Discursive Injustice: The Role of Uptake

In recent times, phenomena of conversational asymmetry have become a lively object of study for linguists, philosophers of language and moral philosophers—under various labels: illocutionary disablement and silencing (Langton in Philos Public Affairs 22:293–330, 1993; Hornsby and Langton in Legal Theory 4:21–37, 1998), discursive injustice (Kukla in Hypatia 29(2):440–457, 2014; Lance and Kukla in Ethics 123:456–478, 2013), illocutionary distortion (Green in The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy, Stanford University Press, Palo Alto, 2014, Oxford handbooks online, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2017). The common idea is that members of underprivileged groups sometimes have trouble performing particular speech acts that they are entitled to perform: in certain contexts, their performative potential is somehow undermined, and their capacity to do things with words is distorted or even annulled. In this paper I will assess this idea, focusing on Rebecca Kukla’s and Rae Langton’s accounts; in particular, I will criticize the role the notion of uptake plays in their accounts, and claim that it may ultimately undermine the very idea of discursive injustice. While, according to Kukla and Langton, members of disadvantaged groups are victims of a kind of uptake failure, leading to illocutionary disablement and even silencing, in the account I present they are victims of a kind of communicative (neither illocutionary nor perlocutionary) disablement. My overall aim is to develop a notion of discursive injustice that is more plausible and more effective for our broader purposes of criticising the structures of power and oppression.