Abstract
Figleaves, as defined by Jennifer Saul (2021, 2024), are utterances that tend to accompany explicitly norm-violating speech acts. Their function is to prevent at least some members of the audience from correctly concluding that the speech act is, for instance, racist or sexist, or that it is a reason to believe that the speaker is racist or sexist. The key to Saul’s analysis of figleaves is the diversity of the audience. But what determines the audience’s response to figleaved speech? On the one hand, it is possible that some people are inherently more vigilant, ready to spot any traces of bigotry, subtle or blunt, while others may be more charitable, taking the speakers’ declarations of good intentions at face value. On the other hand, drawing from recent results in social psychology (e.g., Galak & Critcher 2023), we may hypothesise that the audience’s reception of figleaved speech will depend on how much their own politics aligns with that of the speaker, or to what extent they will be personally affected by the damage to the speaker’s reputation. Which of these hypotheses is true is ultimately an empirical question. In my talk, I will present the first results of an empirical investigation of how figleaves affect people’s perception of the speaker and their utterances.