Pragmatics and Social Reality

3 Credits · Level: Graduate

Whatever one thinks about the relation between knower and known when it comes to the sorts of claims that are made by natural science, social facts are both reported and constructed - at least sometimes, and in some sense. I make it the case that my dog's name is 'Fiona' and later many people can report on this social fact. A complicated bunch of people, making use of social institutions, make it the case that Washington is the capital of the US. And again, this fact can then be reported on (correctly or incorrectly.) This feature of social reality is commonplace, and hardly controversial, but the controversies arise pretty fast when we try to say anything more precise. Most folks working in this area also agree that language is very important to the process of instituting social facts. This is not to deny that non-linguistic animals can institute social facts, but language certainly ramps up the ability and the complexity. In this seminar, I want to work through three recent books, and some related literature - Haslanger's Resisting Reality: Social Construction and Social Critique, Shotwell's Knowing Otherwise: Race, Gender and Implicit Understanding, and Kukla and Lance's 'Yo!' and 'Lo!': the pragmatic topography of the space of reasons - with an eye to getting clearer on the relation between the pragmatics of language and social institution. How do the various things we do with language facilitate the generation of social facts? How might a better understanding of the complexity and variety of pragmatic functions clarify what it is to know a social fact, what it is for a social fact to obtain, what different sorts of facts there might be, and importantly influence the range of forms of resistance to existing social facts that are available to us.