Research Group
in Analytic Philosophy

Abstract

This talk offers a tentative account of how hate speech expresses hate. In so doing, it answers two objections to expressivist views. It further gives a hypothesis to explain how and when hate speech can correlate with hate crimes. It combines an account of the illocutionary structure of conversational contexts and of the normative requirements that speech makes on context, with recent accounts of the attitudes or sentiments expressed through hate speech. It concludes that hate speech is illocutionarily expressive, and presupposes ongoing hate as a sentiment which organizes people’s social world.