jason stanley | Yale University (original) (raw)
Papers by jason stanley
Disputatio, 2018
In this short piece belonging to a book symposium on my book How Propaganda Works (Oxford Univers... more In this short piece belonging to a book symposium on my book How Propaganda Works (Oxford University Press, 2015), I reply to the objections, comments and suggestions provided by the contributors: Bianca Cepollaro and Giuliano Torrengo, Olúfémi O. Táíwò, and Maria Cristina Amoretti. I show how some of the objections can be accommodated by the framework adopted in the book, but also how various comments and suggestions have contributed to the development, in future work, of several threads pertaining to the general view put forward in How Propaganda Works.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Chalmers’s philosophical work exploits a distinctive version of two-dimensionalism, a formal moda... more Chalmers’s philosophical work exploits a distinctive version of two-dimensionalism, a formal modal framework from the 1960s and 1970s that one can use to define two kinds of possible worlds semantic values. Chalmers presents this as the best form of a Fregean account of content. One of the principal aims of Constructing the World is to provide its metaphysical foundations. Chalmers presents himself as vindicating a Fregean account of meaning. I will be arguing that this is incorrect; the resulting theory of meaning is not properly regarded as Fregean, because it is not a plausible theory of cognitive significance How much this poses a problem for Chalmers depends upon whether his notion of content ultimately depends upon the Fregean theory of content, i.e. the theory of content that does provide an account of cognitive significance. While Constructing the World takes the form of a vindication of something like Carnap’s project in the Aufbau, my interest in this paper is in that part...
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
The overarching goal of How Propaganda Works is to provide an argument that democracy requires ma... more The overarching goal of How Propaganda Works is to provide an argument that democracy requires material equality. I hoped to forge an argument for this view without premises about morality or justice. I do not think this is as bold as it may sound. Democracy requires political equality. And political equality involves an epistemic component. This is recognizable in much traditional democratic political philosophy, which looked to a democratic or liberal education as a prerequisite for democracy. We see this, for example, in the work of W.E.B. Du Bois and John Dewey.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Democratic Theory, 2018
Stanley and Min discuss how propaganda works in liberal democratic societies. Stanley observes th... more Stanley and Min discuss how propaganda works in liberal democratic societies. Stanley observes that the inability to address the crisis of liberal democracies can be partially explained by contemporary political philosophy’s penchant for idealized theorizing about norms of justice over transitions from injustice to justice. Whereas ancient and modern political philosophers took seriously propaganda and demagoguery of the elites and populists, contemporary political philosophers have tended to theorize about the idealized structures of justice. This leads to a lack of theoretical constructs and explanatory tools by which we can theorize about real-life political problems, such as mass incarceration. Starting with this premise, Stanley provides an explanation of how propaganda works and the mechanisms that enable propaganda. Stanley further theorizes the pernicious effects that elitism, populism, authoritarianism, and “post-truth” have on democratic politics.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Philosophical Topics, 2021
Neutrality functions as an ideal in deliberation—we are supposed to have a neutral standpoint in ... more Neutrality functions as an ideal in deliberation—we are supposed to have a neutral standpoint in debate, speak without bias or taking sides. We argue against the ideal of neutrality. We sketch how a theory of meaning could avoid commitment even to the coherence of a neutral space of discourse for exchanging reasons. In a model that accepts the ideal of neutrality, what makes propaganda exceptional is its non-neutrality. However, a critique of propaganda cannot take the form of “clearing out” the obstacles for a “neutral space of discourse for exchanging reasons”, since that is to misunderstand how speech works. Such a critique would suggest that any emotive appeal is fundamentally undemocratic, and would delegitimize almost all historical protest movements. In this paper, we contrast a neo-Fregean picture of the neutral core of language with our own practice-based view, a view that takes political propaganda and the language of protest as central cases, and in which all language pra...
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Philosophical Topics, 2021
Let’s say that discussion is neutral if perspectives and social location are irrelevant to the un... more Let’s say that discussion is neutral if perspectives and social location are irrelevant to the understanding and evaluation of each move in the discussion. If perspectives and social location are irrelevant to the
discussion, the discussion is neutral. We argue that there is no such thing as a neutral discussion - neutrality is inconsistent with the metaphysics of language, and as such, is incoherent.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
The Good Society 25.1, 2016
In April 2014, the city of Flint, Michigan, began using water from the Flint River. The official ... more In April 2014, the city of Flint, Michigan, began using water from the Flint
River. The official reason to break Flint’s long time contract with the Detroit
Water and Sewage Department was financial efficiency; it was presented as
a cost-cutting measure. Flint residents began immediately complaining about their water, complaints that were ignored. Thanks to the local activists, it was eventually discovered that the water was indeed corrosive, the city failed to treat it, and lead leached from the pipes into the water drunk by the city’s children and families. By September 2015, the city was acknowledging the size of the health crisis this entailed, and in October 2015, Flint switched back to Detroit water. It was too late: the damage was done, and Flint’s children have shown persistently high levels of lead—poisoned by a series of decisions that would never have been made in a majority white city. It is also now clear that relevant officials knew that the switch to the Flint River was in fact more expensive, both in the short term and the long term, than remaining with the Detroit Water and Sewage Department. Using Vesla Weaver’s concept of frontlash, I argue that a technocratic ideology combined with a certain version of racism, resembling settler colonialism, is the cause of the tragedy.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 39.2 , 2019
In this paper, we sketch a conception of the theory of meaning that focuses on political speech a... more In this paper, we sketch a conception of the theory of meaning that focuses on political speech as a core example, which has different goals than standard practice—such as capturing unintended communicative effects—and different key concepts, such as that of a speech practice. The book that this paper begins is devoted to adjusting, reinterpreting, and modifying tools, concepts, and understandings thereof to incorporate the resources we need to understand speech in a non-ideal world.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Routledge Handbook of Social and Political Philosophy of Language , 2021
The study of propaganda involves understanding the communicative processes in persuading people b... more The study of propaganda involves understanding the communicative processes in persuading people by bypassing rationality. It has led philosophers and linguists to add new elements to theory of
meaning - such as Elizabeth Camp’s notion of a perspective (Camp, 2013), introduced to explain the communicative effect of slurs. And it has led theorists of meaning to alter their understanding of classic notions, such as Sbisa’s argument that propaganda forces us to recognize a normative character to the rule of accommodation (Sbisa, 1999), or the more dramatic reworking of the theory of presupposition and accommodation in Beaver and Stanley (forthcoming). In studying propaganda, theorists of meaning
connect to a long tradition of inquiry. We may have new terms, such as “fake news”, or study it in piecemeal, as in the case of slurs. But in studying these phenomena, theorists of meaning connect to a longer tradition. Our goal in this chapter is to contextualize and systematize this study in the context of
its recent history.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Nomos , 2021
In this piece, I use the distinction between liberal democratic culture and fascist culture to il... more In this piece, I use the distinction between liberal democratic culture and fascist culture to illuminate the difference between the kind of lying one finds politicians engaged in during fairly normal democratic times, and the kind of lying (if that is what it is) that occurs when fascist culture has made significant inroads. Fascism’s friend/enemy ideology underlies its vexed relationship with truth.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Shared rationality is the common ground of scientific progress. However, some theorists have argu... more Shared rationality is the common ground of scientific progress. However, some theorists have arguedthat this common ground may not be level, in that subtle assumptions embedded within lay views of rationality marginalize some would-be participants. Specifically, feminist philosophers have argued that rationality is associated with male rather than female discourse. This claim has frequently been dismissed as incoherent, but a straightforward interpretation is readily available: The concept reason is semantically associated with the concept male. We support this hypothesis in four studies (total N > 900), finding that at both the explicit and implicit level, reason is preferentially associated with male, feeling is preferentially associated with female, male faces prime unrelated judgments of reason/rationality, and gendered associations are related to interest in academic disciplines as well as estimates of the (mis)representation of women within those disciplines. Implications f...
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Analysis, 2014
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
THEORIA. An International Journal for Theory, History and Foundations of Science, 2016
The overarching goal of How Propaganda Works is to provide an argument that democracy requires ma... more The overarching goal of How Propaganda Works is to provide an argument that democracy requires material equality. My aim was to forge an argument for this view without premises about morality or justice. I do so by arguing that material inequality, like other forms of inequality, has pernicious epistemic effects. Inequality results in anti-democratic flawed ideologies, such as the ideology of meritocracy, and the ideology underlying the division of labor, the subjects of the last two chapters. Propaganda plays crucial roles both in preventing us from recognizing these epistemic harms, in the form of demagoguery, and in repairing them, in the form of civic rhetoric.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Journal of Philosophy, 2008
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
The Philosophical Quarterly, 1998
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Nous, 2002
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume, 2005
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Disputatio, 2018
In this short piece belonging to a book symposium on my book How Propaganda Works (Oxford Univers... more In this short piece belonging to a book symposium on my book How Propaganda Works (Oxford University Press, 2015), I reply to the objections, comments and suggestions provided by the contributors: Bianca Cepollaro and Giuliano Torrengo, Olúfémi O. Táíwò, and Maria Cristina Amoretti. I show how some of the objections can be accommodated by the framework adopted in the book, but also how various comments and suggestions have contributed to the development, in future work, of several threads pertaining to the general view put forward in How Propaganda Works.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Chalmers’s philosophical work exploits a distinctive version of two-dimensionalism, a formal moda... more Chalmers’s philosophical work exploits a distinctive version of two-dimensionalism, a formal modal framework from the 1960s and 1970s that one can use to define two kinds of possible worlds semantic values. Chalmers presents this as the best form of a Fregean account of content. One of the principal aims of Constructing the World is to provide its metaphysical foundations. Chalmers presents himself as vindicating a Fregean account of meaning. I will be arguing that this is incorrect; the resulting theory of meaning is not properly regarded as Fregean, because it is not a plausible theory of cognitive significance How much this poses a problem for Chalmers depends upon whether his notion of content ultimately depends upon the Fregean theory of content, i.e. the theory of content that does provide an account of cognitive significance. While Constructing the World takes the form of a vindication of something like Carnap’s project in the Aufbau, my interest in this paper is in that part...
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
The overarching goal of How Propaganda Works is to provide an argument that democracy requires ma... more The overarching goal of How Propaganda Works is to provide an argument that democracy requires material equality. I hoped to forge an argument for this view without premises about morality or justice. I do not think this is as bold as it may sound. Democracy requires political equality. And political equality involves an epistemic component. This is recognizable in much traditional democratic political philosophy, which looked to a democratic or liberal education as a prerequisite for democracy. We see this, for example, in the work of W.E.B. Du Bois and John Dewey.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Democratic Theory, 2018
Stanley and Min discuss how propaganda works in liberal democratic societies. Stanley observes th... more Stanley and Min discuss how propaganda works in liberal democratic societies. Stanley observes that the inability to address the crisis of liberal democracies can be partially explained by contemporary political philosophy’s penchant for idealized theorizing about norms of justice over transitions from injustice to justice. Whereas ancient and modern political philosophers took seriously propaganda and demagoguery of the elites and populists, contemporary political philosophers have tended to theorize about the idealized structures of justice. This leads to a lack of theoretical constructs and explanatory tools by which we can theorize about real-life political problems, such as mass incarceration. Starting with this premise, Stanley provides an explanation of how propaganda works and the mechanisms that enable propaganda. Stanley further theorizes the pernicious effects that elitism, populism, authoritarianism, and “post-truth” have on democratic politics.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Philosophical Topics, 2021
Neutrality functions as an ideal in deliberation—we are supposed to have a neutral standpoint in ... more Neutrality functions as an ideal in deliberation—we are supposed to have a neutral standpoint in debate, speak without bias or taking sides. We argue against the ideal of neutrality. We sketch how a theory of meaning could avoid commitment even to the coherence of a neutral space of discourse for exchanging reasons. In a model that accepts the ideal of neutrality, what makes propaganda exceptional is its non-neutrality. However, a critique of propaganda cannot take the form of “clearing out” the obstacles for a “neutral space of discourse for exchanging reasons”, since that is to misunderstand how speech works. Such a critique would suggest that any emotive appeal is fundamentally undemocratic, and would delegitimize almost all historical protest movements. In this paper, we contrast a neo-Fregean picture of the neutral core of language with our own practice-based view, a view that takes political propaganda and the language of protest as central cases, and in which all language pra...
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Philosophical Topics, 2021
Let’s say that discussion is neutral if perspectives and social location are irrelevant to the un... more Let’s say that discussion is neutral if perspectives and social location are irrelevant to the understanding and evaluation of each move in the discussion. If perspectives and social location are irrelevant to the
discussion, the discussion is neutral. We argue that there is no such thing as a neutral discussion - neutrality is inconsistent with the metaphysics of language, and as such, is incoherent.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
The Good Society 25.1, 2016
In April 2014, the city of Flint, Michigan, began using water from the Flint River. The official ... more In April 2014, the city of Flint, Michigan, began using water from the Flint
River. The official reason to break Flint’s long time contract with the Detroit
Water and Sewage Department was financial efficiency; it was presented as
a cost-cutting measure. Flint residents began immediately complaining about their water, complaints that were ignored. Thanks to the local activists, it was eventually discovered that the water was indeed corrosive, the city failed to treat it, and lead leached from the pipes into the water drunk by the city’s children and families. By September 2015, the city was acknowledging the size of the health crisis this entailed, and in October 2015, Flint switched back to Detroit water. It was too late: the damage was done, and Flint’s children have shown persistently high levels of lead—poisoned by a series of decisions that would never have been made in a majority white city. It is also now clear that relevant officials knew that the switch to the Flint River was in fact more expensive, both in the short term and the long term, than remaining with the Detroit Water and Sewage Department. Using Vesla Weaver’s concept of frontlash, I argue that a technocratic ideology combined with a certain version of racism, resembling settler colonialism, is the cause of the tragedy.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 39.2 , 2019
In this paper, we sketch a conception of the theory of meaning that focuses on political speech a... more In this paper, we sketch a conception of the theory of meaning that focuses on political speech as a core example, which has different goals than standard practice—such as capturing unintended communicative effects—and different key concepts, such as that of a speech practice. The book that this paper begins is devoted to adjusting, reinterpreting, and modifying tools, concepts, and understandings thereof to incorporate the resources we need to understand speech in a non-ideal world.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Routledge Handbook of Social and Political Philosophy of Language , 2021
The study of propaganda involves understanding the communicative processes in persuading people b... more The study of propaganda involves understanding the communicative processes in persuading people by bypassing rationality. It has led philosophers and linguists to add new elements to theory of
meaning - such as Elizabeth Camp’s notion of a perspective (Camp, 2013), introduced to explain the communicative effect of slurs. And it has led theorists of meaning to alter their understanding of classic notions, such as Sbisa’s argument that propaganda forces us to recognize a normative character to the rule of accommodation (Sbisa, 1999), or the more dramatic reworking of the theory of presupposition and accommodation in Beaver and Stanley (forthcoming). In studying propaganda, theorists of meaning
connect to a long tradition of inquiry. We may have new terms, such as “fake news”, or study it in piecemeal, as in the case of slurs. But in studying these phenomena, theorists of meaning connect to a longer tradition. Our goal in this chapter is to contextualize and systematize this study in the context of
its recent history.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Nomos , 2021
In this piece, I use the distinction between liberal democratic culture and fascist culture to il... more In this piece, I use the distinction between liberal democratic culture and fascist culture to illuminate the difference between the kind of lying one finds politicians engaged in during fairly normal democratic times, and the kind of lying (if that is what it is) that occurs when fascist culture has made significant inroads. Fascism’s friend/enemy ideology underlies its vexed relationship with truth.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Shared rationality is the common ground of scientific progress. However, some theorists have argu... more Shared rationality is the common ground of scientific progress. However, some theorists have arguedthat this common ground may not be level, in that subtle assumptions embedded within lay views of rationality marginalize some would-be participants. Specifically, feminist philosophers have argued that rationality is associated with male rather than female discourse. This claim has frequently been dismissed as incoherent, but a straightforward interpretation is readily available: The concept reason is semantically associated with the concept male. We support this hypothesis in four studies (total N > 900), finding that at both the explicit and implicit level, reason is preferentially associated with male, feeling is preferentially associated with female, male faces prime unrelated judgments of reason/rationality, and gendered associations are related to interest in academic disciplines as well as estimates of the (mis)representation of women within those disciplines. Implications f...
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Analysis, 2014
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
THEORIA. An International Journal for Theory, History and Foundations of Science, 2016
The overarching goal of How Propaganda Works is to provide an argument that democracy requires ma... more The overarching goal of How Propaganda Works is to provide an argument that democracy requires material equality. My aim was to forge an argument for this view without premises about morality or justice. I do so by arguing that material inequality, like other forms of inequality, has pernicious epistemic effects. Inequality results in anti-democratic flawed ideologies, such as the ideology of meritocracy, and the ideology underlying the division of labor, the subjects of the last two chapters. Propaganda plays crucial roles both in preventing us from recognizing these epistemic harms, in the form of demagoguery, and in repairing them, in the form of civic rhetoric.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Journal of Philosophy, 2008
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
The Philosophical Quarterly, 1998
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Nous, 2002
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume, 2005
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact