On Silencing and Systematicity: The Challenge of the Drowning Case

Abstract

Silencing is a speech‐related harm. We here focus on one particular account of silencing offered by Jennifer Hornsby and Rae Langton. According to this account, silencing is systematically generated, illocutionary‐communicative failure (of a very specific sort). We here raise an apparent challenge to that account. In particular, we offer an example—the drowning case—that meets these conditions of silencing but does not intuitively seem to be an instance of it. First, we explore several conditions one might add to the Hornsby‐Langton account, but we argue that none are satisfactory. Then, we further explore the systematicity condition, which is insufficiently characterized in the current literature. Although we explore several promising ways to further characterize this condition, we ultimately conclude that more work needs to be done. Consequently, because this systematicity condition is under‐specified, the Hornsby‐Langton account of silencing is incomplete.

Critical Republicanism and the Discursive Demands of Free Speech

“…2The literature on the impact of group membership on speaker status from the feminist perspective is vast. The following are some notable works on the topic of silencing in particular: Hornsby (1993, 1995), Hornsby and Langton (1998), Jacobson (1995), Langton (1993, 1998, 2018), Maitra (2004, 2009), McGowan (2003, 2004, 2009a, 2009b, 2014, 2018a, 2018b, 2019), MacKinnon (1993), West (2003), Saul (2006), Simpson (2013), Wieland (2007), and McGowan et al (2016).…”