Conversational Pressure: Normativity in Speech Exchanges

In the course of conversation, we exert implicit pressures on both ourselves and others. These forms of conversational pressure are many and far from uniform, so much so that it is unclear whether they constitute a single cohesive class. In this book Sanford C. Goldberg explores the source, nature, and scope of the normative expectations we have of one another as we engage in conversation that are generated by the performance of speech acts themselves. In doing so he examines two fundamental types of expectation – epistemic and interpersonal. It is through normative expectations of these types that we aim to hold one another to standards of proper conversational conduct. This line of argument is pursued in connection with such topics as the normative significance of acts of address, the epistemic costs of politeness, the bearing of epistemic injustice on the epistemology of testimony, the normative pressure friendship exerts on belief, the nature of epistemic trust, the significance of conversational silence, and the various evils of silencing. By approaching these matters in terms of the normative expectations to which conversational participants are entitled, Goldberg aims to offer a unified account of the various pressures that are exerted in the course of a speech exchange.