Forensic Linguistics AND...Philosophy
About this Event
The half a day symposium will be hosted in the Susan Cadbury lecture theatre at Conference Aston.
Please note that this is a hybrid event. Online participants will be sent the MS Teams link the morning of the event.
The symposium will include talks from philosophers and linguists working on the interface of language, justice, and thought.
Speakers and Abstracts:
Dr. Sam Wilkinson (University of Exeter), Diagnosis as Verdict: Consequences and Cross-currents.
This paper argues that medical diagnosis is best understood as a verdictive speech act, drawing on J. L. Austin's taxonomy of illocutionary acts. On this view, diagnostic utterances do not simply describe a person's condition; they perform an institutional act of judgment that reshapes rights, responsibilities, and social expectations. Like other institutional speech acts, their success depends not only on accuracy but also on authority, procedure, and uptake.This perspective places diagnosis alongside other forms of institutional language familiar from legal contexts while offering a new way of understanding several debates in the philosophy of medicine. It clarifies the relationship between psychiatric and somatic diagnosis as well as between medical practice and scientific research. It also explains how diagnoses shape decision-making across institutions such as healthcare, education, and criminal justice, and sheds new light on controversies including overdiagnosis and self-diagnosis.
Dr. Zoe Adams (Aston University). Beyond namelessness: A linguistic re-examination of anonymity
In an era of increasing connectivity, maintaining anonymity in sensitive textual data has become a significant challenge. Even after removing direct identifiers of Personally Identifying Information (PII), individuals remain vulnerable to reidentification. Many approaches draw on techniques developed in computer science, such as Named Entity Recognition, but even the development of Large Language Models cannot entirely eliminate this risk. This problem is amplified in complex unstructured texts which demonstrate anonymity is more than a categorisation problem. This talk argues that returning to the fundamental question of, ‘what is anonymity?’ is an essential step in addressing the limitations of current approaches. Drawing on Pfitzmann & Hansens’ (2005) concept of the ‘anonymity set’ and a cognitive grammar framework, I will show how linguistic features combine to reveal vulnerabilities in a text. In doing so, I hope to highlight the value of an interdisciplinary perspective in advancing anonymisation techniques.
Dr. Ian Kidd (University of Nottingham), Knowing What To Ask: Questioning and Epistemic Injustice in Healthcare
Healthcare is saturated with questions. Yet work on epistemic injustice in healthcare has focused primarily on what happens once patients have spoken: whether they are believed, understood, and afforded appropriate uptake. This paper moves upstream to examine the questions and practices of inquiry through which patients’ epistemic contributions are elicited and pursued. Questions do not merely retrieve information. They direct attention, embody assumptions, constrain possible answers, and structure opportunities to contribute knowledge. I examine several ways questioning can contribute to epistemic injustice: failing to ask relevant questions, asking restrictive or insensitive questions, and failing to pursue answers through further warranted inquiry. I also consider patients as questioners and the unequal distribution of questioning power within healthcare.The broader argument is that epistemic justice concerns not only who is believed, but who gets to ask, who gets asked, what gets asked, and what happens to the answers.
Agenda
🕑: 01:00 PM - 01:30 PM
Registration and coffee
🕑: 01:30 PM - 01:40 PM
Welcome (Dr. Lucia Busso)
🕑: 01:40 PM - 02:30 PM
Diagnosis as Verdict: Consequences and Cross-currents (Dr. Sam Wilkinson)
🕑: 02:30 PM - 03:20 PM
Beyond namelessness: A linguistic re-examination of anonymity (Dr. Zoe Adams)
🕑: 03:20 PM - 03:40 PM
Coffee break
🕑: 03:40 PM - 04:30 PM
Questioning and Epistemic Injustice in Healthcare (Dr. Ian Kidd)
🕑: 04:30 PM - 05:00 PM
Discussion and close
Where is it happening?
Event Location & Nearby Stays:
GBP 0.00
