Emilia Wilson gave a talk entitled “A Defence of Direct Linguistic Interventions as Communicative Strategy” at “The Changing Norms of Democratic Rhetoric: Philosophical and Political Perspectives” workshop at the University of Genoa. In her presentation, she argued that revising linguistic norms by ‘direct linguistic intervention’ (using words in ways that depart from the dominant convention) is a vital communicative strategy when trying to dismantle distorting conceptual resources. Such interventions, it was argued, enable a speaker to bypass a hearer’s distorting interpretive process, obtaining understanding that would otherwise be precluded by the dominant resources.
