What We Can Say to Each Other.

9798607313067

Ann Arbor : ProQuest Dissertations & Theses, 2019

1 online resource (166 p.)

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I identify and analyze some of the deep social and moral norms that govern our conversational behavior. In doing so, I hope to offer “proof of concept” of a new way of thinking about conversation, one that focuses foremost on conversation as an activity real people undertake in the real world, and not (just) as a dynamically changing information state that interacts with compositional meaning.In the first chapter, I discuss the moral difference between lying and misleading, tracing it to the different ways that assertion and implicature relate to the social practice of conventional meaning. In the second chapter, I argue that the characteristic goal of conversation is to appear to share the goal of exchanging information on a particular topic. I posit that a social (but not moral) norm called Acquiescence governs interlocutors; this norm prescribes that interlocutors take up this goal. In the third chapter, I explain the moral, social, and psychological significance of forcing others to “renounce” their beliefs. To do this, I posit that we sometimes interpretatively dominate others by failing to accord them proper acknowledgement of their communicative intentions. In an introduction preceding all three chapters, I make explicit the chapters’ interrelations and argue that I have begun the project of the philosophy of conversation.

Dissertations & Theses @ Yale University.

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English

July 15, 2020

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Yale University, 2019.

Yale University. Philosophy.