Scorekeeping in a pornographic language game

Australasian Journal of Philosophy

Volumn 77, Issue 3, 1999, Pages 303-319

  Langton, Rae ^a   West, Caroline ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 60949211968     PISSN: 00048402     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/00048409912349061     Document Type: Article

References (38)

1. Catharine MacKinnon defines pornography as 'the graphic sexually explicit subordination of women in pictures or words that also includes women dehumanized as sexual objects, things or commodities; enjoying pain or humiliation or rape; being tied up, cut up, mutilated, bruised, or physically hurt; in postures of sexual submission or servility or display; reduced to body parts, penetrated by objects or animals, or presented in scenarios of degradation, injury, torture; shown as filthy or inferior; bleeding, bruised or hurt in a context which makes these conditions sexual.' 'Francis Biddle's Sister', p. 176,
2. in MacKinnon, Feminism Unmodified (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987);
3. cf. Only Words (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 121, n. 32. This definition is controversial, but for convenience we follow it here, ignoring for present purposes the problems (political or philosophical) it may pose.
4. Ronald Dworkin, 'A New Map of Censorship', Index on Censorship 1/2 (1994) p. 13,
5. and 'Two Concepts of Liberty', in Isaiah Berlin: A Celebration, ed. Edna and Avishai Margalit (London: Hogarth Press, 1991) pp. 104, 105.
6. He suggests that pornography succeeds in persuading people when he concedes some of the effects claimed by MacKinnon: 'there is some evidence that exposure to pornography weakens people's critical attitudes toward sexual violence' ('Two Concepts', p. 105).
7. The mismatch between rhetoric and reality in Dworkin's analysis of pornography has been commented on by Jennifer Hornsby, 'Speech Acts and Pornography', Women's Philosophy Review, November 1993, 38-45,
8. reprinted with a postscript in Susan Dwyer (ed.), The Problem of Pornography (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1995), 220-232.
9. Dworkin, 'Two Concepts', p. 106, quoting with approval the words of Judge Frank Easterbrook, American Booksellers Assn., Inc. v. Hudnut 771 F.2d 323 (1985).
10. Edward C. Nelson, in 'Pornography and Sexual Aggression', Maurice Yaffe and Edward Nelson (eds.), The Influence of Pornography on Behaviour (London: Academic Press, 1982), p. 185,
11. citing a 1966 study by S. Rachman ('Sexual fetishism: An experimental analogue', Psychological Record 16 (1966), 293-296).
12. Only Words, p. 16.
13. Danny Scoccia, 'Can Liberals Support a Ban on Violent Pornography?', Ethics 106 (1996), 776-799. The quotation is from p. 777. Scoccia's focus, unlike MacKinnon's, is on violent desires produced by violent pornography, rather than on 'bigotry' produced by violent and other pornography. He provides an excellent discussion of the liberal 'persuasion principle', and how its application to pornography is undermined by the conditioning hypothesis. Other reductive accounts include Frederick Schauer's view that pornography is not really speech at all, but a kind of sex aid; and Cass Sunstein 's view that since pornography aims at arousal and affects prepositional attitudes by a process akin to subliminal suggestion, it is non-cognitive speech.
14. See Schauer, 'Speech and "Speech" - Obscenity and "Obscenity": An Exercise in the Interpretation of Constitutional Language', Georgetown Law Journal 67 (1979), 899-933;
15. Sunstein, 'Pornography and the First Amendment', Duke Law Journal (September 1986), 589-627. These views are discussed and rejected by Scoccia.
16. Scoccia, 'Can Liberals Support a Ban?', p. 785.
17. For some philosophical discussions other than those of MacKinnon, see e.g. Melinda Vadas, 'A First Look at the Feminist/Civil Rights Ordinance: Could Pornography be the Subordination of Women?', Journal of Philosophy 84 (1987), 487-511.
18. Langton's 'Speech Acts and Unspeakable Acts', Philosophy and Public Affairs 22 (1993), 293-330 offers a speech act analysis of the claims that pornography subordinates and silences women, and argues that free speech includes illocution.
19. Jennifer Homsby argues likewise with respect to the silencing claim, in 'Speech Acts and Pornography', 'Illocution and its Significance', in Foundations of Speech Act Theory, ed. S.L. Tsohatzidis (London: Routledge, 1994),
20. 'Disempowered Speech', in Philosophical Topics 23 (1995), ed. Sally Haslanger, 127-147.
21. See also Hornsby and Langton, 'Free Speech and Illocution', Legal Theory 4 (1998), 21-37.
22. This question is addressed by West in 'Can Liberals Support a Ban on Pornography?: Pornography, Liberalism and Women's Freedom of Speech' (in progress),
23. and by Langton, in 'Pornography: A Liberal's Unfinished Business', The Canadian Journal of Law and Jurisprudence 12 (1999), 109-33.
24. David Lewis, 'Scorekeeping in a Language Game', in Philosophical Papers, Vol. I (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 233-249,
25. first appearing in the Journal of Philosophical Logic 8 (1979), 339-59.
26. J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962).
27. 'Scorekeeping', p. 236. In addition to these constitutive rules, Lewis describes regulative rules directing the players to play correctly, and directing them to aim to make the score evolve in certain ways. (Team members should try to maximise the number of runs of their own team, and so forth.)
28. The story is described by Catherine Itzin, drawing on work done by Jeanne Barkey and J. Koplin. See Itzin (ed.), Pornography: Women, Violence, and Civil Liberties (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). The story appeared in Hustler, January 1983 issue, about two months before the New Bedford pool hall rape took place (later dramatised in the film The Accused, starring Jodie Foster). Itzin's work also offers detailed descriptions of the kinds of pornography widely available in the United States and the United Kingdom, of which this story is in many ways typical; see especially pp. 27-53.
29. Sometimes also described as a 'positive' depiction, see e.g. Edward Donnerstein, Daniel Linz and Steven Penrod, The Question of Pornography: Research Findings and Policy Implications (New York: Free Press, 1987), especially chapters 5 and 6. An 'unfavourable' or 'negative' depiction would be one in which the woman's later enjoyment was absent.
30. Linda Lovelace, with Mike McGrady, Ordeal (Secaucus, NJ: Citadel Press, 1980). One of the authors received in her junk mail a catalogue of pornographic material in which Ordeal was marketed as pornography. This example, and those of testimony and sexual refusal, are discussed in Langton's 'Speech Acts and Unspeakable Acts' as examples of illocutionary disablement.
31. Ray Wyre, 'Pornography and Sexual Violence: Working with Sex Offenders' in Pornography: Women, Violence and Civil Liberties, p. 236.
32. See also Edna F. Einsiedel, 'Social and Behavioural Science Research Analysis', Report of the Attorney General's Commission on Pornography, Vol. I (Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1986), 901-1033.
33. MacKinnon describes many such examples throughout Feminism Unmodified, Only Words, particularly in 'Francis Biddle's Sister: Pornography, Civil Rights and Speech', in Feminism Unmodified, 163-197.
34. These examples are from Lewis's discussion in 'Truth in Fiction', Collected Papers, Vol. I, 261-280,
35. first published in American Philosophical Quarterly 15 (1978), 37-46. Our mention of 'the right sorts of authorial moves' is more hand-waving than we would like, but this is a large and complex topic beyond the scope of our project here. Sometimes, for example, the 'right' move for introducing implicit content in a fiction will really be an absence of a relevant countervailing move: as when the implicit content of a fiction includes the presupposition that the laws of nature operating in the fictional world are the same as the laws operating in our own.
36. See for example Donnerstein, Linz and Penrod (eds.), The Question of Pornography. Research Findings and Policy Implications (New York: Free Press; London: Collier Macmillan, 1987): viewers of pornography appear to become more likely to view women as inferior, more disposed to accept rape myths (including the idea that women enjoy rape), more likely to see rape victims as deserving of their treatment, and more likely to say that they themselves would rape if they could get away with it.
37. Gregory Currie, 'The Moral Psychology of Fiction', Australasian Journal of Philosophy 73 (1995), 250-259. The quotation is on p. 250. Currie himself is less interested in this factual learning than the moral learning he goes on to argue for. Currie's analysis, with its focus on the roles of simulation and the imagination, may well be relevant in ways we do not discuss here to the question of how one could learn from pornography, and the same may be true of some ideas in Kendall Walton's Mimesis as Make-Believe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990).
38. Lewis himself, in describing these background propositions, moves from an analysis which says they are true in the actual world, to an analysis which says they are true in what he calls the collective belief worlds of their community of origin: 'The proper background. . .consists of the beliefs that generally prevailed in the community where the fiction originated'. See 'Truth in Fiction', pp. 272-3.