Beyond Belief: Pragmatics in Hate Speech and Pornography1

1. Hate speech and pornography1 1.1. Game plan: scope Political theorists and philosophers of language are alike in wanting to know answers to certain questions about speech: what is speech for, and why does it matter? J. S. Mill took the primary function of speech to be our collective journey towards true belief, and he argued for a right to free speech that would allow it fulfill this distinctive function.2 Political theorists following in Mill’s footsteps have wondered how far this goes. Some speech appears to offer dim prospects for helping us reach Mill’s hoped-for destination. To take an example that will occupy us here, speech that promotes racial or sexual hatred is hardly friendly to the pursuit of true belief; and it is by no means obvious that freedom of speech stretches to freedom of hate speech. Philosophers too are interested in speech and its relation to true belief. They ask how speech works. To answer these questions, they develop theories of meaning, and theories of speech acts and pragmatics. Robert Stalnaker gives voice to a crucial desideratum for such theorizing: it is desirable that ‘the pragmatic notions developed to explain the linguistic phenomena be notions that help to connect the practice of speech with purposes for which people engage in the practice.’ He has a certain paradigm in mind. The ‘principal reason for speech’, he says, is that ‘people say things to get other