Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-12
Author(s):  
Maxime Lepoutre
Keyword(s):  
Public Discourse ◽  
Good Faith ◽  
Public Speech ◽  
Current Form ◽  
Social Fragmentation ◽  
Normative Ideals

The Introduction sets the stage by arguing that, in their current form, normative ideals of democratic public discourse tend to be too distant from reality to yield action-guiding prescriptions. Perhaps inclusive public speech is a powerful way of pooling knowledge or contesting power when people who like each other exchange reasons in good faith. But this tells us very little about the value of inclusive public speech in divided settings such as our own, where speech is routinely used to rage, vilify, or deceive, against a background of mutual dislike, political ignorance, and social fragmentation. The Introduction then argues that, to remedy this problem, we need to develop a systematic normative picture of democratic public speech—and specifically, of the norms that should govern democratic public speech—that is sensitive to these non-ideal features.

Voicing Anger

2021 ◽  
pp. 49-82
Author(s):  
Maxime Lepoutre
Keyword(s):  
Public Discourse ◽  
Public Speech ◽  
Divided Societies ◽  
The Public ◽  
Social Segregation ◽  
Epistemic Function

Chapter 1 recommends that emotionally charged discourse play an important role in the public speech of divided democracies. The present chapter builds on this recommendation by examining public expressions of anger. It is commonly held that publicly voicing anger is counterproductive. The chapter resists this challenge by articulating a crucial sense in which voicing anger can be epistemically productive. Because of anger’s distinctive felt quality, conveying anger to one’s listeners can play an indispensable role in alerting them to previously overlooked injustices, and in enhancing their understanding of these injustices. This epistemic function is vital in divided societies. Because such societies typically involve significant social segregation and epistemically detrimental ideologies, the injustices endured by some groups are often invisible to, or misunderstood by, other groups. Finally, the chapter defuses the most powerful objections to this defence, partly by exposing how they overlook the systemic character of public discourse.

RIDICULE, CENSORSHIP, AND THE REGULATION OF PUBLIC SPEECH: THE CASE OF SHAFTESBURY

2016 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 353-380
Author(s):  
ROSS CARROLL
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Intellectual Property ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
State Power ◽  
Corrective Action ◽  
The State ◽  
Religious Liberty ◽  
Public Speech ◽  
The Third ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century

The Third Earl of Shaftesbury has been celebrated for his commitment to free public discourse regulated only by standards of politeness, a commitment exemplified by his defence of the freedom to ridicule. This article complicates this picture by tracing Shaftesbury's response to the early eighteenth-century crisis of public speech precipitated by the demise of pre-publication censorship and growing uncertainty about intellectual property in the print trade. Shaftesbury, the article shows, was a determined opponent of pre-publication censorship through licensing, but he was also aware of the dangers posed to religious liberty by, in particular, clerical attacks on toleration, and sought ways to curb them that included corrective action by the state. When the Whigs opted to impeach the High Church cleric Henry Sacheverell, whose supporters had capitalized on an unregulated print market to disseminate his sermons ridiculing Whig principles, Shaftesbury expressed satisfaction with this use of state power to silence him. But he did not stop there. The article reads Shaftesbury's 1710Soliloquy, or Advice to an Authoragainst the backdrop of the Sacheverell controversy, and shows how the earl used it to undercut Sacheverell's claim that clerical speech enjoyed special status.

scholarly journals Corporate Greenwashing and Canada Goose: Exploring the Legitimacy–Aesthetic Nexus

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 148-162
Author(s):  
James Gacek
Keyword(s):  
Corporate Responsibility ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Environmental Issues ◽  
Unintended Consequences ◽  
Good Faith ◽  
Environmental Responsibility ◽  
Environmental Harm ◽  
Canada Goose ◽  
The Social

Public discourse on environmental responsibility and sustainability continues to pressure corporations, especially those that have been portrayed as key contributors of environmental harm. Greenwashing is a strategy that companies adopt to engage in symbolic communications with environmental issues without substantially addressing them in actions. This paper aims to raise awareness of corporate greenwashing, drawing attention to issues that progress the trend of individualized responsibility and consumption, while concealing the social and (eco)systemic issues in the process. By drawing on the case study of winter apparel company Canada Goose, this paper questions whether businesses can ‘go green’ in good faith, if corporate responsibility and environmental responsibility can ever be reconciled, and if there is considerable need to clarify the intended effects and unintended consequences of corporate greenwashing.  

Publicity and Transparency

2020 ◽  
Vol 64 (11) ◽  
pp. 1531-1544 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tim Wood ◽  
Melissa Aronczyk
Keyword(s):  
Research Agenda ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Political Alignments ◽  
Democratic Communication ◽  
Communicative Power ◽  
Normative Ideals

Publicity and transparency are two foundational ideas about the proper structure of democratic communication. In a context of utterly transformed public discourse, it is time to rethink the value of these concepts and especially their relationship to one another. This special issue aims to test prevailing assumptions about these terms as they are reshaped in the present era of organized promotional culture. To begin, the present introduction recasts the concepts of publicity and transparency as tools for analyzing and organizing communicative power rather than as normative ideals in their own right. To this end, we present three core arguments for rethinking transparency and publicity today. First, all acts of transparency entail a redistribution of communicative power but not an inherently egalitarian or democratic one. Second, publicity is the central means by which transparency distributes communicative power. And third, scholars must analyze transparency, like publicity, as a professionalized and industrialized field. By centering questions of power and practice, this special issue aims to animate a research agenda attentive to the relational character of both transparency and publicity in hopes of foregrounding the ways the concepts might be used in service of more equitable political alignments.

The Problem of Goodwill

2021 ◽  
pp. 131-155
Author(s):  
Maxime Lepoutre
Keyword(s):  
Public Discourse ◽  
Hate Speech ◽  
Prima Facie ◽  
Public Speech ◽  
Divided Societies

This chapter considers the problem of goodwill. According to this concern, productive public discourse requires more goodwill—and, in particular, more trust—than typically obtains in divided societies. The chapter offers a two-pronged response to this worry. First, once we appreciate the systemic character of public discourse, it becomes apparent that productive public discourse demands far less goodwill than one might think. Second, even when levels of mutual dislike are too high for people productively to engage with one another, we can use public discourse to regenerate the missing goodwill. More specifically, features of public discourse that are widespread in non-ideal conditions—namely hypocrisy, anger, and even the occurrence of hate speech—have properties that can be harnessed to rebuild goodwill in divided societies. This might seem counter-intuitive: prima facie, these features of public speech seem wholly at odds with trust and goodwill. The present chapter, however, challenges this common intuition.

Countering Public Hate Speech

2021 ◽  
pp. 83-105
Author(s):  
Maxime Lepoutre
Keyword(s):  
Public Discourse ◽  
Hate Speech ◽  
Prima Facie ◽  
The State ◽  
Public Speech ◽  
Legal Norms

This chapter considers how we should respond to deeply disrespectful or hateful public speech. Unless public hate speech is countered appropriately, it risks eroding the standing or dignity of its targets, and thereby preventing them from participating effectively in democratic public discourse. It is often held that this problem cannot adequately be addressed via ‘more speech’, and that, consequently, we must legally suppress hate speech. But this view relies on an overly limited understanding of how we might counter hate speech with more speech. First, it overlooks the role that the state can play in endowing ‘counterspeech’ with authority. Second, it overlooks the distinction between ‘negative’ counterspeech (which focuses on rejecting hateful perspectives) and ‘positive’ counterspeech (which instead affirms a countervailing and inconsistent perspective). Counterspeech that is both state-sponsored and positively framed constitutes a prima facie preferable tool than legal norms for upholding the standing of targets of hate speech.

Public Discourse on Kids Lore in Post-Katrina New Orleans

2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mona Lisa Saloy ◽  
Cheryl Ajirotutu ◽  
Harry Vanodenallen
Keyword(s):  
New Orleans ◽  
Public Discourse

Investigations into the Clinical Utility of Latex D-Dimer in the Diagnosis of Deep Venous Thrombosis

1993 ◽  
Vol 69 (01) ◽  
pp. 008-011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cedric J Carter ◽  
D Lynn Doyle ◽  
Nigel Dawson ◽  
Shauna Fowler ◽  
Dana V Devine
Keyword(s):  
Venous Thrombosis ◽  
Deep Venous Thrombosis ◽  
Lower Limb ◽  
Clinical Utility ◽  
Rapid Test ◽  
Fibrin Degradation Product ◽  
Current Form ◽  
Non Invasive ◽  
Clinically Significant ◽  
D Dimer

SummaryThe serial use of non-invasive tests has been shown to be a safe method of managing outpatients who are suspected of having lower limb deep venous thrombosis (DVT). Objective testing has shown that the majority of these outpatients do not have venous thrombosis. A rapid test to exclude DVT in these patients, without the need for expensive and inconvenient serial non-invasive vascular testing, would have practical and economic advantages.Studies measuring the fibrin degradation product D-dimer using enzyme-linked immunoassays (EIA) in patients with veno-graphically proven DVT suggest that it should be possible to exclude this condition by the use of one of the rapid latex bead D-dimer tests.We have examined 190 patients with suspected DVT using both a latex and an EIA D-dimer assay. The latex D-dimer test used in this study was negative in 7 of the 36 proven cases of DVT. This sensitivity of only 80% is not sufficient to allow this type of assay, in its current form, to be used as an exclusion test for DVT. The same plasma samples were tested with an EIA assay. This information was used to mathematically model the effects of selecting a range of D-dimer discriminant cut off points for the diagnosis of DVT. These results indicate that 62% of suspected clinically significant DVT could have this diagnosis excluded, with a 98% sensitivity, if the rapid latex or equivalent D-dimer test could be reformulated to measure less than 185 ng/ml of D-dimer.

Discursive construction of an anti-immigration Europe by a Sweden Democrat in the European Parliament

2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 429-439
Author(s):  
Kamber Güler
Keyword(s):  
Critical Discourse Analysis ◽  
Direct Democracy ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Social Power ◽  
European Parliament ◽  
Critical Discourse ◽  
Discursive Construction ◽  
Cognitive Approach ◽  
The Public ◽  
Political Group

Discourses are mostly used by the elites as a means of controlling public discourse and hence, the public mind. In this way, they try to legitimate their ideology, values and norms in the society, which may result in social power abuse, dominance or inequality. The role of a critical discourse analyst is to understand and expose such abuses and inequalities. To this end, this paper is aimed at understanding and exposing the discursive construction of an anti-immigration Europe by the elites in the European Parliament (EP), through the example of Kristina Winberg, a member of the Sweden Democrats political party in Sweden and the political group of Europe of Freedom and Direct Democracy in the EP. In the theoretical and methodological framework, the premises and strategies of van Dijk’s socio-cognitive approach of critical discourse analysis make it possible to achieve the aim of the paper.

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