GOLDBERG, S. (2016) - Arrogance, Silence, and Silencing

II—SANFORD C.
GOLDBERG
ARROGANCE, SILENCE, AND SILENCING

Alessandra Tanesini’s insightful paper (2016) explores the moral and episte-
mic harms of arrogance, particularly in conversation. Of special interest to
her is the phenomenon of arrogance-induced silencing, whereby one
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speaker’s arrogance either prevents another from speaking altogether or else
undermines her capacity to produce certain speech acts such as assertions
(Langton 1993, 2009). I am broadly sympathetic to many of Tanesini’s
claims about the harms associated with this sort of silencing. In this paper I
propose to address what I see as a lacuna in her account. I believe (and will
argue) that the arrogant speaker can put those he silences in the morally
outrageous position in which their own silence contributes to their oppres-
sion. While nothing in Tanesini’s account would predict or explain this, the
wrinkle I propose will aim to do so in a way that is in the spirit of her
account. To do so, I will need to expand the focus of discussion: instead of
concentrating on (arrogance-induced) silencing, I will consider the phenom-
enon of (arrogance-induced) silence. When one is silent in the face of a
mutually observed assertion (whatever the cause of this silence), one’s
silence will be interpreted by others. I argue that (1) under certain wide-
spread conditions, a hearer’s silence in the face of the arrogant speaker’s
assertions is likely to be falsely interpreted as indicating her assent to the as-
sertion, and (2) such an interpretation of the hearer’s silence will bring new
harms in its wake—in particular, harms to the hearer who was silenced,
and also harms to the community at large. When we combine these new
harms with the ones Tanesini identified in her paper, we reach the further
conclusion that (3) the harms of silencing (whether arrogance-induced or
otherwise) are potentially far worse than many have imagined.
In her interesting and far-ranging paper, Tanesini aims to character-

ize the sorts of harms that are engendered by the arrogant person, es-
pecially in conversation. Her main thesis is that
arrogance produces ignorance by silencing others (both preventing
them from speaking and causing their assertions to misfire) and by fos-
tering self-delusion in the arrogant themselves. (Tanesini 2016, p. 72)
C 2016 The Aristotelian Society

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Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume xc
doi: 10.1093/arisup/akw012
94 II—SANFORD C. GOLDBERG
She also argues that, as a result of these harms, arrogance produces

epistemic harms to the community, as it is deprived of the knowledge
of those who are silenced. In so far as the knowledge of which the
community is deprived includes knowledge that would reveal to the
arrogant speaker his own arrogance,1 the sustainment of the self-de-
lusion of the arrogant is to be explained, at least in large part, as an
effect of the arrogance itself.
The sort of arrogance whose harms Tanesini is trying to characterize
involves ‘a disrespectful attitude to others grounded in the presumption
that one is exempt from the ordinary responsibilities of participants in

conversations and especially in the practice of asserting’ (Tanesini 2016,
p. 74). As Tanesini characterizes matters, such an attitude is typically
manifested in such things as the speaker’s failure to allow others to take
turns in the conversation, his frequently interrupting and talking over
them when they do speak up, and his regarding himself as not account-
able to other participants to the speech exchange even when they chal-
lenge his assertion(s). Tanesini points out (no doubt correctly) that
arrogant behaviours of this sort have baleful effects on other partici-
pants, that those who exhibit such arrogance commit the moral wrong
of disrespecting others, and that the results of their doing so are episte-
mically harmful (in so far as their arrogance dissuades and/or prevents
those with knowledge from speaking up, and so promotes ignorance).
One particular feature of Tanesini’s account is of central interest
to me. It concerns the harmful effects that arrogance can have on
those who are silenced by such arrogance. Developing the ground-
breaking work of Rae Langton (1993, 2009) and others, Tanesini
envisages that arrogance can silence others in two different ways. A
person is locutionarily silenced, she writes, when, as a result of sys-
tematic treatment in this arrogant fashion, the person acquires the
disposition to keep to herself (out of a desire not to have her would-
be contributions utterly disregarded or subject to ridicule, disrespect,
etc.). But perhaps the more deep-seated sort of silencing is illocution-
ary silencing.2 A person is silenced in this way when her ‘purported
assertion misfires due to lack of uptake’ (Tanesini 2016, p. 88).
1 As Tanesini herself notes, arrogance tends to be ‘gendered . . . since positions of power are
frequently occupied by men, and arrogance is a trait which is more likely to be developed in
powerful individuals’ (Tanesini 2016, p. 72 n.4). It is for this reason she uses male pronouns
when speaking of the arrogant speaker. I will follow her in this respect.
2 The notion of illocutionary silencing Tanesini has in mind was first developed in Langton
(1993, 2009). See also Hornsby (1995).

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INTELLECTUAL ARROGANCE 95
Arrogance can have the effect of illocutionarily silencing another

speaker in so far as the arrogant behaviour itself produces certain at-
titudes in would-be audience members, where the possession of the
attitudes in question prevent the audience from attaining uptake of
the speaker’s intended illocutionary act(s). Imagine a situation in
which a speaker is regularly observed to be treated with arrogance,
where those who observe this treatment conclude (wrongly!) that the
treatment is deserved or warranted. And suppose that as a result the
observers cease to regard the speaker’s would-be contributions as
worthy of being taken seriously. In so far as this attitude leads them

to conclude that the speaker’s speech contributions do not count as
a case of offering her ‘commitment to’ being accountable for the
truth of what she said, this failure to correctly apprehend her contri-
butions is tantamount to a failure of uptake. Under such conditions,
the speaker’s attempts to state or assert (that such-and-such is the
case) are not taken up as such by her audience; she has effectively
been illocutionarily silenced.3
There can be no doubt that people who have been silenced in ei-
ther of these two ways have been harmed.4 As Tanesini herself notes,
the harms include being disrespected, having one’s self-confidence
eroded, losing the chance for influencing the group (in the case of
locutionary silencing), and (in the case of illocutionary silencing)
losing one’s status as someone who is even able to offer inputs
into the deliberative process of the group. In addition to these
harms, Tanesini suggests the possibility of further harms that
might arise downstream when one is systematically silenced through
arrogance:
[T]he silenced individuals will soon learn that it is less risky to share
the views of those who are capable of silencing them. These individuals
may bite their tongues, unless what they think coincides with powerful
views. Over time, one may expect that because of cognitive dissonance
such individuals may stop biting their tongues and simply defer to the
opinions of others. When they do so, they have become servile.
(Tanesini 2016, p. 90)
3 I have some concerns about allowing the determination of whether an illocutionary act
has been performed to turn on whether there has been proper uptake in the audience.
However, as these concerns are not germane to the points I want to make in this paper, I
will waive them here.
4 See MacKinnon (1989), Young (1989), Langton (1993), Schauer (1993), Dyzenhaus
(1992) and Hornsby (1995).

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Servility of this sort appears to involve the loss of one’s sense of one-
self as an epistemic subject in one’s own right; one who is rendered
servile in this way is the victim of what Fricker (2007) characterizes
as an epistemic injustice.5
I believe that Tanesini is broadly correct in her assessment of the
various harms associated with those silenced by the arrogant.
I worry, however, that something is missing in her account of the
harms involved when arrogance silences. What appears to be miss-
ing is the way in which the harms Tanesini describes are made
far worse by the very manner in which the silenced party defends

herself—namely, through her remaining silent in the face of the
arrogant party’s assertions. For my impression is that, when
conditions are ripe for silencing—when members of certain groups
are systematically oppressed and subordinated—then the very
silence of those who are the victims of this oppression and
subordination is itself standardly interpreted as further evidence
for the warrantedness of the way these victims are being treated.
While this interpretation of their silence is both false and terribly
unfair, it can be traced to aspects of our social practices associated
with assertion; and it is by revealing this faulty interpretation’s
source in our various practices of assertion, that we might best
hope to be able to understand the full scope of the harms of
silencing.
In the sections to follow I hope to explain all of this, and in so do-
ing provide an additional wrinkle to the analysis in Tanesini’s own
account.
II
It should be uncontroversial that a hearer’s silence in the face of a

mutually observed assertion is sometimes, and arguably often, a sig-
nificant part of the speech exchange itself. By ‘silence’ here I mean
the state of remaining quiet, of not responding verbally, and of not
giving any explicit indication of whether one has accepted or rejected
the assertion. By saying that silence in this sense is significant I mean
that it is taken as such by some or all of the participants in the speech
5 An epistemic injustice is an injustice that harms an individual in her role as an epistemic

subject.

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exchange: they interpret other parties’ silence as indicative of this or

that. Suppose that someone asserts something in the mutual presence
of a group of people, and that one or more of the audience members
remains silent in the face of this assertion. It is easy to imagine sce-
narios in which other participants interpret this silence as indicating
that the relevant party is being polite, or that they have no objections
to what was said, or that they think it would be awkward to respond
publicly to the speaker’s contribution, and so on. Whether and how
one’s silence is interpreted will of course depend on many factors:
what the interpreter knows of one’s background beliefs and behav-

ioural dispositions, how others in the audience publicly respond to
the assertion, the prevailing social norms in the community, what is
(taken as) mutually presupposed in the context, and so forth.
Schematically, we might summarize the situation by saying that the
fact that a hearer is silent in the face of a mutually observed assertion
is itself a piece of evidence that other participants will seek to explain
(if only to themselves); and they often seek to do so by way of mak-
ing an inference to the best explanation of that silence.
Among the possible explanations of another’s silence in the face
of a mutually observed assertion, one stands out as particularly sa-
lient. This is the one according to which one’s silence indicates one’s
assent to what was asserted. When a participant P accepts this as the
best explanation of audience A’s silence, P can then be said to inter-
pret A’s silence as indicating her assent. I will designate this sort of
interpretation the ‘assent interpretation’ of silence. Among the vari-
ous candidate explanations for a hearer’s silence, the assent interpre-
tation is ‘particularly salient’ in at least three senses. First, this
interpretation is highly psychologically salient to speakers: faced
with the task of explaining another’s silence in the face of a mutually
observed assertion, the assent interpretation is typically one of the
first to be considered. (I speculate that this is true at least for those
communities in which norms of politeness are not the predominant
social norms.) Second, the assent interpretation is highly socially sa-
lient to members of language communities: it is a mutually familiar
part of the social practice of many speech communities that silence
is standardly interpreted as indicating assent. (By ‘standardly’ here
I have in mind a statistical regularity of sorts. Again, I speculate
that the practice of interpreting silence as indicating assent is standard,
in this sense at least, for those communities in which norms of

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politeness are not the predominant social norms.) Third, this interpreta-
tion of silence is normatively salient to speakers: speakers enjoy a de-
fault (albeit defeasible) entitlement to assume that silence indicates
assent.
I suspect that my claims asserting the psychological and social sa-
lience of the assent interpretation will be relatively uncontroversial,
but my claim asserting the normative salience of this interpretation
will be rejected by many. Indeed, Tanesini herself explicitly rejects
the claim of a normative entitlement to presume that silence means
assent:

An asserter is . . . not entitled to expect that his audience will believe
the content of his assertion if they have not challenged it. So they are
not entitled to presume that silence means assent. (Tanesini 2016,
p. 79)
Although I think that the assent interpretation is one to which we do

enjoy a default (albeit defeasible!) entitlement,6 for the purposes of
this paper I won’t insist on this. It will suffice for my purposes here if
the assent interpretation is merely psychologically and socially
salient.
Since I will be putting a good deal of stock in the psychological
and social salience of this interpretation, and since the conclusions I
reach on this basis will be far-reaching, it is perhaps worth under-
scoring the sort of evidence that supports the hypotheses of psycho-
logical and social salience. I divide the evidence into three categories:
historical evidence attesting to the psychological and social salience
of the assent interpretation; historical evidence suggesting that assent
interpretation is a special case of a generic attitude we have towards
silence in the face of others’ actions more generally; and familiar so-
cial practices in which (something in the neighborhood of) the assent
interpretation figures explicitly.
I begin with the historical evidence attesting to the psychological
and social salience of the interpretation whereby another’s silence in
the face of a mutually observed assertion is taken to indicate her as-
sent. Our first piece of evidence is from Plato’s Cratylus. Plato has
Socrates tell Cratylus in an aside that ‘I shall assume that your
silence gives consent’ (Cratylus 435b). (Cratylus is represented as
silent in response.) Presumably, Plato would not have had Socrates
6 For an extended defence of this claim, see Goldberg (ms).

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give expression to an interpretation of silence that would have

been regarded by his readers as highly controversial or downright
dubious, since to have done so would have been distracting to his
readers. Consequently, from the fact that he had Socrates make this
claim (and that he represented Cratylus as silent in response), we can
infer that Plato regarded this assumption as one that was standard
among those he anticipated as the readers of the dialogue.
Still in the same category of evidence, I note the existence of a
Latin proverb, Qui tacet consentire videtur, ubi loqui debuit ac
potuit: he who is silent, when he ought to have spoken and was able

to, is taken to agree. That there is a proverb to this effect indicates
the status of this principle as something proverb-worthy, and hence
(one might assume) ordinary. Presumably, such a proverb is worth
having around only because there are—or were at the time of the
prevalence of the proverb—many cases it covers, that is, many cases
in which a hearer ‘ought to have spoken and was able to’ yet
remained silent.
Next, I move to the second category of evidence. I submit that we
have ample historical evidence attesting to the prevalence of a generic
attitude towards silence (or inaction) in the face of others’ actions gen-
erally, of which the assent interpretation can be seen as a special case.
In particular, those who are silent (or who do not act) in the face of
another’s actions are typically taken to acquiesce in the performance
of the action (and to have no objections to its acceptability). This sort
of attitude is particularly keenly felt when one oneself regards the per-
formed action as unjust or immoral; one is then likely to disapprove
of the other party’s silence or inaction. Since there are numerous his-
torical examples of people who condemn silence in the face of injus-
tice or unethical behaviour, I will have to satisfy myself with three
examples. The first is from the late eighteenth century, when the then
vice president Thomas Jefferson, helping the Kentucky and Virginia
legislatures draft resolutions denouncing the Alien and Sedition Acts
(which made it illegal for anyone to advocate secession from the
union), proclaimed that ‘silent acquiescence’ to the acts was ‘highly
criminal’ (Jefferson 1799). Almost two centuries later, in his civil
rights sermon at the Ebenezer Baptist Church on 30 April 1967,
Dr Martin Luther King noted, ‘There comes a time when silence is
betrayal’ (King 1967). And Rabbi Bradley Artson, a recent commen-
tator on the Jewish response to injustice and oppression, remarks that

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‘our silence and inaction in the face of contemporary injustice and

oppression is akin to assenting to it’ (Artson 2003).
As noted, these statements express attitudes regarding silence in
the face of unjust acts, rather than in the face of an observed asser-
tion. But several points can help us connect these statements to the
assent interpretation itself. To begin with, the attitude of disappro-
bation regarding silence in the face of injustice would appear to rest
on the general assumption that silence indicates acquiescence to the
performed act.7 Of course, assertions themselves are (speech) acts in
their own right. To acquiesce to this sort of act is to allow it to have

its characteristic or essential effect. And Stalnaker offers an illumi-
nating account of this effect:
[T]he essential effect of an assertion is to change the presuppositions of
the participants in the conversation by adding the content of what is
asserted to what is presupposed. (Stalnaker 1978, p. 86)8
Given Stalnaker’s account, to acquiesce to another’s assertion is to

allow it to have this effect, and so to allow the common ground to
be updated by adding the asserted content to the things presupposed
in context.9 In sum, it would seem that the assent interpretation is
nothing more than a special case of our attitude towards silence (or
inaction) in the face of others’ actions more generally, as applied to
the speech act of assertion.
7 It may rest on a weaker assumption, to the effect that many people will assume that silence
indicates acquiescence. This weaker assumption might be read into the three quotes above.
At a minimum, Jefferson, King and Artson all appear to worry that other people who ob-
serve the participants’ silence will take this silence to indicate acceptance, thereby em-
boldening those who are perpetrating the injustices and enfeebling those who might
otherwise try to resist (by making them think that the support for the injustice is much
greater than in fact it was). This weaker assumption would suit my purposes here. Suppose
that the assumption that silence indicates acquiescence is only merely widely endorsed. In
that case, I could say that the assent interpretation is a special case of a general attitude that
many people have towards silence in the face of others’ actions. This conclusion is in keep-
ing with my hypotheses of the psychological and social salience of that interpretation.
8 Stalnaker adds, ‘This effect is avoided only if the assertion is rejected’ (1978, p. 86; italics
added). In Goldberg (ms), I argue that silent rejection is uncooperative, and that this is
something that is, or should be, mutually manifest. The result is that in so far as participants
to a conversation are (presumptively but defeasibly) entitled to regard the conversation itself
as a cooperative activity, they are (presumptively but defeasibly) entitled to regard silence as
indicating assent.
9 I should point out that for Stalnaker ‘acceptance’ does not imply belief or endorsement.
Still, it involves updating one’s mental representation of the common ground, at least for
the duration of the conversation. In Goldberg (ms) I indicate how to connect Stalnaker’s
notion of acceptance to a more full-blooded notion of endorsement. I pass over these details
here.

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I move now to the third type of evidence in support of the conten-

tion that the assent interpretation is psychologically and socially
salient. I submit that we find (something in the neighbourhood of)
this interpretation built into certain familiar social practices—in
particular, to certain practices of group decision-making. Consider
the practice known as the ‘tacit acceptance procedure’ (also known
as the ‘silence procedure’), which is employed by committees charged
with ratifying a report. This procedure involves the circulation of the
draft document to the members of the committee, on the assumption
that if no objections are made prior to the publicly expressed

deadline, it is taken to be accepted by the members of the committee.
Such a procedure is described in Berridge (2010):
[A] proposal with strong support is deemed to have been agreed unless
any member raises an objection to it before a precise deadline: silence
signifies assent—or, at least, acquiescence. This procedure relies on a
member in a minority fearing that raising an objection will expose it to
the charge of obstructiveness and, thereby, the perils of isolation.
Silence procedure is employed by nato, the osce, in the framework
of the Common Foreign and Security Policy of the European Union
(eu) and, no doubt, in numerous other international bodies. (Berridge
2010, p. 158)
Here we see a social practice that embeds (something in the neigh-

bourhood of) the assent interpretation. I do not here comment on
the overall legitimacy of, or justification for, this procedure. My pre-
sent claim is only that something like the assent interpretation can be
found in familiar social practices, and that this attests to the psycho-
logical and social salience of that interpretation.
In sum, it would appear that there is ample evidence in support of
the hypotheses that the assent interpretation is both psychologically
and socially salient. I do not want to overstate the scope of my claim
here. In those communities in which politeness is an overriding social
norm, where the expression of public disagreement or even mere
doubt is itself seen as impolite, the best explanation for a hearer’s si-
lence will (typically) not be that she assents to the asserted content;
in such communities, silence itself will take on a different signifi-
cance. Even so, I submit that many of us live in communities in
which politeness norms are not weightier than other social norms.
My claim is that for those of us who live in such communities, the as-
sent interpretation is psychologically and socially salient.

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III
Let us now return to the individual who is silenced by the arrogant

speaker. Above I briefly described Tanesini’s account of the various
harms associated with being silenced by the arrogant. I now want to
argue that there are additional harms. In particular, in so far as the
speaker who is silenced by the arrogant lives in a community in
which the assent interpretation is socially and psychologically sa-
lient, then, under certain other (widespread) conditions to be noted,
she is likely to suffer a further harm: one of the very ways she has de-

vised to deal with her oppression—namely, by remaining silent in
the face of the arrogant speaker’s assertions—unwittingly risks
compounding her very oppression. In this section I hope to explain
this point in detail.
As noted above, the phenomenon of silencing (whether locution-
ary or illocutionary) is an injustice for all sorts of reasons.10 At the
same time, it has not been widely noticed that part of the injustice—
a particularly stinging part—is this: as a result of this form of
systematic oppression, people who have been silenced are
susceptible to having the very effects of their oppression regarded
as a kind of endorsement on their part.11 To see how this works,
suppose that we are in a community in which the assent
interpretation is itself psychologically and socially salient. And
suppose further that the community is one in which conditions
are ripe for silencing: members of certain social groups are
systematically oppressed and subordinated. Now it is plausible to
think that under such conditions many people (including perhaps
some victims themselves) are ignorant of the phenomenon of
silencing: they don’t acknowledge it, recognize it, discern when
conditions for it obtain, etc. Such people will be oblivious to reasons
that ought to prompt them to doubt or deny that the hearer’s silence
indicates acceptance. To them, the assent interpretation will remain
psychologically and socially salient; they will continue to regard this
interpretation as a live option as they seek to explain their fellows’
10See the works cited above in footnote 4.

11 The idea that those who are silenced have a positive duty to resist this oppression—and
so have a positive duty not to remain silent—is a prominent theme in Hay (2013).
Interestingly, Hay herself comes at these matters from a very different perspective; her
approach is Kantian, and her central thesis is that ‘people who are oppressed are bound by
the duty of self-respect to resist their own oppression’.

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silence in the face of a mutually observed assertion. In so far as they

are oblivious to the phenomenon of silencing, we would expect that
many of them will end up endorsing this interpretation, and so will
end up regarding the silenced subject’s silence as indicating her
acceptance of what is said. When they do, these oblivious
individuals not only participate in the silencing-constituting
oppression itself, but also harm the silenced victim a second time
over; they do so by interpreting the very effects of that oppression
(the victims’ demoralized silence) as indicating the victims’
acceptance of the assertion. This is a further harm, I submit, not (or

not merely) because it falsely represents them as accepting what they
(likely) reject, but also, and more nefariously, because in so doing it
renders them complicit in their own oppression: in being taken to
agree with the arrogant speaker’s claim, they are being rendered in a
way that will only reinforce the prevailing but unfair attitude which
regards women as lacking an independent perspective that is worth
taking seriously in its own right.
I just argued that the psychological and social salience of the as-
sent interpretation can be used to explain how victims of silencing
are harmed twice over: first, for having been silenced, and second,
for having their silence interpreted as assent. I now want to argue
that the psychological and social salience of the assent interpretation
can also be used to account for the process by which those who are
silenced become (in Tanesini’s terminology) ‘servile’.
Recall Tanesini’s characterization of the process. In the passage I
quoted above, she notes that ‘over time’ those individuals who are si-
lenced ‘may stop biting their tongues and simply defer to the opin-
ions of others’ (2016, p. 90) Tanesini explains this transition as
owed to the need to relieve ‘cognitive dissonance’. Presumably the
thought is this: at first the silenced individual regards herself as
knowledgeable, even on those occasions on which she disagrees with
those who are more powerful; however, this self-conception is in ten-
sion with her observation that those who are more powerful or ‘au-
thoritative’ (read ‘arrogant’) mock her and disregard her claims,
indicating that they regard her opinion as without merit; and the re-
sult is a cognitive dissonance between (on the one hand) her self-
regard and (on the other) the regard others have for her. Tanesini’s
explanatory hypothesis, then, appears to be this: the transition from
biting one’s tongue to deferring to others is made in order to relieve
this dissonance.

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Now it is worthwhile bearing in mind that there are two ways to re-
lieve the noted dissonance: either by downgrading one’s self-assessment
or else by downgrading one’s assessment of others’ assessment of one.
So a question remains: why does the silenced subject relieve the disso-
nance by downgrading her own self-assessment? We can discern
Tanesini’s proposed answer from what she has to say about the ‘risk’ a
hearer would continue to run were she to continue to hold an indepen-
dent perspective (as opposed to deferring to those with power and au-
thority). Tanesini notes,

Whenever illocutionary silencing is deployed to prevent dissent, the si-
lenced individuals will soon learn that it is less risky to share the views
of those who are capable of silencing them. (Tanesini 2016, p. 90;
italics added)
The risks Tanesini has in mind are those of ‘[h]aving one’s claims ig-
nored or dismissed’, and of ‘being made out to be so emotional that
one’s intentions cannot be even discerned’ (2016, p. 89). Thus,
Tanesini’s account appears to be that the silenced party makes the
transition (from biting her tongue to deferring to others) in order to
attain a practical benefit (the avoidance of being ignored, dismissed,
and/or made out to be overly emotional).
I am uneasy with this account of the transition to ‘servility’. For
one thing, the suggested account appears to assume a kind of doxas-
tic voluntarism. In particular, it appears to assume that one can
choose to follow belief-fixing policies (such as the policy of deferring
to others) on the basis of practical considerations. In so far as one
can’t choose to believe at will—in so far as the thesis of doxastic
voluntarism is false—it is hard to see how one could follow a policy
based on such considerations. For another (related) thing, the
suggested account renders the silenced party, uncharitably, as
epistemically irrational in making the transition from keeping to
herself to deferring to others. The suggested account represents the
transition as practically rational, of course; but in so far as the
silenced party’s reasons for the transition are exclusively practical
considerations, the transition is (like the beliefs formed on the basis
of the adopted policy) epistemically irrational.
This leaves us with a question: is there another account of the tran-
sition from keeping to oneself to deferring to others, which (a) doesn’t
assume any version of doxastic voluntarism, and (b) is more charita-
ble to the silenced party? I think that an alternative explanation

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becomes apparent once we recognize the role that other parties’ si-
lence plays in one’s own reactions to observed assertions. Once we
appreciate this role, we are in a position to see that those who are si-
lenced often do have evidence—albeit of a highly misleading kind—
that can seem to justify the move to deference.12 At the very least, we
will see that those who are silenced are responding to epistemic
reasons when they make the transition to servility. While the
conclusion that they reach—that they ought to defer to others
(especially the powerful) when they disagree with them—is false, they
are not epistemically irrational in the manner by which they arrive

at it.
To see the details of the sort of alternative explanation I am envis-
aging, return to the individual who has been silenced by systemati-
cally arrogant treatment. As we have been imagining her, she is in a
community in which the assent interpretation is psychologically and
socially salient. In that case, she herself is likely to interpret the si-
lence of others as indicating that they assent to the arrogant speak-
er’s assertions. If she does so, she then has further evidence in
support of the acceptability of the arrogant speaker’s assertions. The
evidence in question is higher-order evidence: she regards others’ si-
lence in the face of these assertions as indicating their acceptance of
the assertions, and so regards their silence as evidence of the (by
others’ lights) acceptability of the assertions. In so far as she inter-
prets others’ silence in this way, this (higher-order) evidence might
well prompt her to question her own assessment in those cases in
which she regards the assertions themselves as dubious. Indeed, as
she gets more and more evidence of this kind, she has (what she
has reason to believe is) ever greater epistemic grounds for
doing so. In this way, we can see the road that eventuates in a loss
of self-confidence and a deference to others’ opinions can start off
through the subject’s appreciation of the evidence itself—evidence
which, unbeknownst to her, is highly misleading (as the other
participants might be silent, as she is, out of motives other than
acceptance).
12 I say that it ‘can seem to justify’ this move. Whether it does justify this move—or, better,
whether it justifies the beliefs formed on the basis of the doxastic policy—will depend on
one’s views regarding such things as the nature of epistemic justification and the
relationship between (and relative weights of) higher-order evidence and first-order
evidence. These are very deep waters on which I remain silent here.

V
I submit that this ‘higher-order evidence’ (hoe) account of the

transition from keeping to oneself to deferring to others is to be pre-
ferred to the ‘pragmatic’ account Tanesini favours.
For one thing, the hoe account (unlike the pragmatic account)
preserves the hypothesis that the silenced party remains epistemically
rational throughout the transition from keeping to herself to defer-
ring to others. The transition is epistemically rational because it is
based on (what the silenced party has reason to regard as) higher-or-
der evidence of the acceptability of the arrogant speaker’s assertion.
The silenced party’s perspective is this: she is aware of the social

practice whereby silence in the face of a publicly observed assertion
is taken to indicate assent.13 So she has reason to regard others’ si-
lence as indicating their assent, and so as indicating the acceptability
(from their perspective) of the assertion. The more of this evidence
(of others’ silence) she acquires, the more evidence she has for think-
ing that deference is the right policy. Consequently, in so far as arro-
gant people often induce silence in others, we reach the conclusion
that—at least in so far as she non-culpably fails to realize that others
are silent out of motives other than assent—it is epistemically
rational for her to make the transition from keeping to herself to
deferring to others. (Once she is apprised of the facts, of course,
she ought to take the higher-order evidence for what it is: highly
misleading as to the acceptability of the arrogant speaker’s
assertions.)
For another, the hoe account (unlike the pragmatic account) is
charitable. Part of this charitability consists in the fact that the hoe
account can preserve the hypothesis that the silenced individual
13 It might be wondered: why, if she is aware of the practice of interpreting silence as indi-
cating assent, does she herself remain silent in those periods in which she has doubts? More
specifically still: why isn’t she aware of the likelihood that others will interpret her silence as
indicating her assent—in which case, assuming she does not assent, she is allowing them to
misinterpret her silence? For a detailed answer, see Goldberg (ms); the brief answer is this.
Even though the assent interpretation is psychologically and socially salient, it is also part
of the practice that one should reject this interpretation whenever there are better
explanations for a hearer’s silence. What is more, in remaining quiet despite her misgivings,
she might be waiting to see whether others speak up, and when they don’t, she might decide
that it is practically best not to speak up. She might well acknowledge that her policy of
silence runs the risk that others will misinterpret her silence, but she might think that it is
still best, all things considered, for her to remain silent. This is a practical judgement about
what it is best to do (speak up or not), not an epistemic judgement about what it is proper
to believe (accept the assertion or not). Epistemically speaking, at early points in the
process, before she has acquired a good deal of this higher-order evidence, she might persist
in her own independent views; and during this time she remains epistemically rational in so
far as her first-order evidence isn’t swamped by her higher-order evidence.

V
remains a thoroughgoing epistemic subject—that although she has a

diminished sense of her own epistemic competence, she remains an
epistemic subject whose beliefs reflect her best assessment of the
evidence. By contrast, the pragmatic account construes her as
suffering from a complete loss of epistemic agency: on that account’s
construal, she simply opts to defer in belief-fixation to others out of
a desire to avoid being humiliated, ignored, and so on. Even if we
waive my concerns about doxastic voluntarism, such an account
appears to render her in such a way that it is no longer true of her
that her beliefs reflect her best assessment of the evidence.

But there is an additional reason to prefer the hoe account to the
pragmatic account of the silenced party’s transition (from keeping to
herself to deferring to others). The hoe explanation makes use of
considerations that we will need independently of the present matter,
and so the hoe account is more economical than the pragmatic ac-
count. I will return to this point in §iv below.
In this section I have been arguing that we need to consider the
role of silence itself in the sustainment of the oppression of those
who have been silenced. Doing so enables us to supplement
Tanesini’s account of the harms of conversational arrogance. What
is more, if we bracket for the moment our account of the transition
to servility, we can see that the resulting picture is very much in the
spirit of Tanesini’s own account. For my point might be put like this.
When the arrogant speaker’s assertion meets with pervasive silence,
there is a risk that everyone will regard this silence as indicating that
the others accept this assertion. This is a risk just as much for those
who aren’t victims of being silenced as for those who are. But those
who are victims of silencing suffer more when this risk materializes.
The reputations of those who are regularly accorded respect remain
intact even as those individuals are silent in the face of an arrogant
person’s assertion. By contrast, those who already suffer from an un-
justly ascribed reputation for lacking an independent perspective are
likely to be seen, when they remain silent, as further confirming this
(unjust) reputation. This is, of course, an unfair double standard.
But, I submit, this is precisely the double standard that makes the ar-
rogant speaker’s assertions far worse for those who are already vic-
tims of systematic oppression and subordination than they are for
those who aren’t victims of such oppression. This sort of harm is in
addition to the harms Tanesini associates with the phenomenon of
arrogance-induced silencing.

V
In sum, it should be clear that my proposal is an additional wrin-

kle in the account that Tanesini herself has offered. To be sure, I
have disagreed with Tanesini’s suggestion that pragmatic consider-
ations drive the process by which those who are silenced move from
biting their tongue to deferring to others. But I regard this as a mi-
nor, in-house dispute among two accounts that are otherwise in
alignment.
IV

I want to conclude my discussion with a few comments about the
significance of the wrinkle I have proposed, and the importance of
considerations pertaining to conversational silence itself.
First, silence-based considerations enable us to generalize some of
the points Tanesini makes regarding silencing. By design, Tanesini’s
account is limited to cases of silencing induced by conversational ar-
rogance. It should be underscored, however—and I take it that
Tanesini herself would agree—that many of the points she makes
carry over, mutatis mutandis, to silencing induced by unfair
conversational practices more generally. For consider the prevalent
behaviours whereby women are more frequently (and more quickly)
interrupted, or whereby women take up less air time when they do
speak (whether or not they are interrupted). Those who exhibit
interrupting behaviours, or who exhibit disproportionately quick
impatience when women speak up, do not always do so out of
arrogance; for some, this is just what they are used to doing. (The
evidence that they are not doing it out of arrogance is that they
would be ashamed and highly motivated to change if they were to be
made aware of the nature of their behaviours.) Even so, women are
harmed by these behaviours whatever their aetiology. When such
behaviours have the effect of silencing women, the very harms
Tanesini associates with arrogance-induced silencing arise once
again. This suggests that the mechanisms that are responsible for
bringing about the harms do not derive from the arrogance itself,
but rather from the behaviours to which the arrogance gives rise.
And this is precisely what we would predict if some of the
mechanisms that reinforce the oppressive circumstances flow from
audience silence. So long as conversational practices have the effect
of rendering some speakers silent, the harms I described in §iii will

V
obtain. Consequently, the hypotheses for which I have been

arguing—that the very silence of those who have been silenced is
used against them (as when it is taken to indicate their acceptance of
the assertion itself), and that matters are compounded when the
silenced parties themselves interpret the silence of others as
indicating their acceptance—are hypotheses that earn their keep
as we aim for a general theory of the mechanisms and harms of
silencing.
There is a second reason for regarding considerations of conversa-
tional silence as significant: reflection on these considerations puts

us in a position to identify a novel sort of epistemic injustice (Fricker
2007). When the silenced party’s silence is taken to indicate her as-
sent to the asserted proposition, she has been harmed. As I noted
above, the harm here is not (or not merely) that she is taken by the
oblivious interpreter to accept something that she might well reject;
it is rather that, in failing to appreciate the real explanation for her
silence, those who regard her silence as indicating acceptance fail to
acknowledge the oppressive circumstances under which she oper-
ates, and the result is that they construe her in a way that only rein-
forces that oppression. Since the circumstances really are oppressive,
those who don’t acknowledge this, and so who remain silent in the
face of such circumstances, are likely to have their silence and inac-
tion interpreted in turn as accepting the legitimacy of those circum-
stances. And in so far as this interpretation is correct, their failure of
acknowledgement is, at one and the same time, an endorsement of
the unjust circumstances themselves. Given that the unjust circum-
stances harm the victims in their status as epistemic subjects, the re-
sult is that the oblivious interpreters are guilty of committing an
epistemic injustice against those who have been silenced.
I come, finally, to a third reason for taking seriously consider-
ations of conversational silence. Reflection on these considerations
puts us in a position to appreciate that the social epistemic harms of
arrogance go beyond what Tanesini has suggested. According to the
analysis I have offered, victims of silencing are harmed a second
time, in so far as one of the effects of their oppression (namely, their
demoralized silence) is standardly interpreted as indicating the vic-
tims’ acceptance of the assertion itself. Since this is so, such contexts
‘produce ignorance’ (Tanesini 2016, p. 72), as they deprive conver-
sational participants of important sources of knowledge and justified
belief. Tanesini herself points out one very important source of

V
knowledge that is unavailable in such contexts: the knowledge pos-

sessed by members of currently oppressed groups is unavailable, as
these speakers do not speak up. But there is another source of
knowledge that is unavailable under conditions of silencing, one that
we see only after we reflect on the nature of conversational silence.
In particular, the epistemic significance of silence itself is degraded
under conditions of silencing. To see this, consider silence as a (can-
didate) signal of assent. Now, the epistemic value of any signal is a
function of how reliably it indicates the condition it signals: the
more reliable it is, the higher its epistemic value as a signal (that is,

the more warranted confidence one can have regarding the presence
of the signalled condition). Now imagine (as seems plausible) that
very few people are willing to risk antagonizing the arrogant, with
the result that arrogant assertions are typically met with the general
silence (or the feigned assent) of all parties. In that case, the epistemic
value of silence as a signal of assent is degraded. What is more, as
the signal degrades in epistemic value, the risk of false interpreta-
tions of silence increases. Unless people are highly reliable in discrim-
inating those cases in which the best explanation of a hearer’s silence
is that she assents, they risk embracing the assent interpretation in
many cases in which this interpretation is false. They thereby arrive
at a false (highly over-inflated) view as to the acceptability of various
assertions they observe. In this way we see that, in so far as they de-
grade the epistemic value of silence, the arrogant do serious damage
to the epistemic community itself. And the point is perfectly general:
in so far as the risk of faulty interpretations of silence is present un-
der any conditions that elicit silence without hearer assent, condi-
tions of oppression more generally can be said to erode the epistemic
value of silence, and so to harm the epistemic community. Were we
to eliminate the oppression and subordination of our fellows, our
practices of interpreting silence would be significantly more reliable.
I do not for a moment suppose that this social epistemic harm is as
politically important as the harm Tanesini herself noted. On the con-
trary, it is more important that we strive to be a just community, and
so treat people as they deserve to be treated—including as epistemic
subjects. But the harms involved when the epistemic value of silence
is degraded are real nevertheless.
I conclude, then, that we have various reasons to supplement the
account Tanesini has offered regarding arrogance-induced silencing

V
with an account of the harms arising out of the misinterpretation of

conversational silence.14
Department of Philosophy
1860 Campus Drive
Northwestern University
Evanston, il 60208
usa
[email protected]

References
Artson, Rabbi Bradley 2003: ‘No Neutrality: Silence is Assent’. My Jewish

Learning. http://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/no-neutrality-silence-
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Berridge, G. R. 2010: Diplomacy: Theory and Practice. 4th edn. New York:
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Dyzenhaus, David 1992: ‘John Stuart Mill and the Harm of Pornography’.
Ethics, 102(3), pp. 534–51.
Fricker, Miranda 2007: Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Know-
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Goldberg, Sanford C. ms: ‘Assertion, Silence, and the Norms of Public Reac-
tion’. Unpublished manuscript.
Hay, Carol 2013: Kantianism, Liberalism, and Feminism: Resisting Oppres-
sion. Houndmills and New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Hornsby, Jennifer 1995: ‘Disempowered Speech’. Philosophical Topics,
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at http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article16183.htm. Accessed
20 October 2015.
Langton, Rae 1993: ‘Speech Acts and Unspeakable Acts’. Philosophy and
Public Affairs, 22(4), pp. 293–330.
2009: Sexual Solipsism: Philosophical Essays on Pornography and
Objectification. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
14I would like to thank Erin Beeghly, Jennifer Lackey, Hao Liang and Kristin Schaupp for
helpful discussions of these matters. (None of them are responsible for any errors I have
made here!)

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MacKinnon, Catherine 1989: Towards a Feminist Theory of the State. Cam-

bridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
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GOLDBERG, S. (2016) - Arrogance, Silence, and Silencing

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II—SANFORD C.

ARROGANCE, SILENCE, AND SILENCING

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In her interesting and far-ranging paper, Tanesini aims to character-

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She also argues that, as a result of these harms, arrogance produces

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(1993, 2009). See also Hornsby (1995).

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Arrogance can have the effect of illocutionarily silencing another

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(1992) and Hornsby (1995).

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It should be uncontroversial that a hearer’s silence in the face of a

5 An epistemic injustice is an injustice that harms an individual in her role as an epistemic

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exchange: they interpret other parties’ silence as indicative of this or

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Although I think that the assent interpretation is one to which we do

6 For an extended defence of this claim, see Goldberg (ms).

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give expression to an interpretation of silence that would have

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‘our silence and inaction in the face of contemporary injustice and

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Given Stalnaker’s account, to acquiesce to another’s assertion is to

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I move now to the third type of evidence in support of the conten-

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Here we see a social practice that embeds (something in the neigh-

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Let us now return to the individual who is silenced by the arrogant

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10See the works cited above in footnote 4.

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silence in the face of a mutually observed assertion. In so far as they

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C 2016 The Aristotelian Society

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I submit that this ‘higher-order evidence’ (hoe) account of the

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remains a thoroughgoing epistemic subject—that although she has a

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In sum, it should be clear that my proposal is an additional wrin-

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obtain. Consequently, the hypotheses for which I have been

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knowledge that is unavailable in such contexts: the knowledge pos-

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with an account of the harms arising out of the misinterpretation of