Professor Rae Langton: Mind Association Lecture: Blocking as Counter-speech

It has been said that ‘evil’ speech should be fought with more speech, not bans (Brandeis), and this principle has been extended to hate speech and more.

There are familiar handicaps on counter-speech, but unnoticed scope as well.

Counter-speech can work by retroactively ‘undoing’, rather than refuting, ‘evil’ speech: by blocking its presuppositions, and (relatedly) its felicity conditions, thereby disabling its harmful force.

This brings out an unnoticed dimension to counter-speech, and to the powers of ordinary hearers and bystanders.

Professor Rae Langton, Newnham Fellow, will deliver the Mind Association Lecture in the Barbara White Room.

She was one of five Cambridge faculty among Prospect Magazine’s voted list of 50 ‘World Thinkers 2014’, chosen for ‘engaging most originally and profoundly with the central questions of the world today’. In 2015 she gave the John Locke Lectures in Oxford’s Trinity Term, and for that period was Visiting Fellow at All Souls College. She is The Mind Senior Research Fellow for 2015-16.

A reception will be held at 7.15pm following the lecture which is open to the public.

Advance booking is not required.