Dartmouth Events

The Philosophy department is pleased to present:

Jennifer Saul, University of Waterloo

Talk title: "Saying the Quiet Part Loud: How Figleaves Facilitate the Spread of Blatant Racism and Obvious Falsehood"

Description: "It is widely held that something has changed with respect to both blatantly racist speech and obvious falsehood in recent years. Both seem to have gone mainstream, to a shocking degree, in political speech. There's obviously nothing new at all about racism in politics, or about false political speech. Yet since the Civil Rights movement, politicians felt a need to conceal their racism at least partially, in response to the social unacceptability of explicit racism. And concealment of falsehood obviously has a very long tradition in politics. With the rise of the Far Right, and the increasingly high profile of wildly implausible conspiracy theories, there seem to have been dramatic shifts. In this paper, I explain the linguistic mechanism of Figleaves, and argue that they have helped to facilitate both blatantly racist and blatantly false political speech."

Monday, April 17, 2023
3:30pm
Location: 41 Haldeman (tentative)

The Sapientia Lecture Series is underwritten by the Mark J. Byrne 1985 Fund in Philosophy, which is an endowment established in 1996 to help support the study of philosophy at Dartmouth College. For more information, please visit: https://philosophy.dartmouth.edu/news-events/sapientia-lecture-series