Dear all, I warmly invite you to an upcoming APSE event on refusal. It consists of a talk by Laura Caponetto (Milan) entitled "Refusing - and Refusing to Obey" and an accompanying reading circle prior to the talk. Date: Thursday, January 16th Reading Circle: 1pm - 3pm Talk: 3pm - 5 pm Location: room 3A (NIG) After the talk, we will go out for dinner. Please write to veronika.lassl(a)univie.ac.at if you would like to join. Everyone is welcome to attend parts or all of this event! Abstract: We can do several different things with the word ‘No’. We can turn down an offer, decline an invitation, deny permission. We can engage in civil disobedience. In this talk, I aim to map these varieties and unpack the normative profile of refusal. I argue that refusal constitutes an illocutionary family comprising acts which have different felicity conditions but share the definitional normative function of preventing certain obligations from being created or waived. I begin by singling out what I take to be the paradigmatic case of refusal. I then broaden the picture a little, to consider speech acts that share ‘family resemblances’ with this paradigmatic case. And then I broaden it further, to look at speech acts that populate the ‘illocutionary neighborhood’, including ‘refusal to obey’. The talk expands upon my previous work on the topic (Caponetto 2023). While that work was primarily concerned with ‘upstream norms’ for refusing (i.e. the conditions under which refusal succeeds), I here focus on its ‘downstream norms’ – on the changes refusal effects on the normative landscape. Reading Circle: We will discuss Caponetto's 2023 paper "The pragmatic structure of refusal" (attached as a PDF), which is closely related to the topic of the talk. Please feel free to bring your lunch! The reading circle is open to everyone - please send a message to vinzenz.fischer(a)univie.ac.at if you want to attend. As an introduction to the field, we suggest: Green, M. (2020) . Speech acts. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy (Fall 2021 Edition). https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2021/entries/speech-acts/ For further reading regarding the topic: Caponetto, L. (2017). On silencing, authority, and the act of refusal. Rivista di Estetica, 64, 35–52. Langton, R. (2018b). Blocking as counter-speech. In D. Fogal, D.W. Harris, & M. Moss (Eds.), New work on speech acts (pp. 144–164). Oxford University Press. Sbisà, M. (2019). Assertion among the speech acts. In S. C. Goldberg (Ed.), The Oxford handbook of assertion (pp. 158–178). Oxford University Press. Looking forward to seeing you there, Veronika Lassl