Title:“A Limited, Metasemantic Defense of Cancel Culture”

Hume wrote, “We cannot form to ourselves a just idea of the taste of a pine-apple, without having actually tasted it”.  Putnam claimed that brains in vats could not entertain thoughts about the external world, since thinking such thoughts requires genuine contact with the world one is thinking about.  These are claims about how one’s circumstances constrain what one can think — what contents one can entertain.  This talk aims to develop the notion of a content constraint, and to relate this notion to issues of free speech.  A leading idea is that free speech requires adequate conceptual and linguistic resources, and that this requirement can motivate actions designed to avoid content constraints (including constraints that might be caused by the actions of other speakers).  On plausible metasemantic assumptions, there could be cases in which deplatforming or cancelling are appropriate responses to speakers whose speech threatens to create constraints for others; but care is needed to determine exactly what kinds of cases might justify these responses.