Case studies on silencing, exclusion and cancelling: VCE Philosophy
“Analysing case studies from the context of silencing, exclusion and cancelling using the concepts and arguments of the set texts”
Silencing, exclusion and cancelling raise epistemological questions about who gets to speak, whose word is believed and how a community tests its beliefs. Mill argues that silencing an opinion risks losing truth or a part of it, and turns held beliefs into dead dogma. Miranda Fricker shows that some people are excluded as knowers through prejudice, which wrongs them and impoverishes shared knowledge. Nguyen shows how communities can discredit outsiders in advance. The key skill is separating three things that are often run together: unjust silencing, justified exclusion on grounds of evidence or harm, and mere criticism.
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What this dot point is asking
One of the three contexts in Area of Study 2 is silencing, exclusion and cancelling. You analyse a case study from the context in terms of belief, belief formation and justification, using your Area of Study 1 texts. This page shows the lenses available and how to apply them. Which actual case you choose is for you and your teacher.
Key terms
- Silencing: preventing or discouraging someone from speaking or being heard, by force, policy, social pressure or by making them unintelligible.
- Exclusion: keeping some people or perspectives out of an epistemic community or conversation.
- Cancelling: a collective withdrawal of attention, support or platform from a person or view, usually after conduct or speech judged unacceptable. The word is used differently by different commentators, so define it for your case.
Lens 1: Mill
Mill's four grounds for protecting freedom of opinion apply directly: the silenced opinion may be true; it may contain part of the truth; even if the accepted view is the whole truth, unless it is vigorously contested it is held as prejudice, without understanding of its grounds; and the doctrine itself risks losing its meaning and its living effect on character and conduct. A case of silencing can be tested: what epistemic loss might have occurred?
Limits: Mill's discussion is about opinion and discussion. Elsewhere he accepts limits where speech causes harm, so be careful to claim only what your extract supports. Also, critics say the marketplace of ideas presumes everyone has equal access to speak, which may not hold.
Lens 2: Miranda Fricker
Silencing and exclusion can be forms of epistemic injustice. If a group is excluded from a discussion because of a prejudice that their testimony is unreliable, that is testimonial injustice. If a group lacks the concepts to describe their experience, and the community does not provide them, that is hermeneutical injustice (a theme of Fricker's wider book; your prescribed extracts centre on testimonial injustice, so check before leaning on it). In both, the community loses knowledge as well as wrongs the person.
Lens 3: Nguyen
Some communities exclude by design: an echo chamber teaches members to distrust outsiders. This is a self-inflicted kind of epistemic exclusion that may be caused by prior silencing (a group that is excluded may build its own closed community as defence). Cancelling can also function this way if a group treats everything from a disfavoured source as untrustworthy by default.
Lens 4: Clifford and Peirce
Clifford raises a responsibility question: do those who cancel someone have sufficient evidence for the claims on which they act? Peirce's methods suggest asking whether the exclusion rests on tenacity or authority or whether it is open to investigation.
Questions to ask of any case
- Who was silenced or excluded, and by what means?
- On what grounds: evidence, prejudice, harm, disagreement?
- What belief-related loss or gain resulted for the community?
- Is the community open to correction?
- Were there alternatives, such as reply, correction or context, short of exclusion?
Evaluation
- The strongest defences of exclusion say that some speech harms others, including by undermining their standing as knowers, and that platforming everything gives falsehood and bad faith unearned credibility.
- The strongest defences of open discussion say that exclusion undermines our ability to test our own views, and that those with power use 'harm' to silence challenge.
- A middle view: the burden of justification is on those who exclude, and the justification should be evidence-based, proportionate and open to review.
Analysis template (hypothetical): a university cancels a visiting speaker who has argued a contested empirical claim about a minority group.
Assumptions: the university assumes the claim is false and harmful; the speaker's supporters assume open debate will expose its falsity.
Issues: whether excluding the speaker deprives students of the chance to test the claim (Mill); whether the group in question is routinely discounted as knowers (M. Fricker); whether the decision rests on sufficient evidence (Clifford).
Perspective: if the claim has been thoroughly refuted, hearing it again may add little, but excluding it without giving reasons risks turning the refutation into dogma. A better course might be to host the speaker with a rigorous responder. This keeps Mill's benefit while acknowledging the injustice concern.
Objection: a response that platforms the claim gives it credibility it has not earned. Reply: that depends on the format, and an open reply can show weaknesses.
Practice questions
Explain how Mill would assess the silencing of an unpopular opinion.
Model answer: He would say the opinion may be true or partly true, and even if false, suppressing it means the accepted view is held without being tested, so it becomes dogma. So silencing risks epistemic loss.
Why might exclusion of a group be an epistemic harm and not only a social one?
Model answer: Excluding a group from being heard wrongs them as knowers (testimonial injustice) and removes what they know from the community's stock of knowledge, so the community has less chance of correcting its errors.
Always define cancelling for your case, since the word is contested. Then focus on the epistemic question: what happened to the community's ability to form and test beliefs?