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Department Colloquium: Richard Heck

Richard Heck
December 8, 2017
All Day
347 University Hall

"Pornography and Accommodation"
 

Abstract: In “Scorekeeping in a Pornographic Language Game”, Rae Langton and Caroline West deploy notions borrowed from the philosophy of language to attempt to explain how pornography might subordinate and silence women. Pornography is supposed to express certain misogynistic claims implicitly, through presupposition, and to convey them indirectly, through accommodation. The appeal to accommodation cannot do the sort of work Langton and West want it to do, however: Their case rests upon an overly simplified model of presupposition. If we want to understand how (way too much) pornography propogates misogyny, then, we shall have to look for a different sort of account.

Richard Heck is a Professor of Philosophy at Brown University.

 The colloquium is sponsored by Society for Mathematical Logic and Foundational Studies