October 12, 2006

Legal regulation of language use: a radical proposal

So, the lines are drawn. In Turkey, it is a criminal offense to assert that the Turks engaged in a genocidal massacre of hundreds of thousands of Armenians in the early years of the 20th century. And now the lower house of the French parliament proposes to make it a criminal offense to deny that the Turks engaged in a genocidal massacre of hundreds of thousands of Armenians in the early years of the 20th century. There is a clash here — and not a trivial one, given that Turkey wishes to join the European Union of which France is an influential member. Some kind of resolution seems to be needed.

Language Log does not meddle much in international politics or criminal law, but has a suggestion to offer concerning how a modern culture might design its criminal laws respecting language use in a reasonable way. (The following idea is radical, but hear me out.) The idea is to define the criminal laws in such a way that, in the case at hand, it would be fully legal either to assert that the massacre did take place or to assert that it did not take place (and analogously for any other public statement a person might wish to make), but also to endeavor to shape the general intellectual culture in such a way that people expect a serious person to be able to provide evidence and coherent argument in support of their claims — expression and publication of such evidence and argument being similarly protected from prosecution. The idea is (am I explaining this clearly enough?) that the truth values of contingent propositions would not be a matter of legal stipulation. And expressing propositions would be, well, sort of... free. You see the idea? (All right, you hate it. Never mind. I did say it was radical.)

Posted by Geoffrey K. Pullum at October 12, 2006 12:28 PM