Jose Luis Linan

The purpose of this paper is to argue that, when confronted with a specific form of harmful speech, strategic silence can function as a counterspeech strategy that, under certain conditions, outperforms its alternatives. In public contexts characterized by a systematic conflation of the descriptive and the evaluative, usual counterspeech strategies risk amplifying messages that are detrimental to already marginalized communities. These contexts comprise instances of politicization of factual claims and naturalization of ideology. When claims previously perceived as ideological are presented as factual, and conversely, when claims commonly received as factual are presented as ideological, strategic silence can often mitigate the harm more effectively. Our argument crucially relies on the idea that positive interventions in these public contexts tend to foster amplification or to generate crossed disagreements, thereby contributing to the rise of polarization.

The Principle of Context and the Principle of Compositionality only conflict when they are construed as claims about the origin of meanings. I will clarify this point by means of an historical survey into the treatment that PCtxt receives in Frege's Grundlagen and in Wittgenstein's Tractatus. I will argue that Frege actually introduces non-equivalent formulations of PCtxt generating an unstable notion of meaning when related with PCmp. The Tractatus solves this imbalance by assuming both the contextuality and the compositionality at the very core of the notion of meaning, thus by ruling out the claim of two separated —sensitive to collision— principles. My thesis is that in the stage of development of the Tractatus, Wittgenstein found a way to meet and fit together the tensions between PCtxt and PCmp emerging in Frege´s philosophy of language and detected by latter commentators