How Much Freedom of Speech is Too Much? – From the Point of View of Philosophy of Language

On February 14 2025, the Vice President of the United States, J.D. Vance, accused European countries of being too restrictive in their approach to freedom of speech at the Security Conference in Munich. The message: the United States should be taken as an example, especially under the Trump administration. In fact, the United States has historically had an extremely liberal approach to freedom of speech, and the Trump administration in particular has an interest in further expanding the boundaries of what can be said. The speech at the security conference shortly before the elections in Germany was intended as support for European parties pursuing a similar goal, not least the German party AfD. From the perspective of the philosophy of language, the handling of freedom of speech in the United States is problematic – even apart from the Trump administration's attempts to further push the boundaries of speech. Among other things, it is based on a far too naïve view of pejorative and manipulative speech, which places it on the same level as argumentative speech, as we usually find and rightly demand in the sciences. There is more or less a consensus in the philosophy of language that at least the majority of pejorative and manipulative language does not meet these standards. In my talk, I will illustrate this by resorting to so-called implicit content. Put simply, the implicit content of a statement differs from its explicit content in that the latter can be negated or denied (‘That's not true’). Countering implicit content usually involves considerably more linguistic effort. When I respond to a statement of ‘Even Germans can read’ with ‘That's not true’, I have not denied the pejorative content of the statement that the intellectual abilities of Germans are not particularly well developed. Rather, I am denying that Germans can read. This has to do with the fact that the pejorative content is presupposed, while it is only explicitly claimed that Germans can read. In order to counter the pejorative presupposition, a somewhat greater linguistic effort is therefore required, such as “Hey wait a minute, what does “even” mean here. Germans are just as clever as we are”. Something similar applies to the use of so-called dogwhistles, a form of coded language that politicians often use to address a specific group of voters without this being apparent to the general public. I will argue that this lowers the hurdle for prohibiting implicit derogation/manipulation in the light of free speech. Especially as there are other ways to convey the same content, e.g. ‘Germans do not have particularly strong intellectual abilities’. The benefits of such restrictions are twofold. For one thing, we have just seen that it is easier in linguistic terms to counter explicit content than what is implicit in an utterance. Secondly, in Western societies, as Tali Mendelberg argues in her book The Race Card, there is still a norm of equality in place, so that the explicit expression of pejorative attitudes is at least not widely accepted.