Book.
Erving Goffman. Routledge Great Philosopher Series. Under contract.
Click here for the latest circulating chunk.
Publications.
The Grice is Right: Grice’s Non-Cooperation Problem and the Structure of Conversation. Philosophical Perspectives. Forthcoming.
H.P. Grice seemed to rest his theory of conversational implicature on the assumption that speakers aim to cooperatively exchange information with each other. In the real world, speakers often don’t. Does one of the most influential theories in twentieth-century philosophy of language rest on a mistake? Yes—but not in the way that philosophers have thought. I argue that Grice should have rested his theory on a different assumption: that speakers aim to appear to cooperatively exchange information with each other. This proposal dissolves Grice’s Non-Cooperation Problem but preserves Grice’s central insights about the nature of conversational implicatures. More generally, it enables the Gricean to illuminate the structure of many non-cooperative or otherwise “non-ideal” conversations.
Non-Epistemic Deniability. MIND. Forthcoming.
This paper develops an analysis of non-epistemic deniability. On my analysis, a speaker has non-epistemic deniability for G-ing when non-acknowledgment social norms make it impermissible for others to retaliate against the speaker for G-ing. I identify two kinds of non-acknowledgment norms that generate non-epistemic deniability: two-tracking norms, which function to manage conflict within a group, and open secrecy norms, which function to prevent the group from acting on shared knowledge. Narrowly, this paper builds on Alexander Dinges and Julia Zakkou’s recent landmark analysis of deniability. Dinges and Zakkou argue that non-epistemic deniability does not exist. I disagree. But I also use their account of epistemic deniability in order to motivate my own analysis of non-epistemic deniability. Broadly, my paper provides a case study in how speakers strategically leverage non-acknowledgment norms in order to protect their own interests at the expense of others’.
The Structure of Open Secrets. Philosophical Review. Forthcoming.
In conversation, we often do not acknowledge what we jointly know to be true. My aim in this paper is to identify a distinctive kind of non-acknowledgment norm, open secrecy, and analyze how such norms constrain our speech. I argue that open secrecy norms are structurally different from other everyday non-acknowledgment norms. Open secrecy norms iterate: when p is an open secret, then there’s a norm not to acknowledge that p, and this norm is itself an open secret. The non-acknowledgment at issue in open secrecy norms, I argue, motivates a more complex understanding of discourse. When interlocutors are conforming to open secrecy, they rely on at least two disjoint common grounds, one of which has a privileged status. To understand why and how it is privileged, I develop Erving Goffman’s notion of defining a social interaction. Finally, I show how strategic speakers can exploit the structure of open secrecy in order to both communicate about the open secret and shield themselves from retaliation for what they communicate.
Bad Question! Philosophy & Public Affairs 51.4 (2023): 413-449.
If you ask me a nosy question, have you violated my privacy? Put another way: does your intrusive question genuinely intrude? This paper offers a new argument for answering yes. Face-to-face conversation renders us uniquely vulnerable to each other. When you ask me a question, you sometimes undermine my effective control over whether to reveal the answer to you. Without coercing me, or violating my property rights, or literally reading my mind, you can force information from me against my will. Surprisingly, much of the time you may permissibly force this information from me. But when you ask me a question about my private affairs, and you thereby force private information from me, you violate my privacy rights. My discussion reveals the moral complexity of information flow in face-to-face conversations and raises new questions about the value and function of some of our politeness practices.
What’s the Good of Language? On the Moral Distinction between Lying and Misleading. Ethics 130.1. October 2019.
This paper presents a novel argument for the moral difference between lying, construed in terms of assertion, and misleading, construed in terms of Gricean conversational implicature. I derive the distinctive wrong of lying in two steps. First, following David Lewis (1983, 2002), I hold that conventions of truthfulness and trust fix the meanings of our language. These conventions generate fair play obligations. Thus, to fail to conform to the conventions of truthfulness and trust is unfair. Second, I argue that the liar, but not the misleader, fails to conform to the convention of truthfulness. So the liar, but not the misleader, does something unfair. Among other things, this account explains why bald-faced lies are wrong, why we can lie non-linguistically, and why linguistic innovation is morally significant.
Recent working papers.
Conversing in the Dark: Off-Off Record Speech Acts and the Cooperative Creation of Uncertainty (email me)
I argue that cooperative interlocutors do and should work together to save each other’s face. Because of this, interlocutors sometimes do and should work together to fail to coordinate on what’s happening in the conversation. This shows that some popular assumptions about the relationship between meaning and context must be either false or much less attractive than philosophers previously thought. My argument proceeds via a case study of what I call off-off record speech acts. When a speaker intends to issue an off-off record speech act, she intends that (i) her addressee recognizes what she means, (ii) that she herself not know whether (i), and (iii) that her addressee know (ii). Going off-off record enables the addressee to “play dumb:” the addressee can ignore the speaker’s speech act without revealing that she is intentionally doing so. My analysis of off-off record speech acts reveals the collaborative way in which cooperative speakers cultivate and maintain uncertainty about what’s happening in the conversation.
What We Won’t Say (promised to an edited issue)
This paper proposes a novel solution to a puzzle about speech acts. In various scenarios, both real and imagined, a perpetrator will coercively demand that her victim recite a sentence. At great personal cost, the victim will refuse. Normally, if the victim were to say these words, she would thereby renounce her faith or misrepresent her dearest commitments. But conditions aren’t normal: the perpetrator is coercing the victim. On most philosophical accounts, the victim, if she were to speak, would not be meaningfully renouncing or lying about anything. So why does the victim refuse? Here I argue that the speaker, in refusing, is engaged in a distinctively social form of communication. Drawing on the work of the sociologist Erving Goffman, I hypothesize that the victim does not want is self-present in a certain way. In refusing to dramatize a certain version of herself, she expresses an extreme commitment to one of her social identities. By explaining the social mechanisms that undergird this form of communication, I show that the antagonist creates an interpretative dilemma for the victim. The victim is confronted with a potentially unanswerable question: what do her actions under duress reveal about her own relationship to her social performances?
Conversational Display: Some Notes Towards a Dramatic Theory of Communication
This paper analyzes the role of display in ordinary conversation. When we display some aspect of our practical agency, we show someone what we can or will do by doing it. In conversation, we sometimes intentionally design our speech acts in order to display our skills, abilities, or dispositions. But more often, we display aspects of our agency just through trying to conform to everyday speech practices. I argue that conversational display helps us to explain the proper function and social efficacy of many these practices. These include small talk rituals, greetings, and the “double speak” or track-tracking conversations in which adversaries engage. My analysis complicates the old truism that the aim of conversation is to exchange information.
Other current projects.
The Dirty Work of Gossiping. In which I argue that whisper networks benefit the organization in which they are embedded by redistributing risk of sexual violence away from high status, high power women and onto low status, low power women.
Grounding the Non-Cooperation Principle. with Dan Harris. In which we tell you what we think is going on in “Logic and Conversation.”
Older working papers.
Against Cheap Common Ground (draft down; 1.Oct.21)
The common ground is a body of information. But which body of information is it? I object to Stalnaker current position: that the common ground is just the contents of our joint acceptances. On this definition, p can become common ground even when no party to the conversation believes that p is common ground. Say that such common grounds are cheap. Cheap common grounds are unintuitive. They also cannot play the theoretical role that the common ground ought to play. The common ground, I argue, ought to clarify the relationship between meaning and rationality. If that’s right, we must reject Stalnaker’s current definition.
Projects on the back burner.
Etiquette and the Silencing of the Moral Self. Given our background beliefs about social reality, we often resolve a conflict between a social norm and a moral norm by suppressing our awareness of the moral norm. This is not a good thing. Over time, it can systematically alienate us from our own sense of moral dignity.
Face Threat and Sexual Negotiation (with Alisabeth Ayars). In which we argue that we interpret and evaluate heterosexual sexual negotiations in ways that we do not interpret and evaluate other forms of interpersonal negotiation. This is both an epistemic mistake and a form of hermeneutical injustice. The paper makes liberal use of Brown and Levinson’s theory of sociolinguistic politeness. In progress right now.