Introduction
During her time as a contestant on RuPaul's Drag Race: Down Under, drag queen Scarlet Adams was found to have performed wearing blackface, Aboriginal dress, and a burqa. In response, Felicia Foxx (Reference Foxx2021), an Indigenous Australian drag queen, posted images of Scarlet's drag to Instagram and wrote that Scarlet is ‘[taking] the piss out of numerous cultures’ in a way that is ‘concerning and downright vulgar’. This exchange captures a paradigm instance of a call-out. Foxx publicly condemned Adams's behavior as morally impermissible, asserting, not only to Adams but also to others, that it is offensive to turn culture into a costume.
The notions of calling someone out and, relatedly, of calling someone in are likely familiar. The former in particular has a seriously contested presence in public discourse. While acts of calling out are often intended to do social justice work, they have been the subject of high-profile scrutiny due to their ability to inflict reputational damage and associated costs. Calling in, by contrast, is less well-known but usually represented as a correction to the deficiencies of so-called ‘cancel culture’. In their most general form, call-outs and call-ins are mechanisms of social regulation; their use is aimed at stabilizing one's preferred coordinated attitudes and dispositions. However, they tend to differ in their approach to achieving this.
In her New York Times article, ‘I'm a Black Feminist. I Think Call-Out Culture is Toxic’, Loretta Ross (Reference Ross2019) tells us that ‘call-outs happen when people publicly shame each other online, at the office, in classrooms or anywhere humans have beef with one another’. Jennifer Mahan (Reference Mahan2017), a chapter leader of the legal activist group If/When/How, describes call-outs in a similar way, stating that they involve ‘publicly naming instances of oppressive language and behavior’, whereas call-ins are a positive ‘alternative’ that ‘entails having a private, personal conversation . . . without making a spectacle out of it. Calling-in recognizes that people are multi-faceted’. Even Dictionary.com (Austrew Reference Austrew2019) has something to say about the differences between call-outs and call-ins, suggesting that ‘unlike calling in, calling out does not generally feature patient, empathetic dialogue with a trusted person’.
In our understanding, these views are fairly representative of ordinary ways of thinking about call-outs and call-ins. That is, call-outs are taken to be a lot like public shaming, whereas call-ins are considered gentler, often private, and more likely to achieve social change. The drawback of these ways of thinking, however, is that they are vague and underspecified along several dimensions. In what way is calling out like public shaming? What are acts of ‘calling’ supposed to achieve? Exactly what makes a call-in preferable to a call-out?
Because such acts of calling are regularly used with the intention to combat oppressive behavior, having imprecise ideas about them presents a potential danger and does so for a combination of reasons: (1) we do not yet have a good enough understanding of how they function as social regulators; (2) they tend to impugn their target's character; (3) they often involve social reprimand and ‘out-grouping’; (4) they are sometimes highly polarizing; and (5) we have little sense of the extent to which they promote social justice. Given this, we think it is perhaps prima facie irresponsible to use call-outs and call-ins for challenging social norms, especially in attempts to pursue justice.
With this in mind, we are aiming at two broad goals in this article: first, we aim to fill a notable omission of philosophical analyses of call-outs and call-ins, of which, as far as we can tell, there are currently none; and second, we intend to clarify the concepts of call-out and call-in so that we may better understand their nature as social regulators, which will then position us for a more accurate evaluation of their potential in positively transforming social relations.
Central to our explanation is the role of presupposition in conversation and its causal impact on changing the attitudes and dispositions of a targeted interlocutor, in particular through the use of norm-enacting speech. Importantly, we defend call-outs as speech that sanctions on the basis of a presupposed but, crucially, nondominant social norm. Why nondominant? We offer three explanatory reasons. First, the nondominance of the norm that is enacted by call-outs it explains why call-outs have emerged as a distinctive hermeneutical resource and practical tool of social regulation in our unique sociohistorical milieu; second, it explains why call-outs are particularly polarizing; third, it explains the special benefits that call-outs can yield for marginalized social groups.
Call-ins, by contrast, presuppose the targeted interlocutor's willingness to revise their attitudes in light of new information, and they make no attempt at sanction. This presupposition has a very distinctive aim. By presupposing that an interlocutor is open to changing their belief and subsequently their behavior, one sets up conditions for prolepsis such that an interlocutor can become motivated or, minimally, come to accept reasons to change their belief and behavior. From this, we can start to see the difference between call-outs and call-ins. As aphorisms, call-outs sanction but call-ins invite.
We want to stress the importance of clarifying call-outs and call-ins. Making explicit how these modes of norm-enacting speech relate to script-breaking, safe spaces, and mind-changing offers a conceptual toolkit for understanding techniques of speech-related social resistance in general. Our account offers a better vantage point to evaluate whether critiques of call-outs and call-ins in everyday discourse are properly justified or whether they are working to distract from the goals that they are supposed to pursue.
1. Norm-enacting Speech
Ordinary understanding of call-outs and call-ins emphasizes their causal impact on targets, such as whether they are apt to change minds or whether they are simply inflammatory. Indeed, this is true of our thinking about norm-enforcement more broadly. Philosophers tend to think of social regulation mechanisms, like public shaming and retributive justice, as operating under the assumption that changing the cost of norm-violation will causally bring about norm compliance (Axelrod Reference Axelrod1986).
Clearly this is important. We ought to analyze closely the causal relationship between social sanctioning and norm-compliance, especially so that we can discern whether upholding norms via this relationship is morally justifiable (Billingham and Parr [Reference Billingham and Parr2020] discuss these questions in relation to public shaming). However, we believe the ordinary focus on causal features is too narrow. There are constitutive benefits and harms rather than causal ones, involved in norm-enforcement that have been overlooked. The goal of this section is to bring these features into focus. They will be important to keep in mind when we explore the structural character of call-outs and call-ins and the question of whether they are useful in our pursuit of social justice.
Before continuing, we want to highlight that call-outs and call-ins are either forms of speech or expressed through speech. One cannot perform these modes of norm-enforcement in any other way. Moreover, call-outs and call-ins are typically dyadic, taking place between individuals. Still, it is possible that one might direct a call-out at a group of people, a company, or a government. Given that call-outs and call-ins are speech-relevant phenomena, typically taking place between dyads, we will analyze their norm-related functions at the level of conversational kinematics. Our analysis will show that in conversation there are both external and internal mechanisms of norm maintenance that operate via norm-enacting and norm-enforcing speech, where the norms that are introduced and enforced are not just speech related.
1.1. Exercitive Speech
When a speaker through an utterance changes what is permissible to say in conversation, they have performed exercitive speech. For Austin (Reference Austin1975), an exercitive is felicitous to the extent that one has the relevant authority in a domain to change the permissibility facts of conversation. By saying, ‘anything you say can be used against you in a court of law’, an officer invokes their authority to make such a claim, recalibrating speech possibilities for the arrested person (i.e., they cannot simply speak freely).
Contrary to Austin, however, exercitive speech does not always require overt authority (McGowan Reference McGowan2009, Reference McGowan2019, Reference McGowan2021). While someone who is not a police officer cannot felicitously recite Miranda rights, there are other ways that nonauthoritative speakers can change permissibility facts in a conversation. To understand this, we need to introduce some key concepts.
Conversational score is an informal record of the moves that speakers have made in conversation. Importantly, score is not merely descriptive. It is normative in the sense that it determines permissibility facts, that is, what one is allowed to do in conversation depends on what is recorded in the score. According to at least one rule, a speaker must only make contributions that are sensibly related to the set of registered presuppositions (Lewis Reference Lewis1979; Langton and West Reference Langton and West1999). It would be impermissible to talk randomly about the Anthropocene when the previous topic of conversation was one's favorite musician.
The score of conversation is dynamic, constantly changing relative to the speakers’ contributions and updating to include new presuppositions, which subsequently change the boundaries of what is permissible to say. The key takeaway is this: speech itself relies on norms to direct and redirect conversational possibilities. How do permissibility facts of a conversation change? To answer this, we will now introduce and consider Mary Kate McGowan's (Reference McGowan2009, Reference McGowan2019, Reference McGowan2021) distinction between s-norms and g-norms.
G-norms are common to all instantiations of a rule-governed activity. In speech, these include, inter alia, turn-taking and making contributions relevant to a conversational topic. S-norms, on the other hand, are conversation-specific. If Kelly were to start talking about her dog Billie, she would create local norms for that conversation so that it would be inappropriate to say, ‘the dog’, and mean any other dog than Billie. Introducing norms into conversation changes what it is permissible to say in that conversation. This means that s-norm enacting speech constitutes a conversational exercitive. And because g-norms are common to all instantiations of a conversation, raising their salience through introducing corresponding s-norms is a move that does not depend on the exercise of any particular authority.
Suppose that Sam interrupts Lauren when she is speaking. Though the g-norm of turn-taking is in some sense always operative, Sam has clearly violated it, and so Lauren can make that norm more salient by saying, ‘Can you wait your turn to speak?’ Doing so has exercitive force. It sets expectations for that conversation to be recalibrated in reference to the turn-taking norm. The participants are now acutely aware of how the dynamics of the conversation ought to proceed.
Importantly, the g-norms that are available to us are not just speech-related (McGowan Reference McGowan2021:133). Broader social norms, such as politeness, will qualify as g-norms because they inform the rule-governed activity of social life. Extending this, ‘speech can be a move in these other rule-governed activities and when it is, the utterance in question covertly enacts norms in those activities too’ (McGowan Reference McGowan2021:133). In other words, a speaker, through her speech, can change what is permissible to do in a non-speech-related normative activity. So understood, all contributions to a conversation carry some exercitive force by virtue of how they alter the conversational permissibility facts through adjustments to the conversational score. This form of exercitive is common, and it will be the focus of our discussion from here on.
A note. Our discussion of g-norms and s-norms was intended only to show how it is that permissibility facts can change with relative ease and be made salient in conversation by making certain utterances. For the rest of the article, we will not use McGowan's terminology. Instead, we will simply speak of how certain moves in conversation introduce or make explicit dominant and, as we will show, nondominant norms.
Armed with the above, we will now explicate general mechanisms through which conversational exercitives maintain and enforce social norms: power grabbing and the normative pull.
1.2. Power Grabbing
Recall that we do not always need overt authority to change permissibility facts. One can perform an exercitive with just a slight adjustment to the conversational score. What this means is that one can facilitate a power grab over the discourse by making norms salient in conversation, which does not require any special kind of authority. (Mihaela Popa-Wyatt and Jeremy Wyatt [Reference Popa-Wyatt and Wyatt2017] offer an account of how a power grab can be facilitated in slurring utterances. We think power grabs can be achieved via ordinary contributions to score.) We are particularly interested in how a power grab can be achieved by a speaker changing the score to show themselves as a proper adherent to a social norm and simultaneously positioning an interlocutor as norm-violating.
Unlike the conversational exercitive McGowan proposes, the power acquisition we have in mind occurs when a speaker adjusts the score, which introduces new local norms, and this subsequently gives the speaker the requisite authority to police adherence to the new permissibility facts. Put differently, making a norm salient via an exercitive enacts permissibility facts that privilege the enactor, given that, by introducing the norm, the enactor straightway marks themselves as a good adherent. Consider an example.
James speaks over a woman in class to stop her from making her point. Another classmate, Sam, says, ‘James, I don't care how important you think your point is, you need to wait your turn to speak. It's part of being a good listener’.
In this example, Sam makes the norms of turn-taking and politeness salient. This has two effects. It makes James beholden to these norms and liable for retaliation if he continues to violate them. Further, by making the norms salient, Sam shows his allegiance to them. This qualifies as a power grab insofar as the speaker raises the salience of particular norms, norms that subsequently introduce permissibility facts to which the speaker is already committed. Accordingly, the act of sanctioning is immediately legitimated by referencing dominant social norms, and the speaker assumes some dominance in the conversation. This is because the speaker has engineered the normative terrain in such a way that the hearer becomes the proper target of certain reactive attitudes, such as blame and resentment, for violating the now operative norms.
Further to this, the automatic adjustment of permissibility facts created through the salience of a norm can motivate the hearers’ adherence to that norm. In the more overt case, hearers will be motivated to follow the norms introduced if they anticipate retaliation for violating them. Other times, keeping with what Langton (Reference Langton, Maitra and McGowan2012) calls the conative and cognitive appeal of speech, hearers become motivated to share an attitude introduced into the conversational score. Roughly, these appeals refer to our tendency to match our attitudes with those of our interlocutors. In our case, James will be motivated to follow the norms that Sam introduces because of how they relate to being a good listener, which Sam presupposes is a value that is already held by James. We will return to this idea in our discussion of nondominant norms.
1.3. The ‘Normative Pull’
Agents who enact norms can come to feel stronger internal motivations for complying with them, even in the absence of the target's acceptance. This is due to the felt normative pull to act in particular ways that cohere with the available social scripts of a context.
By social scripts, we mean the blueprints for (expected) action in situations that draw on the interpretive resources provided by social schemas. Schemas structure the practical landscape by providing the architecture for interpretation, which becomes the basis for action, thereby solving coordination problems (Haslanger Reference Haslanger2012). Social scripts are activated when we encounter instantiations of a schema, which provide ways of acting that cohere with social expectations (Bicchieri and McNally Reference Bicchieri and McNally2018). For example, the dominant (ideological) script ‘mother’ is associated with a schema for interpreting someone as biologically a woman, disposed to caretaking, and in a heterosexual marriage. This sets the scene for expected action. Mothers must always be caring, act in ways that are typically feminine, and be subordinate to the husband within the family hierarchy.
Internalizing one's social role can make one feel an intuitive or instinctual ‘pull’ toward certain behaviors. This pull is felt as normative because it is usually the result of receiving social goods for adhering to a norm and retaliation for violating that norm (typically over extended periods of time). Crucially, we do not need conscious recognition or endorsement of the threats/rewards for violating/adhering to a norm in order to be responsive to or evaluable under them (Witt Reference Witt2011).
Many social roles come with norms that agents may consciously reject yet nonetheless feel compelled to act in accordance with (Bicchieri Reference Bicchieri2016). Indeed, many pernicious norms gain purchase from the fact that their normative pull remains concealed from conscious deliberation. Women can reject that they ought to shave under their arms yet begin to self-sanction via the affective response of insecurity or embarrassment when entering a space where their armpits will be on display. The feeling of embarrassment need not be about anticipating social sanction. Rather, the operative gender schema makes certain scripts salient, namely, those with which one has failed to comply. This, itself, can be an extremely uncomfortable experience.
When norms are internalized like this, following them becomes intrinsically motivating (Davidson and Kelly Reference Davidson and Kelly2018; Davis, Hennes, and Raymond Reference Davis, Hennes and Raymond2018). This means that when we enforce norms or demonstrate ourselves to be good adherents to them, we can come to feel internal benefits by following the grain of our social role and appeasing the internal motivators that come with it. If Kelly shames Paul for failing to put his rubbish in the bin, she can be empowered by, and so motivated to continue following, the norm of not littering even if he fails to respond in the desired way. This can be explained by the satisfaction of the normative pull that Kelly feels to adhere to the norm.
An interesting upshot is that marginalized agents can use norms that, in theory, contribute to their own oppression, yet still reap personal benefits. A woman who uses the politeness norm to silence another woman gains the upper hand by creating conditions of engagement that allow her to police behavior that challenges that norm moving forward. While enacting these norms will ultimately reinforce the agent's own oppression, it is immediately gratifying because it introduces the conditions for her to hold context-relative authority and satisfy the normative pull she feels to follow such norms.
With this theoretical machinery on the table, we turn to call-outs and call-ins. We will argue that neither call-outs nor call-ins aim to police dominant norms. We explain how we enact and enforce norms through speech when the norm in question does not hold dominant status and whether the enforcing features of norm-enacting speech are available in such instances (i.e., through power grabs and exploiting the normative pull).
2. Call-outs
Call-outs are generally given a bad rap. They are often said to be aggressive, amounting to little more than virtue signaling. However, Evan Westra (Reference Westra2021) argues that virtue signaling is not a social ill, and can be an important instrument for achieving moral progress. So, even if one is convinced that call-outs are instances of virtue signaling, this does not mean that call-outs do not have moral utility—call-outs may still be instrumental in promoting social justice (cf. Tosi and Warmke Reference Tosi and Warmke2016). Perhaps more concerning is what David Brooks (Reference Brooks2019) describes in his New York Times article ‘The Cruelty of Call-Out Culture’, in which he says that practices of call-outs are ‘a vengeful game of moral one-upmanship in which social annihilation can come any second’. Additionally, former US president Barack Obama (Reference Obama2019) lamented the ubiquity of call-outs in a speech, claiming that it ‘is not activism . . . [it] is not bringing about change. If all you're doing is casting stones, you are probably not going to get that far’. His reasons for thinking this include that calling out is ‘un-woke’ behavior and just an act of moral grandstanding. It lacks the kind of understanding and respect that seems integral to building meaningful networks geared to social change.
As we have already seen in section1, ‘casting stones’ via sanctioning can have some effect on social behavior through its norm-related function. But we might still ask: is it right to say that casting stones via call-outs is ineffective? Are call-outs really just a kind of moral grandstanding or virtue signaling? If so, does this make them unsuitable tools for social justice? Answering these questions requires getting clear on exactly what calls-outs are and what makes them a distinctive mechanism for social regulation. Before we offer our account, we will first explore some examples.
(1) Recall the earlier example of Scarlet Adams, a contestant on Ru Paul's Drag Race, who was called out on Instagram by Felicia Foxx, an Indigenous Australian drag queen, for performing in blackface, Aboriginal dress, and a burqa. Notably, Scarlet Adams does not belong to any of the cultures in which these materials have most significance. And the content of Felicia Foxx's call-out was, in essence, a charge of cultural appropriation or disrespect, stating that Scarlet Adams was ‘taking the piss out of numerous cultures’ (Foxx Reference Foxx2021).
(2) The singer Lizzo was called out on Twitter by Hannah Diviney for using an ableist term in her song. Diviney (Reference Diviney2022), writing in the Guardian, said that in the tweet she ‘explained how the slur was connected to [her] disability, cerebral palsy’ and claimed that there is no excuse for the use of ableist language. The tweet went viral and was reported on high-profile media outlets such as the BBC and the New York Times. Lizzo caught wind of the tweet and responded by saying ‘I never want to promote derogatory language’ (2022). Lizzo subsequently changed the slurring lyric, and many who initially took issue with her lyric have hailed her response as a virtuous blueprint.
(3) In 2020, several Twitter users called out J. K. Rowling for transphobic comments made online. Rowling, embroiled in controversy ever since, made sarcastic claims about the phrase ‘people who menstruate’, remarking on Twitter ‘I'm sure there used to be a word for those people. Someone help me out. Wumben? Wimpund? Woomud?’ Many online users, led by trans folk, responded to Rowling by asserting that her comments were offensive, hurtful, ignorant, and recklessly contribute to the ongoing violence and discrimination faced by trans people. Rowling refused to acknowledge wrongdoing.
We think that there are three noticeable differences between these cases. First, the content of the call-outs differs: (1) is about cultural appropriation, (2) is about ableism, and (3) is about transphobia. At this level, it does not seem to us that the content makes a difference as to whether certain speech counts as a call-out. More abstractly, however, there is a commonality in content that we believe is essential to call-outs. We will discuss this shortly.
Second, in cases (1) and (2), the dyadic structure of call-outs is much easier to see. There are identifiable interlocutors: a person issuing a call-out and its target. In case (3), however, there is more of a collective ‘pile-on’. Rowling is subject to a series of distinct call-outs, each playing a role in the build-up of sustained public disapproval, causing her to notice and respond. We do not think this undermines the scorekeeping framework because despite being cumulative, each person's contribution still counts as a single call-out. However, we accept that further work must be done to explain how the force of a call-out is amplified when it comes from many people (and when it comes from people with a high degree of social influence).
Third, example (2) spells out a case where a call-out motivates a person to respond positively, whereas example (1) does not say anything about the call-out's consequences, and case (3) shows a situation where a call-out is polarizing. This shows that whether speech constitutes a call-out does not depend on its effects. All three cases are call-outs even though each has a different outcome. Call-outs, then, can be successful in being a call-out without bringing about intended changes to a target's attitudes or behavior.
What do these cases have in common? Each call-out looks similar to run-of-the-mill normative speech. Examples (1), (2), and (3) involve a power grab, or an attempted power grab, as described in section1. That is, despite not having any particular overt authority, each issuer of a call-out speaks with exercitive force and thereby changes the normative terrain of the conversation. Specifically, each call-out introduces or makes explicit a norm in a context—for example, a norm against cultural appropriation, ableism, or transphobia. The introduction of this norm immediately renders the target beholden to it. This makes the target liable for retaliation because they have already violated the norm introduced. When Felicia Foxx called out Scarlet Adams, she presupposed a norm against cultural appropriation, which, by introducing it into the conversational score, makes Adams's behavior evaluable in reference to that norm. Because Adams has already committed cultural appropriation, she is immediately subject to retaliation. A similar description can be offered for Lizzo and Rowling though the relevant norms that have been violated are different. In other words, call-outs function in a rather peculiar way: they simultaneously introduce a norm into a context and constitute an evaluation of someone as violating that norm.
Moreover, each call-out aims to motivate its target's adherence to a norm introduced. This might be due to anticipating retaliation for violating the norm or else because the target is motivated to match their attitudes with what has been introduced. It has clearly worked with Lizzo but appears to have failed with Rowling.
So far, we have simply shown how call-outs have the features of speech-related sanctioning. But our goal is to explain what makes call-outs particularly distinctive. What we want to highlight is the fact that in examples (1), (2), and (3), we can see that each of the call-outs aims to sanction on the basis of violating a nondominant norm.
Felicia Foxx (Reference Foxx2021) called out Scarlet Adams for cultural appropriation despite it being generally permissible to wear an outfit of cultural significance as a costume; Diviney (Reference Diviney2022) called out Lizzo for ableist language even though the use of such language is widespread and unquestioned; and J. K. Rowling was called out for transphobia in a world where trans people are mostly considered regrettable aberrations. With this in mind, what makes a call-out distinctive? They are distinctive in virtue of their intended enforcement of a nondominant norm. This is the content that examples (1), (2), and (3) have in common at a more abstract level.
Most interesting, despite being nondominant, such norms appear to be presupposed as dominant in order to justify the sanction. That is, someone who calls out another can be aware that a norm they are enforcing is nondominant yet police it as if it were dominant because they believe that it ought to be. Neither Foxx, Diviney, nor any of those who called out Rowling qualify their sanction by saying that they are operating with a nondominant norm. And the reason for this, we think, is that by presupposing that the nondominant norm is dominant, they give the speech-related sanction more cash value: it gives the appearance that the sanction is justified and something that the target must take seriously and in response to which they must correct their behavior.
Does this not just show that there is not much difference between call-outs and shame? In the first place, we should distinguish between shame and acts of shaming. Where the former concerns one's experience of shame, the other is about its activity—when one is shamed, either by another or oneself. Much of the literature on shame focuses on the former (e.g., Williams [Reference Williams1993] on shame as a moral emotion). This is echoed by Heidi Maibom, who says that ‘shame is a painful emotion concerned with the failure to live up to certain standards, norms, and ideals’ (Reference Maibom2010: 566; see also Thomason Reference Thomason2018). Because we are concerned with directed acts of social regulation, the kind of shame we care about is the latter: acts of shaming. For Nussbaum (Reference Nussbaum2004) and others, shaming involves the condemnation of a person or group for failing to comply with a shared norm, which is public, referenced in relation to community expectations, and directed at character rather than actions (Norlock Reference Norlock2017; Jacquet Reference Jacquet2015; and Adkins Reference Adkins2019). This is roughly what we have in mind.
Are call-outs then just acts of shaming? The answer is complicated. We can relate call-outs to shaming in two different ways. First, we might think of the relationship between call-outs and shaming as one being a subset of the other. That is, call-outs can be construed as a particular kind of shaming. What makes them distinct from ‘ordinary’ acts of shaming is the type of norm that call-outs aim to enforce: a nondominant norm. Alternatively, we can think of the relationship between the two as being different kinds of things. Shaming is always about enforcing a dominant norm, whereas call-outs are about enforcing a nondominant one. This might not fit with usual thinking, and therefore we remain impartial on whether call-outs are a particular mode of shaming or entirely different—one's answer will depend on the kind of work one thinks shaming does with regard to norm-enforcement. For our purposes, it does not matter which route we take. In essence, we believe that the relevant distinction is between ‘ordinary’ acts of shaming and call-outs, which might be a ‘new’ act of shaming or something else altogether. Whatever the case, unlike ‘ordinary’ acts of shaming, call-outs are forward-looking: the norm they intend to regulate is presupposed as dominant to justify a sanction with the aim of making that norm dominant in the long run. ‘Ordinary’ shaming does not appear to have this proleptic aspect to it. We focus specifically on the introduction of nondominant norms, and for that reason we think it is worthwhile not to subsume this discussion under the general banner of shaming. In any case, however, call-outs are distinct from ‘ordinary’ acts of shaming insofar as they are concerned with simultaneously introducing a nondominant norm and evaluating someone as violating that norm.
With this all on the table, we define a call-out as follows:
S calls out T if and only if S adjusts the conversational score in a way that presupposes a nondominant norm according to which T's behavior qualifies as norm-violating, and S treats the nondominant norm as if it were dominant.
Call-outs simultaneously introduce and police norms whose dominance is not widely accepted but do so as if those norms were actually dominant. Call-outs thus create the conversational conditions according to which the target's behavior qualifies as norm-violating, and they do so by making nondominant norms salient.
One might have the following concerns: first, why can we not call someone out on the basis of presupposing a dominant norm and accusing them of violating it? And second, why must a nondominant norm be presupposed as dominant? It seems too restrictive to say that what is necessary for a call-out are two kinds of presuppositions: a presupposition of a nondominant norm and a presupposition that this norm is dominant. We have three responses.
First, descriptively, call-outs are ordinarily used for challenging dominant norms. This is seen by looking at paradigm cases. When exploring online forums, such as Twitter, people do not get called out for buying into, say, dominant sexist norms. Rather, people are called out because they are sexist. What explains this? As a hermeneutical resource, the concept of a call-out has emerged in response to our unique sociohistorical moment. This is a period of #MeToo, Black Lives Matters, Say Her Name, and other massive social movements that aim to liberate us from false consciousness and resist oppressive terms of engagement. A call-out is designed to help achieve this, not maintain things as they already are. (This is not to say that call-outs cannot be used for nefarious purposes even if one intends for them to be positive.)
Second, we think that because there are existing hermeneutical resources that are recruited in social regulation, such as the concepts of shaming, blaming, guilt-tripping, and the like, there must be a reason why the concept of a call-out emerged at all. If there was not some reason why the notion of a call-out was developed and circulated, it is hard to explain why speakers did not just use existing terminology. We believe that the notion of a call-out was intended to fill an interpretive lacuna. Concepts like shaming, blaming, and guilt-tripping appear to operate under the assumption that a target has failed to conform to a dominant norm—though, we accept that this is not necessary. For instance, women who contest misogynistic norms by refusing to shave their body hair are often shamed and policed back into such norms for doing so (Manne Reference Manne2019). The notion of a call-out, however, stands apart from these concepts insofar as it is only employed to resist dominant norms, rather than to reinforce them. After all, it is unintuitive to describe a man who shames a woman for growing body hair as ‘calling her out’. The best explanation, we think, for the emergence of call-out is that it is a unique hermeneutical resource, a special tool for norm-enforcement, that is not interchangeable with shame, blame, or guilt.
Third, and relatedly, call-outs, as a form of social regulation, are particularly polarizing. This needs explanation. We take it that the hostility toward call-outs is largely explained by the fact that a speaker makes an accusation of wrongdoing by presupposing that the violated norm is dominant, and this justifies making the accusation. Put differently, call-outs have been the subject of scrutiny because the norms that individuals are accused of violating are not norms that are widely accepted—such as when a man is accused of being sexist for telling a woman that he does not like her body hair.
2.1. The Effectiveness of Call-outs: Speaker-focused
With our definition on the table, we can evaluate the effectiveness of a call-out in two ways. This will help us judge whether call-outs are effective tools against injustice or whether they are, as commonly understood, simply instances of moral grandstanding or casting stones that distract from the goals that call-outs are supposed to pursue.
Our first evaluation of effectiveness is speaker-focused. A call-out is successful if it produces some benefits for the speaker that facilitates their enforcement of a nondominant norm even in the absence of the hearer's cooperation. The second is target-focused. A call-out is successful if it changes the target's convictions in relation to a nondominant norm. Both of these are essential for properly considering the utility of call-outs. We will first explore the former.
In section 1, we argued that dominant scripts orient marginalized agents to feel the pull of dominant norms, which can contribute to bolstering their own oppression. In response, call-outs allow marginalized agents to rehearse and reinforce a nondominant norm as if it were dominant. This is beneficial to marginalized groups insofar as it provides them with an alternative social script that breaks from oppressive dominant normative frameworks. Having renegade scripts available may itself provide an important alternative by which members of marginalized groups can understand themselves and their perception of possibilities for action. Importantly, it can begin to create conditions where a marginalized person feels a pull toward nondominant norms that are agency-enhancing.
Feigning the dominance of a nondominant norm is risky business. While it is liberating to lessen the normative pull that one experiences to act in ways that maintain the oppressive order, this is not always in the interests of marginalized agents. Normative pulls play an important role in the safety of marginalized people because they inform agents about what is expected of them and how to sidestep retaliation. Consider a situation where a man comments on a woman's legs not being shaved, and she retorts with a similar comment about his own. Suppose he calls on periphery norms, like politeness, to show that her reply was unwarranted and that this is a reason not to take her seriously. Such a situation might be empowering for her nonetheless if she feels safe and secure in the face of his retaliation. However, such safety is often not the reality for women. If a group of men makes the same comment about her legs, the threat of retaliation from them might outweigh the perks that come from speaking out against sexist norms. Even if we can imagine a situation in which a call-out empowers an individual through practicing alternative scripts, it is a privilege that is rarely afforded.Footnote 1
Despite this, the benefit of using call-outs to break the normative pull of oppressive norms can generalize to the group level under certain conditions. Call-outs are going to be most effective at a group level when the nondominant norms that a call-out presupposes are endorsed or accepted as a legitimate alternative or at least when the audiences are open to critical perspectives on dominant norms. Spaces where nondominant norms, or openness to them, are explicit are sometimes referred to as ‘safe spaces’, wherein members assert and adhere to norms that best suit their interests. Declaring a space as ‘safe’ indicates that there is specific attention being paid to the norms of behavior that are operative in that context. A music gig might declare that it is safe and that crowd behavior that is hypermasculine, such as moshing, will be sanctioned. In general spaces, moshing might be seen as an indicator of crowd enthusiasm and celebration. But when the association between the norm of enthusiasm and physical contact is fractured, the norm of moshing is instead seen as exclusionary of particular kinds of people, namely, attendees who might be susceptible to sensory overload or dislike that moshing establishes that it is permissible for others to touch one's body.
Safe spaces establish nondominant norms that provide the conditions for agents to safely break from convention. Because nondominant norms are treated as given, call-outs are going to be more likely to reap benefits. This is for two reasons. First, the risk of retaliation that marginalized agents usually face for challenging dominant norms is (mostly) absent. If someone is called out for moshing in the venue that prohibits it, the response will likely be backed by most attendees. Second, even if a target does not accept that moshing is problematic, being in a safe space may prime them to be aware of the fact that such behavior is up for contestation.
A note. Although we have spoken about the benefits of call-outs as they pertain to promoting social justice or, perhaps more weakly, to offering marginalized people an avenue for breaking dominant scripts, these are not necessary to call-outs. Because call-outs presuppose nondominant norms, any nondominant norm that one presupposes and treats as if it were dominant counts as a call-out. This means that pernicious nondominant norms, such as those in regrettable circles like the Red Pill community, will count as a call-out if they are introduced into contexts where that norm is deviant and used for social regulation. Even with this in mind, our goal is simply to lay out the benefits of call-outs for marginalized speakers in their pursuit of social justice.
When we evaluate the effectiveness of call-outs with a focus on their targets, we will see their deficiencies as a strategy for undermining dominant norms. We now turn our attention to that.
2.2. The Effectiveness of Call-outs: Target-focused
Taking a target-focused approach, we see why call-outs are often ineffective. Changing the target's convictions in relation to a nondominant norm will partly depend on the target's perception of this norm as justified or a norm that they accept is up for deliberation. (The belief that the norm is up for contestation might not mean that the call-out itself succeeds in changing the target's mind at first, but it might mean that the call-out changes conversational conditions in a way that prompts follow-up from the target.) This is unlikely, however. The attempted power grab that call-outs are meant to execute tends to fail in robustly changing the normative terrain of conversation in a way that favors the performer of a call-out. When a call-out introduces a nondominant norm or makes it explicit, the call-out has exercitive force, but this is often countered by resistance that recalibrates the norms of conversation that privilege dominant terms of engagement. This resistance to a call-out is due to dominant norms being connected to and supported by other features of our cognitive and affective networks.
It is this tension between the assumed acceptability of a nondominant norm and the target's adherence to a dominant norm that limits the success of calling out as a power grab and thus of recruiting a target to a justice-related cause. Challenging behavior by assuming a nondominant norm is unlikely to inspire normative reflection in the target given that dominant norms often exist within cognitive and affective networks that are not only robust but socially rewarding (Skitka Reference Skitka2010). The fact that dominant norms are readily available to be made salient in a discourse means the target of the call-out need only readjust permissibility facts in accordance with a dominant norm in order to justify their dismissal of the call-out even when these dominant norms are worthy of critique.
Suppose there is a man who believes that body hair on women is repulsive because it is untidy and dirty and that women are the kind of people who should be ‘well-groomed’. At the gym, the man looks at a woman's underarm hair in disgust, and this compels him to tell her what he thinks. Taken aback, the woman calls him out for being sexist. Her call-out presupposes that it is sexist to think that only women's body hair is gross and that this presupposed content is what justifies her call-out. Now, perhaps, in this case the affective response to women's body hair is one of disgust and the consciously endorsed norm that it supports might be hygiene-related, which is enshrined in dominant social structures that are less obvious in their discriminatory force.
The robustness of these networks makes it difficult to deal with a harmful norm in an atomized way. The justification for the targeted belief can be deferred onto other beliefs. The man can say it has nothing to do with being sexist and that his belief is a matter of hygiene. When the targeted belief is interconnected with such networks, the call-out is likely to be met with some kind of emotional retaliation that functions to preserve the belief being attacked. We think this reflects one of the main concerns surrounding so-called call-out ‘culture’: that call-outs often have a polarizing effect.
There are further reasons why these belief networks impede call-outs. Call-outs effectively assume the worst of the target by introducing conditions according to which the target's behavior would qualify as norm-violating. This exaggerates an in-group and out-group divide over an issue. However, if the call-out presupposes a norm that fails to cohere with a dominant normative network, then the person who is performing the call-out can be accused of failing to comply with a social convention. The call-out looks unwarranted because it advocates for a deviant or nonstandard norm. This is perceived as unwarranted and not just in a social sense insofar as the attempted regulation is supposed to correct behavior in a way that is ‘not-done-around-here’, but also epistemically to the extent that the person performing the call-out looks to have gotten the normative facts wrong. This is another reason why we believe that call-outs have a polarizing effect.
What happens when the target is not opposed to nondominant norms? Suppose the man in the body hair example believes in the importance of listening to the lived experiences of particular groups. Call this person a potential ally, someone who is not part of the marginalized group and yet shows an openness to their interests. Allies are important because they provide support in several ways, such as moral support or taking on labor related to the projects of marginalized agents.
We suspect that call-outs could risk alienating potential allies when these allies benefit from dominant norms. As noted, acting as if renegade norms are already dominant is particularly risky when the target is part of the dominant group. Policing potential allies in accordance with norms that they are yet to see as binding may erode trust, given that by treating a nondominant norm as dominant, the actor effectively presupposes that the target wittingly violated that norm. Setting up the conversational conditions in a way that frames the target as a wrongdoer is likely to inflame hostilities by making disparate normative commitments apparent. Further, the erosion of trust can reduce the willingness of potential allies to compromise the goods they receive from their dominant position to support the interests of marginalized agents. For these reasons, presupposing nondominant norms in conversation with a potential ally shares the risk of polarization that afflicts call-outs in general.
The potential for call-outs to act as a norm-enforcing tool will depend in part on who is present, their openness to nondominant norms, and their willingness to undergo epistemically and socially costly work. These conditions reduce the likelihood of call-outs succeeding as norm-enforcing tools in the target-focused sense. In short: call-outs are unlikely to be effective—which aligns with general public sentiment. But what about call-ins?
3. Call-ins
In response to claims that call-outs are polarizing or ineffective, communities have already responded with the alternative notion of call-ins; call-ins are generally characterized as being a more compassionate and patient method of pointing to the harmfulness of someone's behavior. In her New York Times article, Loretta Ross (Reference Ross2019) asserts that ‘calling in is simply a call-out done with love’. She writes that call-ins are more conducive to practices of restorative justice, which she, along with many others, contends are better equipped to build coalitions of social resistance and critique. While her discussion of call-outs is specifically focused on online culture, her centering of gentleness as the primary mode of calling in is shared by most, including Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who tweeted:
We should actively check antisemitism, anti-blackness, homophobia, racism, and all other forms of bigotry. And the most productive end goal when we see it is to educate and heal. It's the difference btwn [sic] ‘calling in’ before ‘calling out. (Ocasio-Cortez Reference Ocasio-Cortez2019, our emphasis)
We can see that call-ins are ordinarily framed as a gentler way of encouraging behavior. There are some preliminary differences we can establish on the basis of this. For one, call-ins are not acts of sanctioning, at least not in the sense that assumes a nondominant norm, which is symbolized with the use of ‘in’ rather than ‘out’. The intended outcome seems to be getting the target on one's side. Call-ins appear to have the goal of creating the conditions under which the target can review their initial behavior in a morally cooperative way, sidestepping the kinds of retaliation that tend to face call-outs. What are these conditions? We first need to say something about how speech functions to alter beliefs, desires, and attitudes. Victoria McGeer's discussion of mindshaping is instructive. She writes,
We are geared to form and regulate our minds according to the sensemaking norms of a culturally shared folk-psychology; hence, we come to experience, as well as outwardly express, a rich and recognizable array of mental states (perceptions, sensations, emotions, beliefs, desires, memories), suitably tailored to the kind of agency we are expected or permitted to develop in our given cultural milieu. (Reference McGeer2019:52, our emphasis)
The social world contains expectations, norms, and other information that influences which mental states are available to us. Though McGeer's discussion is not about conversation, the same mechanisms can function in speech and create conditions for belief change by exploiting our cognitive vulnerability to one another. Recall the discussion of the cognitive and conative appeals of speech. We can see how this works by looking at how presuppositions enter into the conversational score. Imagine that Koen says, ‘I couldn't believe that, of all people, John was the only one at the gym this morning!’ By saying ‘of all people’, Koen is presupposing that John is not the kind of person who usually goes to the gym. If someone listening to Koen does not know much about John or his exercising habits, they are nonetheless able to share Koen's attitude insofar as they are able to understand the contribution that he has made regarding John's infrequent presence at the gym.
Taking on the presupposition, however, is not only prompted by a motivation to understand the proposition that John does not go to the gym often. It is partly facilitated by a desire to share the attitude of humorous disbelief. Presuppositions are facilitated by the hearer's desire to match or understand the attitude of the speaker (Langton Reference Langton, Maitra and McGowan2012). As such, presuppositions covertly invite the hearer into a shared attitude, and they are able to do this partly because of the human tendency to update attitudes in accordance with what is expected of us.
We might say that call-ins are speech that alters the score in a way that creates the possibility for attitude change. This makes call-ins like invitations rather than mere assertions (or accusations). Specifically, they are invitations into alternative belief states. Call-ins introduce the proleptic conditions that prompt a target to take on the requisite attitude for belief revision. (This does not mean that belief is volitional but only that certain attitudes become more plausibly realisable.) It is presupposed that the target will revise their beliefs if they are given the right kind of information.
Suppose that a marginalized student is speaking to a professor who believes in a meritocracy. The student says, ‘Sure, hard work plays some role in success, but I'm sure you wouldn't think that every kid who can't afford to go to university simply isn't working hard enough’. Here, the student is presupposing that the professor will revise his attitude in light of the new information that she has introduced into the conversational score. Importantly, the student does not presuppose that meritocracy is classist but rather just raises its possibility. This invites the professor to update his belief rather than accuse the professor of violating a nondominant norm.
With this in mind, we define call-ins as follows:
S calls-in T if and only if S makes a contribution to the conversational score that presupposes T's willingness to revise their attitudes in light of information that challenges a dominant norm.
Rather than presupposing a nondominant norm and treating it as dominant, a call-in only presupposes that the target will, or at least might, revise their beliefs if they are given the right kind of information. In other words, call-ins use presupposition as a way to set up the expectation that the target will properly listen to and consider the information that the speaker presents to them. In this sense, the invitation aspect is located at the level of the presupposition, priming the target to consider the information in a particular way: one that opens up the possibility for belief revision.Footnote 2
How successful are such revisions when the normative commitments of S and T are significantly different? When someone presupposes that we will update our belief in light of counterevidence and proceeds to provide that evidence, we might think that the speaker is clueless or even that they are disrespecting us by presupposing that we have not considered alternative possibilities. Moreover, the presupposition might feel manipulative or insensitive to our epistemic reasons. Thus, trust will have to play some role when introducing a presupposition of another's willingness to change their belief. Trust will dispose us to let the speaker take our hand and enter their belief-world. This is plausibly what is meant when people characterize call-ins as being done ‘with love’ or ‘care’, and it explains the intuition that most people have about call-ins being more effective at an intimate conversational level. However, this also highlights the difficulty of calling-in others from totally different backgrounds.
This is reminiscent of Hinchman's (Reference Hinchman2005) notion of ‘tellings’, the idea being that ‘I can be responsible for your belief because in telling you, I invite you to trust me, and in inviting you to trust me I take a degree of responsibility for your trust by certifying its status as reasonable’ (Reference Hinchman2005:587). This adds an extra dimension to call-ins: properties of the issuer. If a call-in involves a telling, which constitutes an invitation to trust, a caller-in holds some responsibility for this trust. However, we want to extend Hinchman's idea to the possibility that call-ins sometimes presuppose that the person already has the relevant belief but has simply forgotten. Here, a call-in looks a little like a moral reminder. In such cases, the trust is not about changing another person's belief, but that one is in good epistemic standing to be able to ‘remind’ that person of who they are—even if this reminder is inaccurate.
If the reminder is inaccurate, however, the call-in will function in a similar way to Hinchman's tellings insofar as it is about undergirding belief change via trust though by trying to convince someone that they already have a belief, which, if successful, causes the person to form that belief. The benefit of this kind of call-in is that rather than trying to convince someone that they should revise their belief, it is trying to convince someone that they had a belief all along. This signals to the target that they and the speaker are not so different, after all.
While call-ins depend partly on trust, the act of presupposing that the target will do the right thing can be understood as a kind of trust-building exercise. Acting in accordance with what is presupposed when called in is distinctly less costly than when called out. Indeed, acting in accordance with what is presupposed might actually be socially rewarding by virtue of realizing that one is seen as trustworthy. This makes calling in a more effective method of recruiting would-be allies, given that it does not presuppose a norm under which the target would qualify as norm-violating.
In saying this, however, a call-in that functions as a ‘moral reminder’ yet is inaccurate can be construed as manipulative, trust-undermining, or even gaslighting. As such, it is likely unwise. First, this is because one should engage in good faith, treating the person as an independent epistemic agent capable of making rational decisions. Second, if the target catches on to this tactic, the call-in could be apt to polarize, making it ineffective—in roughly the same way that we think call-outs are likely to be ineffective.
Moreover, it may not always be in the caller's best interest to act as if their target is trustworthy or to share the information necessary for their target to revise their beliefs properly. Whether call-ins are effective all-things-considered will depend on a number of factors. In many cases, presupposing that one's target would do the right thing may not be wise. If the target has a sketchy record regarding justice-related discussions, then undergoing the labor required to set up the conditions for their attitude revision and provide information to facilitate it would be costly. Additionally, the information required for belief change might depend on sharing resources that are in nascent stages and so are not necessarily ready to be shared with those who might appropriate, dilute, or recharge its meaning (Podosky Reference Podosky2021). This gives us reasons to think that the likely effectiveness of call-ins will differ across cases. Nonetheless, they are much safer as tools for social justice than call-outs.
4. Conclusion
In this article, we considered how nondominant norms are negotiated through speech, specifically through call-outs and call-ins. The definitions we proposed centered on presupposition as a core mechanism for both modes of speech, where call-outs presuppose a nondominant norm and call-ins presuppose a target's willingness to revise their beliefs. While it is easy to dismiss call-outs as perpetuating toxic moral discourse, the definition we proposed suggests some benefits that come from this kind of speech. However, call-ins are likely to be more effective and less costly than call-outs in pursuing justice. With these definitions at hand, we are better equipped to analyze the mechanics of these phenomena in a way that does not bleed into an evaluation of the content or goals that the call-outs and call-ins are supposed to achieve.
Open access
