Robert Simpson (UCL Philosophy Department) has posted The Chilling Effect and the Heating Effect on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
Chilling Effects occur when a restriction on speech deters lawful speech, because of people’s un-certainty about the risks of incurring costs related to the restriction. I propose that, contrary to an orthodox account of this phenomenon, individual-level deterrence of speech sometimes intensifies discourse, at the group level, rather than suppressing or subduing it. The deterrence of lawful speech may, somewhat counterintuitively, trigger a Heating Effect. This hypothesis offers us a promising (partial) explanation of the relentlessness of public debate on topics for which there is, simultaneously, evidence of people self-censoring, for fear of running afoul of speech restrictions. It also helps to identify and rectify two shortcomings in existing theoretical accounts of the Chilling Effect – in how they (i) explain the relation between individual- and group-level discursive phenomena, and (ii) characterize the distinctive objectionability of inadvertent speech deterrence.
Cool. Highly recommended.
