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ILLOCUTION, SILENCING AND THE ACT OF REFUSAL
Author(s) -
MIKKOLA MARI
Publication year - 2011
Publication title -
pacific philosophical quarterly
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.914
H-Index - 32
eISSN - 1468-0114
pISSN - 0279-0750
DOI - 10.1111/j.1468-0114.2011.01404.x
Subject(s) - silence , argument (complex analysis) , pornography , speech act , epistemology , philosophy , psychology , sociology , linguistics , psychoanalysis , aesthetics , medicine
Rae Langton and Jennifer Hornsby argue that there may be a free‐speech argument against pornography, if pornographic speech has the power to illocutionarily silence women: women's locution ‘No!’ that aims to refuse unwanted sex may misfire because pornography creates communicative conditions where the locution does not count as a refusal. Central to this is the view that women's speech lacks uptake, which is necessary for illocutionary acts like that of refusal. Alexander Bird has critiqued this view by arguing that uptake is not necessary for the illocutionary act of refusal. The Hornsby‐Langton view, then, is philosophically indefensible. Here I defend the philosophical cogency of the Hornsby‐Langton approach.