The Politics of Language

"In much of the theory of meaning, philosophers and linguists have focused on the use of language in conveying information in cooperative informational exchanges. As a result, political uses of speech, of the sort that political propaganda exemplifies, have not been taken to be a central case of language use. In this book, Jason Stanley and David Beaver focus on the political use of speech as a central case, which leads to a foundational rethinking of the theory of meaning. By focusing on the political uses of speech, one arrives at better (and more general) tools to describe speech, as well as a more accurate view of its central functions. More dramatically, it enables us to see the ways in which virtually all speech is political-a fact that is masked by much of the theory of meaning. Stanley and Beaver's topic is speech generally-its function and how best to represent that function. Political propaganda serves as a window into that topic, since its function is not obviously to share information, or even misinformation. They emphasize the importance of understanding how political propaganda works via the topic of the justification of free speech and argue that political propaganda poses a problem for a broad range of justifications of free speech. Stanley and Beaver argue that it is not possible to compartmentalize the political aspects of speech from the non-political aspects of speech, nor is it possible to carve out a neutral deliberative space of evaluating reasons qua reasons. Speech is invariably political"--