Hägerström Lectures 2015

What we do with words can help or hinder justice in ways that exploit rules of accommodation: a process of adjustment that tends to make speech acts count as ‘correct play’. Speech acts follow rules of accommodation. Authority, norms and knowledge can likewise follow rules of accommodation, in ways that contribute to injustice. Accommodation allows speakers and hearers to build unjust norms and patterns of authority, sexual subordination, and racial hatred. ‘Back-door’ speech acts work subtly, via presupposition, generics, thick concepts and epithets. Accommodation can contribute to epistemic injustice: through knowledge destruction, via alteration of standards, stakes, and credibility; and also, more surprisingly, through knowledge creation. Handicaps on would-be speakers are failures of, or challenges to, accommodation: such limits on ‘correct play’ can be viewed as a kind of silence.

Attending to these dangers makes visible certain solutions. Accommodation reveals speech acts as something we do together with words: the acts and omissions of hearers, as well as speakers, contribute to what is done. Free speech itself looks different, demanding richer resources: state and individual action, not just inaction, could be needed to make it real.