Co-authored with Kai Tanter. We look at a problem case for the relationship between speaker intent and audience uptake. If a speaker says “no”, intending to refuse sex, but her addressee gives the utterance uptake as a speech act of consent, does the speaker refuse or consent? We argue that: 1) addressee uptake can unjustly force a speaker to perform a speech act of consent, and 2) this is a distinctive way speakers can be wronged. However, we also argue that the addressee’s uptake is not the only form of uptake that matters—the broader discursive community’s uptake matters too, and can override the addressee’s uptake, constituting the speaker’s utterance as the speech act it was intended to be.

Draft available on request.

I develop a theory of speech acts as actions which unfold over time. Within speech act theory, it is commonly accepted that speech acts are performed instantaneously, in the moment of utterance. Drawing on apologies as a case study, I argue that this assumption about the temporal structure of speech acts is ill-equipped to explain important elements of speech acts which take place after the moment of utterance, such as the addressee’s acceptance or rejection of an apology. As illustrative examples, I consider Joseph Biden’s apology to Anita Hill and the Australian national apology to the Stolen Generations of Aboriginal children. As an alternative, I propose a novel theory of speech acts as a kind of temporally extended process, which involves both the speaker and their addressee. Apologies, I argue, are best understood as actions which unfold over time, like building a house or baking bread.

Draft available on request.

I argue that speakers can perform unintended speech acts, including threats, urgings, and orders. Within speech act theory, it is standardly supposed that speakers can only perform speech acts they intend to perform. I examine a range of disputes over which speech act a speaker performed, including whether catcalls (like “Come over here and let me get a look at that a**!”) are compliments or threats and whether former President Trump’s call to “fight like hell” in his January 6 speech was an order or merely an assertion. I argue that these uptake disputes demonstrate that we accept the possibility that a speaker can unintentionally perform some speech acts. I then defend the idea that speakers can reasonably be held responsible for some unintended speech acts—I argue that we can hold a speaker morally accountable for an unintended illocutionary act iff the speaker should reasonably expect that their utterance will be given uptake as an unintended illocutionary act.

Using stand-up comedy performances by Joe Rogan, Daniel Tosh, and Louis C.K. as case studies, I explore examples where humor-oriented speech acts (including jokes, irony, sarcasm) are intermixed with serious assertions. In contexts like this, audiences face a special interpretive challenge: how should they determine where the speaker’s non-serious (‘funny’) content ends and seriously asserted content begins? I argue that these cases point to an underexamined moral risk of humorous speech—humor can become a tool of oppression when it is used to blur the lines between seriously asserted content and jokingly asserted content which, if seriously asserted, would promote oppressive values.

Prominent accounts of illocutionary silencing and other forms of discursive injustice (Langton 1993; Kukla 2014; McKinney 2016) have proposed that speakers can be unjustly prevented from performing some speech acts (like refusal and protest) and can be forced to perform other speech acts. Using the #MeToo Movement, Black Twitter, and transgender activism as key case studies, I argue that the creation of alternate speech communities is a key social mechanism for challenging discursive injustice. Even in contexts where dominant power structures and norms deny marginalized speakers the uptake their speech deserves, alternate speech communities can provide marginalized speakers with a crucial form of discursive agency by offering their speech just uptake. I conclude by considering the limitations of speech communities under conditions of oppression.

I develop a new model of audience for speech act theories. Within speech act theory, it’s common to rely on a dyadic speaker-hearer model, which assumes that a speaker addresses either one hearer or perhaps a small group of hearers. However, a speaker’s actual audience is often far broader than this. The speaker’s direct audience may include an addressee, other intended hearers, and unintended overhearers (Clark & Carlson 1982). The speaker’s indirect audience will also include a wide range of hearers who encounter the speaker’s utterance second-hand, when it is repeated verbally or transmitted in written or recorded forms. I argue that a broader model of audience which incorporates both the speaker’s direct and indirect audience is needed to account for speech acts in online speech, written speech, and public speech. A broader model of audience, however, raises difficult questions about what counts as a successful speech act. If some members of the speaker’s audience give their utterance uptake as one kind of act, and other members give it uptake as a different kind of act, does the speaker perform one speech act or many? Do all parts of the speaker’s audience play an equal role in determining whether the speech act succeeds? Or do addressees have a privileged position? I distinguish between two distinct forms of success for speech acts—addressee success and audience success. For second-personal speech acts (like apologies and promises), addressee success has a privileged status. Audience success, however, still plays a crucial role in facilitating communication across conversational contexts.

I examine whether we ought to suspend judgment in response to sexual violence claims. In cases where there is conflicting testimony about sexual violence (so-called “he said, she said” cases), it is often suggested that ordinary epistemic agents ought to suspend judgment about sexual violence claims in an attempt to remain epistemically neutral. I argue against what I call the business as usual approach to suspending judgment, where epistemic agents act as if an act of sexual violence did not take place. Drawing on William James’ (1897) discussion of religious belief, I argue that adopting the business as usual approach in sexual violence cases unjustly prioritizes the testimony of the accused and forces the accuser into a kind of limbo. Presenting this way of responding to sexual violence claims as epistemically neutral is a form of what I call epistemic hypocrisy. Genuinely suspending judgment in sexual violence cases requires us to act in a way which is consistent with both possibilities—the accused person’s guilt and their innocence. I conclude that suspending judgment is a lot more difficult to do than is commonly supposed. We often have to take a side, rather than attempt a form of fence-sitting.

I explore the relationship between oppressive ideologies, political resistance, and moral learning. Oppressive ideologies present prevailing forms of social order as natural, inevitable, and unchangeable. Given this, an important question for moral epistemologists is: what kinds of experiences or practices can undermine the influence of oppressive ideologies and facilitate the moral learning of the oppressed? Using the 1936 Flint sit-down strike as a case study, I argue that disruptive protests are an important form of collective action which can provide members of oppressed and exploited groups with an “experiential break” (Haslanger 2017) through which they can come to recognize the extent of their own power and agency. The Flint sit-down strikers’ experiences of self-organization, egalitarian decision-making procedures, and the temporary reversal of pre-existing power arrangements are features of many disruptive protests which can give participants epistemically and morally transformative insights into how things could be. I end by considering whose moral learning disruptive protests ought to be oriented towards. Some accounts of the value of protest (Anderson 2014) suggest that disruptive protests are important because they challenge the moral biases of members of dominant social groups. I argue that disruptive protests can generate important forms of moral learning in contexts where dominant groups are resistant to acknowledging the moral worth of the oppressed.