Conversational Context and Normativity

Ellefson, Gretchen

doi:https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-b9ry-an71

Work

Conversational Context and Normativity

Public

Download PDF

Download All Files (.zip)

If I mistakenly hear you ask for directions to the “shore” when instead you asked for directions to the “store,” the miscommunication is probably an innocent mistake. If, on the other hand, a man misunderstands a woman’s refusal of his sexual advances as consent, the mistake seems like it might be deeper. In my dissertation, I look at cases of miscommunication to develop a theory of conversational context and the norms that constraint contexts. I argue that miscommunication can only be adequately understood in terms of an agent-centered notion of conversational context—and not in terms of the shared attitudes of the participants. I then propose an account of the normativity of context to explain why some agent-centered contexts are permissible and some are not. Finally, I engage with Grice’s Cooperative Principle, arguing that, consistent with my view of agent-relativized contexts, such a view is misguided. Instead, I argue that we should adopt what I call the Coordinative Principle. My central contention is that we can better explain many cases of miscommunication by appealing to an individualized, agent-relative understanding of linguistic context according to which each participant in a conversation has their own set of attitudes that they use to produce and interpret utterances. According to widely accepted paradigms, conversational context is shared between participants; contexts may include shared assumptions, beliefs, records of past moves, etc. However, these views overlook the fact that many beliefs and attitudes that are not—and sometimes cannot be—shared can still influence the conversational context. Consider implicit bias: plausibly, implicit biases can influence one’s communicative behavior as an element of the context. A man who implicitly conceives of women as coy but sexually impressionable may be more likely to interpret an attempted refusal of his sexual advances as coy flirtation rather than a sincere refusal. The fact that the man’s beliefs are not shared by the woman does not make it the case that they do not play the functional role the context plays in the man’s interpretation of the woman’s conversational contributions. Moreover, as I show, the man need not even think that the woman accepts the content of his beliefs in order to treat them as included in the context. Nevertheless, the man does treat the content of these beliefs as elements of the context of the exchange, allowing him to (mis)interpret the woman’s utterance as consent. I then develop an account of communicative normativity to distinguish the innocent cases from the criticizable. I focus in particular on the normativity involved in updating contexts with new content to show that there are requirements of social and rational agency to update one’s context in particular ways given new events within the conversation. These social requirements can often be related to moral requirements, which explains why we understand the case of the man who failed to recognize a woman’s non-consent has done something that is (at least potentially) morally wrong. I end my dissertation by considering whether my account is consistent with a widely accepted principle adopted by many theorists–Grice’s Cooperative Principle. Many of the cases I consider throughout the dissertation appear to be, in some sense, uncooperative. Yet the Cooperative Principle appears to presuppose that conversations are cooperative (in some sense) and, moreover, that this involves an at least partial sharing of conversational context. Since I argue that contexts need not be shared, there is a clear tension between my view and the Cooperative Principle. I argue that we can reframe the Cooperative Principle as a Coordinative Principle without losing explanatory force, while avoiding the inconsistency between my view of context and the Principle.

Creator