Commemoration and constriction

Abstract

In analysing the problems with commemorative artefacts, philosophers have tended to focus on objectionable monuments that honour inappropriate subjects. The problems with such monuments, however, do not exhaust problems with a society’s public commemorative landscape – the totality of public commemorative artefacts in general, and the institutions involved in their creation and maintenance. I argue that a public commemorative landscape can implicate authoritative ideas, including stereotypes about people in virtue of their group membership. This contributes to what I term hermeneutical constriction – a situation in which people are given reason to rely on an authoritative subset of the totality of hermeneutical resources that they actually have access to. Critiquing and resisting these problems with a public commemorative landscape that contributes to hermeneutical constriction is fraught with difficulties. Attempts to do so render activists vulnerable to a range of serious criticisms.

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Item Type:	Article
Authors/Creators:	Lim, C.-M. https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7888-6302
Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information:	© 2024 The Authors. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this licence to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.
Keywords:	Commemoration; Hermeneutical injustice; Constriction; stereotypes; Implicature
Dates:	Accepted: 20 November 2024 Published (online): 6 December 2024 Published: March 2025
Institution:	The University of Sheffield
Academic Units:	The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Arts and Humanities (Sheffield) > School of History, Philosophy and Digital Humanities
Date Deposited:	12 Jan 2026 12:25
Last Modified:	12 Jan 2026 12:25
Published Version:	https://doi.org/10.1007/s10892-024-09503-7
Status:	Published
Publisher:	Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Refereed:	Yes
Identification Number:	10.1007/s10892-024-09503-7
Related URLs:	Author
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID):	oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:236384

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Commemoration and constriction

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