Abstract

Manipulative speech is ubiquitous and pernicious. We encounter it continually in both private conversation and public discourse, and it is a core component of propaganda, whose wide-ranging insidious effects are well-known. Much recent work has been devoted to investigating particular forms of manipulative speech, but this work leaves the nature of manipulative speech itself intuitive or implicit, and so leaves us without a general account of what manipulative speech is or how it functions. In this paper I develop a theory of manipulative speech. On my view, manipulative speech involves a deliberate, coordinated violation of the two core Gricean norms of conversation: Cooperativity and Publicity. A manipulative speaker violates Cooperativity to further her goals at the expense of the audience’s. But the manipulative speaker also violates Publicity in intending, and taking steps to ensure, that her speech _appears_ cooperative. Thus, in a slogan, manipulative speech is _covertly strategic speech_. I go on to show how this view unifies various forms of manipulative speech discussed in the literature and serves as the basis for a novel, attractive definition of propaganda.