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Project

On the injustice of exclusionary language

With the rise of ‘woke’ culture, our language use seems to faceunprecedented level of scrutiny. So many of our words, terms, and expressions that were commonly used in the past are now beingseen as sexist, racist, homophobic or transphobic. Political institutions are abandoning terms that are considered to be politically incorrect and language academies are imposing new grammatical rules for more inclusivity. Language is, de facto, being regulated atthe level of society. This project takes as its principal subject matterthe observation that there is almost no normative scrutiny paid to theway language is defined, which is often exclusionary. For instance, if the Dutch term ‘Mongool’ is defined as a person who has Down syndrome, should we do something about it? Who are the agents responsible for remedy? In order to examine this problem, this project marries three fields that have hitherto remained distinct: linguistic justice, feminist philosophy of language and social epistemology. Comprising of multiple publications, which will collectively form a monograph, this project will put forward a new theory of linguistic justice that challenges predominantly liberal and multicultural assumptions about language.

Date:1 Nov 2022 →  Today
Keywords:social epistemology, linguistic justice, feminist philosophy of language
Disciplines:Social and political philosophy, Feminist philosophy