The Institute for Forensic Linguistics invites you all to our hybrid (online and in person) symposium on Forensic Linguistics and Philosopy

The half a day symposium will be hosted in the Susan Cadbury lecture theatre at Conference Aston.

Please note that this is a hybrid event. Online participants will be sent the MS Teams link the morning of the event.

The symposium will include talks from philosophers and linguists working on the interface of language, justice, and thought.

Speakers and Abstracts:

Dr. Sam Wilkinson (University of Exeter), Diagnosis as Verdict: Consequences and Cross-currents.

This paper argues that medical diagnosis is best understood as a verdictive speech act, drawing on J. L. Austin's taxonomy of illocutionary acts. On this view, diagnostic utterances do not simply describe a person's condition; they perform an institutional act of judgment that reshapes rights, responsibilities, and social expectations. Like other institutional speech acts, their success depends not only on accuracy but also on authority, procedure, and uptake.This perspective places diagnosis alongside other forms of institutional language familiar from legal contexts while offering a new way of understanding several debates in the philosophy of medicine. It clarifies the relationship between psychiatric and somatic diagnosis as well as between medical practice and scientific research. It also explains how diagnoses shape decision-making across institutions such as healthcare, education, and criminal justice, and sheds new light on controversies including overdiagnosis and self-diagnosis.

Dr. Zoe Adams (Aston University). Beyond namelessness: A linguistic re-examination of anonymity

In an era of increasing connectivity, maintaining anonymity in sensitive textual data has become a significant challenge. Even after removing direct identifiers of Personally Identifying Information (PII), individuals remain vulnerable to reidentification. Many approaches draw on techniques developed in computer science, such as Named Entity Recognition, but even the development of Large Language Models cannot entirely eliminate this risk. This problem is amplified in complex unstructured texts which demonstrate anonymity is more than a categorisation problem. This talk argues that returning to the fundamental question of, ‘what is anonymity?’ is an essential step in addressing the limitations of current approaches. Drawing on Pfitzmann & Hansens’ (2005) concept of the ‘anonymity set’ and a cognitive grammar framework, I will show how linguistic features combine to reveal vulnerabilities in a text. In doing so, I hope to highlight the value of an interdisciplinary perspective in advancing anonymisation techniques.

Dr. Ian Kidd (University of Nottingham), Epistemic Injustice and Forensic Linguistics

Epistemic injustice studies how people can be unfairly wronged in their capacity as knowers, speakers, and interpreters. It examines epistemic practices such as conversation, testimony, discussion, and argumentation, especially in institutional settings including law, healthcare, and education. This talk offers a brief introduction to the field before exploring its possible connections to forensic linguistics. Epistemic injustice studies has much to learn from forensic linguistics' close analysis of language in legal contexts, while its ethical concepts may offer a useful vocabulary for thinking about credibility, interpretation, understanding, and communicative justice.

Description supplied by the event organiser.