Linguistic Intervention and Transformative Communicative Disruptions

Abstract

What words we use, and what meanings they have, is important. We shouldn’t use slurs; we should use ‘rape’ to include spousal rape (for centuries we didn’t); we should have a word which picks out the sexual harassment suffered by people in the workplace and elsewhere (for centuries we didn’t). Sometimes we need to change the word-meaning pairs in circulation, either by getting rid of the pair completely (slurs), changing the meaning (as we did with ‘rape’), or adding brand new word-meaning pairs (as with ‘sexual harassment’). A problem, though, is how to do this. One might worry that any attempt to change language in this way will lead to widespread miscommunication and confusion. I argue that this is indeed so, but that’s a feature, not a bug, of attempting to change word-meaning pairs. The miscommunications and confusion such changes cause can lead us, via a process I call transformative communicative disruption, to reflect on our language and its use, and this can further, rather than hinder, our goal of improving language.

What Should Conceptual Engineering Be All About?

“…The first alternative is a general one that consists of two opposite options: On the one hand, the principled views , which take conceptual engineering to be about some specified representational devices (viz., concepts, linguistic meanings, lexical items, conceptions, speaker-meanings, etc. ); and on the other hand, the unprincipled views which, building on anti-foundationalism (be it implicitly or not), take conceptual engineering to be about any kind of representational device more or less indistinctly, that is, with no need for further specification (e.g., Burgess 2020; Burgess and Plunkett 2020;Cantalamessa 2019;Nado 2019;Prinzing 2018;Sterken 2020;Tanswell 2018).…”

Fake news, conceptual engineering, and linguistic resistance: reply to Pepp, Michaelson and Sterken, and Brown

“…A related concern is that the theoretical case for abandonment will forbid us from generating any new terms, since neologisms will often go through a period of growing pains as they settle into place (Brown 2019: 147), (Pepp, Michaelson, and Sterken 2019a), (Sterken 2019).…”

“…And, the kind of radical abandonment practiced by groups like Group 47 disregards the necessity considerations that I built into the political argument for abandonment, leaving a language stripped of descriptive resources. The lesson is that linguistic resistance projects need to embrace a bundle of different strategies, including contestation, correction, and disruption (Komska, Moyd, and Gramling 2019), as well as discourse-level interventions (Tirrell 2018), (Langton 2019), metalinguistic negation (Haslanger 2012 C4), communicative disruptions (Sterken 2019), and positive propaganda (Stanley 2015). Linguistic resistance projects also need to work together with positive ameliorative projects to cultivate terms that are suitable for better political projects.…”

Metalinguistic proposals

“…Metalinguistic proposals are speech acts that involve an intention for an audience to come to have a reason to use or understand the use of a linguistic expression in a particular way. They are related to what Barker (2002, p. 2) calls a "metalinguistic use" of language, which "communicate[s] something about how to use a certain word appropriately", and what Plunkett and Sundell (2013) call a "metalinguistic negotiation", or what Ludlow (2014) calls "lexical warfare", and they can play a role in what has been called "conceptual engineering" (Cappelen, 2018), "conceptual ethics" (Burgess and Plunkett, 2013), and "linguistic interventions" (Sterken, 2019). The following passage, which occurs in the context of an online debate over whether to use the expressions "battle rifle" and "assault rifle" to describe certain firearms, makes a metalinguistic proposal in its final line (linguistic errors and inconsistency in observation of the use/mention distinction are preserved from the original): * Thanks to Eliot Michaelson, Rachel Sterken, audiences at the Uppsala Online Speech Workshop, the New College for the Humanities Cognitive Science Research Group, and an anonymous referee for discussion of the issues in this paper.…”

“…How do metalinguistic proposals and authoritative metalinguistic directives relate to the rich variety of neighboring theoretical concepts, such as "conceptual engineering" (Cappelen, 2018), "conceptual ethics" (Burgess and Plunkett, 2013), "lexical warfare" (Ludlow, 2014), "metalinguistic negotiation" (Plunkett and Sundell, 2013), "linguistic interventions" (Sterken, 2019), and "ameliorative projects" (Haslanger, 2012)?…”