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Conférences

"The Foundations of Social Control”, cycle de conférences de Jason Stanley, professeur de philosophie (Yale University) invité par François Recanati et Pascal Engel à l'Institut Jean Nicod, les 8, 15 et 22 janvier 2015.

Language as a Mechanism of Control

Jeudi 8 janvier 2015, de 14h à 16h

In recent philosophy of language, there has been a great deal of attention devoted to explicit slur words. But public discourse in liberal democratic societies are guided by what John Rawls has called a norm of “reasonableness”. We do not find explicit slurs in public discourse in societies that follow liberal democratic ideals, and when we do, it is a sign of the break down of such ideals. Instead, we find “code words”; words that function like slurs, but are explicitly not slurs. In this talk, I draw on the two distinct traditions of slurs in analytic philosophy of language, the inferential role tradition, due to Robert Brandom students such as Lynne Tirell and Rebecca Kukla, and the semantic tradition, due to students of David Lewis, such as Rae Langton. I argue that recent tools in semantics and pragmatics allow us to draw these traditions together. And I bring this work to bear on *actual* political discourse in societies that take themselves to follow liberal democratic ideals. I conclude with a discussion of the morals for liberal democratic ideals of public reason.

Ideology I

Jeudi 15 janvier 2015, de 14h à 16h

In this lecture, I present a theory of ideology, one informed by social psychology and cognitive science. I give a theory of the nature of ideological beliefs, ideological concepts, and ideological perception. I also characterize the notion of a *flawed ideology*

Ideology II

Jeudi 22 janvier 2015, de 14h à 16h

In this lecture, I look at some particularly democratically problematic flawed ideologies. I use resources from analytic epistemology to characterize the sense in which knowledge is power, and some of the mechanisms by which epistemic power is wielded to maintain flawed ideology. I will also look at whether relativism about truth is of explanatory use in this domain, an option explored in Section 5 of Sally Haslanger’s 2007 paper, “But Mom Crop Tops are Cute: Social Knowledge, Social Structure, and Ideology Critique”.