When Norm Violations Come Out of the Shadows

This talk will explore what happens to public discourse when previously restrictive norms against blatant falsehood and overt racism start to erode.

Are there still efforts to conceal?

Do new mechanisms arise?

What changes in audiences and communicative environments allow for these shifts, and how can one push back against them?

Jennifer Saul
https://uwaterloo.ca/philosophy/profiles/jennifer-saul
Professor
Department of Philosophy
University of Waterloo

About the Speaker:

Jenny's primary interests are in Philosophy of Language, Pragmatics, Feminism, Philosophy of Race, and Philosophy of Psychology. In recent years, much of her work has been on deception and racism in political speech. Her book Dogwhistles and Figleaves: How Manipulative Language Spreads Racism and Falsehood has recently been published by Oxford University Press. It explores certain commonalties in the communicative mechanisms that have allowed politicians to get away with much more obvious falsehood and racism than previously thought possible.

Jenny has also published Lying, Misleading and What is Said: An Exploration in Philosophy of Language and in Ethics (Oxford University Press 2012). It argued that considering the distinction between lying and misleading-- which seems to many an ethically significant one-- can help to shed new light on methodological disputes in philosophy of language over notions like what is said, semantic content, implicature, and the semantic/pragmatic distinction more generally.

Jenny was Director of the Leverhulme-funded Implicit Bias and Philosophy Project. She has published two co-edited volumes on implicit bias with Michael Brownstein, and she continues to lecture widely on this topic to a range of audiences. She is especially interested in helping institutions find methods to combat implicit biases, and she frequently advises on this topic. Her view is that structural and institutional solutions are the most effective means of doing this, and she works with the institutions at which she speaks to improve their policies and procedures.

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This is a talk with audience Q&A presented by the University of Toronto's Centre for Ethics that is free to attend and open to the public. The talk will also be streamed online with live chat here [to be posted].

About the Centre for Ethics (http://ethics.utoronto.ca):

The Centre for Ethics is an interdisciplinary centre aimed at advancing research and teaching in the field of ethics, broadly defined. The Centre seeks to bring together the theoretical and practical knowledge of diverse scholars, students, public servants and social leaders in order to increase understanding of the ethical dimensions of individual, social, and political life.

In pursuit of its interdisciplinary mission, the Centre fosters lines of inquiry such as (1) foundations of ethics, which encompasses the history of ethics and core concepts in the philosophical study of ethics; (2) ethics in action, which relates theory to practice in key domains of social life, including bioethics, business ethics, and ethics in the public sphere; and (3) ethics in translation, which draws upon the rich multiculturalism of the City of Toronto and addresses the ethics of multicultural societies, ethical discourse across religious and cultural boundaries, and the ethics of international society.

The Ethics of A.I. Lab at the Centre For Ethics recently appeared on a list of 10 organizations leading the way in ethical A.I.: https://ocean.sagepub.com/blog/10-organizations-leading-the-way-in-ethical-ai