Blame as performance

Abstract

This paper develops a novel account of the nature of blame: on this account, blame is a species of performance with a constitutive aim. The argument for the claim that blame is an action is speech-act theoretic: it relies on the nature of performatives and the parallelism between mental and spoken blame. I argue that the view scores well on prior plausibility and theoretical fruitfulness, in that: it rests on claims that are widely accepted across sub-disciplines, it explains the normativity of blaming and it accounts for associated psychological phenomena.

Strategies of Blaming on Social Media: An Experimental Study of Linguistic Framing and Retweetability

“…However, in the case of outcome-focused expressions of blame the actor is excluded and the reader can only infer from the interactional context that the blame maker is regarding the politician as the agent who caused the negative outcome. While blame can in principle be expressed explicitly (“I hereby blame you for X”), it is more commonly performed in many different ways—including by describing some bad outcome or simply by saying something like “What you did was bad”—with an aim of affecting the blame taker (Simion, 2021). Therefore, the speech act of blaming can in most instances be understood primarily via inference.…”

Discursive Strategies of Blaming: The Language of Judgment and Political Protest Online

“…It should be noted that debates are continuing among scholars working within different disciplines as to how blame could be conceptualized. Within these debates, the extent to which “blaming someone for something” ( Simion, 2021 ) focuses on the evaluation of character is an ongoing issue. 5 We have chosen to include all three possible foci of blaming—character, behavior, and outcomes—in our analysis instead of restricting it to only behavior or outcomes.…”