The Politics of Language | Reviews | Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews | University of Notre Dame

Review “Do what’s easy first; deal with the harder stuff later”. I heard this routinely when introduced to the philosophy of language. It was offered as an explanation, perhaps even an apology, for why the discipline was slow to engage with the political dimensions of language, at least in the analytic tradition. The thought was that once we had settled the fundamentals, such as reference, truth-conditions, compositionality, the messier questions about power and ideology would simply fall into place. Whatever its initial plausibility, the promise now rings hollow. The philosophy of language has become extraordinarily sophisticated in its treatment of representation, while remaining strikingly thin in its description of how language actually shapes social life—though, there is a contemporary surge in interest in this area, with notable contributors including Rae Langton, Sally Haslanger, Lynne Tirell, Elisabeth Camp, and Jennifer Saul. In this respect, The Politics of Language can be understood as beginning from a reversal both provocative and compelling. Beaver and Stanley treat the “hard stuff” as the beginning of analysis, treating the frameworks developed to handle “easy” cases as not merely incomplete but unable to explain how language does its most significant work: maintaining ideology. One of the book’s central ambitions, then, is revisionary. Beaver and Stanley argue that we need to rethink the core terms of the philosophy of language: meaning, communication, rational uptake. As currently understood, they are poorly suited to explaining the aspects of language that matter most to our everyday political lives. Equipped with the right tools, however, we would be better positioned not only to understand communicative practices in general but also to see how political language operates across populations over time, rather than merely between individuals within isolated exchanges. The ambition is real and written with fervour and urgency. Yet, it also carries a burden. What follows is an attempt to reconstruct Beaver and Stanley’s rather difficult text. I trace the route by which they promise to deliver on their ambition, and, importantly, to explain why readers may find themselves unsure of what exactly the framework commits us to. My own path through the book involved a series of misunderstandings that, I now think, were not accidental. They were invited by the framework’s presentation. Clarifying those misunderstandings, I suggest, strengthens Beaver and Stanley’s insights and brings into focus the limits of what their revisionary project can indeed justify (and what it cannot). If there is an ultimate goal of the book, it is to explain “the transmission and development of ideology” (120). Of course, there will be many ways this can occur. Beaver and Stanley focus on language. But before they even begin to discuss the communicative mechanics of ideological maintenance, Beaver and Stanley bring into disrepute the philosophy of language itself. The book opens with a familiar complaint against the content-delivery model (24) of language: the picture on which communication primarily involves the transfer of information from speaker to hearer, governed by conventions that determine what words and sentences say about the world. The model, they argue, leaves us ill-equipped to understand phenomena such as propaganda, harmful speech, dog-whistles, and the persistence of ideology. These are cases where language matters not because of what is explicitly asserted but because of how speech shapes affect, attention, values, and practices. The alternative proposed is framed around three notions in Part I, each given its own chapter. At the broadest level, language use is embedded in social practices that tend to push interactions in familiar directions: toward certain emotions, assumptions, priorities, or courses of action. This practice-level regularity is what they call resonance. At the level of individuals, attunement refers to when agents are variously set up to register and respond to these regularities, often automatically and without endorsement. And at the level of groups, shared participation in linguistic practices brings these individual sensitivities into alignment, enabling coordinated patterns of response even without shared belief or explicit agreement; this is harmonization. In terms of what these concepts replace, resonance supplants semantic content; attunement supplants belief; and harmonization supplants accommodation. At first encounter, the vocabulary is both intuitive and disorienting. It is intuitive because it captures something familiar. As Austin (1962) reminds us, words “do” things beyond conveying information, and this depends on shared practices rather than explicit beliefs. It is disorienting, however, because it is not immediately clear how the three notions relate to one another or what kind of explanation they are supposed to provide. This is where my own difficulty began. Beaver and Stanley frequently write as if communities of practice lend words their resonance and as if the use of words attunes members of those communities to those resonances. Read straightforwardly, this suggests a metaphysical picture on which resonances are features of the social environment that are in place prior to individual agents’ sensitivity to them. Attunement, on this reading, is a kind of response to an already-structured field of resonances. Of course, this picture is seductive. It fits ecological metaphors that are common in social theory, and it aligns with the book’s political emphasis on how agents are shaped by linguistic environments they did not choose. It also helps explain why the framework initially feels powerful: it appears to promise a way of explaining ideological influence without appealing to belief, intention, or rational uptake. Yet this cannot be right as stated. Resonance, as Beaver and Stanley define it, is not an intrinsic property of words or practices; even if they accept that it is “quasi-objective, as if floating free from any individual’s associations or dispositions” (69). It is characterized entirely in terms of its effects on agents, exemplified by an extended discussion of Bayesian theory in Chapter 1. The relevant concern is how speech shifts emotions, values, and dispositions. Yet these effects appear to be precisely instances of attunement. To say that a word resonates with fear or dehumanization is just to say that people are disposed to respond in those ways to that word. If so, resonance cannot exist independently of attunement in the way the initial metaphysical picture suggests. Treating resonances as metaphysically prior to attunement would simply be circular. It must be said, the worry isn’t pedantic. The language of “attunement to resonances”, which Beaver and Stanley frequently use, invites a reading on which resonance does explanatory work by standing in place before agents arrive on the scene. They say that agents are attuned to resonances in much the same way as certain films tug on our heartstrings (30). But the framework itself cannot sustain that reading without begging the question. Indeed, Beaver and Stanley suggest that “It is no exaggeration to say that as regards the role we give to [resonance and attunement] in sustaining practice, the two concepts are mirror images of each other” (94). Presumably, what this means is that one does not exist without the other: there is no resonance without attunement; no attunement without resonance. And this is most explicit when Beaver and Stanley say, “to state the resonances of a speech practice found in a speech community… is just to state the attunements that members of the community tend to have to that practice, and vice versa” (103). The framework becomes clearer, and more defensible, once this metaphysical picture is set aside. On a more charitable reading, resonance and attunement are not related by metaphysical priority at all. Neither is grounded in the other. Instead, they are complementary descriptions offered at different vantage points of a coupled social system. Resonance describes practice-level regularities, or stable patterns in what linguistic actions tend to do within a community over time. Attunement describes individual-level practices, or how agents are disposed to respond within those practices. Each presupposes the other as part of an ongoing system of social interaction. Harmonization names the process by which these sensitivities are (re)aligned across individuals and groups within a community. Read this way, Beaver and Stanley are not offering a metaphysics of social forces acting independently of agents. They are offering a system-level account of how linguistic practices and individual dispositions co-evolve and stabilize. This reading, which I hope is correct, avoids circularity and preserves the core insights of the framework. It also explains why the book is so effective at illuminating certain kinds of political speech. So, what does the framework do well? Resonance and attunement excel at explaining ideological maintenance. They show how language sustains patterns of power even when no one explicitly endorses them, how harm can occur without malicious intent, and how coordination can arise sub-doxastically. Ideology, as a system of attunements, can change through subtle but repeated exposure (109). By consistently being subject to certain words that draw our sensitivities in a certain direction, whether affective, perspectival, or simply attentive, we can come to accept that a context “is just as it has been presupposed to be” (109). This analysis earns its theoretical keep in the remaining parts of the book. In Part II, Beaver and Stanley apply the resonance-attunement framework to presupposition and accommodation, stalwarts in the philosophy of language. Presuppositions are no longer treated as background propositions that enter a common ground through rational adjustment, but as sites at which practices exert pressure on agents to align their attunements. And accommodation is not simply a matter of updating one’s beliefs about what has been taken for granted but a form of harmonization to a practice one already inhabits. Most compelling about this revisionary work is how it accounts for the reproduction of ideological assumptions without ever being explicitly asserted and why such assumptions are often difficult to contest once in place. Presupposition and accommodation are mechanisms of normalizing a way of seeing and responding that comes to feel unremarkable. This analysis is extended to overt political cases in Part III, which includes dogwhistles, neutrality and straight-talk, and what Beaver and Stanley call hustle: the way social meaning operates below the level of conscious awareness. Here, the resonance-attunement framework flexes its diagnostic muscle. It allows the authors to explain how certain forms of speech sort audiences, mobilize affect, or license discriminatory practices, even when speakers deny any such intention, and hearers cannot easily articulate what has been said. The critique of neutrality is especially effective: if all words are embedded in practices that carry resonances, appeals to “just stating the facts” function less as guarantees of objectivity than as ways of obscuring the ideological work that language performs. The lesson of Part III is that political speech operates not primarily by persuading individuals of new propositions but by exploiting and reinforcing existing patterns of attunement. Part IV turns to the normative implications of this picture, particularly for questions of responsibility, regulation, and free speech. If ideological harm is often the product of diffuse practices rather than discrete intentions, then traditional ways of assigning blame and assessing permissibility may be ill-suited to the phenomena at hand. The framework thus motivates a shift away from speaker-centred accounts of responsibility toward a more structural perspective, one that takes seriously the cumulative effects of ordinary linguistic practices. The proposed normative upshot is not that speech should be evaluated solely in terms of its content but that attention must be paid to the broader environments of resonances within which speech occurs, with a special focus on equality over liberty. All in all, Parts II-IV aim to deliver the promise of the framework: a theory of how language stabilizes social reality over time. The central explanatory insight is that language does not need to introduce new beliefs to be politically effective. By repeatedly orienting agents within familiar practices, it can sustain and intensify ideological patterns even in the absence of explicit endorsement. Despite the framework’s strength, my reconstruction reveals potential limits. Because resonance and attunement are defined in terms of stabilized practices, where resonance never exists prior to attunement, the framework is methodologically oriented toward explaining how ideology is reproduced and reinforced. It is much less clear about how ideologies are formed, how they are disrupted, or how agents can stand outside prevailing practices, rather than merely being re-harmonized within them. Presumably, the politics of language should be as much about revolution as it is about revelation. Speech, on Beaver and Stanley’s model, primarily reconfigures what is already in place. Its capacity to generate genuinely novel orientations or to enable radical resistance that transcends dominant ideology is correspondingly constrained. This needn’t be a flaw if Beaver and Stanley are willing to accept limits on the politics of language. But it does matter because the book’s stated ambition is not merely to supplement existing concepts within the philosophy of language but to revise them. Here a distinction must be drawn between justificatory adequacy for conceptual extension and justificatory adequacy for conceptual revision. A framework is justified as an extension when it reveals phenomena that existing concepts systematically leave unexplained, even if those concepts continue to do important explanatory work elsewhere. By contrast, a framework is justified as a revision only if it can plausibly take over the explanatory roles of the concepts it seeks to displace without leaving central phenomena unexplained. Beaver and Stanley have shown, convincingly, that existing semantic frameworks are insufficient when taken in isolation. What isn’t obvious, however, is whether they have shown that those frameworks should be abandoned rather than simply supplemented. This matters because the content-delivery model, however idealized, retains distinctive explanatory resources in precisely those cases where ideology is not merely reproduced but challenged or transformed. Accounts that appeal to content, belief, and rational uptake are well-suited to explaining how agents learn new ideological commitments, how they revise old ones, and how they come to resist prevailing practices by articulating reasons, drawing distinctions, and re-describing social reality. Ideological change can proceed through moments of explicit contestation: through argument, reinterpretation, conceptual innovation, and the deliberate rejection of inherited frames. In such cases, what matters is not merely how speech resonates within an existing system but what is said, how it is understood, and how it figures in agents’ reasoning about what to believe and how to act. The tools of the content-delivery model, however inadequate, still possess radical potential that we should not want to go without. For all its problems, there is yet reformatory work for information transfer to undertake. By contrast, the resonance-attunement framework is most at home where ideology operates automatically and below the level of explicit endorsement. It is at its best when explaining why certain patterns persist despite reflective disavowal and why harm can occur without intention or belief. But this strength comes with a weakness. Because the framework presupposes relatively stable practices to which agents are already attuned, even if to varying degrees, it offers fewer resources for explaining how those practices are first (de)stabilized, how agents come to recognize them as ideological, or how speech enables forms of resistance that involve standing, even partially, outside existing patterns rather than being re-harmonized within them. For this reason, the successes of Beaver and Stanley’s framework appear to justify the expansion of our existing concepts within the philosophy of language, rather than the replacement of those already at work. They have shown that content-based theories are incomplete, not that they are dispensable. Until the resonance-attunement framework can account with comparable clarity for ideological (un)learning, critique, and transformation, its most plausible role is as a supplement to, rather than a substitute for, the traditional resources of the philosophy of language. And indeed, this shouldn’t be surprising. For the goal of Beaver and Stanley, by their own lights, is first and foremost to explain the transmission of ideology. It isn’t clear why such a strong claim about conceptual revision, and indeed replacement, is needed to serve that goal. At most, what Stanley and Beaver have shown is that there ought to be a methodological perspectival shift: we must decentralise the content-delivery model of communication when thinking critically about the politics of language. Yet what follows from this is not the abandonment of the content-delivery model, but its relegation to the peripheries of analysis, still there to be drawn on when needed, even if not suited to the starting point of enquiry. The Politics of Language is a challenging book, not least because it is so long. Along the way, the reader is introduced to a variety of literature beyond philosophy, and it often feels that existing philosophy isn’t mentioned much at all. Further, definitions are routinely introduced and reappear down the line when one has already forgotten what they meant (making it akin to characters of Anna Karenina). Despite this, Beaver and Stanley are right to insist that the hard stuff should not have been postponed, and their framework brings into view dimensions of language that philosophy has too often ignored. Yet once the metaphysical temptations of the framework are resisted, its explanatory strengths appear asymmetric: it illuminates ideological persistence far more convincingly than ideological formation or transformation. A complete politics of language should give us all in equal measure. Now, the asymmetry does not undermine the significant value of the book. But it does suggest that what Beaver and Stanley have given us is a powerful extension of our conceptual resources for understanding the politics of language. Yet, from my perspective, they fall short of justifying a revision of them wholesale. Recognizing this helps both to appreciate what the framework achieves and to see where its limits lie. Beaver and Stanley have masterfully shown us how ideologies are managed, even if they haven’t demonstrated how they are created or radically transformed.