Cooper began by declaring that she was there for help. She had hit a wall in her research and was hoping that by presenting her problem to a multidisciplinary group of researchers, with their different methodologies, she may be able to break through. She then described her two main research goals: the use of conceptual analysis in the history of medicine; and the problems caused by shifts in the meaning of concepts over time.

She explained conceptual analysis as a tool used by philosophers to establish a basis for categorisation. Regarding the concept of disorder, she said that it acted as an umbrella concept for a variety of things: injuries, disease, disability (though recent disability activism had challenged the latter’s inclusion). Conceptual analysis begins with a first stab at detailing the necessary and sufficient conditions for the application of a given term. This is followed by testing with actual and hypothetical cases in order to expose flaws in the concept. For example, a first stab might list a condition for disorder as is treated by doctors, but the example of doctors also delivering babies would expose that as not sufficient.

In another example, Cooper asked us to consider what knowledge means. Beginning with a condition of true belief, she gave the example of someone who reads tea leaves to predict the result of an election, but who gets lucky and coincidentally is correct. We would not say that that person had knowledge of the result of the election from their tea leaves, so additional qualifiers are needed. The aim, said Cooper, of conceptual analysis is to be descriptive; to unearth a tidied-up account of a pre-existing concept that, when explained to a layperson would result in them agreeing that that was what they meant.

Cooper delineated two prevailing views on the concept of disorder:

• Christopher Boorse’s value-free view of disorder as biological dysfunction, harmful or otherwise; and
• the value-laden view, subscribed to by Cooper, that dysfunction must be detrimental to be a disorder.

The test case of these two views, she said, was homosexuality. Whilst we do not yet know the exact causes, it is possible that it results from a biological dysfunction. However, we generally accept that it is not harmful, so in her view it would not be considered a disorder. The American Psychological Association voted in line with this view in 1973, and from 1980–2011 all psychologists subscribed to the value-laden view of disorder.

This changed in 2013, with publication of the DSM-5. In 2011 a draft had included two definitions of mental disorder—one value-free, one value-laden—and a note stating that a decision on which to adopt would be made later. The two definitions were the result of the two working groups whose work is combined to create the DSM coming from differing traditions: one from the tradition of homosexuality being removed as a disorder, the other from disability studies and its view that many disorders are not necessarily harmful but are still disorders. The aim, suggested Cooper, was to align the definition of mental disorder more with that of physical disorder, and the two views on disorder could be summed up as one of impairment and one of disability. As another example, Cooper highlighted the shift in discussions around tic disorders, usually benign and often not even noticed by those with them, being described as such.

This shift presented a problem for conceptual analysis. Terms change meaning over time, and the unearthed necessary requirements might not always be necessary and are therefore weak connections. Cooper said there had been three types of academic response to this. The first was to argue against seeking a definition of disorder entirely. The second, embodied by the work of Sally Haslanger, was a new revisionist project that aimed for concepts to be prescriptive, rather than descriptive. That is, concepts should aim for better science or better politics. The example was given of the definition of parent, which has shifted in recent times to mean a child’s guardian more than exclusively their biological antecedants (e.g., school parents’ evenings that invite carers where parents are absent, adoptive parents, etc.). Haslanger’s view is that philosophical study can help to facilitate a linguistic shift already underway.

Cooper’s preference, option three, is to develop methods that are robust in the face of future conceptual changes. This means supporting a claim with multiple, redundant conditions, such that the invalidation of one does not invalidate the entire concept. She cited the example of mountain climbers on unstable rocks using multiple anchor points, and said that in many cases these additional conditions were already present, but implicit. For example, whilst a directly-stated condition for disorder to apply might be that is is harmful, indirect ones could be that someone with a disorder is unlucky (e.g., what is happening to them does not happen to most people) and that it is internal (e.g., the disorder is not a result of social or environmental pressures).

During the Q&A, many (perhaps to be expected, considering the research group hosting the presentation) fixated on the power dynamics of the DSM, which both describes and affects concepts of mental illness, as well as the impact of such definitions on people’s ability to access treatment, exam extensions, etc., as well as the effect on their own self-image. Someone asked why we don’t just have two concepts, harmful and non-harmful disorders, and Cooper replied that this represents the revisionary project she had touched on, which she had concerns about—the idea of best tends to depend on the project itself and the politics of who is doing it, she said, and these sorts of things are very hard to predict.

Prompted by her mention of caffeine addiction in a prior edition of the DSM, I asked if she thought there might be a value in the DSM cataloguing all non-expected modes of existence, even benign ones, so that practitioners could still find what is up with their patients and see that it is no cause for concern. She replied that there was a huge range of possible non-normal functioning that a person could experience, so such a catalogue would be prohibitively large. I’m not sure I’m convinced; the DSM-5 is already almost 1,000 pages long, and there’s nothing stopping it being split into volumes. I also asked what her definition of harmful was with the following example: the disorder is a harmful dysfunction definition could be accepted by two psychiatrists and yet still lead to one considering homosexuality a disorder and not, based on whether they thought it was harmful. Additionally, three psychiatrists could be of the opinion that it is harmful for different reasons: one might think it is a sin, one might think it increases the risk of certain STIs and one might think it leads to social exclusion.

Cooper replied that harmful is a term that is very difficult to define in the abstract, but easy to define in practice. This willingness to selectively use duck typing seemed strange from someone’s whose entire project is based around avoiding such a technique, but she did offer a valuable way of assessing different reasonings: consistency. For example, for someone to claim that homosexuality is a sin and therefore harmful, they would have to demonstrate that they adhere to all the other commandments of their religion. That said, this does still seem to lead to a situation in which homosexuality (to continue the example) is not just considered to be a disorder in one culture and not another, but actually is simultaneously a disorder and not a disorder, and in which somebody can be cured of their disorder by moving to a different country. I suppose that political construction of disorder is what Foucault was trying to get at.

She began by highlighting that social media companies are currently being asked to take more responsibility for hateful speech on their platforms. Extremists, said Smith, use free speech to argue that they have a right to express their views, whilst free speech activists claim that they don’t support the views, but support the extremists right to express them—Voltaire’s classic line. The issue, said Smith, was that the metaphoric line between hate speech and non-hate speech that is often bandied around in such debates is located differently for different people—she cited the ICCA’s 2013 report on online hate speech, which claimed that The danger [of hate speech] is real because Internet hate easily translates into real-world violence, basing their argument on the idea that There is a fine line between the exchange of values and ideas and the perpetuation of hate in the form of degradation and violence.

Smith’s presentation would focus on the hate speech/free speech debate within the online context and the benefits of counter-speech over censorship. First, she demonstrated why even defining free speech and hate speech is difficult, presenting a slew of subtly-conflicting definitions sourced from art. 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Irish Prohibition of Incitement To Hatred Act 1989 and § 61 of the the New Zealand Human Rights Act 1993, to name a few. Some explicitly include insulting language under the banner of hate speech—as did England & Wales until recently—whilst the UN’s 1969 International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination defines racial discrimination as any distinction, exclusion, restriction or preference based on race, colour, descent, or national or ethnic origin which has the purpose or effect of nullifying or impairing the recognition, enjoyment or exercise, on an equal footing, of human rights and fundamental freedoms in the political, economic, social, cultural or any other field of public life.

Smith also cited Erjavec & Kovačič who states that [a]lthough there is no universally preferred definition of hate speech, some common elements seem to emerge, and Brown who writes that hate speech [is] a heterogeneous collection of expressive phenomena held together by family resemblances. Similarly, there are different terms for what Smith calls negative online behaviour, from incendiary speech, online shitstorm and flaming to excitable speech, fear speech and linguistic aggression. The issue when such behaviour is online is that the infrastructure has an amplifying potential for speech to cause violence, even to the level of genocide or atrocity, as we see now in Myanmar. Constant exposure to negative content also desensitises, and governments are eager to use dangerous speech as a justification for repression. This is along with the other negative effects of interfering with the expression of unpalatable views, which serves primarily to whitewash reality and can lead those with such views to simply become more subtle or to go underground.

However, Brown suggests that it is not just the law that we can use to response, and Strossen proposes counter-speech as a term that encompasses any speech that counters a message with which one disagrees. Smith considers the field of counter-speech interesting, though under-researched and theoretically anaemic. As such her research questions became, first, in what ways are digital technologies enabling negative online behaviour? and, secondly, to what extent can counter-speech initiatives be used? The example to be discussed here was the New Zealand Human Rights Commission’s Give Nothing to Racism campaign—specifically, the YouTube comments beneath it.

New Zealand has a bicultural relationship between the indigenous Māori and the British settler cultures. The campaign focused on supposed everyday racism, with the goal of stop[ping] casual racism from developing into something more extreme, though Smith was unsure what this fear was based on as nothing extreme has happened in New Zealand so far. The video stars director Taika Waititi of Black Panther fame in a parodic charity ad., urging people to give nothing to racism as though it were a charitable cause that could only survive with their support. Smith analysed the comments under the video over a 6-week period, during which 62 people made 112 comments, and a third contained overt racism. Good job, NZ Human Rights Commission.

Smith was primarily interested in how people responded to these hateful comments—how they deployed counter-speech. First, she identified a number of alt-right intertextual features such as the use of terms like cuck, SJW, triple parentheses and Mein Kampf quotes. She then detailed their argumentation strategies: denial of racism; accusations that the video was political propaganda against white people; and immigrants don’t belong in New Zealand rhetoric. Smith honed in on one particular interaction that she dubbed a flame war polylogue. The polylogue consisted of: A, a troll who criticised Black Panther supposed blackwashing of white characters; B, a Muslim who enjoyed the increased representation that that brought with it; and the audience, who were largely silent observers.

Analysing the discourse, Smith pointed out that A refused use B’s name, instead using terms such as Mahommadean. They quoted B verbatim and then took apart B’s claims one-by-one, which is apparently an alt-right argumentation tactic now. B initially responded politely, using A’s name, before shifting to trying to expose A as a troll, trying to exit the conversation, re-entering sincerely and then echoing A in their use of sarcasm and point-by-point rebuttals. B then shifted to using their own inflammatory remarks about Islam, taking on the persona that A had originally accused them of being. In short, B followed Hardaker’s 2015 taxonomy of troll response types to a T. A went quiet for a time and was replaced by trolls C & D before returning and calling B an alt-right troll. B returned to their original politeness, wished A good luck and exited the conversation. A, however, had the final say, quoting B’s previous inflammatory comments. Others from the audience chimed in, including E who wrote I felt myself losing IQ reading this. B’s counter-speech, Smith argued, was not directed against A, but against the Es of the world.

In her epilogue, Smith posed a number of questions. Did A’s comments class as hate speech? Did being able to observe the flame war make us more aware of abusive speech, or should it have been taken down? Finally, do we risk sanitising the Internet and forcing such views underground to fester and grow? As an addendum, Smith added that she returned to the video in the new year and found that the first three months’ worth of comments were nowhere to be seen, so clearly the NZ Human Rights Commission had made their choice. This, said Smith, hinted at the central tension of freedom of speech—we want to know what people are thinking, but what should we do when seeing this can have a psychological effect on people? In my own view, we should embrace the fact that those affected will be more resilient, but I can empathise to a degree with those who choose the seemingly-more-compassionate view.