What Is Silencing Anyway?

Abstract This chapter motivates and defends a definition of silencing as communicative failure. It presents three different versions of communicative failure: an attempt prevention version, a misrecognition version, and an impact prevention version. Following from these three different conceptions of communication failure, three broad categories of silencing are identified: cases where a speaker is prevented from trying to communicate, cases where an attempt is made but some aspect of the intended communication is not recognized, and cases where a communication does not impact the world as it should. This chapter also argues (against the grain) that speaker sincerity is sometimes part of what a speaker intends to communicate (in the strict sense). Various issues and considerations involved in defining things—and in defining silencing—are also spelled out.