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Salience Perspectives

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cam.restrictionthesis_access_embargoed
cam.supervisorLangton, Rae
cam.thesis.fundingtrue
dc.contributor.authorWhiteley, Ella Kate
dc.date.accessioned2019-07-01T08:56:38Z
dc.date.available2019-07-01T08:56:38Z
dc.date.issued2019-10-26
dc.date.submitted2019-02-28
dc.date.updated2019-06-28T12:50:45Z
dc.description.abstractIn the philosophy of language and epistemology, debates often centre on what content a person is communicating, or representing in their mind. How that content is organised, along dimensions of salience, has received relatively little attention. I argue that salience matters. Mere change of salience patterns, without change of content, can have dramatic implications, both epistemic and moral. Imagine two newspaper articles that offer the same information about a subject, but differ in terms of what they headline. These articles can be said to adopt different linguistic salience perspectives. Making different things salient in language is a way of making different things salient in an audience’s mind: it is a way of encouraging the audience to adopt a particular cognitive salience perspective. Building on Elisabeth Camp’s work on perspectives, and Sebastian Watzl’s work on attention, I suggest that one has a certain cognitive salience perspective in virtue of better noticing, remembering, and finding cognitively accessible certain contents over others. Drawing on psychological research into cognitive biases and framing effects, I argue that that simply making some content salient in the mind, perhaps through first making it salient in language, can be sufficient to activate substantive cultural beliefs or ideologies associated with that content. Where those beliefs and ideologies have epistemic and moral problems, we have grounds for criticising the salience perspective that causally produced them. Besides this instrumental harm, I also suggest that certain salience perspectives can themselves constitute harm. I draw on feminist work on objectification to argue that making the wrong thing salient about a person can constitute a way of dehumanising them. A great many factors, from physical and psychological violence, to false beliefs and credibility deficits, have already been identified as potentially harming an individual or group. What is distinctive about this argument, then, is the idea that, sometimes, mere patterns of salience can be damaging in and of themselves.
dc.description.sponsorshipI would like to thank the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Faculty of Philosophy for financial support, which enabled me to complete this thesis.
dc.identifier.doi10.17863/CAM.41316
dc.identifier.urihttps://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/294216
dc.language.isoen
dc.publisher.collegeGonville and Caius
dc.publisher.departmentPhilosophy
dc.publisher.institutionUniversity of Cambridge
dc.rightsAll rights reserved
dc.rightsAll Rights Reserveden
dc.rights.urihttps://www.rioxx.net/licenses/all-rights-reserved/en
dc.subjectsalience
dc.subjectperspectives
dc.subjectlanguage
dc.subjectattention
dc.subjectmind
dc.subjectphilosophy
dc.subjectgender
dc.subjectobjectification
dc.subjectfeminism
dc.subjectcognition
dc.subjectbias
dc.subjectcamp
dc.subjectwatzl
dc.subjectessentialism
dc.subjectframing
dc.titleSalience Perspectives
dc.typeThesis
dc.type.qualificationlevelDoctoral
dc.type.qualificationnameDoctor of Philosophy (PhD)
dc.type.qualificationtitlePhD in Philosophy

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