence claims. In cases where there is conflicting testimony about sexual violence (so-called “he said, she said” cases), it is often suggested that ordinary epistemic agents ought to suspend judgment about sexual violence claims in an attempt to remain epistemically neutral. I argue against what I call the business as usual approach to suspending judgment, where epistemic agents act as if an act of sexual violence did not take place. Drawing on William James’ (1897) discussion of religious belief, I argue that adopting the business as usual approach in sexual violence cases unjustly prioritizes the testimony of the accused and forces the accuser into a kind of limbo. Presenting this way of responding to sexual violence claims as epistemically neutral is a form of what I call epistemic hypocrisy. Genuinely suspending judgment in sexual violence cases requires us to act in a way which is consistent with both possibilities—the accused person’s guilt and their innocence. I conclude that suspending judgment is a lot more difficult to do than is commonly supposed. We often have to take a side, rather than attempt a form of fence-sitting.
-
I explore the relationship between oppressive ideologies, political resistance, and moral learning. Oppressive ideologies present prevailing forms of social order as natural, inevitable, and unchangeable. Given this, an important question for moral epistemologists is: what kinds of experiences or practices can undermine the influence of oppressive ideologies and facilitate the moral learning of the oppressed? Using the 1936 Flint sit-down strike as a case study, I argue that disruptive protests are an important form of collective action which can provide members of oppressed and exploited groups with an “experiential break” (Haslanger 2017) through which they can come to recognize the extent of their own power and agency. The Flint sit-down strikers’ experiences of self-organization, egalitarian decision-making procedures, and the temporary reversal of pre-existing power arrangements are features of many disruptive protests which can give participants epistemically and morally transformative insights into how things could be. I end by considering whose moral learning disruptive protests ought to be oriented towards. Some accounts of the value of protest (Anderson 2014) suggest that disruptive protests are important because they challenge the moral biases of members of dominant social groups. I argue that disruptive protests can generate important forms of moral learning in contexts where dominant groups are resistant to acknowledging the moral worth of the oppressed.