Conversational Resistance and the Varieties of Counterspeech

Abstract

Counterspeech is a kind of communicative resistance that tries to oppose, neutralize or remedy harmful speech. It can be defined as a form of non-coercive intervention that is, in some cases, available for just any competent speaker. In recent years, some philosophers of language have focused on analyzing and proposing different varieties of counterspeech in the hopes that their insights about communicative mechanisms can contribute to the development of efficient strategies of contention. This investigation is however still new and in programmatic expansion. Our first goal then is to suggest a separation between two larger categories of counterspeech, confrontational and redirecting, adopting as an organizational criterion the impact of the interventions on the cooperativity between participants. Secondly, we propose a type of confrontational counterspeech, which we call elucidation, and a type of redirecting counterspeech, namely, reframing. In cases of elucidation, the recalcitrant hearer makes a problematic aspect of what was said especially salient. This is a way of calling the bigot out for the commitments that he/she undertakes in virtue of choosing to use certain words. In reframing, the recalcitrant hearer tries to neutralize the effects of code words by replacing them for semantically equivalent alternatives that have different social meanings and connotations. For example, replacing ‘ideologia de gênero’ (‘gender ideology’) by ‘diversidade de gênero’ (‘gender diversity’), when accommodated, gives the hearer additional control over the discursive topics (the QUD) and the “terms of the conversation”.