Uptake and refusal

ABSTRACTDiscussions of uptake in the philosophy of language focus our attention on what role other people have in fixing the import, success, influence and social life of a speech act. The general idea in most discussions of uptake, despite their differences and disagreements, is whether and how an audience is cooperative or uncooperative when a speaker plays a critical role in how speech acts function. This essay is primarily concerned with “refusals”, or uncooperative uptakes. The essay analyzes the varieties of refusal; when refusal is possible why it might be challenging and when it is ethical. It examines how and when the uptake of a speech act can constitute the pragmatic form and force of the original speech act.KEYWORDS: Uptake; refusal; speech act theory; discursive injustice; sexual consent Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 We can think of this point as an extension of Grice’s famous development of the maxims of conversation (Grice Citation1975). Grice argued that in functional conversations, responses are always semantically constrained: the content of our responses needs to be relevant, informative, and so forth. We can add that our responses are also pragmatically constrained; which responsive actions count as felicitous will be shaped by the original speech act, in its the social and material context.2 McDonald (Citation2021) claims that any constitution that goes beyond ratification is impossible, because speaking is the exercise of a normative power, and exercising normative power necessarily requires intentional will. So, performing any speech act you did not intend is impossible. But I am not sure why I should accept that we can exercise normative powers only intentionally, nor that, when we do, the exercise must go exactly as I intended. As I already pointed out near the start of this essay, speech acts have all kinds of normative effects that I did not intend! When I say, ‘I do!’ in a marriage ceremony, this has tax and legal implications I did not intend. A speech act may constitute a racist microaggression even if the speaker did not intend to be racist. A professor who wants to invite a student over to his house for wine but does not want to pressure her may make pressure her anyhow. In general, our speech acts do all sorts of unintended things, even apart from any constitutive work uptake does. We could, of course, define ‘exercising’ normative power as an intentional act by stipulation, but there seems then to be no reason to think that discursive power is always exercised in this sense, nor that whatever intentions we may in fact have need to map exactly onto the normative impact of what we perform.3 This is, perhaps, part of why gaslighters often try to isolate their victims; when speech receives uptake only from one person, it is much easier for that person to use their uptake to constitutively manipulate the situation.4 This point is consonant with points made by Naomi Scheman (Citation1983) and Talia Mae Bettcher (Citation2009) about how respecting speaker’s psychological self-descriptions is a political duty rather than an epistemic principle.5 Caponetto allows only this type of refusal of open-call speech acts to count as a ‘refusal’ at all (Ibid.). Of course, to some extent this is a matter of semantic stipulation; I just prefer to use the term ‘refusal’ more broadly than she does. But I hope to demonstrate in subsequent sections that it is useful to think of refusals as a larger category of speech acts than this, with these open-call refusals as the weakest form.6 A caveat here is that some speech acts present themselves as open-call, but really are not. If I am truly inviting you to something, then you legitimately have the option of declining. But someone might ‘invite’ someone else to do something – attend an unpleasant relative’s wedding, perhaps – where that invitation is a stealth command and the invitee will in fact be punished if they don’t accept. It might well take some social power and authority to refuse this sort of coercive offer masking itself as an open call.7 See for example Goldberg Citation2020 and Klieber Citation2021 on substantive, contentful silence.8 This point is a riff on a helpful worry raised by an anonymous reviewer.9 The scenario is Langton’s, but insofar as I have been taking as defended the idea of constitutive uptake, the worry has been taken to apply to me as well. See for instance McDonald Citation2021 and Harris and Tanter unpublished.10 Here, unlike in most of this essay, I am using gendered pronouns and nouns, both because the literature discussing this issue uniformly assumes a masculine instigator and feminine recipient, and because the relevant norms at play in rape culture are distinctively gendered in ways that will matter as I progress through this section.11 This room for constitutive refusal of sexual refusals, I think, was Langston’s deep point. I do not think that Langton’s intentionalist framework was the best one for making this point, since it makes it sound like just misrecognizing someone’s intention is enough to undo their refusal. I also think she made pornography specifically, rather than rape culture, sex negativity, and patriarchy more generally, do too much heavy lifting.Additional informationFundingThis work was supported by The Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung.