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About
About
I am a postdoctoral associate in philosophy at Yale. My research tries to understand the often paradoxical ways that social practices can be a tool of both oppression and resistance. In my work on dog whistles, coded speech, propaganda, reclaimed slurs, and subversive speech, I trace how speakers are constrained yet also empowered by their communities' speech practices. The teleo-praxiological structure of our actions, I argue, is the key: to make sense of our agency within social structures, we must identify the functions our actions serve within the practices they instantiate.
More recently, I'm also an amateur potter—perhaps one of the few human practices older than philosophy.
You can find my CV here.
Research
Research
A teleo-praxiological account of the social
A teleo-praxiological account of the social
We act in and on a social world, not just a physical one. But too often in analytic philosophy our theories of interpersonal phenomena abstract away from historical contingencies and sociopolitical context, and figure agents or actions as severable from the historically extended social practices in which they’re embedded. My work illustrates how thinking of agency in terms of social practices allows us to understand phenomena that are misunderstood and under-appreciated from individualistic approaches—namely, phenomena concerning how the sociopolitical structures and histories of our communal, shared practices both enable and constrain individuals’ agency. To identify actions as performances of social practices, I argue, we should understand social practices as networks structured by shared functions. Besides capturing the dynamics of practice that make complex, multiplicitous, and subversive action possible, this conception of social practices enables us to trace the syncretic processes through which practices evolve in pluralistic communities.
Linguistic agency
Linguistic agency
Focusing on communicative acts, my dissertation, “How Words Do Things, And What We Can Do About It” develops and applies some practice-theoretic tools for locating speakers’ utterances in communal, historically extended speech practices. Using this approach, I identify the conditions in which speakers can deploy dog whistles like “law and order” and reclaimed slurs like “queer.” Starting with historical and sociological data on the use of these expressions, I show that thinking of utterances as performances of certain practices is necessary for a complete account of what makes it possible for speakers to dog whistle or to reclaim slurs.
Non-ideal agency
Non-ideal agency
A teleo-praxiological approach equips us to study agency at the level of systems, not just at the level of individual agents. This is the level of explanation we need, if we’re to understand ourselves as agents in a sociopolitical world, and to fully address normative questions about collective phenomena, such as complicity in problematic practices.
My current project is to identify the ways that thinking in terms of practices and their functions allows us to reconceive certain aspects of agency—such as freedom, responsibility, and creativity—in ways that can resolve (or rather, dissolve) the apparent conflict between freedom and determinism.
The Stand in the Schoolhouse Door — June 11, 1963
While physically preventing the University of Alabama's first-ever Black students from entering a university building, Alabama Governor George Wallace declaims on national TV against violations of "states' rights."
Photo by Warren K. Leffler, U.S. News & World Report Magazine.
Queer Nation activists march in New York City — 1990
At a time when "queer" is used almost exclusively as a homophobic slur, members of Queer Nation set out to reclaim the term, subversively using "queer" at Gay Pride events and during protests and demonstrations.
Photo by Ellen Neipris.
Publications
Publications
"Dog Whistles, Covertly Coded Speech, and the Practices that Enable Them," Synthese 200 (2022).
Penultimate draft available here.
Abstract: Dog whistling—speech that seems ordinary but sends a hidden, often derogatory message to a subset of the audience—is troubling not just for our political ideals, but also for our theories of communication. On the one hand, it seems possible to dog whistle unintentionally, merely by uttering certain expressions. On the other hand, the intention is typically assumed or even inferred from the act, and perhaps for good reason, for dog whistles seem misleading by design, not just by chance. In this paper, I argue that, to understand when and why it’s possible to dog-whistle unintentionally (and indeed, intentionally), we’ll need to recognize the structure of our linguistic practices. For dog whistles and for covertly coded speech more generally, this structure is a pair of practices, one shared by all competent speakers and the other known only to some, but deployable in the same contexts. In trying to identify these enabling conditions, we’ll discover what existing theories of communicated content overlook by focusing on particular utterances in isolation, or on individual speakers’ mental states. The remedy, I argue, lies in attending to the ways in which what is said is shaped by the temporally extended, socio-politically structured linguistic practices that utterances instantiate.
“Propaganda” (with Jason Stanley) in The Routledge Handbook of Social and Political Philosophy of Language, ed. Justin Khoo and Rachel Sterken (Routledge, 2021), 125–46.
Penultimate draft available here.
Abstract: This chapter provides a high-level introduction to the topic of propaganda. We survey a number of the most influential accounts of propaganda, from the earliest institutional studies in the 1920s to contemporary academic work. We propose that these accounts, as well as the various examples of propaganda which we discuss, all converge around a key feature: persuasion which bypasses audiences’ rational faculties. In practice, propaganda can take different forms, serve various interests, and produce a variety of effects. Propaganda can aim to affect not only audiences’ beliefs and attitudes, but also their emotions and moods, and in turn how audiences subsequently reason or act. While propaganda is often thought of as false or misinformation, it can instead involve framing effects (“The war on drugs”), covert messaging (“There are Muslims among us”), emotionally charged slogans (“Make America Great Again”), or myths (“The American dream”). These forms of propaganda mislead audiences, not by introducing false information, but by making some beliefs and values, rather than others, salient. In fact, propaganda can even employ straightforwardly true claims (again, as in “There are Muslims among us”) and seemingly objective bureaucratic reports (“Crime has risen 4.2%”). To understand how these and other mechanisms enable propaganda to persuade by arational means, further study is needed. To that end, throughout the chapter we identify a number of places where the study of meaning and communication can help elucidate propaganda, as well as the places where propaganda issues challenges for the study of meaning.
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