Hate speech and misinformation are rife. How to respond? Counterspeech proposals say: with more and better speech. This paper considers the treatment of counterspeech in Maxime Lepoutre’s Democratic Speech In Divided Times. Lepoutre provides a nuanced defence of counterspeech. Some counterspeech, he grants, is flawed. But, he says: counterspeech can be debugged. Once we understand why counterspeech fails – when fail it does – we can engineer more effective counterspeech strategies. Lepoutre argues that the failures of counterspeech (...) can be theorised using the ideology of salience. Negative counterspeech fails because it reinforces the salience of the very ideas or associations that it contests. His solution? Positive counterspeech – a form of counterspeech which avoids the salience trap. I argue that the salience paradigm is ill-suited to theorise the failures of counterspeech. I suggest some alternatives. Further, I show that these alternative paradigms make importantly different practical recommendations – recommendations concerning how we ought to engineer our counterspeech – from those issued by the salience paradigm. (shrink)

It is widely held that free speech is a distinctive and privileged social kind. But what is free speech? In particular, is there any unified phenomenon that is both free speech and which is worthy of the special value traditionally attached to free speech? We argue that a descendent of the classic Millian justification of free speech is in fact a justification of a more general social condition; and, via an argument that 'free speech' (...) names whatever natural social kind is justified by the best arguments, that free speech is therefore this more general condition. This condition involves not merely the orthodox freedom (in some sense) of speakers to distribute words, but also two less frequently acknowledged dimensions of free speech: audience understanding and consideration. We conclude with some discussion of the policy implications of this conception of free speech. (shrink)

Most of the time our utterances are automatically interpreted as speech acts: as assertions, conjectures and testimonies; as orders, requests and pleas; as threats, offers and promises. Surprisingly, the cognitive correlates of this essential component of human communication have received little attention. This book fills the gap by providing a model of the psychological processes involved in interpreting and understanding speech acts. The theory is framed in naturalistic terms and is supported by data on language development and on (...) autism spectrum disorders. Mikhail Kissine does not presuppose any specific background and addresses a crucial pragmatic phenomenon from an interdisciplinary perspective. This is a valuable resource for academic researchers and graduate and undergraduate students in pragmatics, semantics, cognitive linguistics, psycholinguistics and philosophy of language. (shrink)

Speakers often do not state requests directly but employ innuendos such as Would you like to see my etchings? Though such indirectness seems puzzlingly inefficient, it can be explained by a theory of the strategic speaker, who seeks plausible deniability when he or she is uncertain of whether the hearer is cooperative or antagonistic. A paradigm case is bribing a policeman who may be corrupt or honest: A veiled bribe may be accepted by the former and ignored by the latter. (...) Everyday social interactions can have a similar payoff structure (with emotional rather than legal penalties) whenever a request is implicitly forbidden by the relational model holding between speaker and hearer (e.g., bribing an honest maitre d’, where the reciprocity of the bribe clashes with his authority). Even when a hearer’s willingness is known, indirect speech offers higher-order plausible deniability by preempting certainty, gossip, and common knowledge of the request. In supporting experiments, participants judged the intentions and reactions of characters in scenarios that involved fraught requests varying in politeness and directness. (shrink)

It is raining but you don’t believe that it is raining. Imagine accepting this claim. Then you are committed to saying ‘It is raining but I don’t believe that it is raining’. This would be an ‘absurd’ thing to claim or assert, yet what you say might be true. It might be raining, while at the same time, you are completely ignorant of the state of the weather. But how can it be absurd of you to assert something about yourself (...) that might be true of you? This is Moore’s paradox as it occurs in speech. What is the source of the absurdity? And why does it strike us that a contradiction is somehow at work when there is no contradiction in the content of what is asserted? In Section 2, I describe Moore’s formulation of the paradox and evaluate his own solutions. In Section 3, I discuss Wittgenstein’s inf luence in solving the paradox. In Section 4, I discuss Shoemaker’s priority thesis that once the absurdity in belief has been explained, then this will translate into an explanation of the absurdity in assertion. In Section 5, I discuss work on omissive and commissive Moore-paradoxical assertions, i.e. those of the forms p & I don’t believe that p and p & I believe that not-p. In Section 6, I discuss work on assertions of the form p & I don’t know that p. (shrink)

Inner speech has been shown to vary in form along several dimensions. Along condensation, condensed inner speech forms have been described, that are supposed to be deprived of acoustic, phonological and even syntactic qualities. Expanded forms, on the other extreme, display articulatory and auditory properties. Along dialogality, inner speech can be monologal, when we engage in internal soliloquy, or dialogal, when we recall past conversations or imagine future dialogs involving our own voice as well as that of (...) others addressing us. Along intentionality, it can be intentional (when we deliberately rehearse material in short-term memory) or it can arise unintentionally (during mind wandering). We introduce the ConDialInt model, a neurocognitive predictive control model of inner speech that accounts for its varieties along these three dimensions. ConDialInt spells out the condensation dimension by including inhibitory control at the conceptualization, formulation or articulatory planning stage. It accounts for dialogality, by assuming internal model adaptations and by speculating on neural processes underlying perspective switching. It explains the differences between intentional and spontaneous varieties in terms of monitoring. We present an fMRI study in which we probed varieties of inner speech along dialogality and intentionality, to examine the validity of the neuroanatomical correlates posited in ConDialInt. Condensation was also informally tackled. Our data support the hypothesis that expanded inner speech recruits speech production processes down to articulatory planning, resulting in a predicted signal, the inner voice, with auditory qualities. Along dialogality, covertly using an avatar’s voice resulted in the activation of right hemisphere homologs of the regions involved in internal own-voice soliloquy and in reduced cerebellar activation, consistent with internal model adaptation. Switching from first-person to third-person perspective resulted in activations in precuneus and parietal lobules. Along intentionality, compared with intentional inner speech, mind wandering with inner speech episodes was associated with greater bilateral inferior frontal activation and decreased activation in left temporal regions. This is consistent with the reported subjective evanescence and presumably reflects condensation processes. Our results provide neuroanatomical evidence compatible with predictive control and in favor of the assumptions made in the ConDialInt model. (shrink)

This book review symposium aims to open a space for discussions and questions responded to the book Education between Speech and Writing: Crossing the Boundaries of Dao and Deconstruction, which is...

_Interpretation and Construction _examines the interpretation and products of intentional human behavior, focusing primarily on issues in art, law, and everyday speech. Focuses on artistic interpretation, but also includes extended discussion of interpretation of the law and everyday speech and communication. Written by one of the leading theorists of interpretation. Theoretical discussions are consistently centered around examples for ease of comprehension.

Language has a rich typology of inferential types. It was recently shown that subjects are able to divide the informational content of new visual stimuli among the various slots of the inferential typology: when gestures or visual animations are used in lieu of specific words in a sentence, they can trigger the very same inferential types as language alone (Tieu et al., 2019 ). How general are the relevant triggering algorithms? We show that they extend to the auditory modality and (...) to music cognition. We tested whether pro-speech musical gestures, i.e. musical excerpts that replace words in sentences, can give rise to the same inferences. We show that it is possible to replicate the same typology of inferences using pro-speech music. Minimal and complex musical excerpts can behave just like language, gestures, and visual animations with respect to the logical behavior of their content when embedded in sentences. Specifically, we found that pro-speech music can generate scalar implicatures, presuppositions, supplements, and homogeneity inferences. (shrink)

Recent years have seen recurring episodes of tension between proponents of freedom of speech and advocates of the disenfranchised. Recent survey research attests to the ideological division in attitudes toward free speech, whereby conservatives report greater support for free speech than progressives do. Intrigued by the question of whether “canceling” is indeed a uniquely progressive tendency, we conducted a vignette-based experiment examining judgments of offensiveness among progressives and conservatives. Contrary to the dominant portrayal of progressives and conservatives, (...) our study documented ideological symmetry in their evaluations of offensive speech. When faced with utterances whose content matters to them, both conservatives and progressives viewed outgroup speakers as more offensive than ingroup speakers. A second contribution of this chapter is to provide a deeper understanding of the cognitive mechanism implicated in evaluating outgroup speech as more offensive than ingroup speech. Our results suggest that perception of offensiveness is mediated by ascriptions of intent: we tend to attribute negative intent to the speaker whenever we deem their utterances to be offensive, even against the explicitly stated speaker’s background attitudes. (shrink)

Although others have focused on Catharine MacKinnon's claim that pornography subordinates and silences women, I here focus on her claim that pornography constructs women's nature and that this construction is, in some sense, false. Since it is unclear how pornography, as speech, can construct facts and how constructed facts can nevertheless be false, MacKinnon's claim requires elucidation. Appealing to speech act theory, I introduce an analysis of the erroneous verdictive and use it to make sense of MacKinnon's constructionist (...) claims. I also show that the erroneous verdictive is of more general interest. (shrink)

Ernie Lepore and Herman Cappelen (2005) argue that contextual influences on semantic content are much more restricted than most theorists assume, by presenting three tests for semantic context-sensitivity and concluding that only a very restricted class of expressions pass them. They combine this extreme semantic minimalism with an even more extreme speech-act pluralism, according to which a speaker has said anything that she can be reported as having said. I argue that because Lepore and Cappelen refuse to distinguish what (...) is said from what is claimed, their tests wrongly classify metaphor as semantically context-sensitive. I then argue that our ordinary linguistic practices support a distinction between what is said and what is claimed, and that underwrites a much more moderate form of speech act pluralism. (shrink)

We analyze axioms and postulates as speech acts. After a brief historical appraisal of the concept of axiom in Euclid, Frege, and Hilbert, we evaluate contemporary axiomatics from a linguistic perspective. Our reading is inspired by Hilbert and is meant to account for the assertive, directive, and declarative components of modern axiomatics. We will do this by describing the constitutive and regulative roles that axioms possess with respect to the linguistic practice of mathematics.

Ernie Lepore and Herman Cappelen (2005) argue that contextual influences on semantic content are much more restricted than most theorists assume, by presenting three tests for semantic context-sensitivity and concluding that only a very restricted class of expressions pass them. They combine this extreme semantic minimalism with an even more extreme speech-act pluralism, according to which a speaker has said anything that she can be reported as having said. I argue that because Lepore and Cappelen refuse to distinguish what (...) is said from what is claimed, their tests wrongly classify metaphor as semantically context-sensitive. I then argue that our ordinary linguistic practices support a distinction between what is said and what is claimed, and that underwrites a much more moderate form of speech act pluralism. (shrink)

According to the contemporary consensus, when reaching in the lexicon grammar looks for items like nouns, verbs, and prepositions while logic sees items like predicates, connectives, and quantifiers. In fact, there doesn’t seem to be a single lexical category contemporary grammar and logic both make use of. I hope to show that while a perfect match between the lexical categories of grammar and logic is impossible there can be a substantial overlap. I propose semantic definitions for all the major parts (...) of speech . I argue that the differences among these categories can be captured in terms of distinctions recognized in logic. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to explore the viability of accounting for presumptions as a subtype of verdictives, within the framework of the Austinian approach to speech acts. The available set of felicity conditions is examined and worked out, in order to try and account in particular for a main feature of presumptions, namely, their function in shifting the burden of proof. In order to extend the Austinian framework as required, the notion of pragmatic presupposition accommodation is shown (...) to be a useful device. (shrink)

This paper critiques the version of the argument that the regulation of hateful speech by the state undermines its democratic legitimacy made by Ronald Dworkin and James Weinstein. It argues that in some cases the harmful effects of hateful speech on the democratic process outweigh those of restriction. It does not challenge the central premise of the Legitimacy Argument, that a wide-ranging right to freedom of expression is an essential political right in a liberal democracy. Instead, it uses (...) ideal and nonideal theory as a framework for judgements about the regulation of hate speech. The mistake underpinning the Legitimacy Argument is that it assumes that other conditions pervade that make an ideal democratic procedure possible when they do not. In reality the state can be put in a position where, whatever course of action it takes with regard to the regulation or non-regulation of hate speech, some citizens will not be able to participate fully in political deliberation. Under such conditions there remain strong pro tanto reasons not to regulate hate speech on democratic grounds, but they are not all-things-considered reasons, and there are also pro tanto reasons to regulate hate speech that might outweigh them in some cases. This leads to the cautious conclusion that while there might be a normative justification for the regulation of hate speech in individual instances, the debate is best understood as one between competing pro tanto reasons, and must be approached on a case-by-case basis. (shrink)

In the wake of Citizens United v. the Federal Elections Commission, more companies are spending heavily on political speech, but the moral implications of doing so are not clear. Few business ethicists have directly addressed the moral legitimacy of corporate political speech and the conditions under which it may be morally permissible. My goal here is to outline the moral hazards associated with engaging in corporate political speech. I argue that whether one takes a narrow Friedman-style shareholder (...) primacy view of managerial duty, a broader stakeholder view, or an even more wide-ranging political corporate social responsibility view of the moral duties of business, various moral hazards must be taken into account in determining the moral legitimacy of corporate political speech. I discuss a number of moral hazards endemic to corporate political speech and suggest ways in which business practitioners might avoid those moral hazards. (shrink)

This paper offers a new account of reflective knowledge’s value, building on recent work on the epistemic norms of speech acts. Reflective knowledge is valuable because it licenses us to make guarantees and promises.

first-order HMM, the current tag t0 is predicted based on the previous tag t−1 (and the current word).1 The back- We present a new part-of-speech tagger that ward interaction between t0 and the next tag t+1 shows demonstrates the following ideas: (i) explicit up implicitly later, when t+1 is generated in turn. While unidirectional models are therefore able to capture both use of both preceding and following tag con-.

My main argument in this paper is that the right to freedom of expression is not a single right, complex as it may be, but spans two separate rights that I label the right to speak and the right to hear. Roughly, the right to speak stands for the right of a person to express freely whatever they wish to communicate to some other persons or to the public at large. The right to hear stands for the right to have (...) free and unfettered access to any kind of content that has been communicated by others. The right to speak and the right to hear are two separate rights, grounded in different kinds of interests. I try to show that this division of rights and their respective rationales can be utilized to explain how we think about some of the limits of the right to freedom of expression, particularly in the context of conflicts between the right to speak and the right to hear, conflicts that are rather pervasive. I also argue, though perhaps less conclusively, that in thinking about the limits of freedom of expression, an exclusive focus on the harm principle would be misguided. There is no reason to deny that speech is often harmful, sometimes very much so, but the prevention of harm is not sufficient to justify legal prohibition, at least not in this case. (shrink)

The present paper aims to report on the preliminary findings from the initial stages of ongoing research on hate speech in Lithuanian online comments. Comments are marked strongly by such phenomena as flaming and trolling; therefore, in this genre we can expect a high degree of hostility, obscenity, high incidence of insults and aggressive lexis, which can inflict harm to individuals or organizations. The goal of the current research is thus to make an attempt to identify some features of (...) verbal aggression in Lithuanian by applying the principles and instruments of corpus linguistics, which proved to be a useful approach when dealing with such issues as trolling. It is expected that further analysis of those features will help to identify and define formal linguistic criteria that could facilitate identification of hate speech in public discourse. The data has been obtained from the Lithuanian corpus of user-generated comments collected from one major Lithuanian portal, www.delfi.lt. The corpus consists of all the comments posted in the year 2014 and in total includes 17,909 comments, which make up 1,160,109 words. For the initial data analysis, linguistic aspects, such as wordlists, collocations, and formulaic language, were analysed by using the AntConc software. The interpretations of the results are still very tentative, but what the initial findings show is that overt aggression does not feature among the most frequent and most salient features of comments. Aggression is, in our data, indirectly expressed through creative language use, which can mainly be studied through qualitative analysis. (shrink)

This book presents an accessible and carefully argued challenge to conventional approaches to thinking about free speech. Anthony Leaker provides a richer, more nuanced understanding of what free speech is and how it operates, explaining how free speech arguments are situated within a broader liberal humanist ideology.

Traditionally, writing is viewed as a code that stands in one-to-one correspondence to spoken language, which is therefore also viewed as a code. However, this is a delusion, which is shared by educators and has serious consequences for cognition, both on individual and on social levels. Natural linguistic signs characteristic for the activity of languaging and their symbolizations are ontologically different phenomena; speech and writing belong to experiential domains of different dynamics. These dynamics impact differently on the linguistic/behavioral strategies (...) of individuals and communities, viewed as second- and third-order living systems operating in a consensual domain as structure-determined systems. Failure to acknowledge this contributes to the spread of functional illiteracy in modern societies, which may lead to cognitive/communicative dysfunction. Technology-enhanced new literacies challenge the value of traditional written culture, raising questions about the relationship between speech and writing and their roles in human evolution. (shrink)

Speech recognition by second language (L2) learners in optimal and suboptimal conditions has been examined extensively with English as the target language in most previous studies. This study extended existing experimental protocols ( Wang et al., 2013 ) to investigate Mandarin speech recognition by Japanese learners of Mandarin at two different levels (elementary vs. intermediate) of proficiency. The overall results showed that in addition to L2 proficiency, semantic context, F0 contours, and listening condition all affected the recognition performance (...) on the Mandarin sentences. However, the effects of semantic context and F0 contours on L2 speech recognition diverged to some extent. Specifically, there was significant modulation effect of listening condition on semantic context, indicating that L2 learners made use of semantic context less efficiently in the interfering background than in quiet. In contrast, no significant modulation effect of listening condition on F0 contours was found. Furthermore, there was significant interaction between semantic context and F0 contours, indicating that semantic context becomes more important for L2 speech recognition when F0 information is degraded. None of these effects were found to be modulated by L2 proficiency. The discrepancy in the effects of semantic context and F0 contours on L2 speech recognition in the interfering background might be related to differences in processing capacities required by the two types of information in adverse listening conditions. (shrink)

Background: Many people with aphasia and people without brain injury talk to themselves in their heads, i.e., have “inner speech.” Inner speech may be more preserved compared with spoken speech for some people with aphasia and may serve a variety of functions (e.g., emotion regulation), which motivates us to provide a high-fidelity characterization of it. Researchers have used multiple methods to measure this internal phenomenon in the past, which we combine here for the first time in a (...) single study. -/- Aims: We compare performance between individuals with and without aphasia on inner speech tasks that assess inner speech “inthe- moment” to general subjective impressions of inner speech to tease apart the relationship of aphasia severity to inner speech. Methods and Procedures: Twenty people with mild-moderate aphasia and twenty neurotypical controls completed several inner speech tasks, including objective silent rhyme judgements (picture, written, and auditory), subjective reports of inner speech during naming, and subjective rating scales about inner speech experience more generally. -/- Outcomes and Results: In-the-moment inner speech during silent rhyming tasks was associated with aphasia severity only for picture and written rhyming but not auditory rhyming. In-the-moment inner speech reports during silent naming were not associated with aphasia severity, nor were the subjective ratings about general inner speech experience. Individuals with and without aphasia demonstrated a variety of subjective general inner speech experiences, demonstrating heterogeneity of this phenomenon more broadly. -/- Conclusions: Methods of measuring inner speech complement each other and speak to different facets of the inner speech phenomenon, and clinicians and researchers must carefully choose the method(s) that will provide the information about inner speech that they desire. (shrink)

This paper investigates whether, and if so, in what way, argumentation can be profitably described in speech-act theoretical terms. I suggest that the two theories of argumentation that are supposed to provide the most elaborate analysis of it in speech-act theoretical terms (namely van Eemeren and Rob Grootendorst’s Pragma-Dialectics and Lilian Bermejo-Luque’s linguistic normative model of argumentation) both suffer from the same two flaws: firstly, their “illocutionary act pluralism” assumption and secondly, a lack of interest in where arguing (...) belongs in the classification of illocutionary acts. I argue that these flaws derive from the authors’ reliance on an intention-based speech-theoretical framework. Finally, I adopt a deontic framework for speech acts in order to propose an alternative way of accounting for argumentation which seems to overcome the two limitations outlined above. According to this framework, argumentation may be conceived as a speech act sequence, characterized by the conventional effects brought about by the communicative moves (as illocutionary acts) of which it is composed. (shrink)

Contemporary egalitarian liberals—unlike their classical counterparts—have lived through many contentious events where the right to freedom of expression has been tested to its limits—the Skokie, Illinois, skinhead marches, hate speech incidents on college campuses, Internet pornography and hate speech sites, Holocaust deniers, and cross-burners, to name just a few. Despite this contemporary tumult, freedom of expression has been nearly unanimously affirmed in both the U.S. jurisprudence and philosophical discourse. In what follows, I will examine Ronald Dworkin's influential contemporary (...) justification for freedom of expression, which claims that a thoroughgoing right to freedom of expression is justified by the fact that it guarantees and preserves liberalism's commitment to equality by offering everyone an opportunity to speak, whereas any other policy, such as state regulation, would fail to offer this equal opportunity. This justification has been challenged by feminists and critical race theorists, who find the cases of pornography and hate speech to be sufficient threats to the freedom of expression and equality of their targets—women and minorities—to warrant limiting freedom of expression in these cases. I will argue that if Dworkin is to take equality as seriously as he claims to, then, by his own lights, he must back away from an unrestricted freedom of expression, in light of these distinctly contemporary challenges of the harms of systemic racism and sexism, which underlie hate speech and pornography. (shrink)

What should be the rules governing campus speech in a liberal democratic society? On one side are those arguing for maximal protections for campus speech analogous to the First Amendment in the United States. On the other are those promoting stricter regulation of speech through formal and informal speech codes. This paper aims to carve a new path in the conversation. Both sides agree that the mission of the university is the discovery and dissemination of knowledge (...) and that achieving this mission requires tolerant and open-minded students, faculty, and administrators. However, neither side has explicitly connected its advocacy for specific speech policies with these shared goals. Our paper advances the conversation by proposing a series of empirically testable mechanisms for connecting speech policies to the desired outcomes. We also argue that focusing on these mechanisms opens the way towards new and more tractable conceptual and normative debates. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The paper has to do with Peter Singer's statement ‘A German Attack on Applied Ethics’, and particularly with the claim that those who protested against his speaking at conferences in Europe in 1989 failed to recognise his right to freedom of expression. I argue that the right to free expression does not mean that we may say anything at all, to anyone at all, anywhere at all. Visitors to foreign countries, for example, have some obligation to be sensitive to (...) local concerns. I also argue that there is an important difference between free expression, which is a basic right, and regular access to public platforms, which is a special right or privilege. This special right or privilege goes with certain jobs and professions, and could not be made universal. The German and Austrian protests against Singer temporarily deprived him of the privilege of access to a platform but were not attacks on the basic right of free speech as such. In fact the protests themselves could be regarded as a legitimate exercise of the right of free expression. (shrink)

I examine what would be necessary to move part-of-speech tagging performance from its current level of about 97.3% token accuracy (56% sentence accuracy) to close to 100% accuracy. I suggest that it must still be possible to greatly increase tagging performance and examine some useful improvements that have recently been made to the Stanford Part-of-Speech Tagger. However, an error analysis of some of the remaining errors suggests that there is limited further mileage to be had either from better (...) machine learning or better features in a discriminative sequence classifier. The prospects for further gains from semisupervised learning also seem quite limited. Rather, I suggest and begin to demonstrate that the largest opportunity for further progress comes from improving the taxonomic basis of the linguistic resources from which taggers are trained. That is, from improved descriptive linguistics. However, I conclude by suggesting that there are also limits to this process. The status of some words may not be able to be adequately captured by assigning them to one of a small number of categories. While conventions can be used in such cases to improve tagging consistency, they lack a strong linguistic basis. (shrink)

Suppose a diner says, 'Can you pass the salt?' Although her utterance is literally a question (about the physical abilities of the addressee), most would take it as a request (that the addressee pass the salt). In such a case, the request is performed indirectly by way of directly asking a question. Accordingly this utterance is known as an indirect speech act. On the standard account of such speech acts, a single utterance constitutes two distinct speech acts. (...) On this account then, 'Can you pass the salt?' is both a question and a request. In a provocative essay, Rod Bertolet argues that there are no indirect speech acts. According to Bertolet, 'Can you pass the salt?' is only a question. It is a question that merely functions as a request (without also being one). In this paper we respond to Bertolet's skeptical argument. Appealing to Searle's theory of speech acts and to certain features of linguistic communication, we argue that, despite Bertolet's challenge, there is good reason to countenance indirect speech acts. (shrink)

The paper’s main goal is to compare laws banning hate speech with counterspeech as an effective method of curtailing hate speech. In the first part, the paper discussed three normative justifications for hate speech bans. Firstly, the line of argument developed by critical race theorists that assumes that hate speech leads to the direct harm and violation of individuals’ rights. Secondly, paper examines the Weimar model that rests on the assumption that hate speech can lead (...) to indirect harm to members of vulnerable minorities by creating a toxic environment, which opens the door to discrimination and even violence. Thirdly, the justification which is derived from the idea that such forms of extreme public speech violate the basic values and principles – such as inclusiveness, equality and mutual respect - on which constitutional democracies are built. This approach extends its argument from general values to the status of citizens by arguing that hate speech violates the equal standing of citizens by attempting to exclude certain members of society from the process of democratic deliberation based on their ascriptive characteristics. The second part of the paper looks at counterspeech as an efficient approach to limit harms that arise from hate speech. The author argues that legal bans should be reserved only for the most extreme forms of hateful rhetoric, while counterspeech is a valid option for tackling all other forms of hate speech. (shrink)

Most Western democracies and international institutions have currently adopted a range of policies aimed at regulating hate speech. However, the kinds of target groups that hate speech regulations seek to protect have not been clearly defined yet. In a series of publications, Eric Heinze has challenged the coherence of such regulations. His core thesis is that hate speech laws have simply no place in longstanding, stable, and prosperous democracies. In this paper, I examine the three main charges (...) Heinze raises against hate speech laws—namely, discriminatory selectivity, impermissible censorship, and arbitrariness—and I seek to demonstrate that none of them can withstand critical analysis. (shrink)

When considering the question of what makes us human, the ancient Greeks provided numerous suggestions. This book argues that the defining criterion in the Hellenic world, however, was the most obvious one: speech. It explores how it was the capacity for authoritative speech which was held to separate humans from other animals, gods from humans, men from women, Greeks from non-Greeks, citizens from slaves, and the mundane from the heroic. John Heath illustrates how Homer's epics trace the development (...) of immature young men into adults managing speech in entirely human ways and how in Aeschylus' Oresteia only human speech can disentangle man, beast, and god. Plato's Dialogues are shown to reveal the consequences of Socratically imposed silence. With its examination of the Greek focus on speech, animalization, and status, this book offers new readings of key texts and provides significant insights into the Greek approach to understanding our world. (shrink)

Following and extending Searle’s speech act theory, both Pragma-Dialectics and the Linguistic Normative Model of Argumentation characterize argumentation as an illocutionary act. In these models, the successful performance of an illocutionary act of arguing depends on the securing of uptake, an illocutionary effect that, according to the Searlean account, characterizes the successful performance of any illocutionary act. However, in my view, there is another kind of illocutionary effect involved in the successful performance of an illocutionary act of arguing, which (...) affects both the speaker’s and the hearer’s set of rights, obligations, and entitlements. In order to give an account of this second type of effect, I will argue that it is necessary to distinguish two levels in the analysis of the illocutionary act of arguing. The first one is related to the illocutionary effect of securing of uptake and thus to the speech act performed by the speaker, while the second one allows us to account for the changes produced by the performance of the illocutionary act of arguing in the deontic modal competence of both the speaker and the hearer. (shrink)

Much work in the philosophy of language assumes that a semantic theory T, for a language L should assign p as the semantic content of an utterance u, by A, of a sentence S in L, if and only if “A said that p” is true. This assumption is mistaken. More generally, the aim of semantics cannot be to capture the extension of English expressions such as “meaning” or “what was said”. This provides support for Davidson’s paratactic theory of indirect (...) speech and for the view that a semantic theory should take the form of a truth-theory. (shrink)

In a narrow sense, hate speech is symbolic representation that expresses, hatred, contempt, or disregard for another person or group of persons. The use of deeply insulting racial or ethnic epithets is an example of such hate speech. In a broader sense, hate speech also includes the symbolic representation of views are deeply offensive to others. The expression of the view that women are morally inferior to (or less intelligent than) men is example of hate speech (...) in the broader sense. The question I shall address is this: What should be done about hate speech in the broad sense in a free and open society? (shrink)

English direct discourse is easily recognized by e.g. the lack of a complementizer, the quotation marks (or the intonational contour they induce), and verbatim (`shifted') pronouns. Japanese employs the same complementizer for all reports, does not have a consistent intonational quotation marking, and tends to drop pronouns where possible. Some have argued that this just shows many Japanese reports are ambiguous: despite the lack of explicit marking, the underlying distinction is just as hard. On the basis of a number of (...) `mixed' examples, I claim that the line between direct and indirect em is blurred and I propose a unified analysis of speech reporting in which a general mechanism of mixed quotation replaces the classical two-fold distinction. (shrink)

Quid ais has as its two main functions in Latin to express surprise (“what are you saying?”), and to get the addressee’s attention (“tell me something…”); the latter type has a commanding tone. It is proven that quid ais in Plautus has a decidedly male character; that is, he avoided giving the phrase to women. To explain this finding, it is noted that 91% of instances of quid ais in Plautus are of the second “attention-getting” type. With its imperatival force, (...) this quid ais was probably not felt to be appropriate for Plautus’ female characters whose speech is generally more polite and deferential than male speech. Indeed, in the three cases when a woman does utter the phrase, she either assumes a male role, or belongs to a type which in recent scholarship has been shown to have a “commanding” style of speech: the meretrix or the uxor dotata. (shrink)

This volume unites various contributions reflecting the intellectual interests exhibited by Professor Herman Parret (Institute of Philosophy, Leuven), who has continued to observe, and often critically assess, ongoing developments in pragmatics throughout his career. In fact, Parret's contributions to philosophical and empirical/linguistic pragmatics present substantive proposals in the epistemics of communication, while simultaneously offering meta-comments on the ideological premises of extant pragmatic analyses. In a lengthy introduction, an overview is provided of his achievements in promoting an integrated, "maximalist" pragmatics, as (...) well as of the links between his own work in philosophy of language and in semiotics and aesthetics. The remaining 12 essays address relevant pragmatic themes or look into the relation between pragmatics and neighboring disciplines. They deal with grammatical deixis (Brisard, Ikegami) and mood (van der Auwera & Schalley), performativity (Harnish, Holdcroft), speech-act types and their praxeological dimensions (Roulet, Van Overbeke), Wittgensteinian language games (Marques, Parisi), cultural and intercultural identities (Vandenabeele, Verschueren), and the visual arts (Wildgen). (shrink)

This is a comparative study of the discourses on the nature of sacred language found in Indian Abhidharma texts and those written by 7th century Chinese Buddhist scholars who, unlike the Indian Buddhists, questioned 'the essence of the Buddha's teaching'. This issue labeled fo-chiao t'i lun, the theory of 'the essence of the Buddha's teaching', was one of the topics on which Chinese Yogācāra scholars have shown a keen interest and served as the inspiration for extensive intellectual dialogues in their (...) texts. It is in Hsüan-tsang's massive and organized translation works, begun in 648, that various previous translations of the term buddhavacana from Indian Abhidharma texts were given the unified translation of fo-chiao. (Fo-chiao literally means "the Buddha's teachings," and is the term used in the modern period for "Buddhism.") By combining fo-chiao with the term t'i, meaning 'essence' or 'substance' throughout his translations, Hsüan-tsang attempted to define 'the essence of the Buddha's teaching'. In Indian Abhidharma texts, the nature of the Buddha's word was either 'sound' (abdha), the oral component of speech, or 'name' (nāma), the component of language that conveys meaning, or some combination of the two. From the time of Hsüan-tsang's translation, however, discourse on the nature of sacred language was no longer relegated to the category of language or of epistemological investigation, but became grounded in the Chinese discussion investigating the 'essence' or 'substance' of the Buddha's teaching, and even of 'Buddhism' itself. As such, it sought to transcend the distinction between language and meaning. This gradual but explicit process of inquiry into the nature of 'the Buddha's word' was a necessary antecedent to the transition to a 'Chinese' Buddhism. (shrink)

This paper combines domestic and international research results to analyze and study the difference between the attribute features of English phrase speech and noise to enhance the short-time energy, which is used to improve the threshold judgment sensitivity; noise addition to the discrepancy data set is used to enhance the recognition robustness. The backpropagation algorithm is improved to constrain the range of weight variation, avoid oscillation phenomenon, and shorten the training time. In the real English phrase sound recognition system, (...) there are problems such as massive training data and low training efficiency caused by the super large-scale model parameters of the convolutional neural network. To address these problems, the NWBP algorithm is based on the oscillation phenomenon that tends to occur when searching for the minimum error value in the late training period of the network parameters, using the K-MEANS algorithm to obtain the seed nodes that approach the minimal error value, and using the boundary value rule to reduce the range of weight change to reduce the oscillation phenomenon so that the network error converges as soon as possible and improve the training efficiency. Through simulation experiments, the NWBP algorithm improves the degree of fitting and convergence speed in the training of complex convolutional neural networks compared with other algorithms, reduces the redundant computation, and shortens the training time to a certain extent, and the algorithm has the advantage of accelerating the convergence of the network compared with simple networks. The word tree constraint and its efficient storage structure are introduced, which improves the storage efficiency of the word tree constraint and the retrieval efficiency in the English phrase recognition search. (shrink)

This paper offers a biosemiotic account of the poetic aspects of gesture and speech in schizophrenia. The argument is that speech and gesture are not the mere expression of pre-verbal thoughts. Instead, meaning is enacted by the temporal and semantic coordination of speech and gesture. The bodily basis of language is highlighted by the fact that, failing to create language that is organized around topics, individuals with schizophrenia often rely on poetic associations in directing their utterances. Accordingly, (...) the analysis of schizophrenic speech and gesture based on McNeill’s Growth Point theory is enriched with reference to both Cowley’s (2007b) views on language as distributed social coordination, and Alexander’s (Biosemiotics 2(1):77–100, 2009) description of formal causes in nature. Schizophrenic language can be seen as a hypertrophied manifestation of the discourse-scaffolding function of poetic associations in speech and gesture. The analysis of schizophrenic language shows that language behavior need not be built on pre-verbal thoughts and important aspects of schizophrenic language, such as metalinguistic awareness and semiotic agency, can be clarified by applying concepts from biosemiotics. (shrink)

This paper aims to explore conceptual relationships between philosophical developments to support freedom of speech in John Milton´s Areopagitica and Johann Gottlieb Fichte´s Reclamation of the Freedom of Thought. I intend to enhance the philosophical heritance collected and recreated by Fichte. This paper hypothesizes that both theories state that freedom of speech is a condition for the development of morality. In both cases, moral deliberation has a public character, given that moral judgment needs the consideration of different viewpoints (...) about the question at stake. Finally, in both cases, it is defended a republican concept of power, characterized by opposition to moral paternalism, as a form of despotism. (shrink)

This article presents an overview of the single-channel dereverberation methods suitable for distant speech recognition application. The dereverberation methods are mainly classified based on the domain of enhancement of speech signal captured by a distant microphone. Many single-channel speech enhancement methods focus on either denoising or dereverberating the distorted speech signal. There are very few methods that consider both noise and reverberation effects. Such methods are discussed under a multistage approach in this article. The article concludes (...) with a hypothesis that the methods that do not require an a priori reverberation impulse response is desirable in varying the environmental conditions for DSR applications such as intelligent home and office environments, humanoid robots, and automobiles rather than the methods that require an a priori reverberation impulse response. (shrink)

This article looks at the work of Cornel West with respect to his description of the social function played by the prophetic witness. West's account of the prophet's unique brand of truth-telling is introduced by first examining Michel Foucault's description of the capacity of parrhesia, or frank speech, in antiquity. The frank speech of the prophetic witness as described by West is a more pertinent model of truth-telling for the present day's social, political, and philosophical concerns.