Sometimes, It Is Just Words: Norm-Setting as Negotiation

Australasian Philosophical Review 5 (2):196-202 (2021)
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Abstract

ABSTRACT McGowan’s notion of norm ‘enactment’ is the linchpin of her practical project, designed to provide an objective standard that circumvents the need to assess actual subjective uptake of discriminatory norms proposed by racist utterances in public spaces. However, the essential role of uptake to potential norm-imposing utterances—and responses like dismissing, countermanding, and ignoring—cannot be waved away. Contributions to conversations, and even more so to other social interactions, do not exert the normative compulsion upon participants that McGowan’s theory needs. People’s words, even their ugly words, are not invariably norm ‘enactments’ that ‘constitute harm’—sometimes they are just words.

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Lawrence Lengbeyer
United States Naval Academy

Citations of this work

Response to Critics.Mary Kate McGowan - 2021 - Australasian Philosophical Review 5 (2):211-220.

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References found in this work

Scorekeeping in a language game.David Lewis - 1979 - Journal of Philosophical Logic 8 (1):339--359.
Just Words: On Speech and Hidden Harm: An Overview and an Application.Mary Kate McGowan - 2021 - Australasian Philosophical Review 5 (2):129-149.
Conversational Exercitives and the Force of Pornography.Mary Kate Mcgowan - 2003 - Philosophy and Public Affairs 31 (2):155-189.

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