The Conversational Character of Oppression

ABSTRACT

McGowan argues that everyday verbal bigotry makes a key contribution to the harms of discriminatory inequality, via a mechanism that she calls sneaky norm enactment. Part of her account involves showing that the characteristic of conversational interaction that facilitates sneaky norm enactment is in fact a generic one, which obtains in a wide range of activities, namely, the property of having conventions of appropriateness. I argue that her account will be better-able to show that everyday verbal bigotry is a key factor in social inequality if it tries to isolate a more specific property of conversation as the thing that facilitates sneaky norm enactment.

KEYWORDS:

• conversation
• oppression
• social norms

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 McGowan’s explanation of this ‘extrapolation step’ is ostensibly the same in the extended presentation of her account [McGowan 2019: 86–91]; although see note 5 below.

2 The whole set-up of Lewis’s paper is geared towards illustrating how conversation’s rule-governed nature differs from other more rigidly rule-governed activities, with baseball being the main comparative example. He says ‘there is one big difference between baseball score and conversational score. Suppose the batter walks to first base after only three balls. His behavior would be correct play if there were four balls rather than three. That’s just too bad . . . Baseball has no rule of accommodation to the effect that if a fourth ball is required to make correct the play that occurs, then that very fact suffices to change the score . . . Language games are different . . . conversational score does tend to evolve in such a way as is required in order to make whatever occurs count as correct play’ [Lewis 1979: 346–47].

3 Here I’m paraphrasing my own precis of Lewis’s account (see Simpson [2013: 557]).

4 This point about conversational score-changes being blockable, and needing the interlocutor’s accession, appears on the first page of Lewis [1979]. Recent work on conversational scorekeeping expands on the basic point. Suppose someone says to you ‘even you might get my award for being the cleverest person I know’. Langton [2018] distinguishes different ways to block a conversational score-change following such a remark. Explicating the implied propositional content (‘what do you mean even me? I’m no dummy’), differs from the tactic of contesting an assumed felicity condition for the utterance’s success (‘who are you to give out these prizes?’). In a similar vein, Caponetto [2018] proposes a taxonomy of different ways the speaker herself may retract or undo her own verbal enactments.

5 In the longer version of her account McGowan [2019] elaborates on the difference between conversations and more rigidly rule-governed activities, like baseball. She accepts Lewis’s contrast of the rigidity of score-updating in baseball, versus the flexibility of score-updating in conversation. But she notes that conversational rules can be rigid in certain ways (incomprehensibly ungrammatical speech isn’t easily accommodated, after all), and also notes ways in which accommodation is in effect in activities like baseball. For example, a pitch outside the strike zone might mistakenly be called as a strike, and ‘in at least some cases, the strike zone is automatically adjusted so that the umpire’s call counts as correct’ [ibid.: 84]. But even if that’s right, it’s compatible with there being a difference in kind between the two sorts of activities. If I move my rook diagonally, and my opponent keeps playing and follows suit, we shouldn’t say that chess has proven itself to be less rigidly rule-governed than initially presumed. Rather, we’ve just stopped playing chess, and started playing chess'. There’s no clear analogy for this in conversation, or in something like improvisational jazz. No matter how wildly you stretch the ordinary conventions, the conversation or jam is still going as long as others continue playing along.

6 We may wonder how one justifies this account of things. Rightly or wrongly, Wittgenstein’s presentation of this picture isn’t justificatory in tenor. He takes himself to be describing things about our existence that would be almost self-evident, except that we’re so immersed in them that we don’t recognize them when they’re described back to us. David Egan suggests that trying to justify Wittgenstein’s ideas about the significance of attunement, in language and life, ‘would be as circular as justifying the practice of justification itself’. If we find Wittgenstein’s picture difficult to embrace, this is because ‘it demands a shift of aspect in our thinking, much like . . . when looking at the Necker cube illusion, where background becomes foreground and vice versa’ [Egan 2019: 64–65]. My appeal to the Wittgenstein-via-Cavell notion of attunement is only meant to indicate a potentially helpful modification to one part of McGowan’s account. A full defence of the claims about attunement that I’ve sketched here would require much to be said beyond these brief remarks.