Book.
Erving Goffman. Routledge Great Philosopher Series. Under contract.
Teaser trailer: click here for Chapters 1, 2, and parts of 3.
Publications.
The Ritual Infrastructure of Conversation Conference proceedings of “Infrastructure of Non-Knowledge” (title TBD). Forthcoming.
I sketch a theory of small talk’s structure and function. Small talk enables us to “get to know each other” not through what we say to each other but through the way we conform to social practices in saying it. Through small talk, we indirectly generate evidence about the nature of our underlying practical agency. I show why my analysis predicts small talk’s most striking structural features. I then distinguish between two types of questions: questions about what interlocutors aim to do within a conversational genre and questions about what a conversational genre aims to do. Analytic philosophers of language have ignored the second type of questions. This paper demonstrates their importance.
The Grice is Right: Grice’s Non-Cooperation Problem and the Structure of Conversation. Philosophical Perspectives 38.1 (2025): 26-40.
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 134.2 (2025): 109-148.
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.
The Attention Gift Economy (email me; draft available Dec 2025)
I argue that both individual and collective attention sometimes function as ritual goods. Ritual goods have two features. First, they matter to us primarily insofar as receiving the good expresses something about our social status or relationships. Second, we exchange ritual goods within an informal gift economy, structured not by market dynamics but by delayed, reciprocal, and personal generosity. I sketch a preliminary theory of both attention and collective attention as ritual goods. I then outline a few implications for the theory of “social meaning” and the “ethics of attention.”
Are Talk Exchanges Cooperative? (currently promised to The Cambridge Companion to Paul Grice)
Conversations are cooperative affairs. So H.P. Grice claimed in “Logic and Conversation” (1989 [1967]). Thanks to that paper’s explosive influence, Grice’s thesis now has the status of orthodoxy in analytic philosophy and formal pragmatics. But isn’t the thesis obviously false? In conversations, we regularly lie, manipulate, show off, insult, demean, feign ignorance, and commit all other manner of improprieties. Did Grice really not understand this basic social fact?
This chapter aims to make sense of Grice’s cooperation thesis. To do this, it explores three related sub-questions. First, what did Grice mean (or what should he have meant) when he claimed that conversations are cooperative? In other words, what is Grice’s cooperation thesis? Second, if Grice’s cooperation thesis fails, what other Gricean theses fail too? Third, under what assumptions is Grice’s cooperation thesis plausible—or at least not obviously false?
Conversing in the Dark: Off-Off Record Speech Acts and the Cooperative Creation of Uncertainty (email me)
If we are cooperative, and we are conversing, should we aim to coordinate on what we each mean? Philosophers assume so. Here I argue against this assumption. Through an analysis of what I call off-off record speech acts, I show that cooperative speakers sometimes intentionally create prosocial uncertainty about what they each mean. This uncertainty helps each party save her interlocutor’s face and her own. My analysis falsifies several widely accepted assumptions about the relationship between speech acts and discourse.
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?
Two-Tracked Conversations (email me; draft available Dec 2025)
We sometimes two-track our conversations. That is, we seem to have two conversations with each other simultaneously: an official, overt, and out-in-the-open one and an unofficial, covert, and shadowy one. What’s the point of this? Here I argue that successful two-tracking itself is a form of communication. When we two-track with each other, we show each other that we can and will two-track with each other. This, in turns, enables us to directly display our capacities and preference structure to each other. If I am right, then philosophers have been working with an overly simplistic notion of conversational organization. Conversations are not just organized to facilitate our shared discursive goals. Sometimes, the way we organize our conversations is itself the point.
Other current projects.
The Dirty Work of Gossiping. In which I argue that whisper networks embedded within firms function to redistribute risk away from high status, high power individual and onto low status, low power individual. The stigmatization of gossip stabilizes this redistribution pattern. This means that firms benefit both from the flow of gossip within a gossip network and from stigmatizating the individuals who help them achieve this benefit. This makes gossiping “dirty work” in a technical sense.
The Cult of Authenticity as a Barrier to Free Expression. In which I argue that high rates of non-sincere, ritualistic speech systematically depress of social risk of voicing unpopular political opinions. Environments that highly value authentic self-expression reduce the high rates of non-sincere ritualistic speech. Thus, unintuitively, they actually dispromote authentic self-expression.
Grounding the Non-Cooperation Principle. with Dan Harris. In which we argue that Grice’s Cooperative Principle straightforwardly derives from norms of prudential rationality.
Projects on the back burner..
Face Threat and Sexual Negotiation (with Alisabeth Ayars). In which we argue that we interpret and evaluate heterosexual sexual negotiations in ways in which we do not interpret and evaluate other forms of interpersonal, non-market negotiations. In particular, we expect men to practice fewer forms of cooperative face-saving techniques, and we expect women to practice more forms of cooperative face-saving techniques. The contemporary push towards “explicitization” in sexual negotiations rests on confusion about face as a social good.