How Language Oppresses

Project Information

HaLO

Grant agreement ID: 841443

DOI

10.3030/841443

Project closed

EC signature date 22 March 2019

Start date 1 April 2019

End date 31 March 2021

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions

Total cost

€ 174 806,40

EU contribution

€ 174 806,40

Coordinated by

GEISTESWISSENSCHAFTLICHE ZENTREN BERLIN EV
Germany

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - HaLO (How Language Oppresses)

Reporting period: 2019-04-01 to 2021-03-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

Oppressive speech is speech that harms and disempowers its targets. It includes hate speech (slurs “Yid”, “Spic”), derogatory attitudes (“migrant vermin”), and negative moral talk (“gypsies are feckless”). Such speech doesn’t just offend but seeks to harm the target during the conversation, so that they feel humiliated, attacked, denigrated, and silenced. This harm is not confined to conversation. Utterances shift social norms by changing people’s opinions about how targets ought to be treated. Oppressive speech uses this effect to establish and maintain oppressive norms. Recent rhetoric in politics is a vivid example of this. This is a significant cause of economic and social harm to many groups. Oppressive speech is thus one of the most urgent social and political issues of our time.

The project uses a multidisciplinary approach that combines the complementary strengths of game theory, theories of social norms and social injustice, to explain:

(i) the effects of oppressive speech within a conversational game;

(ii) the way speech can shift norms that govern the social game;

(iii) how the desire to maintain social injustice motivates oppressive speech.

The proposed model of oppressive speech combines three interlinked work-packages:

· (WP1) Oppressive conversational games.

· (WP2) Oppressive speech shifting social norms.

· (WP3) Structural oppression and social change

GOALS
Speech is a means by which groups of people are oppressed. We use game theory to explain both the motivations of speakers and the mechanism of oppression. A conversation is a game, nested within a larger social game. The project goals are:

Model oppressive conversational games: we model oppressive speech as a conversational game, in which speakers make utterances that change the rules of the game. The changes arising from oppressive utterances shift power from target to speaker.

Model conversational games and social structures: conversations do not exist within a void, but both draw upon and alter social structures. This goal is to show how.


SOCIETAL RELEVANCE
Language is the currency of democratic conversation. Social media has proven a two edged sword with respect to such free exchange. On the one hand, it has enabled debate between citizens on a scale previously unimaginable. On the other hand, this power has been easily subverted by anti-democratic forces, particularly those seeking to oppress groups based on their race, ethnicity, gender or sexuality.

A key problem is online hate speech. To oppose bad actors we must model their behaviours so we can develop tools to resist them.

IMPACT
We will create policy actions and educational materials arising from our simulations. These will advise how to minimise hate speech. It will be available to lawmakers, educators and social media companies.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

Publications
1. 2020 Reclamation: taking back control of words. Mihaela Popa-Wyatt. Grazer Philosophische Studien 97 (eds. Bianca Cepollaro and Dan Zeman) Non-Derogatory Uses of Slurs. pp.159-176. DOI:10.1163/18756735-09701009 (Meaning; Social Meaning)
2. 2020 “Slurs, Pejoratives, and Hate Speech.” Mihaela Popa-Wyatt. In Oxford Bibliographies in Philosophy. Ed. Duncan Pritchard. New York: Oxford University Press.
DOI: 10.1093/OBO/9780195396577-0403 (Meaning; Social Meaning)
3. 2020 Hyperbolic Figures. Mihaela Popa-Wyatt. In A. Athanasiadou & H. Colston (Ed.), The Diversity of Irony. De Gruyter. pp. 91-106. DOI:10.1515/9783110652246-005 (Meaning; Semantics/Pragmatics)
4. 2020 Mind the Gap: Expressing affect with hyperbole and hyperbolic figures. Mihaela Popa- Wyatt. In Gargett, A. & J Barnden (Ed.) Producing Figurative Expression: Theoretical, Experimental and Practical Perspectives. John Benjamins. 449-468. (Meaning; Semantics/ Pragmatics)

Under revision
5. Compound Figures: Intention Structure and Communicative Channels. Mihaela Popa- Wyatt. In revision for Psychological Philosophy. (Meaning; Semantics/Pragmatics)

Under review
6. 2020 Slurring Speech and Social Norms. Mihaela Popa-Wyatt. In L. Townsend, P. Stovall, and H. B. Schmid (Ed.)  “Social Institution of Discursive Norms”. Routledge/Taylor & Francis. (Social Meaning; Speech Acts)
7. Online Harm: Is hate a virus? Is social media a viral promoter? Mihaela Popa-Wyatt. Submitted to Special Issue on “Digital Construction of Identities”, Phenomenology and Mind. (Social Meaning)
8. Norm Shifting through Slurs. Pacific APA. Portland, USA. April 2021.

Accepted but event cancelled
9. 2020 How Language Oppresses: How it Undermines Democracy and What to Do about It. Mihaela Popa-Wyatt, Roland Mühlenbernd, Christoph Hesse, Jeremy L Wyatt. (poster for for “Revitalising Democracies”. Bonn, 28-29 October.) (Social Meaning)

Talks & Public Engagement
10. 2020 “Doing bad things with bad words”. In the Long Night of Science. Berlin, 18 August.
11. 2020 “Slurring speech and social norms”. Online Summer School: 
MINORITIES, RIGHTS AND INEQUALITY. Blavatnik School of Government. Oxford. 22-29 July. YouTube Video.
12. “Norms-shifting: a game-theoretic approach to oppression”. Workshop on Slurs, Name-
Calling, and Exclusionary Speech: Shifting the Normative Boundaries through Speech
Acts”. TU-Berlin, 9-13 March 2020.
13. Ditchley Foundation conference: “Technology, society and the state: how do we remain competitive, and true to our values, as the technological revolution unfolds and accelerates?“. 20-22 February 2020.

In composition
14. Group-Identification: Diversity in the face of Unfairness. Roland Mühlenbernd, Mihaela Popa-Wyatt, and Jeremy L Wyatt. (Social Meaning)
15. Gaslighting: Nash demand game with dynamic disagreement point update. Christoph Hesse, Mihaela-Popa-Wyatt , Roland Mühlenbernd. (Social Meaning)
16. Slurs and Norm-shifting in Nash Demand Games. Mihaela Popa-Wyatt and Jeremy L. Wyatt. (Social Meaning)




Grant writing & Workshop Organisation
17. 2020 Workshop on Slurs, Name-Calling, and Exclusionary Speech: Shifting the Normative Boundaries through Speech Acts” + Minorities in Philosophy, TU-Berlin, 9-14 March (with
Axel Gelfert and Quill Kukla).

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

Popa-Wyatt is a Marie Curie fellow working on the HaLO project (How Language Oppresses). She has published a survey and bibliography on oppressive speech describing 217 published works on oppressive speech for Oxford University Press. Her HaLO project gives a game theoretic account of oppressive speech. From this project she published a paper giving a game theoretic account of the process of reclamation of slurring terms. She has also spent considerable time on developing a collaboration with a game theorist (Mühlenbernd) and a linguist (Hesse). This has produced several game theoretic simulations of slurring and gaslighting. These simulations use a population of agents playing a series Nash Demand Games to simulate economic bargaining. The simulation results show that slurring utterances increase the probability of a society converging on unfair bargaining norms. In the second simulation, it is shown that the probability with which a society converges to an unequal division of resources is a function of the information about bargaining power conveyed by signals sent by agents. Finally, there is joint work (with Hesse) on a game theoretic model of gaslighting. These results are being written up into three separate papers.

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