While I find Huaping Lu-Adler’s excavation of Kant’s long-overlooked linguistic Orientalism both enlightening and thought-provoking, I disagree with her diagnosis of its theoretical and practical relevance. On the one hand, while I agree that Kant’s positionality renders all his writings and teachings presumptively impactful, there is reason to doubt that his peculiar construction of the linguistic Oriental Other had much actual impact on his disciples. On the other hand, while I agree that the Kantian ideal of public reason is inapt (...) for rectifying the linguistic-epistemic injustices of global knowledge production, I disagree on why it is so. In particular, I argue for a shift in theoretical and practical focuses, from linguistic biases and prejudices, to the structural epistemic constraints of linguistic diversity, as well as to other political-structural conditions shaping global knowledge production. (shrink)

On Kant’s account, “public use of reason” is the use that a truth-seeking scholar makes of his reason when he communicates his thoughts in writing to a world of readers. Commentators tend to treat this account as expressing an egalitarian ideal, without taking seriously the limiting conditions—especially the scholarship condition—built into it. In this paper, I interrogate Kant’s original account of public reason in connection with his construction of the “Oriental” as a linguistically and therefore epistemically and culturally inferior Other. (...) I thereby give reasons to worry that Kant’s account is substantively inegalitarian (even if it is nominally egalitarian). I also draw attention to the fact that Kant constructed a linguistic Other against the backdrop of colonialism and from a position of power. This positionality gave what he said about the Other an ideology-forming and world-making effect. In this way, his exclusionary discursive practices—such as depicting the Oriental as an inferior linguistic Other—could have a lasting impact on knowledge production and on the real-world exercise of public reason. (shrink)

Journal of Social Philosophy, EarlyView.

Drawing on empirical findings, a number of philosophers have recently argued that people who use English as a foreign language may face a linguistic bias in academia in that they or their contributions may be perceived more negatively than warranted because of their English. I take a critical look at this argument. I first distinguish different phenomena that may be conceptualized as linguistic bias but that should be kept separate to avoid overgeneralizations. I then examine a range of empirical studies (...) that philosophers have cited to argue that people who use English as a foreign language are subject to linguistic bias in academia. I contend that many of these studies do not sufficiently support key claims that philosophers have made about linguistic bias, are challenged by counterevidence, and lack generalizability. I end by introducing methodological recommendations that may help philosophers develop more convincing empirically informed arguments regarding linguistic bias. (shrink)

Many political theorists believe that a state cannot be neutral when it comes to languages. Legislatures cannot avoid picking a language in which to conduct their business and teachers have to teach their pupils in a language. However, against that, some political liberals argue that liberal neutrality is consistent with the state endorsement of particular languages. Claims to the contrary, they say, are based on a misguided understanding of what neutrality is. I will argue that this line of argument fails, (...) for two reasons. First, the primary challenge to which political liberals should respond is not that of reconciling the promotion of languages with liberal neutrality but, rather, that of reconciling liberal neutrality with the fact that reasonable people disagree about the existence and nature of languages. Second, even if everyone accepted the existence of languages along essentialist lines, one should still doubt the possibility of state neutrality with respect to them, regardless of the conception of neutrality one prefers. The reason why is that human beings cannot care about or value languages so when a state promotes a particular language, it is not supporting the preferences of its citizens but, rather, acting on perfectionist or simply irrational grounds. (shrink)

Despite its status at the heart of a closely related field, philosophers have so far mostly overlooked a phenomenon sociolinguists call ‘social meaning’. My aim in this paper will be to show that by properly acknowledging the significance of social meanings, we can identify an important new set of forms that discursive injustice takes. I begin by surveying some data from variationist sociolinguistics that reveal how subtle differences in the way a particular content is expressed allow us to perform importantly (...) different illocutionary actions, actions we use to do things like constructing a public persona and building a rapport with an audience. The social importance of these activities and the pervasiveness of our engagement in them means that the ethical stakes involved are high—substantial injustices may result if speakers from different social groups are differently empowered with regard to the illocutionary possibilities made available to them by variation. (shrink)

Journal of Social Philosophy, EarlyView.

English continues to rise as the lingua franca of academic philosophy. Philosophers from all types of linguistic backgrounds use it to communicate with each other across the globe. In this paper, we identify how the rise of English leads to linguistic injustices. We argue that these injustices are similar in an important regard: they are all instances of distributive epistemic injustice. We then present six proposals for addressing unjust linguistic discrimination and evaluate them on how well they can mitigate the (...) specific types of distributive epistemic injustice that we identify. We accept that there is much more to be said. But we hope that what we say will motivate other philosophers to take these types of injustices more seriously and encourage them to make academic philosophy a more inclusive global community. (shrink)

Public debates on linguistic integration as a socially desired outcome often share a prevailing sentiment that newcomers ought to “learn the language.” But the intensity of that sentiment is rarely accompanied by an equally robust understanding of what, precisely, it means in practice. This results in a notion of linguistic integration with an inbuilt tension between a seemingly pragmatic and commonsensical appearance, on the one hand, and a minimal action‐guidance capacity, on the other hand. This paper explores this intriguing tension, (...) and it identifies three moral and practical challenges that this challenge presents to the normative theorizing of the practical ethics of linguistic integration: (1) a predicament of arbitrary treatment; (2) the interpersonal structure of social and linguistic learning; and (3) the affective dimension of linguistic integration. (shrink)

Linguistic justice is concerned with the just way of politically regulating linguistic diversity. Today, the linguistic-justice debate may be differentiated into three different domains: interlinguistic justice, intralinguistic justice, and global linguistic justice. Each of these domains has, to a significant extent, attracted different authors and debates, although the normative system underlying them is structurally similar. This introductory piece aims to provide context for our symposium dedicated to linguistic justice and migration by, first, giving an overview of linguistic justice, second, linking (...) linguistic justice to migration, and, finally, providing an overview of the various papers in the symposium, situating them against the background developed in the first two sections. (shrink)

Although there is now a substantial body of literature exploring the effects of language diversity in international management contexts, little attention has been paid to the ethical dimensions of language diversity at work. This conceptual paper draws on the concept of epistemic injustice in order to explore how language, and in particular corporate language policies, may act as a source of epistemic injustice within the workplace. It demonstrates how language competence affects credibility judgements about a speaker, and also considers how (...) corporate language policies can create situations of hermeneutic injustice, in which marginalised groups are denied the vocabularies to understand their own experiences. Finally, ways in which such epistemic harms can be reduced are discussed, and the possibilities for management education to create epistemically responsible managers are highlighted. (shrink)