Papers by Laura Caponetto
Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 2024
Moorean constructions are famously odd: it is infelicitous to deny that you believe what you clai... more Moorean constructions are famously odd: it is infelicitous to deny that you believe what you claim to be true. But what about claiming that p, only to immediately put into question your evidence in support of p? In this paper, we identify and analyse a class of quasi-Moorean constructions, which we label counterevidentials. Although odd, counterevidentials can be accommodated as felicitous attempts to mitigate one’s claim right after making it. We explore how counterevidentials differ from lexicalised mitigation operators, parentheticals, and anaphoric mitigation devices, and consider some cognate non-assertoric constructions. We conclude by exploring the implications of our analysis for theorising about linguistic responsibility, assertion, and lying.
Retraction Matters. New Developments in the Philosophy of Language, 2024
Retraction maneuvers are common currency and play a significant role in our discursive practices,... more Retraction maneuvers are common currency and play a significant role in our discursive practices, as well as in our social and political lives. By expanding upon previous work (Caponetto 2020) and engaging with recent contributions to the topic (esp., Kukla and Steinberg 2021), I set out to unpack the illocutionary fabric of retraction. I construe retraction as a higher-order speech act whose definitional function is to cancel the normative update enacted by some previous, lower-order speech act. I identify and examine a set of general felicity conditions for retraction. The picture that emerges includes the following features. (i) Retraction operates on felicitous speech acts: since you cannot cancel what was never done, any attempt to retract an infelicitous act would result in an infelicitous retraction. (ii) One can only retract one's own speech acts-as such, retracting involves admitting responsibility or authorship. (iii) Depending on the act to be retracted, a retraction may require that the audience recognizes and accepts the speaker's attempt to retract. I conclude by stressing that retractions are often accompanied by reason-stating assertions, whose insincerity may affect the felicity of the retraction.
Counterspeech: Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Countering Dangerous Speech, 2024
This chapter provides an opinionated survey of a number of counterspeech strategies that have bee... more This chapter provides an opinionated survey of a number of counterspeech strategies that have been variously discussed in contemporary philosophy of language. Each of the discussed strategies is promising under certain circumstances and unpromising, and even liable to backfire, under others. When it comes to countering toxic speech, there is no one-size-fits-all solution, and in order to decide on a particular strategy one has to factor in a number of contextual variables -- including the linguistic form of the toxic utterance (e.g. whether it is explicitly toxic, or conveys a toxic message implicitly) and the counterspeaker's social role. Overall, the chapter uncovers how tools from philosophy of language can illuminate the workings of toxic speech and help us devise tailor-made strategies to counter it. It thus sketches the foundations of a philosophy of counter-language.
Synthese, 2023
It is prima facie uncontroversial that the justification of an assertion amounts to a collection ... more It is prima facie uncontroversial that the justification of an assertion amounts to a collection of other (inferentially related) assertions. In this paper, we point at a class of assertions, i.e. mathematical assertions, that appear to systematically flout this principle. To justify a mathematical assertion (e.g. a theorem) is to provide a proof – and proofs are sequences of directives. The claim is backed up by linguistic data on the use of imperatives in proofs, and by a pragmatic analysis of theorems and their proofs. Proofs, we argue, are sequences of instructions whose performance inevitably gets one to truth. It follows that a felicitous theorem, i.e. a theorem that has been correctly proven, is a persuasive theorem. When it comes to mathematical assertions, there is no sharp distinction between illocutionary and perlocutionary success.
Synthese, 2023
This paper sets out to unpack the pragmatic structure of refusal-its illocutionary nature, succes... more This paper sets out to unpack the pragmatic structure of refusal-its illocutionary nature, success conditions, and normative effects. I argue that our ordinary concept of refusal captures a whole family of illocutions, comprising acts such as rejecting, declining, and the like, which share the property of being 'negative second-turn illocutions'. Only proper refusals (i.e. negative replies to permission requests), I submit, require speaker authority. I construe the 'refusal family' as a subclass of the directives-commissives intersection. After defending my view against a number of potential objections, I highlight how a theoretically grounded analysis of refusal is not only of intrinsic value, but may also have significant moral and legal implications.
Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, 2022
In this paper, we identify and examine an overlooked strategy to counter bigoted speech on the sp... more In this paper, we identify and examine an overlooked strategy to counter bigoted speech on the spot. Such a strategy we call 'bending'. To 'bend', in our sense, is to deliberately give a distorted response to a speaker's harmful move -- precisely, an ameliorative response, which may turn that move into a different, less harmful, contribution. To substantiate our proposal, we distinguish two ideas of uptake -- interpretation and response -- and argue for the general claim that a distorted response on the hearer's part may end up transforming a speaker's contribution. Patterns of distortion have been analyzed in the literature as unjustly undermining speakers' agency and exacerbating oppression. Our analysis shows that, under certain circumstances, distortion can be employed to derail bigoted speech and thus serve the purposes of social justice. We close by discussing the virtues and limits of bending vis-à-vis a different, much-discussed, counterspeech strategy, i.e. 'blocking' (Langton 2018).
Analysis, 2022
Speaker authority can spring into existence via accommodation mechanisms: a speaker acts as if th... more Speaker authority can spring into existence via accommodation mechanisms: a speaker acts as if they had authority and they can end up obtaining it if nobody objects. Versions of this claim have been advanced by Rae Langton, Ishani Maitra, Maciej Witek, and others. In this paper, I shift the focus from speaker to hearer authority. I develop a three-staged argument, according to which (i) felicity conditions for illocution can be recast in presupposition terms; (ii) just as certain illocutions require speaker authority, there are also illocutions requiring hearer authority; (iii) accommodation may provide a way to confer authority to one's audience, rather than gain it for oneself. Speakers sometimes act as if their hearer had authority, and the hearer can end up obtaining it solely by playing along. In closing, I pause on the potentially problematic interplay between informal authority conferral and social norms of female deference to men.
Australasian Philosophical Review, 2021
Mary Kate McGowan (2019, 2021) argues that ordinary verbal bigotry enacts norms that prescribe ha... more Mary Kate McGowan (2019, 2021) argues that ordinary verbal bigotry enacts norms that prescribe harm, i.e. norms that impose an ‘ought’ upon relevant parties to implement discriminatory practices against certain targets. We here take issue with her view and claim that ordinary verbal bigotry enacts a special kind of permissive norms – what we call ‘non-neutral permissives’. Neutral and non-neutral permissives alike introduce a ‘can’ (as opposed to an ‘ought’), but non-neutral permissives, in addition, mark the newly permitted course of action as preferable vis-à-vis contrasting options. Non-neutral permissives push individuals to take advantage of the permission they are given. The claim that ordinary instances of verbal bigotry enact non-neutral permissive norms thus contributes to explain their distinctive capacity to get others to play along. We conclude by maintaining that, even though ordinary verbal bigotry enacts permissive rather than prescriptive norms, it can still be constitutive of harm.
Linguaggio d'odio e autorità, ed. by C. Bianchi & L. Caponetto, Milan: Mimesis, 2020
Il saggio delinea analogie e disanalogie tra una particolare concezione di riduzione al silenzio ... more Il saggio delinea analogie e disanalogie tra una particolare concezione di riduzione al silenzio (o silencing) e il fenomeno della contestazione illocutoria (o blocking). Con il termine ‘blocking’, Langton (2018) designa le strategie di esplicitazione e messa in discussione delle presupposizioni illocutorie di un enunciato, la cui funzione è ostacolare il processo di accomodamento, e con esso la felicità dell’atto del parlante. Avvalendosi di strumenti teorici desunti da Austin e Lewis, il saggio offre un’analisi inedita della nozione di blocking come controparte positiva del silencing: se quest’ultimo restringe il potenziale illocutorio dei parlanti e acuisce asimmetrie sociali e discriminazione, il blocking può contrastare quelle asimmetrie, configurandosi come un'importante tattica di resistenza.
Topoi, 2020
A recurring concern within contemporary philosophy of language has been with the ways in which sp... more A recurring concern within contemporary philosophy of language has been with the ways in which speakers can be illocutionarily silenced, i.e. hindered in their capacity to do things with words. Moving beyond the traditional conception of silencing as uptake failure, Mary Kate McGowan has recently claimed that silencing may also involve other forms of recognition failure. In this paper I first offer a supportive elaboration of McGowan's claims by developing a social account of speech act performance, according to which the success of an illocutionary act is not only a function of the intentions of and the conventions deployed by the speaker, but partly depends on how the act is recognized or taken up by the hearer. I then provide a comprehensive definition of illocutionary silencing and spell out what it means for it to occur in a systematic manner.
Synthese, 2018
Over the last five decades, philosophers of language have looked into the mechanisms for doing th... more Over the last five decades, philosophers of language have looked into the mechanisms for doing things with words. The same attention has not been devoted to how to undo those things, once they have been done. This paper identifies and examines three strategies to make one’s speech acts undone—namely, Annulment, Retraction, and Amendment. In annulling an act, a speaker brings to light its fatal flaws. Annulment amounts to recognizing an act as null, whereas retraction and amendment amount to making it null. Speakers employ retraction to cancel the deontic updates engendered by a given act. They instead use amendment to adjust its degree of strength. I will argue that annulling, retracting, and amending are second-order speech acts, whose felicity conditions vary with the type of illocution they operate on. Undoing is therefore conceived of as a form of doing. Furthermore, I claim that, in calling off our acts, we undo the conventional or illocutionary effects of our words while leaving intact their past causal or perlocutionary outcomes.
Rivista di estetica, 2017
The notion of 'illocutionary silencing' has been given a key role in defining the harms of pornog... more The notion of 'illocutionary silencing' has been given a key role in defining the harms of pornography by several feminist philosophers. Though the literature on silencing focuses almost exclusively on the speech act of sexual refusal, oddly enough, it lacks a thorough analysis of that very act. My first aim is to fill this theoretical gap. I claim that refusals are 'second-turn illocutions' : they cannot be accomplished in absence of a previous interrogative (or open) call by the hearer. Furthermore, I maintain that refusals constitute authoritative illocutions only when preceded by requests for permission. The secondary goal of my paper is to assess Mary Kate McGowan's (2009) account of silencing as authority denial. Despite its virtues, I argue that ultimately it should be rejected on two grounds: (i) it entails an objectification of female sexuality; (ii) if sexual advances are requests for permission (as McGowan implies), a man who asks a woman for sex cannot fail to ratify her authority over her own body. I conclude by sketching an alternative explanation for the failure of women's refusals, according to which women may be unable to refuse sex for their interlocutors' advances are intended as imperative (or closed) calls.
Phenomenology and Mind, 2016
The aim of this paper is to offer a map of the dynamics through which pornography may silence wom... more The aim of this paper is to offer a map of the dynamics through which pornography may silence women's illocutions. Drawing on Searle's speech act theory, I will take illocutionary forces as sets of conditions for success. The different types of silencing, I claim, originate from the hearer's missed recognition of a specific component of the force of the speaker's act. In addition to the varieties already discussed in literature (which I label essential, authority, and sincerity silencing), I shall finally consider another kind of silencing produced by the failure to acknowledge the speaker's words as serious (seriousness silencing).
Books by Laura Caponetto
Edited Volumes by Laura Caponetto
Sbisà on Speech as Action, 2023
The volume provides a thorough look into Marina Sbisà’s distinctive, Austinian-inspired approach ... more The volume provides a thorough look into Marina Sbisà’s distinctive, Austinian-inspired approach to speech acts. By gathering original essays from a world-class lineup of philosophers of language, linguists, social epistemologists, action theorists, and communication scholars, the collection provides the first comprehensive critical treatment of Sbisa’s outstanding contribution to speech act theory.
Phenomenology and Mind, 2022
This volume collects the papers presented at the “Mind, Language, and the First-Person Perspectiv... more This volume collects the papers presented at the “Mind, Language, and the First-Person Perspective” International Conference and School of Philosophy held at the Faculty of Philosophy, San Raffaele University, from 28th to 30th September 2021. The Conference was organized by the San Raffaele PRIN Research Unit within the “Mark of the Mental” (MOM) Research Project, with the collaboration of the San Raffaele Research Centre in Experimental and Applied Epistemology and the San Raffaele Research Centre in Phenomenology and Sciences of the Person.
Mimesis, 2020
Il linguaggio d'odio ha valenza performativa: non descrive né rispecchia ma crea e alimenta gerar... more Il linguaggio d'odio ha valenza performativa: non descrive né rispecchia ma crea e alimenta gerarchie sociali ingiuste. Ciò è particolarmente evidente se chi parla lo fa da una posizione di autorità. L'autorità amplifica il potere delle parole di cambiare i limiti di ciò che può essere detto e può essere fatto. Fa delle parole potenti mezzi di costruzione di una nuova normalità, mediante i quali pratiche prima ritenute illegittime vengono a poco a poco rese accettabili, non problematiche, normali. Le lezioni per la Cattedra Rotelli che Rae Langton ha tenuto presso l'Università Vita-Salute San Raffaele indagano le complesse relazioni tra parole, autorità e ingiustizia sociale, a partire da una prospettiva performativa sulla natura del linguaggio. Il volume si apre con un contributo di Langton, che ripercorre i passaggi chiave delle sue lezioni, e prosegue con alcune note critiche, in cui studiose e studiosi del panorama accademico italiano riflettono sulla proposta teorica dell'autrice.
Phenomenology and Mind, 2017
This Special Issue of Phenomenology and Mind (“New Trends in Philosophy”) gathers the works of yo... more This Special Issue of Phenomenology and Mind (“New Trends in Philosophy”) gathers the works of young philosophers from all over the world, from master students to PhD candidates, post-doctoral fellows, and young researchers. It aims to draw a picture of the directions in which philosophy is heading and provide a critical overview of some of the most interesting topics and methodologies in the current philosophical debate. The volume consists of four invited papers and nineteen contributed papers that were selected through a double-blind peer review process.
Book Reviews by Laura Caponetto
Argumenta, 2020
There has been a joint effort lately among philosophers, political theorists, and legal scholars ... more There has been a joint effort lately among philosophers, political theorists, and legal scholars to show that speech plays a major role in enacting and bolstering unjust social hierarchies, and that we should pay more attention to linguistic considerations in our attempts to disentangle and resist identity-based disadvantage. Mary Kate McGowan’s "Just Words: On Speech and Hidden Harm" is a pivotal contribution to this area. McGowan’s central claim is that offhand racist, sexist, or otherwise bigoted remarks impact on the normative landscape in ways that are detrimental to the social standing of certain groups of people (e.g. black people, women), and thus constitute, as opposed to merely cause, harm. In this review, we first provide a sketch of McGowan’s account of how speech routinely and covertly enacts norms, and then critically focus on her notion of harm constitution.
APhEx, 2016
Che cos'è la filosofia e, soprattutto, perché si studia ancora oggi? È questa la duplice domanda ... more Che cos'è la filosofia e, soprattutto, perché si studia ancora oggi? È questa la duplice domanda alla quale "Filosofia", libro scritto a quattro mani da Gloria Origgi e Giulia Piredda ed edito da Egea nel 2016, si ripropone di rispondere. Il testo è un'efficace "bussola filosofica", il cui scopo è quello di guidare il lettore inesperto all'interno del panorama e dei dibattiti filosofici, con particolare attenzione alle questioni ancora aperte e a temi e metodi della riflessione contemporanea.
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Papers by Laura Caponetto
Books by Laura Caponetto
Edited Volumes by Laura Caponetto
Book Reviews by Laura Caponetto
List of confirmed speakers:
Marina Terkourafi, Mark Jary, Mikhail Kissine, Tomoyuki Yamada, Gregory Bochner,
F. Ch. Dörge, Neri Marsili, Marcin Lewinski, Leo Townsend, Grzegorz Gaszczyk,
Chloé Muteau-Jaouen, Lucy McDonald, Mitchell Green, Jennifer Hornsby, Claudia Bianchi, Laura Caponetto, Filippo Domaneschi, Paolo Leonardi, Marco Mazzone,
Maciej Witek, Bruno Ambroise, Rae Langton, Bart Geurts.