Distributing Meanings across Contexts: When Hermeneutical Injustice Meets Linguistic Contextualism

null, Alex Davies (University of Tartu)

The ALEF research group (Cluj-Napoca, Romania) announces an online talk by Alex Davies (University of Tartu) entitled "Distributing Meanings across Contexts: When Hermeneutical Injustice Meets Linguistic Contextualism". The talk is part of the group's regular seminar and takes place on Friday, JANUARY 14, 18.00 EET (Eastern European Time). Please write to [email protected] or check our Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/ALEF-100692348488914) if you want to participate. For more information about ALEF, as well as the schedule for the seminar in the 2021-2022 winter semester, please visit https://sites.google.com/view/alefgroupcluj.

Here is the abstract of the talk:

Hermeneutical injustice arises when there's a flaw in the semantic economy within a given community: the meanings that would make it possible to readily communicate and think about the social experiences of a particular sub-group of that community are not widely distributed within that community, undermining such ready communication and thought. Typically, the meanings in question are implicitly identified with linguistic meanings: the meanings of words and phrases. However, when philosophers of language and linguists talk about linguistic meanings they distinguish between two kinds: "standing" meaning (that which is constant to an expression across different contexts of use), and, content (the contribution the expression makes to a proposition expressed by a sentence containing the expression). They distinguish between these because when the expression in question is context-sensitive, the two kinds of meaning are clearly not the same. To date, discussions of hermeneutical injustice have tended not to distinguish standing meaning from content--assuming that where you have distributed the former you have distributed the latter too. This paper argues that such discussions abstract out of consideration an important dimension to hermeneutical injustice: the need to design contexts so that expressions with given standing meanings bear a content that makes it possible to readily communicate and think about relevant important social experiences. To borrow a metaphor from Bruno Latour: a content can travel through a community like a train can travel through a field—only if it has the rails to go by. A content-infrastructure is required. To explore this idea, I draw upon sexual harassment codes in UK universities as an extended case study.