Ethics in Language
Who has the authority to name - and what happens to those who name differently?
Who has the authority to name - and what happens to those who name differently?
THE PROVOCATION
The word was everywhere. And entirely absent.
The word was everywhere. And entirely absent.
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Gaza genocide
On 16 September 2025, the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel revealed in a report its conclusion that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza.
“The Commission finds that Israel is responsible for the commission of genocide in Gaza,” said Navi Pillay, Chair of the Commission. “It is clear that there is an intent to destroy the Palestinians in Gaza through acts that meet the criteria set forth in the Genocide Convention.” |
In December 2024, Amnesty International concluded that Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. The International Association of Genocide Scholars - the academic body whose specific purpose is to study, define, and identify genocide - reached the same conclusion. So did a range of other human rights organisations whose institutional function is precisely this kind of determination.
This is not a contested finding among the bodies qualified to make it. It is a consensus.
And yet the word is absent from the statements of most Western governments. It is avoided or qualified in much mainstream media coverage. The Israeli government rejects it entirely. The gap between the conclusion of the relevant expert institutions and the language used by politically powerful actors is not a gap produced by genuine uncertainty about the evidence. It is a gap produced by power.
This is not a page about whether genocide is occurring in Gaza. The organisations whose entire purpose is to answer that question have answered it. This page is about something else: why do powerful actors resist a naming that expert bodies have formally established? What does it cost them to say the word - and what does it cost others when they refuse to? Who, in the end, has the authority to make a name stick?
Words are not labels attached to events after the fact. They carry legal force, political consequence, historical weight. To name something genocide is to invoke the 1948 Genocide Convention, to activate obligations that its signatories agreed to honour, to commit to a position that demands a response. Governments that use the word must act. Governments that refuse it protect themselves from obligation. The refusal is not a factual judgment. It is a political one, executed through language.
The question this page asks is: who has the authority to name - and what happens to those who name differently?
Big idea 1 - Words are acts.
The philosopher J. L. Austin spent his career dismantling a seemingly obvious assumption: that language primarily describes. In his lecture series How to Do Things with Words (delivered at Harvard in 1955 and published in 1962), Austin identified a class of utterances that do not describe a state of affairs but enact one. He called these performatives.
Consider the difference between saying "it is raining" and saying "I promise to be there." The first is true or false depending on the weather. The second does not describe a promise that already exists - it creates one. The same logic applies to "I now pronounce you married," "I declare war," "I sentence you to ten years," and "I apologise." None of these are reports. They are acts performed through language. The words and the deed are the same event.
Consider the difference between saying "it is raining" and saying "I promise to be there." The first is true or false depending on the weather. The second does not describe a promise that already exists - it creates one. The same logic applies to "I now pronounce you married," "I declare war," "I sentence you to ten years," and "I apologise." None of these are reports. They are acts performed through language. The words and the deed are the same event.
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Austin mapped the structure of speech acts in detail. Every utterance has a locutionary dimension - what is literally said. It also has an illocutionary dimension - what is done in saying it. A judge saying "guilty" is not reporting a verdict; the saying is the verdict. And it has a perlocutionary dimension - what effect the utterance produces in its hearer. The same sentence can have different illocutionary force in different contexts: "can you pass the salt?" is grammatically a question but illocutionarily a request.
This matters enormously for ethics. If language can act - if certain utterances constitute deeds rather than merely accompany them - then the argument that speech should be protected because it is only speech becomes more complicated. A slur directed at a person does not merely describe; it enacts a relationship of subordination. A threat does not merely predict harm; it begins to deliver it. The legal and ethical question of where expression ends and action begins depends entirely on whether Austin is right. |
Judith Butler and excitable speech The philosopher Judith Butler extended Austin's argument in Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (1997). Butler agreed that hate speech can wound through its utterance rather than merely through its consequences - the injury is in the performance, not only in what follows from it. But she added a complication. Language, she argued, is excitable: it does not fully obey the intentions of the speaker. A word can be turned against the purposes for which it was deployed. Communities that have been targeted by slurs have sometimes reclaimed those words - taken ownership of the instrument of their own dehumanisation and made it mean something different. This is not possible for all words in all contexts. But it is a demonstration that meaning is not fixed in the word itself; it is negotiated in the social space between speakers. This will become important in Big Idea 3. |
The genocide case from the provocation is directly an Austin problem. Saying "this is genocide" in an international legal context is a performative utterance. It does not merely describe an event - it activates obligations, assigns legal categories, commits the speaker to a position that carries consequences. The ICJ's careful language - issuing provisional measures without ruling on genocide as such - was itself a speech act, calibrated to produce specific legal effects while avoiding others. When governments decline to use the word, they are not merely choosing different vocabulary. They are choosing not to perform the act.
Fire in a crowded theatre
The classic liberal defence of free speech comes from John Stuart Mill. In On Liberty (1859), Mill argued that the only legitimate ground for restricting speech - or any action - is the prevention of harm to others. Expression, however offensive, should be protected unless it causes direct harm. This is the harm principle, and it remains the foundation of most liberal free speech law.
The classic liberal defence of free speech comes from John Stuart Mill. In On Liberty (1859), Mill argued that the only legitimate ground for restricting speech - or any action - is the prevention of harm to others. Expression, however offensive, should be protected unless it causes direct harm. This is the harm principle, and it remains the foundation of most liberal free speech law.
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But Mill's principle immediately raises a question: what counts as harm? In 1919, the US Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes offered what became the most cited limit case. Writing in Schenck v. United States, he observed that the most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic. The example was designed to mark a clear boundary: speech that directly causes harm is not protected.
Austin's framework sharpens the argument considerably. Shouting "fire" in a crowded theatre is not an expression of opinion. It is a speech act - an utterance whose illocutionary force is to command evacuation, and whose perlocutionary effect is a panic in which people are injured. The harm is not downstream of the speech; it is the speech. Mill's harm principle applies to it for exactly the same reasons it applies to any other harmful act. The difficulty is that Holmes's ruling was not actually about theatres. It was used to uphold the conviction of Charles Schenck, who had distributed leaflets opposing military conscription during the First World War. The example that was meant to mark an obvious, uncontroversial limit was used immediately to suppress political speech that merely made the government uncomfortable. |
The line between speech that causes harm and speech that causes offence, or speech that challenges power, turns out to be much harder to draw in practice than the fire-in-the-theatre example suggests. Austin tells us that words can act. Mill tells us that harmful acts can be restricted. What neither can tell us, by itself, is which words those are.
Big idea 2 - Language can be engineered.
In George Orwell's 1984 (1949), the ruling party develops a language called Newspeak. Its purpose is not to give citizens new ways of expressing old thoughts. It is to destroy the old thoughts by destroying the words that carried them. The word "freedom," for example, still exists in Newspeak - but only in the sense of a dog being free from fleas. The political sense - freedom from oppression, freedom to dissent - has been excised. Without the word, Orwell's argument goes, the concept cannot form. Thoughtcrime becomes literally impossible because there will be no words to think it in. Newspeak is fiction. But the essay Orwell published three years earlier, "Politics and the English Language" (1946), is not. In it, Orwell described the mechanism by which political language, in his own time and ours, performs a version of the same operation. Not by removing words - but by replacing vivid, concrete language with abstract, distant vocabulary that severs the connection between words and the realities they describe.
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The colonial suppression of indigenous languages operated on a similar logic, but more directly. The prohibition on speaking Welsh in Welsh schools - enforced through a device called the Welsh Not, a wooden token passed to any child caught speaking Welsh, who would then be beaten unless they passed it on to another offender - was not merely cultural aggression. It was an attempt to make certain ways of knowing the world unavailable. Indigenous languages encode knowledge of local ecologies, social structures, and relationships that have no equivalent in the colonising tongue. Destroying the language was destroying the knowledge system it carried.
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This connects to the argument of the Methods section. Walter Ong's claim was that writing restructures consciousness - that certain kinds of thought are only possible because writing exists. The inverse of this argument is equally powerful: remove the linguistic instrument, and you remove the cognitive possibility. Orwell understood this intuitively in 1949. The colonial administrations that ran residential schools, forbidding First Nations children from speaking their languages, understood it practically. What neither fully articulated was the epistemological dimension: this was not just suppression of expression, but suppression of knowledge itself.
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The vocabulary of atrocity
Orwell's examples from 1946 have been extended by every subsequent decade. "Pacification" for the destruction of villages. "Transfer of population" for forced expulsion. "Collateral damage" for civilian deaths in military strikes. "Enhanced interrogation techniques" for torture, a phrase introduced by the United States government after 2001 to describe practices that met legal definitions of torture under the Geneva Conventions. "Ethnic cleansing" - a phrase notable for the way the word "cleansing" implies that the people removed were dirt, that their removal was a form of hygiene. Orwell's point was not that these phrases are merely imprecise. They are precise, precisely designed to produce a specific effect. Concrete language forces the mind to form a concrete image: a person being waterboarded, a village burning, a family expelled from its home. Abstract language prevents the image from forming. If you cannot see it, you are less likely to object to it. The purpose of the euphemism is to make atrocity manageable - to let it be known without being felt. |
Big idea 3 - Naming is power.
In 1851, the American physician Samuel A. Cartwright published a paper in the New Orleans Medical and Surgical Journal describing two mental illnesses he claimed to have identified in enslaved African Americans. The first was drapetomania - a condition causing enslaved people to flee captivity. The second was dysaesthesia aethiopica, which Cartwright characterised as a tendency toward "rascality" and reluctance to work. Both conditions, he argued, were medical in origin and required medical treatment. By classifying the desire for freedom as a disease, he transformed an act of political resistance into a symptom requiring intervention. The name did not describe a reality. It created one - or rather, it created a framework in which resistance to slavery could be perceived as an illness in need of treatment rather than as a rational response to an unjust condition. The power to name the experience was the power to determine what the experience meant.
Cartwright's example is extreme, but the structure it reveals is not unusual. The history of psychiatric diagnosis is in part a history of naming as a political act. Homosexuality was classified as a mental disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) until 1973, not removed through new clinical evidence but through sustained political pressure from gay rights activists, internal debate within the American Psychiatric Association, and eventually a vote. The classification had not described a medical reality. It had constructed one, with consequences for employment, custody, military service, and criminal law. When the name changed, the reality did not change - but what could be done to people on the basis of that reality changed entirely.
In 1851, the American physician Samuel A. Cartwright published a paper in the New Orleans Medical and Surgical Journal describing two mental illnesses he claimed to have identified in enslaved African Americans. The first was drapetomania - a condition causing enslaved people to flee captivity. The second was dysaesthesia aethiopica, which Cartwright characterised as a tendency toward "rascality" and reluctance to work. Both conditions, he argued, were medical in origin and required medical treatment. By classifying the desire for freedom as a disease, he transformed an act of political resistance into a symptom requiring intervention. The name did not describe a reality. It created one - or rather, it created a framework in which resistance to slavery could be perceived as an illness in need of treatment rather than as a rational response to an unjust condition. The power to name the experience was the power to determine what the experience meant.
Cartwright's example is extreme, but the structure it reveals is not unusual. The history of psychiatric diagnosis is in part a history of naming as a political act. Homosexuality was classified as a mental disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) until 1973, not removed through new clinical evidence but through sustained political pressure from gay rights activists, internal debate within the American Psychiatric Association, and eventually a vote. The classification had not described a medical reality. It had constructed one, with consequences for employment, custody, military service, and criminal law. When the name changed, the reality did not change - but what could be done to people on the basis of that reality changed entirely.
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Hermeneutical Injustice
As we saw in Knowledge and the Knower, philosopher Miranda Fricker identified a form of injustice that operates through the absence of a name rather than the presence of a wrong one. She called it hermeneutical injustice: the harm that results when a gap in collective interpretive resources puts someone at an unfair disadvantage in making sense of their own social experience. The concept of sexual harassment did not exist as a named, legally recognised category in most jurisdictions until the 1970s. |
The flip side of this is the reclamation of names. When a community takes ownership of a word that was used to dehumanise them - reappropriating a slur, making it mean something different in mouths it was designed to wound - this is itself a political act. Butler's point about excitable language applies here: the word does not have a fixed meaning installed by its original users. Its meaning is contested in use. Reclamation does not neutralise the word for all contexts or all speakers. But it demonstrates that naming is not a one-directional exercise of power. It can be resisted, reversed, turned around.
The word "queer" is one of the clearest examples. For most of the twentieth century it was a weapon - a term of abuse directed at gay men in particular, used to shame, expose, and harm. From the late 1980s, activists began deliberately reclaiming it. Queer Nation, founded in 1990, used the chant "We're here, we're queer, get used to it" - taking the insult, stripping it of its shaming function, and wearing it as an assertion of visibility. By the 2000s "queer" had become an umbrella term of self-identification across LGBTQ+ communities and had entered academic language through queer theory. But the reclamation is not total. Some older gay men and women still experience the word as a wound regardless of who uses it - the history it carries for them is not cancelled by the community's reappropriation. The word now does different things in different mouths, in different generations, in different contexts. This is exactly what Butler means by excitable language: the word has escaped the control of those who first weaponised it, but it has not settled into a single stable meaning.
The same complexity runs through the N-word - and the debate is sharpest when it erupts in unexpected contexts. In 2016, at the White House Correspondents' Dinner, the comedian Larry Wilmore closed his address to President Obama by saying: "Yo Barry, you did it, my n****." The moment divided audiences immediately, despite the fact that Obama had himself recently used the term. Wilmore was Black, Obama was Black, and Wilmore was invoking the reclaimed register - the term of kinship and solidarity that Sean Leon describes in the video below. But the setting was a formal Washington dinner, broadcast live on C-SPAN. The same utterance that carries warmth in one context arrived in another where many viewers heard only the word's history, not its reclamation. Obama's own expression in that moment - a slow smile, a slight hesitation - captured the complexity precisely. Even within the community, even between two people who share the history, the word is not stable. Context is not a frame around the word. It is part of what the word does.
The word "queer" is one of the clearest examples. For most of the twentieth century it was a weapon - a term of abuse directed at gay men in particular, used to shame, expose, and harm. From the late 1980s, activists began deliberately reclaiming it. Queer Nation, founded in 1990, used the chant "We're here, we're queer, get used to it" - taking the insult, stripping it of its shaming function, and wearing it as an assertion of visibility. By the 2000s "queer" had become an umbrella term of self-identification across LGBTQ+ communities and had entered academic language through queer theory. But the reclamation is not total. Some older gay men and women still experience the word as a wound regardless of who uses it - the history it carries for them is not cancelled by the community's reappropriation. The word now does different things in different mouths, in different generations, in different contexts. This is exactly what Butler means by excitable language: the word has escaped the control of those who first weaponised it, but it has not settled into a single stable meaning.
The same complexity runs through the N-word - and the debate is sharpest when it erupts in unexpected contexts. In 2016, at the White House Correspondents' Dinner, the comedian Larry Wilmore closed his address to President Obama by saying: "Yo Barry, you did it, my n****." The moment divided audiences immediately, despite the fact that Obama had himself recently used the term. Wilmore was Black, Obama was Black, and Wilmore was invoking the reclaimed register - the term of kinship and solidarity that Sean Leon describes in the video below. But the setting was a formal Washington dinner, broadcast live on C-SPAN. The same utterance that carries warmth in one context arrived in another where many viewers heard only the word's history, not its reclamation. Obama's own expression in that moment - a slow smile, a slight hesitation - captured the complexity precisely. Even within the community, even between two people who share the history, the word is not stable. Context is not a frame around the word. It is part of what the word does.
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Sean Leon and Dalton Higgins are both Black, both have been targeted by the word, and they disagree - not on the history, but on what reclamation means, who it belongs to, and whether it can be sustained. Dalton's term for what reclamation attempts is semantic inversion: the deliberate remixing of a word to strip it of its original force. The question neither can fully answer is whether a word can be simultaneously reclaimed within a community and still weaponised against it from outside. Sean's concert crowd is the limit case: he cannot police who sings along.
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Return to the provocation at the top of the page. The word "genocide" was coined in 1944 by the Polish-Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin, who lost most of his family in the Holocaust and spent years lobbying for an international convention making it a crime. The 1948 Convention was the result. Lemkin created the word precisely because he understood that naming was necessary - that without a name, the concept could not be prosecuted, could not be recognised, could not obligate a response. He gave the act a name so that it could not be done without being seen.
The contemporary politics of that word - who uses it, who refuses it, what it costs to say it or withhold it - is exactly the struggle Lemkin understood. The authority to name is not distributed equally. It is held by states, by courts, by media institutions, by those whose testimony is heard and those whose is not. This is where Austin's speech act theory, Orwell's politics of language, and the history of naming converge: language is not a neutral medium through which knowledge travels. It is an ethically charged instrument. The question of who controls it is a question about power.
Bringing it together
The ethics of the word.
These three big ideas converge on a single proposition: language is not a neutral medium. It is an instrument with ethical force. Austin showed that speaking is acting - that certain utterances do not describe states of affairs but create them. This means that choosing a word is not merely a semantic decision. It is a decision about what is being done. The refusal to say "genocide" when the evidence meets the legal definition is not a failure of vocabulary. It is a choice not to perform the act.
Orwell showed that language can be engineered to make certain thoughts harder. Euphemism does not merely soften reality - it severs the connection between words and the concrete images that would produce moral response. When abstract vocabulary replaces vivid language, the effect is not neutrality but anaesthesia. This is not accidental. It is a tool, and it has users. The history of naming - in medicine, in law, in the politics of colonial suppression - showed that the authority to name is one of the most consequential forms of power. To name an experience is to determine whether it exists as a harm, a pathology, a crime, or a normal state of affairs. Those who lack the authority to name their own experience are not merely unheard. They are without the instrument by which experience becomes knowledge that can be acted on.
The three threads are not separate. The word "genocide" is a performative with legal force (Austin). It was coined precisely because euphemism had made mass murder administratively manageable (Orwell). And the struggle over who has the authority to apply it is a struggle over naming as power (Big Idea 3). One word, at the intersection of all three. The pages on Scope, Perspectives, and Methods in Language asked what language can do as a cognitive and epistemological instrument. This page asks a different question: given what language can do, what are we responsible for when we use it?
Orwell showed that language can be engineered to make certain thoughts harder. Euphemism does not merely soften reality - it severs the connection between words and the concrete images that would produce moral response. When abstract vocabulary replaces vivid language, the effect is not neutrality but anaesthesia. This is not accidental. It is a tool, and it has users. The history of naming - in medicine, in law, in the politics of colonial suppression - showed that the authority to name is one of the most consequential forms of power. To name an experience is to determine whether it exists as a harm, a pathology, a crime, or a normal state of affairs. Those who lack the authority to name their own experience are not merely unheard. They are without the instrument by which experience becomes knowledge that can be acted on.
The three threads are not separate. The word "genocide" is a performative with legal force (Austin). It was coined precisely because euphemism had made mass murder administratively manageable (Orwell). And the struggle over who has the authority to apply it is a struggle over naming as power (Big Idea 3). One word, at the intersection of all three. The pages on Scope, Perspectives, and Methods in Language asked what language can do as a cognitive and epistemological instrument. This page asks a different question: given what language can do, what are we responsible for when we use it?
Next: Optional Theme 2: Technology
Questions, assessments, films and other stuff.
Questions to think about
These are questions for discussion, reflection, and your TOK journal. They do not have single correct answers, they have better and worse arguments.
These are questions for discussion, reflection, and your TOK journal. They do not have single correct answers, they have better and worse arguments.
- Austin argued that some utterances are not descriptions but acts. Does this mean that language which harms - a slur, a threat, an incitement - should be treated as an action rather than as expression? What would follow from this for how we think about free speech?
- Orwell's Newspeak was designed to make unorthodox thought literally unthinkable by removing the words needed to think it. Is this possible? Can the absence of a word prevent a thought from forming - or does the thought persist even without the name?
- Is the choice of a word - "refugee" or "migrant", "genocide" or "conflict", "enhanced interrogation" or "torture" - ever purely a factual decision? Or is it always also an ethical one?
- Fricker's hermeneutical injustice describes harm that results from the absence of a name for an experience. Who has the responsibility to create new concepts when the existing ones fail? Is this a task for philosophers, for those with the experience, or for both?
- If a community reclaims a slur - taking ownership of a word used to dehumanise them - does this change what the word does? Can the same word perform different acts depending on who says it, to whom, and in what context?
- Raphael Lemkin created the word "genocide" because he believed naming was necessary for accountability. Does giving something a name change it - or does it only change what we can do about it?
- What are the implications of having, or not having, the right word? Consider a situation where an experience is real but unnamed. Is the harm diminished by the absence of the concept?
- Is silence ever an ethical act? When a government, a journalist, or an individual withholds a word that accurately names a situation, is this a form of complicity - or can the refusal to name ever be justified?
Exhibition connections
See more exhibition ideas and previous student work here
It is never too early to start to think about your TOK Exhibition, the ideas in this lesson connect strongly to three of the 35 prompts. Start noticing objects in the world around you that speak to these questions.
Prompt 7: What are the implications of having, or not having, knowledge?
Suggested object: any object that represents the absence of a concept - a blank space on a map where something now has a name, a document from before a legal category existed (before "sexual harassment" was codified, before "genocide" was defined), or an untranslatable word from another language that has no equivalent in English. Fricker's hermeneutical injustice argument is the backbone here: not having the word is not merely an inconvenience. It is a form of not having the knowledge - of being unable to identify, articulate, or act on an experience. The exhibition argument asks what changed when the name arrived, and what was the cost of its absence.
Prompt 14: Does some knowledge belong only to particular communities of knowers?
Suggested object: an object connected to a language, dialect, or form of expression that carries knowledge unavailable in translation - an untranslatable word, an indigenous place name that encodes ecological knowledge, a proverb that only makes sense in its original cultural context. The argument draws on the colonial language suppression thread of Big Idea 2: when a language is destroyed or suppressed, it is not only a cultural loss. It is an epistemological one. The knowledge encoded in that language - of local environments, social relationships, histories - is destroyed with it. The exhibition question asks whether there is knowledge that belongs to communities rather than individuals, and what obligations this creates for those with the power to preserve or suppress it.
Prompt 27: Does all knowledge impose ethical obligations on those who know it?
Suggested object: a document, report, or data set that establishes a harm - a medical study, a casualty count, a legal ruling, a testimony. The Austin argument is central: knowing that a word applies (knowing that an act meets the legal definition of genocide, knowing that a practice meets the clinical definition of torture) is not a neutral state. It creates pressure toward a speech act - toward saying what you know. The exhibition argument asks whether knowing the correct name for something obligates the knower to use it, and what the ethical weight of deliberate silence is when you have the knowledge and the authority to speak.
See more exhibition ideas and previous student work here
It is never too early to start to think about your TOK Exhibition, the ideas in this lesson connect strongly to three of the 35 prompts. Start noticing objects in the world around you that speak to these questions.
Prompt 7: What are the implications of having, or not having, knowledge?
Suggested object: any object that represents the absence of a concept - a blank space on a map where something now has a name, a document from before a legal category existed (before "sexual harassment" was codified, before "genocide" was defined), or an untranslatable word from another language that has no equivalent in English. Fricker's hermeneutical injustice argument is the backbone here: not having the word is not merely an inconvenience. It is a form of not having the knowledge - of being unable to identify, articulate, or act on an experience. The exhibition argument asks what changed when the name arrived, and what was the cost of its absence.
Prompt 14: Does some knowledge belong only to particular communities of knowers?
Suggested object: an object connected to a language, dialect, or form of expression that carries knowledge unavailable in translation - an untranslatable word, an indigenous place name that encodes ecological knowledge, a proverb that only makes sense in its original cultural context. The argument draws on the colonial language suppression thread of Big Idea 2: when a language is destroyed or suppressed, it is not only a cultural loss. It is an epistemological one. The knowledge encoded in that language - of local environments, social relationships, histories - is destroyed with it. The exhibition question asks whether there is knowledge that belongs to communities rather than individuals, and what obligations this creates for those with the power to preserve or suppress it.
Prompt 27: Does all knowledge impose ethical obligations on those who know it?
Suggested object: a document, report, or data set that establishes a harm - a medical study, a casualty count, a legal ruling, a testimony. The Austin argument is central: knowing that a word applies (knowing that an act meets the legal definition of genocide, knowing that a practice meets the clinical definition of torture) is not a neutral state. It creates pressure toward a speech act - toward saying what you know. The exhibition argument asks whether knowing the correct name for something obligates the knower to use it, and what the ethical weight of deliberate silence is when you have the knowledge and the authority to speak.
Films
For more see my 10 films for the TOK journey page.
For more see my 10 films for the TOK journey page.
🎬 WATCH - 1984 (Michael Radford, 1984)
adford's adaptation stays close to Orwell's text. The Ministry of Truth sequences - Winston at his speakwrite, feeding corrected documents into the memory hole, adjusting the historical record so that the party's past pronouncements are always consistent with the present - are directly relevant to Big Idea 2. The point is not that the party lies. The point is that it has engineered a language and an archive in which the lie and the truth are indistinguishable. Read alongside "Politics and the English Language": Orwell was writing the essay and the novel in the same years, and the film makes visible what the essay describes. My students can watch the film here.
adford's adaptation stays close to Orwell's text. The Ministry of Truth sequences - Winston at his speakwrite, feeding corrected documents into the memory hole, adjusting the historical record so that the party's past pronouncements are always consistent with the present - are directly relevant to Big Idea 2. The point is not that the party lies. The point is that it has engineered a language and an archive in which the lie and the truth are indistinguishable. Read alongside "Politics and the English Language": Orwell was writing the essay and the novel in the same years, and the film makes visible what the essay describes. My students can watch the film here.
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🎬 WATCH - The Lives of Others (Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, 2006)
The Stasi officer Gerd Wiesler is assigned to surveil a playwright in East Germany. What he hears changes him. The film is partly about the ethics of listening - of knowing things about people that they have not chosen to share - and partly about the ethics of what is reported, named, and recorded. The Stasi's power was the power to name: to classify citizens as enemies of the state, to write reports that determined fates. The film asks what happens to someone whose job is to use language as an instrument of control when the humanity of the person being controlled becomes impossible to ignore. It is the most precise film available about language, power, and the ethics of the word in a surveillance state.
My students can watch the film in German here.
The Stasi officer Gerd Wiesler is assigned to surveil a playwright in East Germany. What he hears changes him. The film is partly about the ethics of listening - of knowing things about people that they have not chosen to share - and partly about the ethics of what is reported, named, and recorded. The Stasi's power was the power to name: to classify citizens as enemies of the state, to write reports that determined fates. The film asks what happens to someone whose job is to use language as an instrument of control when the humanity of the person being controlled becomes impossible to ignore. It is the most precise film available about language, power, and the ethics of the word in a surveillance state.
My students can watch the film in German here.
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Further reading
Books
📚 READ - George Orwell, "Politics and the English Language" (1946) - essential. Short, fierce, and directly applicable. The diagnosis of political euphemism and the six rules Orwell proposes are the anchor for Big Idea 2. The essay is available free online and in the library. Read it alongside a current news article and apply the diagnosis.
📚 READ - Miranda Fricker, Epistemic Injustice (2007) - Chapters 1 and 7 are the most directly relevant: testimonial injustice (not being believed because of who you are) and hermeneutical injustice (lacking the concept to understand your own experience). Fricker is in the library under Ethics. The argument connects all three big ideas on this page and runs through Lesson 7 of the core course.
📚 READ - J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (1962) - the foundational text for speech act theory. The first three lectures establish the performative/constative distinction and the illocutionary/perlocutionary framework.
📚 READ - Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (1997) - Butler's extension of Austin into hate speech and language as wounding. Chapter 1 ("Burning Acts: Injurious Speech") is the key passage. More demanding than Austin but directly relevant to contemporary debates.
📚 READ - Miranda Fricker, Epistemic Injustice (2007) - Chapters 1 and 7 are the most directly relevant: testimonial injustice (not being believed because of who you are) and hermeneutical injustice (lacking the concept to understand your own experience). Fricker is in the library under Ethics. The argument connects all three big ideas on this page and runs through Lesson 7 of the core course.
📚 READ - J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (1962) - the foundational text for speech act theory. The first three lectures establish the performative/constative distinction and the illocutionary/perlocutionary framework.
📚 READ - Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (1997) - Butler's extension of Austin into hate speech and language as wounding. Chapter 1 ("Burning Acts: Injurious Speech") is the key passage. More demanding than Austin but directly relevant to contemporary debates.