Words in Action: An Introduction to the Social Philosophy of Language

Social philosophy of language considers the role language plays in reflecting and enforcing social relations. This fast-growing field combines philosophy of language with ethics, epistemology, and feminist, social, and political philosophy to ask crucial questions about the importance of language in the social world.

Words in Action offers an authoritative and accessible introduction to the social philosophy of language, for students at undergraduate and graduate levels. Authors Ishani Maitra and Mary Kate McGowan show how tools from the philosophy of language can help illuminate both how language works socially and how we can challenge the injustices wrought by the use of language. They examine topics like lying and deception, telling and testimony, silencing, jokes, slurs, linguistic manipulation, linguistic oppression, consent, promises, threats, gendered language, and much more. To fruitfully address these topics, the book introduces important tools and concepts from the philosophy of language that are relevant to theorizing these issues, including saying, assertion, conversational and conventional implicature, taxonomies of speech acts, indirect speech acts, common ground, conversational score, semantic and pragmatic presupposition, at-issue and not-at-issue content, and much more.