Abstract
This article proposes that paradigmatic conversations involve the development of a collective cognitive profile of the parties. This occurs through the negotiation of a series of collective beliefs. Collective beliefs are constituted by commitments that are joint in a sense that is explained. The parties to any joint commitment have associated rights and obligations. This helps to entrench a given collective belief once established. Even when interlocutors do not manage to negotiate a collective belief whose content has explicitly been specified, they are likely to establish one or more associated implicit collective beliefs. This supports the idea of a conversation as a collective activity whose stages are marked by the development of a relatively stable collective cognitive profile of the parties. This idea is briefly related to some of the existing literature on conversation, including classic articles by Stalnaker and Lewis on presupposition and conversational score.
This article is dedicated to the memory of David Lewis, who suggested the connection between the idea of collective belief elaborated in Section I and his own and Robert Stalnaker’s work on conversation. See section III in the text below. The authors thank the following people for reading and commenting on the penultimate draft at short notice: Alessandro Capone, Antonella Carassa, Marco Colombetti, Daniel Pilchman, Frederick Schmitt, Martin Schwab, Richmond Thomason and Philip Walsh. Responsibility for the ideas expressed here is ours alone.
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- 1.
See Gilbert (1989: esp. 294–298).
- 2.
- 3.
Does such a conversational pair constitute a group as opposed to a mere plurality of persons? Perhaps not prior to the conversation; once the conversation has started, it would seem that the answer is affirmative. See Simmel (1971: 24). For lengthy exploration of the relatively substantial idea of a group that is in play here see Gilbert (1989: ch. 4; 2006: ch. 8). Groups of this kind differ among themselves, of course, in important ways. One intuitive starting point that will be assumed in what follows is Rousseau’s idea that a group in the sense in question is an association of some kind as opposed to a mere aggregate of persons.
- 4.
Quinton (1975-6: 17, see also p. 9).
- 5.
- 6.
- 7.
Our argument so far leave it open whether a summative account of collective belief other than those considered here may offer conditions sufficient for collective belief. That said, an account that offers both necessary and sufficient conditions is preferable. This, as we argue in the text below, will have to be a non-summative account. See Gilbert (1989: ch. 5) for discussion of a summative account that is more complex than those considered here. Gilbert argues that that account also fails to offer conditions sufficient for collective belief.
- 8.
For further discussion on this point see Gilbert (1987).
- 9.
Cf. Hart (1961).
- 10.
Such “authority-presupposing” terms often have broader senses, which can lead to confusion. See Gilbert (2006: ch. 1).
- 11.
Cf. Hart (1961). Note that the obligations here are obligations to someone to do a certain thing. Such obligations are generally referred to as “directed” obligations. It is this type of obligation that correlates with rights of the type at issue here, referred to as “claim-rights” in rights theory.
- 12.
On basic versus non-basic cases see e.g. Gilbert (2006: ch. 7).
- 13.
- 14.
See Gilbert (2013).
- 15.
Note that the idea is not that they are to emulate a human collectivity with the belief in question. To suppose that it is is to see the joint commitment account of collective belief as circular. “Single person” is an alternative that would presumably avoid any such thought. See also the alternative offered in the text.
- 16.
As understood here, to have reason to do something is not necessarily to have a reason to do it, where having a reason implies that some good will come of one’s doing it. See Gilbert (2006: ch 2).
- 17.
For further discussion see e.g. Gilbert (2006: ch. 2).
- 18.
See e.g. Gilbert (2006: ch. 7) for further discussion.
- 19.
Since Gilbert proposed this account of collective belief, a literature has grown up concerning whether collective belief in her sense is belief or rather some other cognitive state. There is no need to go into this discussion for present purposes. For references to this literature and for discussion of the issue, see Gilbert (2002).
- 20.
Gilbert (1989: 296) briefly relates questions and orders to the thesis.
- 21.
Drawing on Gilbert’s account of collective belief and her notion of joint commitment, Carassa and Colombetti (2009a) propose that, centrally, conversations involve a negotiation of joint meaning. Joint meaning as they understand this is a collective belief to the effect that, roughly, the speaker intended to perform a particular speech act. For instance, he was simply making a statement, or he was both doing this and issuing an invitation. We take their discussion to be complementary to that in Gilbert (1989) and the present paper. See Carassa and Colombetti (2009a), (2009b) and references therein for related discussions in which the authors characterize the conversational process in terms of Gilbert’s idea of joint commitment. Another important discussion that suggests an “emerging” collective belief of a particular type (though it is not couched in these terms) is Brennan and Clark (1996) on what the authors refer to as “conceptual pacts”. Here the envisaged pact or agreement [which we would construe as a matter of joint commitment as in Gilbert (2006: ch. 10)] relates to the way in which each party is to conceptualize something. In fact one might argue that insofar as conversationalists come to make various conceptual pacts these relate to how we are collectively to understand certain terms, and so on, as in “What’s a vixen?” “It’s a female fox” “Ah”. The parties now collectively believe that a vixen is a female fox (whatever they personally believe). Fixing their collective belief about what a vixen is will be the primary need of the conversational process---given that vixens are the topic of conversation. We regret that there is no space in the present article for further consideration of these and related topics and publications, though see the note on Clark (1996) in the text and notes below.
- 22.
Here and in other statements of the thesis we refer to collective beliefs in the class roughly indicated earlier in this section.
- 23.
See Gilbert (1989: 294–298) and the rest of Chap. 5 of that work for further pertinent discussion.
- 24.
In our discussion in this paper we shall not address the ways in which established collective beliefs can be amended. Suffice it to say that such amendment requires the concurrence of the parties.
- 25.
See section I above.
- 26.
Cf. Gilbert (1989: 297).
- 27.
It seems that the target of a SPA proposition could be another a SPA proposition. Thus consider such cases as: “I think I believe him”, or “I’m not sure I really do think that”.
- 28.
Cf. Nowell-Smith (1954): “a given word can not only do two or more jobs at once but also is often in the absence of counter-evidence or express withdrawal presumed to be doing two or more jobs at once” (emphasis added). He refers to this as the Janus principle (p. 100).
- 29.
Note that the objective proposition in question here is not the proposition that the department is moving but the proposition that its moving is something bad---apt to be hated.
- 30.
See Gilbert (1989: ch. 5).
- 31.
An alternative way of interpreting this case is offered in Gilbert (1989: 296). This too was developed in accordance with the NCB thesis and accords with it. We shall not attempt to adjudicate between these two options here.
- 32.
With respect to the discussion that follows in this section, the literature on conversation contains familiar, related ideas that do not bring collective beliefs into the picture. Relevant classic texts include Stalnaker (1973, 1974, and elsewhere) and Lewis (1979). In this section we do not try to align what we say with this literature. We briefly compare and contrast the perspective of Lewis and Stalnaker with that of the NCB thesis in the third section of this article. To briefly anticipate here: the fact that the NCB fits as well with their ideas as it does lends support to the NCB, which we take to be a plausible way of elaborating their perspective.
- 33.
Something similar seems to occur when people respond to a collective belief proposal with such a retort as “Rubbish!” Here it is clear that the explicitly proposed collective belief is rejected. Though it is not clear why it is rejected, it is hard to say that any of the implied propositions are accepted.
- 34.
In referring to this as a “principle” we mean only that it (or something like it) is a true generalization about conversational collective belief formation. It is not a normative principle, i.e. it is not a principle requiring or recommending certain conduct. Note added in response to a comment by Antonella Carassa and Marco Colombetti, personal communication 2011.
- 35.
This implies that the individual conversationalists may not be consciously aware of the content of some of the collective beliefs of the group, in particular the implicit collective beliefs.
- 36.
Thanks to Frederick Schmitt for emphasizing this point, personal communication October 24 2011.
- 37.
Lewis (1979).
- 38.
In the late 1980s: personal communication with Margaret Gilbert, after reading Gilbert (1987) around the time of its publication. Lewis acknowledges his debt to Stalnaker’s work on presupposition in footnote 1 of his paper.
- 39.
Lewis (1979 esp. p. 347).
- 40.
Stalnaker (1973: 448) refers to presupposition as a propositional attitude, which he does not equate with belief.
- 41.
Stalnaker (1973).
- 42.
- 43.
We would interpret “collectively accepted” here in terms of a joint commitment to accept as a body.
- 44.
Here we replaced “all of them willingly” with “they collectively”. The rest of the material in square brackets in the quotation is inserted into the text without replacing anything.
- 45.
Taylor (1985).
- 46.
On this point see also Gilbert (1989: 295).
- 47.
See Clark (1996). In emphasizing that conversation is a “joint activity” is Clark not showing himself to take a non-individualistic approach to conversation? Given his carefully expounded account of what he takes joint action and joint activity to be, and our construal of “individualism” (see the text immediately below), it seems not. The work of Carassa and Colombetti, cited earlier, is an exception here.
- 48.
- 49.
- 50.
Gilbert [Martin] (1971: 384, also 477).
- 51.
- 52.
In this paper we often refer to what we (Gilbert and Priest) believe, and so on. These references should be understood in accordance with the theory of collective belief adumbrated here, and therefore not logically to entail anything about what either Gilbert or Priest personally believes. Similarly, when we maintain, in the first footnote, that responsibility for the points made here is ours alone, neither one of us means to ascribe responsibility for any or all of the points made to her personally. Collective responsibility, however, is a topic for another occasion.
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Gilbert, M., Priest, M. (2013). Conversation and Collective Belief. In: Capone, A., Lo Piparo, F., Carapezza, M. (eds) Perspectives on Pragmatics and Philosophy. Perspectives in Pragmatics, Philosophy & Psychology, vol 1. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-01011-3_1
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