1 Approaches to the meaning of hate speech
Victoria Guillén-Nieto · 2023
Approaches to the meaning of hate speech 1 IntroductionThe term hate speech recognises a wide range of harmful social practices and discourses.Let us take, for instance, Islamophobic blogs, cross burnings, racial epithets, or dehumanising pictures of Jews.If all these social activities fall under hate speech, they must have certain elements or features in common.It might therefore be reasonable to think that a definition of hate speech should comprise the essential elements that enable us to recognise the phenomenon.This chapter aims to demonstrate how Wittgenstein's concept of family resemblance, which Brown 7 borrowed in his legal essay What is hate speech?Part II: Family resemblances (2017b), can help linguists and legal scholars better describe hate speech.The discussion is divided into three parts, each corresponding to a different approach to hate speech.The first approach I deal with is ordinary language analysis, a philosophical investigation method concerned with how verbal expressions, in our case, the term hate speech, is used in non-technical, everyday language (Wittgenstein 2009 [1953]).Then I analyse various legal scholarly attempts to define hate speech.Finally, the chapter provides an overview of the approaches to a technical legal definition of hate speech in international law, common law and civil law. Wittgenstein's concept of family resemblance applied to the definition of hate speechFamily resemblance is a philosophical concept found in Wittgenstein's posthumously published Philosophical investigations (2009 [1953]).Wittgenstein turned to games, as a way to explain the gist of his idea:Look, for example, at board games, with their various affinities.Now pass to card games; here, you find many correspondences with the first group, but many common features drop out, and others appear.When we pass next to ball games, much that is common is retained, but much is lost [. ..]And the upshot of these considerations is that we see a complicated network of similarities overlapping and crisscrossing; similarities in the large and in the small (Wittgenstein 2009 [