Leo Townsend

Full paper available open access at https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0020174X.2023.2220359

Since Austin’s introduction of the locutionary-illocutionary-perlocutionary distinction, it has been a matter of debate within speech act theory whether illocutionary acts like promising, warning, refusing and telling require audience ‘uptake’ in order to be performed. Philosophers on different sides of this debate have tried to support their positions by appealing to hypothetical scenarios, designed to elicit intuitive judgements about the role of uptake. However, philosophers’ intuitions appeared to remain deadlocked, while laypeople’s intuitions have not yet been probed. To begin rectifying that, we ran two experiments probing lay intuitions about the implications of uptake failure. Overall, we found that participants’ responses were skewed towards agreement that speech acts were performed, despite the lack of uptake. There were, however, significant differences across the four different speech act types we investigated (with the highest levels of agreement found for refusing, followed by warning, then telling, and finally promising). We also obtained evidence of complex effects relating to the (high or low) stakes involved in the scenarios. While this study only represents an initial exploration of intuitions about uptake, our results form a basis for further research into their nature and significance, across a range of speech acts, scenarios, and experimental designs.

Sometimes an individual gets taken as speaking for a wider group without laying claim to any such authority – they are thrust unwillingly, and sometimes even unknowingly, into the role of that group’s representative. Especially for members of subordinated social groups in certain contexts, this can be hard to shake: despite their best efforts to disavow any authority to speak in the name of others, their voice might be taken as the voice of their group. In this paper we explore the intuitive injustice involved in such cases. After establishing the felicity conditions of speaking for a group, we argue that certain forms of pernicious ignorance often stand in the way of the fulfilment of these conditions. The result is a distinctive kind of ‘epistemic violence’, which can result in the silencing of both the group that is taken to be spoken for, and the spokesperson who is taken to speak for them.

In this paper we examine the epistemic treatment of Indigenous peoples by the Inter-American Court and Commission on Human Rights, two institutions that have sought to affirm the rights of Indigenous peoples in the wake of colonialism and industrial encroachment onto Indigenous land. The Court and Commission have sought to do this in two ways. First, they have insisted on a right to consultation, according to which any Indigenous peoples who would be affected by industrial activity must be given a say in the decision-making process. Second, they have given an expansive interpretation of the right to property in order to encompass Indigenous relations to land. We argue that although the right to consultation and the expanded right to property have led to a number of landmark legal victories for Indigenous peoples, they nonetheless have an epistemic dark side in that they foster forms of epistemic injustice. What happens in the course of consultation often involves a kind of epistemic objectification of Indigenous testimony that amounts to radical testimonial injustice. And the requirement that Indigenous peoples frame their relation to land in the language of ‘property’ stifles their ability to articulate that relation, thus amounting to a hermeneutical injustice.

Over the past few decades, Indigenous communities have successfully campaigned for greater inclusion in decision-making processes that directly affect their lands and livelihoods. As a result, two important participatory rights for Indigenous peoples have now been widely recognized: the right to consultation and the right to free, prior and informed consent (FPIC). Although these participatory rights are meant to empower the speech of these communities-to give them a proper say in the decisions that most affect them-we argue that the way these rights have been implemented and interpreted sometimes has the opposite effect, of denying them a say or 'silencing' them. In support of this conclusion we draw on feminist speech act theory to identify practices of locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary group silencing that arise in the context of consultation with Indigenous communities.

It is common in popular depictions to portray the attitude of trusting and the norms associated with rationality as standing in some kind of tension. In this article, we suggest a way of capturing this tension, and explore some recent attempts at resolving it.

Although understanding fanaticism-its character, its causes, and its cures-was a major theme in the work of Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Hobbes, Locke and others, it is a topic that receives very little philosophical attention today. This is a pity, since not only does fanaticism appear to be thriving in contemporary society, it also seems to be changing in ways and at a pace we are yet to fully understand. This suggests that renewed attention to various questions about fanaticism is merited. What exactly is fanaticism? What are its distinctive features? What are its causes? Is religious fanaticism-in its disconcerting contemporary return-an exemplary or rather the paradigmatic form of fanaticism? And how can it be combatted or curtailed? Our workshop aims to address these and other questions by focusing on the following four themes: the epistemology of fanaticism; fanaticism and affectivity; fanaticism and collectivity; and political aspects of fanaticism. We welcome contributions from disciplines as diverse as philosophy of religion, anthropology of religion, phenomenology, social and political philosophy, epistemology, and philosophy of emotions, with interdisciplinary accounts being especially encouraged.

Imagine a group of kids kicking a ball around, evolving certain patterns of play, and, over time, shared skills and a shared practice. Imagine further that they jointly form intentions to meet regularly, that they evolve a narrative, a body of beliefs about how their group and their game came about, and negotiate a set of rules for it, which is passed on in the oral tradition. Finally, imagine these rules are written down, various kinds of functionaries are appointed to enforce them and to organize various aspects of the sport, fixed procedures are put into place for electing these officials and for resolving disagreements within the organization, and so on. This vignette is supposed to illustrate that there are different layers or levels of collective intentionality. These layers can roughly be distinguished as the pre-conceptual layer of joint attention, joint bodily action, shared emotions and corresponding dispositions; the conceptual layer of we-beliefs, we-intentions and other joint propositional attitudes; and the documental layer of institutional reality. Similar distinctions have sometimes been drawn in the literature. For example, Mike Tomasello distinguishes collective from joint intentionality and partly grounds this distinction in an account of their ontogeny and phylogeny. Others have emphasized the importance of writing and documentation for some (Barry Smith) or even all (Maurizio Ferraris) forms of collective intentionality. Yet others have given accounts of collective intentionality which are explicitly restricted in scope, for example to small-scale cooperative activity (Michael Bratman). Such work raises the question what a unified account of collective intentionality might look like and what role, if any, a distinction between layers might play in such an account.

This edited book creatively explores and uncovers new ways of understanding the intersections between human rights and the environment, as well as introducing readers to the ways in which we can use new methodologies, case studies and approaches in human rights to address environmental issues.

Interdisciplinary in nature, this Research Agenda recognises and engages with the short-comings and problematic framings of traditional approaches to human rights and environmental law. Keeping these limits and failings unflinchingly in view, it identifies potential opportunities to maximise the law’s effectiveness, providing readers with a thought-provoking agenda for future research. Contributions also call for resistant, transformative and inclusive research and practice in the area of human rights and the environment, using human rights law to center the knowledge, practices, laws and priorities of marginalised groups in addressing environmental injustice.

This edited volume examines the relationship between collective intentionality and inferential theories of meaning. The book consists of three main sections. The first part contains essays demonstrating how researchers working on inferentialism and collective intentionality can learn from one another. The essays in the second part examine the dimensions along which philosophical and empirical research on human reasoning and collective intentionality can benefit from more cross-pollination. The final part consists of essays that offer a closer examination of themes from inferentialism and collective intentionality that arise in the work of Wilfrid Sellars.

Groups, Norms and Practices provides a template for continuing an interdisciplinary program in philosophy and the sciences that aims to deepen our understanding of human rationality, language use, and sociality.

In this chapter, we argue that approaches to consultation that purport to give affected Peoples a chance to speak without ensuring that what they say is heard, do not amount to consultation in any meaningful sense. We demonstrate this, making use of the theoretical framework of epistemic injustice, by outlining some of the many ways in which Peoples are not heard, facing instead practices of hermeneutical and testimonial injustice. As a result, the right to consultation, we find, needs to be recognized as a right to be heard. More work needs to be done to articulate exactly what a right to be heard entails and demands, but we have suggested a few possible guidelines for the realization of this right.