2015 Jack Smart Public Lecture

How to gain (and lose) authority with words
 
Good speech is better, and bad speech is worse, when it has authority. But where does the authority come from? 
 
In part from the acts and omissions of other speakers and hearers, following rules of accommodation – a routine process of adjustment that makes our speech count as ‘correct play’.
 
Rae Langton is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge, and Professorial Fellow at Newnham College.
 
She is a Fellow of the British Academy, and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
 
This lecture takes up themes from her six John Locke Lectures, ‘Accommodating Injustice’, recently completed at Oxford University, May-June 2015.