RESEARCH
Social Movements and the Synecdoche Problem, Noûs.
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In both lay and academic discourse about social change, a certain kind of social object is ubiquitous: the social movement. Against the backdrop of decades of movement research in social theory and the social sciences, and a recent uptick in philosophical work on the topic, I raise a foundational question: what is a social movement? I argue that the features enumerated by the prevailing analysis are at best necessary conditions on movementhood, but that they don't offer a jointly sufficient analysis because they allow that arbitrary parts of movements will count as further movements. I consider the range of conditions that what makes social movements special and distinct from other sorts of collectives--- NGOs, political parties, formal mass membership organizations or mere crowds---is that they are, as a matter of definitional necessity rather than mere contingent fact, part of an explanation of social change. A social movement for x--- e.g. for racial justice, for tax reform, for climate change mitigation--- is a social unit which, in addition to satisfying something like the necessary conditions posited by the prevailing analysis, is part of what explains x coming about, or will explain it coming about, when and if it does. This view has a number of interesting implications concerning how we might understand the sorts of claims and disputes that populate our discourse about social movements.
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Deepfakes, Public Announcements, and Political Mobilization, forthcoming, Oxford Studies in Epistemology vol. 8.
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A lot has recently been written about the promises and perils of deepfake technology--- that is, of machine learning models capable of creating realistic audio-visual samples depicting events that may never have happened. Philosophers writing on this topic (e.g. Rini 2021, Fallis 2022) have emphasized that, in an environment of ubiquitous deepfakes, we would expect the epistemic character of all videos, and not just the fake ones, to change. I point to a consequence of deepfake technology that has not yet been appreciated: that, where videos in general no longer carry the same epistemic weight, publicly shared videos then no longer have the same capacity to bring about common knowledge-- i.e. a state where everyone knows that everyone knows that the events depicted in the video occurred. This has significance that reaches beyond the fact that videos may cease to give rise to first order knowledge, because common knowledge is the unique basis for such phenomena as accountability, solidarity, and ultimately collective action. While existing critical work by academics has focused on deepfake technology as a threat to democratic institutions, I draw our attention to the threat this technology poses to the capacity for pre-institutional collective action that is the ultimate reservoir of democratic power and legitimacy.
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The Politics of Past and Future: Synthetic Media, Showing and Telling, 2023, Philosophical Studies, 182, 137-158.
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Generative artificial intelligence has given us synthetic media that are increasingly easy to create and increasingly hard to distinguish from photographs and videos. Whereas an existing literature has been concerned with how these new media might make a difference for would-be knowers---the viewers of photographs and videos--- I advance a thesis about how they will make a difference for would-be communicators--- those who embed photos and videos in their speech acts. I claim that the presence of these media in our information environment reduces our ability to show one another things, even as it may increase our resources for telling. And I argue that this has consequences beyond the disruption of knowledge acquisition; showing is a way that we preserve relational equality through superficial asymmetries in political communication, and thereby express respect for our audiences. If synthetic media reduce our options for showing, they then interfere in the way that we manage our relationships in the context of collective political action.
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What is Social Organizing? 2024, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. 10(2), 460-496.
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While scholars of, and participants in, social movements, electoral politics, and organized labor are deeply engaged in contrasting different theories of how political actors should organize, less has been recently written about what social organizing is. This paper aims to say what a theory of social organizing must do in order to make sense of typical organizing-related claims and debates. It is intuitive that what social organizing does is bring about some kind of collectivity. However, I argue that the varieties of collectivity most amply theorized by analytic philosophers in recent years, including grouphood and collective intentionality, are not the right kinds to embed in a theory of social organizing. I ultimately argue that the sort of collectivity that organizing characteristically brings about is a special kind of causal complementarity among agents' actions--- and that while this can exist alongside grouphood and collective intentionality, it is not the same thing as either. The notion of social organizing that emerges is one that can clarify, without trivializing, a number of pressing contemporary debates about how normal people should conduct themselves as interconnected political actors.
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On Group Lies and Lying to Oneself: Comment on Jennifer Lackey’s ‘The Epistemology of Groups', 2023, Asian Journal of Philosophy 2(2)
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In The Epistemology of Groups, Jennifer Lackey investigates the conditions for the possibility of groups telling lies. Central to this project is the goal of holding groups, and individuals within groups, accountable for their actions. I show that Lackey’s total account of group phenomena, however, may open up a means by which groups can evade accusations of having lied, thus allowing them to evade responsibility in precisely the way Lackey set out to avoid. Along the way, I also take note of some interesting implications of Lackey’s view: that it makes groups uniquely susceptible to a lack of self-knowledge and that it creates an interesting mechanism by which groups can lie to themselves.
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Luck and the Value of Communication, 2023, Synthese, 201(96), 1-19.
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Those in the Gricean tradition take it that successful human communication features an audience who not only arrives at the intended content of the signal, but also recognizes the speaker’s intention that they do so. Some in this tradition have also argued that there are yet further conditions on communicative success, which rule out the possibility of communicating by luck. Supposing that both intention-recognition and some sort of anti-luck condition are correctly included in an analysis of human communication, this article asks what the value of events satisfying these conditions is. I present a puzzle concerning the value of intention-recognition which is analogous to the Meno Problem in epistemology, but ultimately argue that this puzzle is solveable: the signaling-relevant value of intention recognition can be vindicated. However, I argue that the version of this puzzle that concerns the further proposed luck-proofing conditions on communication can not be answered. I argue therefore that communication, as analyzed by many, is no more valuable qua signal than a proper subset of its conditions. Human communication is thennot a uniquely valuable signaling event.
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Against Irrationalism in the Theory of Propaganda, 2023, Journal of the American Philosophical Association, 9(2), 303-317.
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According to many accounts (e.g. Stanley, 2015; Ross, 2002; Marlin, 2002; Ellul, 1973), propaganda is a variety of politically significant signal with a distinctive connection to irrationality. Depending on the account, the irrationality may be supposed to be theoretical, or practical; it may be supposed that propaganda characteristically elicits this irrationality anew, or else that it exploits its prior existence. The view that encompasses such accounts we will call irrationalism. This paper presents two classes of propaganda that don’t bear the sort of connection to irrationality posited by the irrationalist: hard propaganda and propaganda by the deed. Faced with these counterexamples, some irrationalists will offer their account of propaganda as a refinement of the folk concept rather than as an at-tempt to capture all of its applications. This paper argues that a desideratum on any refinement of the concept of propaganda should be that the concept re-main essentially political, and that the irrationalist refinement fails to meet this condition.
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Propaganda, Irrationality, and Group Agency, 2021, in The Routledge Handbook of Political Epistemology, (Eds. Michael Hannon, Jeroen de Ridder), Routledge, 226-235.
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I argue that propaganda does not characteristically interfere with individual rationality, but instead with group agency. Whereas it is often claimed that propaganda involves some sort of incitement to irrationality, I show that this is neither necessary nor sufficient for a case’s being one or propaganda. For instance, some propaganda constitutes evidence of the speaker’s power, or else of the risk and futility of opposing them, and there is nothing irrational about taking such evidence seriously. I outline an alternative account of propaganda inspired by Hannah Arendt, on which propaganda characteristically creates or destroys group agency. One aspiring to control the public should have an interest in both creating and suppressing group agency, I argue, both because groups have capacities that individuals don’t, and because participation in group action can have a transformative effect upon the individual. Finally, I suggest that my characterization of propaganda suggests a vision of resistance to propaganda quite unlike the one that emerges from irrational-belief accounts, on which propaganda cannot be resisted by oneself.
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In defense of political correctness and against “political correctness”, 2019, Ethics, Left and Right, Oxford University Press.
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Of Martyrs and Robots: Propaganda and Group Identity, 2018, The Yale Review, link here.
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