Poetic Witness in a Networked Age

When online videos mobilize protestors to occupy public spaces, and those protestors incorporate hashtags in their chants and markered placards, deliberative democratic theory must no longer dismiss technology and peoples historically excluded from the arena of politics. Specifically, political models must account for the role of repetition in paving the way for unheard and unseen messages and people to appear in the political arena. Drawing on Judith Butler’s theory of the Performative and Hannah Arendt’s Space of Appearance, this paper assesses that critical and generative role of iteration. Repeating unheeded acts performs the capacity for those acts to be entered into discourse. The World Wide Web evidently augments such performativity with features such as accessibility, potential for ‘viral’ proliferation, and an endurance unlike non-networked acts. This paper eventually grapples with the hazards and risks of networked repetition (e.g. desensitization, trivialization, etc.) in order to propose a poetics of repetition to mitigate those dangers. Such poetics ultimately distinguishes the witness from the spectator

Communicative Actions

Communicative actions in the broad sense of communicationattempts ­ are special cases of instrumental actions, i.e. actions by means of which one tries to achieve some ends, their differentia specifica being that in the case of communicative actions the speaker expects to achieve her primary (communicative) aim iff this aim is recognized by her addressee. In short, from the speaker's viewpoint communication coincides with understanding, where understanding is to be identified with recognition of the relevant speaker's intentions. This idea is, using some elementary formal machinery from intentional logic, expounded in more detail, related to proposals of Paul Grice's (speaker's meaning), and compared to the alternative approach of classical speech act theory

Deliberation across Deep Divisions. Transformative Moments

In group discussions of any kind there tends to be an up and down in the level of deliberation. To capture this dynamic we coined the concept of Deliberative Transformative Moments (DTM). In deeply divided societies deliberation is particularly important in order to arrive at peace and stability, but deliberation is also very difficult to be attained. Therefore, we wanted to learn about the conditions that in group discussions across the deep divisions of such societies help deliberation. We organized such group discussions between ex-guerrillas and ex-paramilitaries in Colombia, Serbs and Bosnjaks in Srebrenica, and poor residents and local police officers in the favelas (slums) of Brazil. We could identify factors that help to transform discussions from low to high deliberation and risk transformations in the opposite direction. We could also identify factors that help to keep a discussion at a high level of deliberation, and, in a next step, we could determine to what extent long sequences of deliberation had a positive impact on the outcomes of the discussions. Finally, we show how our research results can have a long term effect if it is used in schools of such deeply divided societies

Deliberation across Deep Divisions. Transformative Moments

From the local level to international politics, deliberation helps to increase mutual understanding and trust, in order to arrive at political decisions of high epistemic value and legitimacy. This book gives deliberation a dynamic dimension, analysing how levels of deliberation rise and fall in group discussions, and introducing the concept of 'deliberative transformative moments' and how they can be applied to deeply divided societies, where deliberation is most needed but also most difficult to work. Discussions between ex-guerrillas and ex-paramilitaries in Colombia, Serbs and Bosnjaks in Bosnia-Herzegovina, and police officers and locals in Brazilian favelas are used as case studies, with participants addressing how peace can be attained in their countries. Allowing access to the records and transcripts of the discussions opens an opportunity for practitioners of conflict resolution to apply this research to their work in trouble spots of the world, creating a link between the theory and practice of deliberation

Assertion and Testimony

[The version of this paper published by Oxford online in 2019 was not copy-edited and has some sense-obscuring typos. I have posted a corrected (but not the final published) version on this site. The version published in print in 2020 has these corrections.] Which is more fundamental, assertion or testimony? Should we understand assertion as basic, treating testimony as what you get when you add an interpersonal addressee? Or should we understand testimony as basic, treating mere assertion -- assertion without testimony -- as what you get when you subtract that interpersonal relation? In this chapter, I’ll argue for the subtractive approach and for the more general thesis that its treatment of the interpersonal element in assertion makes understanding that interpersonal element the key to understanding how assertion expresses belief. My theory of belief-expression in assertion treats it as internalizing the transmission of belief in testimony. How we understand that internalizing move depends on how we conceptualize the interpersonal element in testimony. Since what I’ll call the Command Model does not give us the conceptual resources to make this move, we should adopt an alternative that I’ll call the Custodial Model, on which a testifier aims not to convince her addressee but to reason with him – to give him reasons to believe what she tells him grounded in her trustworthiness in thus attempting to influence him. The subtractive approach to assertion thus rests on a key distinction between the aims of reasoning and persuasion

Defaming Muhammad: Dignity, Harm, and Incitement to Religious Hatred

The Danish cartoons controversy has generated a torrent of commentary seeking to define and defend competing conceptions of the normative implications of the affair. This Article addresses the question of how liberal democratic states ought to respond to visible manifestations of hatred, especially speech that constitutes incitement to religious hatred. Taking the publication of the Danish cartoons as its point of departure, the Article interrogates the complex historical and normative relationship between free speech and freedom of religion in the liberal democratic order and discusses the two critical questions of whether the cartoons give rise to a genuine conflict of rights and how we should understand the notion of harm. An argument is advanced which intervenes in the extant literature by suggesting two dialectical moves, each premised on the distinction between internal and external reasons in philosophical argument, which have the capacity to unsettle the static secular-religious binary and purportedly incommensurable divide between liberal and Islamic values. The Article concludes by asking what a more robust, reflexive account of toleration might look like premised on notions of mutual justification and peaceful coexistence between rival ways of life and on recognition of the need to pay close attention to how legal restrictions seem from the internal point of view of a religious tradition

Ex Nihilo (2017-2018)

Table of Contents: Sex is About Power: Dissecting Pornography’s Role in the Sexual Language Game / by Hitaxhe Kupa; The University of Pennsylvania (p. 8-14) -- "Point and Proclaim": Possible Response to the Grounding Problem / by Eli Barrish; The University of Texas at Austin (p. 15-21) -- Choosing Eudaemonic Emotions: Aristotle and the Proto-Stoic Theory of Emotions / by Abdulwausay I. Ansari; The University of Houston (p. 22-29) -- Affirming Neo-Aristotelian Teleology And its Applications in Normative Medical Ethics / by Nathan Wong; The University of Texas at Austin (p. 30-40)Philosoph

Expressive political behaviour : foundations, scope and implications

A growing literature has focused attention on ‘expressive’ rather than ‘instrumental’ behaviour in political settings, particularly voting. A common criticism of the expressive idea is that it is ad hoc and lacks both predictive and normative bite. No clear definition of expressive behaviour has gained wide acceptance yet, and no detailed understanding of the range of foundations of specific expressive motivations has emerged. This article provides a foundational discussion and definition of expressive behaviour accounting for a range of factors. The content of expressive choice – distinguishing between identity-based, moral and social cases – is discussed and related to the specific theories of expressive choice in the literature. There is also a discussion of the normative and institutional implications of expressive behaviour