The (Call-)Ins and (Call-)Outs of Norm-Enacting Speech

In 2020 Kelly Herbison was the recipient of a Hastie Scholarship, awarded annually to the highest achieving students in Honours Philosophy. In this article, Kelly shares some of the findings from her Honours thesis project, which used the philosophy of language and social norms to examine the practices of ‘calling-out’ and ‘calling-in’ as methods for changing people’s behaviour.  

Hang around long enough in any social justice group and you are likely to witness, or perhaps even conduct or experience, a call-out or a call-in. These phenomena are essentially tactics that are used to promote the values of a given social group according to which a particular behaviour qualifies as problematic or harmful.

Suppose, for example, that someone has been discriminating against a person on the basis of their race. If I were to call them out, I might call them or their behaviour racist. If I were to call them in, instead of calling them a racist, I might explain to them the reasons why their behaviour was objectionable.

In everyday usage, call-outs are usually made in retaliation to a specific behaviour and look a lot like public shaming. In popular discourse, they are often enmeshed with discussion about the hotly debated ‘cancel culture’. Call-ins, it might be said, are gentler and more akin to restorative justice, which refers to improving people’s behaviour without using retributive mechanisms (like shame or punishment).

These concepts are, however, harder to fully specify than their familiarity might suggest. This seriously limits our ability to evaluate their utility and often distracts us from the content of what these modes of speech are vying to achieve.

For instance, if someone calls-out racist behaviour in an aggressive way, people are likely to focus on and critique the aggression, rather than fully consider the significance of the anti-racist content that the speaker is trying to express. This puts us at a disadvantage when evaluating tactics for social resistance, some of which are going to be crucial in pursuing justice. My Honours thesis produced some working definitions of these phenomena, using the philosophy of language and social norms as my theoretical framework.

I began my analysis from a few basic observations.

First, call-outs and call-ins generally aim to improve attitudes and behaviour. For this reason, we can say that they have a normative (that is, morally engaged) function.

Second, call-outs and -ins are carried out through speech. These two insights motivated the starting point for my analysis: how do call-outs and call-ins function as norm-related speech?

To answer this question, I drew upon the work of Mary Kate McGowan, who offers a framework for understanding how we enact and negotiate social norms in speech. Specifically, she proposes that we can understand conversational norms as functioning like rules, which fall into two categories: s-norms and g-norms.

G-norms generalise across multiple conversations and include things like turn-taking. S-norms, on the other hand, are conversation specific norms and will emerge through the development of a conversation. So, if turn-taking is a G-norm, an S-norm would be whose turn it is to speak next within this conversation.

To give another example, consider a game of chess. Imagine that my opponent’s knight is two diagonal squares away from my pawn.

The g-norms of chess say that pawns cannot take a piece that is more than a single diagonal square away. Accordingly, the g-norms of chess disallow me from creating any s-norm within this game where taking that knight would be lawful.

I can, however, update the s-norms of the game in reference to the g-norm by moving my pawn one square closer to the knight. Doing so will update the s-norms of the game such that it will be permissible for me to take the knight on the next move. I can update the s-norms (about the position of the chess pieces) by introducing information into the game’s score that coheres with g-norms (about what pawns can do). Consequently, I can update the score to make new s-norms (about who can take whom) operative. In this way, making contributions to the score in a norm-governed activity changes who can do what within it.

With this framework on the table, in my thesis, I proposed that speech that sanctions updates the s-norms of a conversation by drawing upon g-norms such that the previous move made by one’s interlocutor qualifies as norm-flouting. Consider the following example of a call-out:

James speaks over a woman in class to stop her from making her point. Another classmate, Sam, responds, “James, I don’t care how important you think your point is, you need to wait your turn to speak. It’s part of being a good listener.”

In this example, Sam enforces g-norms to do with turn-taking and the related issue of politeness, and in doing so, changes the conditions against which James’ behaviour is viewed. This does two things. First, it makes James beholden to these norms and liable for retaliation if he continues to flout them. Second, by introducing the g-norm, Sam shows themselves to be an allegiant to it.

Our discussion so far has been specifically focussed on instances where the norm being introduced holds g-norm status. Recall that the motivation for looking at call-outs and call-ins is because they can facilitate social justice by challenging dominant norms. In accordance with this, I assume that call-outs and call-ins aim to promote non-dominant norms. I call these g*-norms. Both kinds of speech are motivated by g*-norms and function to resist dominant norms by either challenging them (call-outs), or else by inviting new attitudinal orientations (call-ins).

How can we introduce s-norms into a conversation if the g-norms that they are proposing are in fact g*-norms, and so lack the authority that socially entrenched and legitimate g-norms possess? I propose that this is achieved through the conversational feature of presupposition, which occurs when a speaker takes it to be the case that some information or attitude already exists in common ground. When I say “Lauren is so tired today, even Deanna has more energy”, I am presupposing that my hearer knows that Deanna is generally someone who lacks energy, which is how the sentence is able to carry the meaning that Lauren is particularly and surprisingly tired today. So understood, presupposition is a mechanism by which information is brought into a conversation without being stated explicitly.

So, we have the following basic ideas before us:

  1. conversations are governed by social norms;
  2. what we can do in a conversation is informed by the s-norms of that conversation, which are calibrated in reference to g-norms; and:
  3. the process of sanctioning someone involves making g-norms salient and s-norms operative according to which the target qualifies as worthy of sanction.

In my Honours thesis, I defend the idea that unlike regular sanctioning, call-outs are a kind of norm-enacting speech that sanctions on the basis of a presupposed, yet crucially, non-dominant social norm. The fact that the presupposed norm is a g*-norm, and not a g-norm, helps to explain why call-outs are polarising. Smuggling in the presupposition that a non-dominant norm is dominant (e.g., by sanctioning someone for using a racist slur when that person does not believe what they’re saying to be problematic) can lead to a hostile response, as the target contests the conversational move according to which they have qualified as worthy of critique.

I propose that call-ins, on the other hand, presuppose the target’s willingness to revise their attitudes in light of new information. For instance, by explaining why someone’s utterance qualifies as racist, instead of sanctioning them as if they just were a racist, we are operating with the presupposition that this person would revise their beliefs and behaviour if they had access to the right information. The presupposition of an attitude explains why call-ins are often less polarising, seeing as they set up the conversational conditions under which the target is apt to revise their beliefs.

On my definitions, call-outs sanction and call-ins invite. These definitions served as my starting point for further exploration of how these modes of norm-regulating speech relate to other practices, such as script breaking and mind-changing, and to the concept of safe spaces. all of which contribute to our understanding of speech-related social resistance.

While I do not expect these concepts to neatly apply to the messy reality of social life, I do believe that having working definitions of these phenomena will help us notice the risks and rewards associated with certain kinds of speech. In future projects, I hope to continue exploring the complex and often subtle ways that we shape, and are ourselves shaped by, one another.

Kelly Herbison is currently completing her Masters in Philosophy at The University of Melbourne, where her research is supported by a Hastie Postgraduate Scholarship. Kelly’s research focuses on the role of aesthetics in identity and social life. In particular, she is looking at issues surrounding deference on aesthetic issues and why we can feel ‘let down’ by the aesthetic sensibilities and preferences of others. 

In 2020, Kelly Herbison and Campbell Rider were joint recipients of the Hastie Scholarship, awarded to the two highest achieving students in honours Philosophy. Kelly was also a founding member of Minorities and Philosophy chapter at the University of Melbourne.


 

Feature image: Volodymyr Hryshchenko via Unsplash