Publications.
The Structure of Open Secrets. Philosophical Review. Forthcoming. (draft Aug.24)
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. Forthcoming. (draft 12.June.23)
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.
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Non-Epistemic Deniability (draft August 2024, conditionally accepted at Mind)
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’.
Off-Off Record Speech Acts (email me)
Philosophers tend to assume that if I am a cooperative speaker, I ought to intend that you know that I know that you know that I know…what I mean. Here I argue that sometimes, if I am cooperative, I should intend that our minds not meet in this way. I motivate and introduce what I call off-off-record (OOR) speech acts. When I intend to issue an off-off-record speech act, I intend for you to recognize my act; I intend not to know whether this intention succeeds; and I intend for you to know that I don’t know this. I argue that OOR communication is a staple strategy of what Erving Goffman called facework. Through working together to create and sustain their ignorance about what’s really happening in the conversation, interlocutors can save face. This helps them preserve their relationship, avoid open conflict, and minimize the risk of reputational damage. In addition to falsifying popular principles about the relationship between meaning and context, my analysis sheds new light on the functional role of indirect speech and non-acknowledgment in conversation. More broadly, my analysis makes the case that the sociolinguistic study of facework deserves a more central place within the philosophy of language.
The Grice is Right: Or, On Grice’s Non-Cooperation Problem (email me)
Does the Gricean theory of conversational implicature fail because it rests on the assumption that speakers are cooperating with each other? Some philosophers think so. Here I argue, on novel grounds, that it does not. My central claim is that in the problem cases, one or both interlocutors are pretending to cooperate towards the effective exchange of information. Sometimes, I argue, they are even cooperatively pretending to cooperate towards the effective exchange of information. I call this strategy achieving cooperation through ostensible cooperation and suggest that it’s a widespread social strategy. This not only defangs a long-standing class of objections against Grice. It also demonstrates how we can use broadly Gricean resources in order to clarify the structure of many so-called non-cooperative or non-ideal conversations.
Controlling the Subject: Coerced Speech and the Construction of Social Face
Suppose I have you at gunpoint. I demand that you say certain words: that you confess to bogus charges, renounce your dearly held commitments, apologize for actions you stand behind, and so on. You refuse, at great personal cost to yourself. Stories with this structure pervade our cultural landscape and grip our moral imagination. Some of us even demand such sacrifices from ourselves. But under standard philosophical assumptions about speech and coercion, these sacrifices rest on a confusion. Here I propose that the confusion is not the victim’s but the philosopher’s. I argue that the perpetrator and victim are fighting for control over the victim’s self-presentation. The perpetrator aims to control and the victim aims to protect her face, or social self. Drawing on the work of mid-century sociologist Erving Goffman, I develop notions of self-presentation and face that not only explain our puzzle but provide new insight into the structure of social interaction and our concept of personal integrity.
Other current projects.
Implausible Deniability, and Other Ways of Showing Off. In which I argue that many implausible denials function as expressive demonstrations of the speaker’s rhetorical skill. Moreover, we often expressively demonstrate a skill or capacity in order to intimidate our interlocutor.
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.