Michelle Liu
Affiliation: Monash University
Category: Philosophy
Keywords: mental imagery, misinformation, generics, metaphor, harmful representation
Date: Thursday 4th of September
Time: 17:00
Location: Maria Skłodowska-Curie Hall (123)
View the full session: Imagination
Language can transmit harmful representations, in the sense that it can elicit representations in the addressee’s mind which can lead to harmful judgements and behaviours. Consider the kind of language from politicians and news media on minority groups. In the United States, during his ultimately successful 2024 election campaign, Trump intensified his rhetoric on immigrants, calling them ‘animals’ and portraying them as ‘eating pets’, and ‘attacking villages’. Across the pond, the previous UK Conservative government, while implementing economic measures of austerity, had long been presenting migration as an existential crisis for the country, with a former home secretary describing migrants crossing the Channel as an ‘invasion’ and Britain as run by Islamists and extremists. Such language, unsurprisingly, transmits harmful representations of refugees and immigrants, especially those from Africa and Muslim-majority countries, culminating in the nationwide racist riots in the summer of 2024.
It is intuitive to think that language like the abovementioned paints a vivid picture of the relevant group, whether it is describing migrants as invaders and criminals or depicting Muslims as terrorists and extremists. In this talk, I explore the idea that language can transmit harmful mental imagery. This is an uncharted topic in social and political philosophy of language. Discussions on harmful representations that pernicious language triggers or transmits tend to focus on beliefs and associations. The lack of attention to mental imagery as a type of harmful representation triggered by pernicious language overlooks the close connection between language processing and mental imagery. It also neglects the crucial role mental imagery plays in memory and cognition. A comprehensive understanding of the mechanisms through which pernicious language fosters harmful thinking and behaviour, as I will show in this talk, requires recognizing the role of mental imagery.
The structure of the talk is as follows. Drawing on psycholinguistic research on language comprehension (e.g., Zwaan and Madden 2005; Bergen 2012), I will first show that language often transmits mental imagery understood in the sense that the latter is frequently involved in language comprehension. Drawing on research on the misinformation effect (e.g., Loftus 2005; Zaragoza et al. 2007; Chrobak and Zaragoza 2013), I will argue that the mental imagery transmitted by language can be harmful – specifically, language containing misinformation about a witnessed event can elicit mental imagery that leads to false memories and judgments about the event. Moving beyond language containing misinformation, I will consider language about social groups, focusing on generics and metaphors, which are important carriers of mental imagery. I will explain how such language can transmit harmful mental imagery that leads to biased or misinformed judgements about social groups. Finally, I will suggest ways to combat the imagistic harm. While the talk focuses on language containing misinformation about witnessed events and language about social groups such as generics and metaphors, the framework proposed here has broader applicability. It provides a foundation for analysing other forms of pernicious language that transmit and perpetuate harmful mental imagery.
References Bergen, B. (2012). Louder than words. New York: Basic Books. Chrobak, Q., & Zaragoza, M. S. (2013). The misinformation effect: Past research and recent advances. In A. M. Ridley, F. Gabbert and D. J. La Rooy (Eds.) Suggestibility in legal contexts: Psychological research and forensic implications. (pp. 21-44). Chichester, England: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Loftus, E. F. (2005). Planting misinformation in the human mind: A 30-year investigation of the malleability of memory. Learning & Memory 12: 3761–366. Zaragoza, M. S., Belli, R. F., & Payment, K. E. (2007). Misinformation effects and the suggestibility of eyewitness memory. In M. Garry & H. Hayne (Eds.), Do justice and let the sky fall: Elizabeth Loftus and her contributions to science, law, and academic freedom (pp. 35–63). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Publishers. Zwaan, R. A., Madden, C. J., Yaxley, R. H., and Aveyard, M. E. (2004). Moving words: dynamic representations in language comprehension. Cognitive Science, 28, 611–619.