In this video, participants analyze the claim “Speech is violence." More voices than usual are included because the audience was invited to ask questions. Many angles on the claim are considered, including the definition of “violence,” if speech used to incite violence is violence, and whether a speaker is responsible for a stress response in a listener.
In an unusual turn, Peter gave his facilitator microphone to a student, stood on a line on the Likert scale, and participated in the epistemological exercise. We hear Peter’s perspective on the claim and what it would take to change his mind. Thanks to the student who did a great job facilitating that part of the conversation.
This discussion took place at Dartmouth College on May 4, 2022.
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It was interesting that no one brought up that invididual humans are in control of their own respective actions and emotional responses to speech. It felt like a gaping hole in the dialogue. It would seem to me to be one of the very few things we actually can control in life.
Great stuff. Keep it coming.
Speech is using words to communicate an idea, whereas violence is physical. At best, you could use speech to give a threat of violence. Speech can cause people to become very emotional and feel unwell or tense, but that does not mean that the speech is violent itself. We could perhaps call a reaction "violent" but that is an alternative use of the term. A volcano could "violently" erupt but this is meaning is different from interpersonal violence. Regardless, Critical Social Justice advocates use violence to refer to just being silent in some situations. Their goal is to attribute everything to downstream bad consequences. This is really manipulative, but they do it all the time. I think they even confuse themselves, like the girl who said "verbal abuse is abuse" and "abuse is violent."
I think the linguistic confusion takes two forms. They want to use a word ideosyncratically but maintain the negative associations. This can only last so long and degrades language. They do this all the time. The other form is that they create categories and then make ethical arguments from these categories. I explain more here: https://parrhesia.substack.com/p/playing-word-games-with-the-woke
These are great videos. Keep up the good work.