The Pragmatics of Obscuring in Political Philosophy

Abstract

According to the obscuring objection against mainstream political philosophy, there has been a long-standing dominant research paradigm focusing on distributive justice. This has made it difficult to call attention to important social facts, such as discrimination and oppression. The purpose of this article is not to defend the claim that mainstream political philosophy obscures important social facts. We instead focus on how obscuring arises. There are undoubtedly several different forces at play in the development of a research field, but the focus here is to spell out mechanisms that enforce obscuring which draw from influential theories in pragmatics. The account starts with the assumption that conversations are structured around mutual assumptions among interlocutors. We argue that the contents of these mutual assumptions represent certain general norms for efficient conversation and unequal social power among interlocutors, both of which constitute an important part of how obscuring arises.