Changing Minds

Abstract In the past years, as analytic philosophy of language begins to give more attention to harmful political and ideological speech, the topic of counterspeech has become an attractive topic to researchers. Much of this work is limited to the countering of individual speech acts in order to reduce the harm they cause, but another method is to change the minds of speakers so that the harmful speech isn’t produced at all. This paper proposes a method for doing so: borrowing techniques from narrative and affect generation to produce more general methods of changing minds, considers some of its consequences, and compares it with other related views.