180246 SE The Politics of Language (2023S)

Language is not just used to talk about the world or communicate information, but also to do things in the social-political arena: to approve, convince, create new norms and social facts, but also to deceive, derogate, dehumanize, and spew propaganda. And questions about how language should be used, which languages should be used, and about language preservation are themselves political questions. Such social-political aspects of language-use can be studied from a variety of perspectives. In this course we will see how they can be illuminated with the help of theoretical tools from philosophy of language. We will study controversies about pronouns, work on the semantics of pejoratives and slurs, implicature and coded communication, speech act theory and its applications in feminist philosophy, conversational scorekeeping and accomodation, the lying vs. misleading distinction and questions about plausible deniability, as well as worries about language extinction. As a result, you will become equipped with the theoretical tools to understand and engage with these issues as they arise in contemporary society.