2026 Theses Doctoral

The Autonomy of the Oppressed: A Pragmatics-First Account of Discursive Injustice

Holmes, Michael A.

Recent work by philosophers of language, feminist theorists, and legal theorists has examined how historically marginalized groups are constrained in their language use, often because of their social identity (Maitra and McGowan 2012; Langton 1993; Fricker 2007). The popular way of accounting for this limitation appeals to theories of communication, which hold that successful communication depends on the constitutive rules of a linguistic practice, operating independently of speaker intentions. This dissertation focuses on a dilemma that discursive harm brings out, which I argue this language-first approach struggles to resolve. The dilemma arises from two constraints that any adequate theory of discursive injustice must meet.

The first is the metanormative constraint: the account must explain how society-wide oppressive norms become operative within particular conversations: when, for example, does a joke about gender participate in broader social practices of discrimination? When does dismissing someone’s contribution constitute silencing them? The answer to this question distinguishes communicative failures constituted by oppressive power structures from those caused solely by the contextual features of a particular conversation. The second constraint is the autonomy constraint: the theory must preserve the role of marginalized speakers’ intentions in determining what they do, rather than treating their speech acts as decisively fixed by their audience. Without this constraint, theories of discursive injustice risk modeling the norms set by oppressive power as a feature of language rather than a defect.

I argue that we can account for both constraints by adopting a pragmatics-first approach to communication. Within this framework, instances of discursive injustice are modeled as breakdowns in communication that persist because of oppressive power structures. I define power structures as social practices and beliefs that confer credibility to utterances. According to this view, false beliefs that are credible can still serve as the best focal point for rational agents to coordinate their mental states. The falsity of the beliefs is where speaker autonomy is preserved, and the credibility of the belief accounts for the metanormative constraint.