The Conversational Self - Daniela Dover University of California, Los Angeles, USA
←
→
Page content transcription
If your browser does not render page correctly, please read the page content below
Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/mind/article/131/521/193/6482035 by University of California, Los Angeles user on 24 January 2022
The Conversational Self
Daniela Dover
University of California, Los Angeles, USA
dover@humnet.ucla.edu
This paper explores a distinctive form of social interaction—interpersonal in-
quiry—in which two or more people attempt to understand one another by engag-
ing in conversation. Like many modes of inquiry into human beings, interpersonal
inquiry partly shapes its own objects. How we conduct it thus affects who we
become. I present an ethical ideal of conversation to which, I argue, at least
some of our interpersonal inquiry ought to aspire. I then consider how this ideal
might influence philosophical conceptions of the self.
The possibilities that exist between two people, or among a group of people,
are a kind of alchemy. They are the most interesting thing in life.
—Adrienne Rich, Lies, Secrets, and Silence
Suppose I am eager to understand you. The desire is as familiar as it is
inchoate: I don’t just want to understand this or that remark or action
of yours; I want to understand you, more globally. How might I
proceed?
We can learn a fair amount about other people simply by observing
them. I might stand at a party taking notes like a field biologist:
‘Human, at time t, approaches and smiles, extending their right
hand’. But at this point, it would be rather rude to keep playing the
silent observer. Instead, I should extend my own right hand and
introduce myself: our attempts to understand one another proceed
largely by interacting with one another. This interaction might involve
gesture, touch, eye contact: consider how much you can glean by
dancing with someone, for instance. But if the person you are inter-
acting with is a language user, chances are that conversation is among
the best ways to come to understand them better.
I will use ‘interpersonal inquiry’ as a stipulative label for the activity
in which you and I are engaged as we get acquainted at the party:
conversation in which we try to understand one another. What inter-
ests me about this practice is the distinctive value of a mode of human
interaction that is animated by mutual curiosity. So while we can
inquire into people for all sorts of reasons—perhaps we want to
Mind, Vol. 131 . 521 . January 2022 ß Dover 2021
doi:10.1093/mind/fzab069 Advance Access publication 24 December 2021194 Daniela Dover
understand one another’s motivations so as to draw up a mutually
Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/mind/article/131/521/193/6482035 by University of California, Los Angeles user on 24 January 2022
acceptable contract—as I will be using the term, it is in virtue of
engaging our curiosity about one another that a conversation will
count as a case of interpersonal inquiry.
Interpersonal inquiry is an activity that engages our mutual curi-
osity, but its aim is not to satisfy that curiosity, thereby bringing the
inquiry to an end. The role of curiosity in interpersonal inquiry is
instead rather like the role of an artist’s desire to create. The desire is
not to create once and for all and have done with it, but to engage in
indefinitely extended creative activities and processes, animated by
that very desire, where the desire as well as the activities and processes
it prompts are valued in their own right.1 Similarly, interpersonal
inquiry as I understand it is an autotelic activity: one pursued and
valued for its own sake.2
Like other social practices, interpersonal inquiry raises ethical ques-
tions. While many of the questions ethicists ask about conversation
focus on the moral contours of individual speech acts (lying, promis-
ing, the use of slurs), the questions that will concern me here are
‘ethical’ in the broad sense popularized by Bernard Williams (1985):
they have to do with our most general aspirations for conversation as
a mode of human interaction.3 Beyond the mere exchange of
1
Interpersonal inquiry is akin to aesthetic experience in that it is ‘self-sustaining’: it
‘motivates us to maintain our cognitive relation (whether perceptual or intellectual or
both)’ to its object (Dokic 2016, p. 74). In Kant’s words, aesthetic experience tends toward
‘preserving the state of contemplation itself and keeping the cognitive powers engaged without
any further aim’ (Kant [1790] 2000, §12, cited at Dokic 2016, p. 74). Similarly, the curiosity
that inspires interpersonal inquiry motivates inquirers to sustain their inquisitive activity itself,
not to consummate it and then move on. The ‘powers’ it engages include broadly epistemic
capacities—otherwise it would not aptly be called a form of ‘inquiry’—but they also include
ethical and aesthetic capacities, such as the ability to recognize, appreciate, respect, love,
admire, delight in, and wonder at another human being.
2
I discuss the autotelic character of interpersonal inquiry in more depth in Dover (n.d.);
cf. Talbot Brewer’s discussion of ‘dialectical activities’ pursued ‘in the name of some intrinsic
goodness or value that we see in those activities rather than in the name of conceptually
independent goods that the activities might produce or promote’ (Brewer 2009, p. 37). I am
indebted to Anthony Laden and Daniel Muñoz for valuable correspondence on this point, and
for calling my attention to Brewer’s work.
3
In Williams’s parlance, ‘ethics’ addresses broad questions about what we might want out
of life, who we might wish to become, and how we might hope to relate to one another.
Williams (1985, p. 7) regards ‘morality’ as a ‘subsystem’ of ethics particularly concerned with
obligation. My concerns here are ‘ethical’ but not ‘moral’ in Williams’s terms, since I do not
claim that we are morally obligated to have conversations of the sort described below. Instead,
I attempt to illustrate why they are worth wanting to have. For further discussion of the non-
deontic shape of the project undertaken here, see §4 below.
Mind, Vol. 131 . 521 . January 2022 ß Dover 2021The Conversational Self 195
information, what are we doing in conversation? What role can it play
Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/mind/article/131/521/193/6482035 by University of California, Los Angeles user on 24 January 2022
in our lives and in our relationships with one another?4 What does it
look like when it goes well, and how can it go awry?
In what follows I describe a conversational ethos—a way of
approaching the activity of conversation—to which we might aspire.
I go on to explore how adopting this ethos in the context of inter-
personal inquiry might influence our thinking about the self. I should
emphasize at the outset that I will not aim to establish the truth or
falsity of any comprehensive theory of the self. As David Velleman
(2006b, pp. 1–2) notes, talk of ‘the self’, and self-reflexive thought and
talk more generally, is used in many different ways, for many different
ethical and psychological purposes. Like Velleman, I doubt that a
single, metaphysically weight-bearing entity can successfully serve at
once as the subject of agency, the bearer of rights and duties, the locus
of moral responsibility, the seat of consciousness, the object of love,
and the entity that survives alteration until death. If what we want is
to understand the full range of human experience, our philosophical
theorizing should allow for multiple, parallel, non-competing ways of
thinking about selfhood and subjectivity.5
That said, ethical considerations can lead us to find some possible
ways of thinking about the self more attractive than others. This is
4
Conversation is an activity that is ‘ethically’ important to many people, in Williams’s
sense: it strikes them as part of what makes life worth living; it enriches their experience and
their relationships with one another. But it is not ethically important in this way for everyone;
nor am I claiming that it ought to be—and I hope that the paper has something to offer more
taciturn readers as well. I do believe that the rich representational capacities of natural lan-
guages enable distinctive forms of human connection not available by other means. But the
same is true of, say, dance. As the anthropologist Robin Dunbar (1996) has argued, conver-
sation itself may have evolved from non-linguistic activities such as allogrooming whose evo-
lutionary purpose was to create and sustain social bonds. Likewise, at the level of an individual
lifespan, it is in the context of physically intimate early childhood interactions that more
verbose forms of intersubjectivity develop. The distinctive forms of intersubjectivity that con-
versation enables retain a deep connection to such bodily modes of human connection, as
anyone who has seen teenagers gossip while braiding each other’s hair can attest. Since I do
not have space here to pursue the many interesting analogies and disanalogies between con-
versation and other kinds of human interaction—dance, musical improvisation, cooking, or
building a bookshelf together (see Lorde 1984, pp. 56–7)—that share some of the same dy-
namics and realize some of the same values, I leave it to the reader to consider how much of
what I have to say about conversation applies, mutatis mutandis, to non-conversational activ-
ities. I am indebted to Genae Matthews for pressing me to clarify this point, and to Ally
Peabody Smith’s forthcoming dissertation on non-linguistic communication between pro-
foundly intellectually disabled people and their caregivers for calling my attention to
Dunbar’s work.
5
I am grateful to Shamik Dasgupta and Kieran Setiya for discussion of this point.
Mind, Vol. 131 . 521 . January 2022 ß Dover 2021196 Daniela Dover
because, as we will see, different views of the self implicitly valorize
Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/mind/article/131/521/193/6482035 by University of California, Los Angeles user on 24 January 2022
different ways of living. I am guided in what follows by a conviction
that our theories of ethically important concepts such as those of self-
hood and conversation should grow out of reflection on the phenom-
enological contours of our experience of human relationships and on
our ethical and political aspirations for those relationships. To move in
the opposite direction—drawing our ethical conceptions of human
relationships from metaphysical theories of the self or epistemological
theories of self-knowledge—would be to get both our explanatory and
our ethical priorities backwards. In other words, our representational
choices when it comes to the self—our choices among different possible
ways of thinking and talking—should be made on normative grounds.
Although I do not explicitly defend this ethics-first approach to think-
ing about the self, I aim to illustrate its advantages.
1. Introduction
A few clarifications are in order before we proceed. I am interested in
interpersonal inquiry because of its distinctive potential value as a way
of relating to one another and the distinctive ethical risks and tempta-
tions it involves. Although I approach interpersonal inquiry first of all
as a form of social interaction—an ethical practice rather than an epi-
stemic project—it is nonetheless a form of inquiry, in that it engages
our epistemic faculties, involves susceptibility to epistemic emotions
like surprise, puzzlement and frustration, and may require distinctively
epistemic virtues to be done well. Accordingly, it comes naturally to use
epistemic terminology in thinking and talking about it.
The conversations I will be discussing are ones in the course of
which, colloquially, we might be said to ‘get to know one another’.
But I avoid ‘knowledge’ and cognate terms wherever possible, prefer-
ring ‘understanding’, which I use as a bit of ordinary language,
unmoored from any particular set of epistemological commitments.6
As I argue elsewhere (Dover n.d.), the modes of inquiry and inter-
pretation that will concern us here place interpreters in relations that
6
Special thanks to Anthony Laden for pressing me to explain this choice. I cannot do so
adequately here, but see Dover (n.d.); see also Russell (2018) and Cavell (1976b, 1976c) for
illuminating discussion of the ethical risks of thinking about our relations to one another in
terms of interpersonal ‘knowledge’. I am indebted to Jonathan Gingerich for calling my at-
tention to Russell’s work and to Charles Petersen and Naomi Scheman for illuminating dis-
cussion of Cavell’s.
Mind, Vol. 131 . 521 . January 2022 ß Dover 2021The Conversational Self 197
are at once epistemic, ethical and aesthetic, and which are not redu-
Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/mind/article/131/521/193/6482035 by University of California, Los Angeles user on 24 January 2022
cible to knowledge. To be sure, interpersonal inquiry entails accumu-
lating bits of propositional knowledge (learning that someone grew up
in Amarillo) and, often, acquiring know-how as well (learning how to
cheer them up when they are homesick for Amarillo). It could also be
said to result in a kind of objectual knowledge by acquaintance
(Grzankowski and Tye 2019). But such instances of knowledge are
best regarded as raw materials and by-products of interpersonal in-
quiry, not as its aim. For now, we can safely use ‘understanding’ as a
placeholder term: let ‘understanding’ be whatever it is that I desire to
have—or perhaps to do, or to become—when I want to understand
you.7
I also use ‘understanding’ as a count noun, in expressions like ‘your
self-understanding’ and ‘my understanding of you’. Here I intend
‘understanding’ in the non-factive sense in which a scholar can refer
to ‘X’s understanding of Kant’ without thereby either endorsing or
contesting X’s interpretation. My ‘understanding of you’ at a given
time is the totality of my current ‘take’ on you: it would be equally apt
to call it my ‘reading’, ‘conception’, ‘interpretation’, or ‘working the-
ory’ of you. The two senses of ‘understanding’ are closely connected:
my ‘understanding’ of you at any given time is the accumulated result
of my efforts to understand you thus far.
Finally, a note about the types of relationship that are most con-
ducive to conversations of the sort I am about to describe. Although
not all good conversations are difficult—indeed, many of the best
conversations are strikingly effortless, phenomenologically speak-
ing—it is difficult to have good conversations when one is anxious
to avoid having difficult ones. The conversations I will be discussing
tend to go best when interlocutors can draw on a deep enough res-
ervoir of mutual trust, goodwill, and interest in one another to be
willing to enter into difficult (emotionally fraught, intellectually
7
This creates a stipulative circle: I defined ‘interpersonal inquiry’ as a form of conversation
motivated by a desire to understand one’s interlocutor, and now I am asking the reader to let
‘understanding’ serve as a placeholder for the desire that motivates interpersonal inquiry. The
circularity is intentional: the Archimedean point here, if there is one, is neither understanding
nor inquiry, but the desire that seeks the former and motivates the latter. This desire (namely,
a form of curiosity that is inseparable from ethical and aesthetic forms of regard and appre-
ciation; see Dover n.d.) has to be ostended by means of an appeal to the reader’s experiences
of wanting to understand—and, correlatively, of wanting to be understood by—another
human being. We have a much firmer grasp on the phenomenology of these experiences, I
think, than we do on any epistemological theory of understanding or metaphysical theory of
the self.
Mind, Vol. 131 . 521 . January 2022 ß Dover 2021198 Daniela Dover
taxing, or otherwise uncomfortable) interactions, and to accept the
Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/mind/article/131/521/193/6482035 by University of California, Los Angeles user on 24 January 2022
vulnerability that this entails. Friendship should, in theory, be espe-
cially conducive to such conversations. Whereas one’s willingness to
enter into an emotionally fraught exchange with a fellow passenger on
the train is usually limited, friends are more likely to care enough
about one another not simply to walk away when the conversational
going gets tough.8 Friendship also differs from relationships such as
familial, spousal and collegial relationships, since what you lose in
losing a friendship is usually just the relationship itself (not, say,
your housing or livelihood). The ‘cost’ of ending a friendship thus
varies closely with the depth and richness of the friendship itself. For
that reason, it makes less sense to avoid difficult conversations in
order to preserve a friendship than it might to preserve, say, a mar-
riage, or a worker’s relationship to their boss, where the extra-
relational stakes tend to be higher, so that discomfort and conflict
may become too costly to be worthwhile or too risky to be prudent.9
My remarks below focus on the context of relatively egalitarian, elect-
ive adult relationships of love, friendship, solidarity and camaraderie,
although conversations of the sort that interest me can and do arise in
other relational contexts too. I leave open, for the most part, import-
ant questions about the extent to which the conversational ethos that I
describe can be extended to obligatory, distant, saliently power-
differentiated and antagonistic relationships (but see §4). And I set
aside entirely the question of conversation in child-rearing, psycho-
therapeutic and pedagogical contexts; the profound structural asym-
metry of these relationships requires separate treatment.
8
This is not to deny that it is possible to have excellent conversations in the context of
one-off encounters. The narrator of Rachel Cusk’s Outline trilogy has a penchant for striking
up intensely personal conversations with strangers, often offering them ways of looking at
things that might not have occurred to their intimates (Cusk 2014, 2017, 2018). I am grateful to
Andreja Novakovic for suggesting this example and to Laura Soter for discussion of the
potential fertility of conversation with strangers.
9
In practice, of course, the aetiolated role of friendship in contemporary bourgeois life
(vis-à-vis, for example, romantic partnership and the nuclear family) makes difficult conver-
sations less likely to be ventured, since many adult friendships are simply too shallow or
peripheral to the friends’ lives for them to be inclined to bother with any unpleasantness.
In this cultural context, many readers may find themselves thinking instead of conversations
they have had with lovers, spouses or family members, rather than friends. It is important,
however, to keep in mind the extent to which conversation in intimate and domestic contexts
can be inhibited and distorted by interlocutors’ awareness of the potential severity of the
material and emotional consequences of conflict.
Mind, Vol. 131 . 521 . January 2022 ß Dover 2021The Conversational Self 199
2. The revelation picture
Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/mind/article/131/521/193/6482035 by University of California, Los Angeles user on 24 January 2022
How should we conceive of the practice that I am calling interpersonal
inquiry? The most popular folk conception, which has recently been
elaborated by Bonnie Talbert as a philosophical theory of ‘second-
personal epistemology’, is what I will call the revelation picture. The
revelation picture portrays interpersonal inquiry as an activity
through which we ‘reveal important aspects of [ourselves]’; it succeeds
when, among other conditions, we ‘have not deceived’ our interloc-
utors, and they have ‘succeeded in accurately perceiving what [we
have] revealed’ (Talbert 2015, p. 194). The idea is that we take turns
disclosing ourselves to one another—telling our life stories, for ex-
ample, or sharing our feelings.10
Two features of the revelation picture give me pause. The first has
to do with the notion of ‘revealing or hiding important aspects of
oneself’ (Talbert 2015, p. 195). What exactly counts as a ‘self-revelation’
in conversation? Talk of hiding and revealing—of ‘concealment and
exposure’, as Thomas Nagel puts it—brings to mind intimate, con-
fessional scenes: lovers quarreling, parents unbosoming long-
suppressed family secrets.11 But as novelists know, discussions about
gardening or food or dogs, let alone about religion or art or politics,
can be just as revealing as heart-to-heart confessions—often more so.
Our inquiries into one another and our inquiries into the world at
large are comprehensively mixed up: when I talk about myself, I am
also talking about the world, and when I talk about the world, I give
my interlocutor a sense of who I am. This is why ‘tell me about
10
The ‘revelation picture’ of conversation has a close analogue in a view of friendship
incisively criticized by Dean Cocking and Jeanette Kennett, according to which ‘friendship is
marked by the great extent to which the self is disclosed in . . . relationship to the other’
(Cocking and Kennett 1998, p. 503). Mikhail Bakhtin (1984, p. 252) criticizes the revelation
picture more directly when he objects to the notion of dialogue as merely ‘a means for
revealing, for bringing to the surface the already ready-made character of a person’. Also
relevant here is Candace Vogler’s deeply insightful (and hilarious) skewering of the ideal of
‘self-expressive intimacy’ that is so central to the ethos of contemporary US middle-class
marriage and its adjutant therapeutic regimes. The ‘miserable triumph’ of self-expressive in-
timacy occurs when spouses’ ‘senses of themselves calcify, and they can neither forget who they
are, what they want, what they’ve been and done to one another . . . nor allow their partners to
forget these things . . . [A]ll that is left between them is the tedious yammering of selves’
(Vogler 1998, p. 330).
11
‘Concealment and Exposure’ is the title of Nagel’s (1998) influential defence of the pub-
lic–private distinction; Nagel’s discussion of privacy does not so much defend the revelation
picture as presuppose it.
Mind, Vol. 131 . 521 . January 2022 ß Dover 2021200 Daniela Dover
yourself’ is such a stultifying conversational move: in reality, we learn
Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/mind/article/131/521/193/6482035 by University of California, Los Angeles user on 24 January 2022
about one another mainly by talking about other things.
Another feature of the revelation picture that might raise eyebrows
is its portrayal of interpersonal inquiry as having a turn-taking struc-
ture: while I reveal, you perceive, and then we switch. This seems true
of the stilted sort of conversation one might have on a bad first date—
the sort that fundamentally boils down to an exchange of autobio-
graphical monologues. Participants in such an exchange nudge each
other along with questions and interjections; they switch roles more
or less frequently throughout the conversation; but at any given mo-
ment, one is cast as autobiographical narrator, the other as audience.
It is hard not to feel that this picture falls short as a depiction of some
of our best conversations—the ones that seem to reveal the full po-
tential of conversation as a human activity. In these conversations, we
do not feel as though we are taking turns doing something in front of
one another, as the revelation metaphor suggests. Rather, we feel that
we are doing something together. We might gesture toward the source
of this dissatisfaction with the revelation picture by saying that the
best conversations often seem more ‘intersubjective’—in some sense
that remains to be explored—than the revelation picture makes them
out to be. In these conversations, my activity of trying to understand
you is somehow constitutively bound up, not just diachronically
interspersed, with your activity of trying to understand me.
Conversation does sometimes feel like a matter of alternating among
distinct activities: I help you to understand me, you help me to under-
stand you, and we work together to understand the world at large. But
our best conversations are often the ones in which our attempts to
understand one another, our attempts to understand ourselves, and
our attempts to understand the world we share are most comprehen-
sively intermingled.
3. Taking one another seriously
We can lend more content to these observations by contrasting the
revelation picture with another mode of relating to one another in con-
versation, which I call ‘taking one another seriously’. I use this expression
as a stipulative term of art to refer to a distinctive way of approaching the
activity of interpersonal inquiry. Interlocutors who take one another
seriously bind their attempts to understand one another with their
attempts to understand themselves. By interweaving the activities of
Mind, Vol. 131 . 521 . January 2022 ß Dover 2021The Conversational Self 201
self- and other-interpretation, they cultivate the sort of intersubjectivity
Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/mind/article/131/521/193/6482035 by University of California, Los Angeles user on 24 January 2022
that seems to be missing in the revelation picture.
I take you seriously in the course of interpersonal inquiry when I
adopt the attitudes or stances of input-seeking, abdication and
reciprocity.
(1) Input-seeking. First, I treat your self-understanding as relevant to
my understanding of you. To treat your self-understanding as relevant
to my understanding of you means that I do not suppose that I can
figure you out from the outside, simply by watching and listening. In
order to take you seriously, I have to seek your input, actively inquir-
ing into your perspective on yourself. So I will not be satisfied with
simply observing you at a party like a field biologist; such observation
would yield little insight into what you think lies behind the behaviour
I observe. Nor would my curiosity be satisfied by, say, reading your
diaries; mute artifacts cannot address the questions that I will have in
response to them, and if I am really curious about you, I will have
plenty of follow-up questions, no matter how copious and revealing
your autobiographical narration may be. So the sense in which I have
to seek your input in order to meet the input-seeking condition is
quite strong. It is not enough to be receptive to your point of view. I
have to actively interrogate your point of view from my point of view:
I have to seek your answers to my questions.
Note that this does not only mean seeking your answers to those of
my questions that are framed as being about you (whatever that might
entail). As I noted above, our activities of interpreting—and express-
ing our interpretations of—ourselves and one another are bound up
with our thinking about the world at large. To take you seriously thus
requires actively inquiring into your perspective on the world—not
only on ‘yourself’, narrowly construed. For convenience’s sake, I will
often speak below of ‘your self-understanding’, ‘my understanding of
you’, and so on, but we should keep in mind how often we express our
understanding of one another through talking about other things, and
vice versa.
(2) Abdication. The second condition for taking you seriously is that
I treat your understanding of me as relevant to my understanding of
myself. Just as I do not suppose that I can figure you out from the
outside, I also do not suppose that I can figure myself out from the
inside. This means that when your interpretation of me conflicts with my
antecedent self-understanding, I do not pull rank by claiming privileged
authority for the deliverances of introspection. I do not simply ask you to
defer to my expertise as an interpreter of myself. In other words, I do not
Mind, Vol. 131 . 521 . January 2022 ß Dover 2021202 Daniela Dover
demand that you grant me what Rahel Jaeggi (2014, pp. 71 ff.) has called
Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/mind/article/131/521/193/6482035 by University of California, Los Angeles user on 24 January 2022
‘interpretive sovereignty’: the privilege of having the last word when it
comes to the subject of oneself. I abdicate that privilege, giving up my
interpretive sovereignty in conversation with you.12
Importantly, abdicating my interpretive sovereignty does not mean
transferring it: it does not mean granting you the last word instead. Nor
does it mean that our conflicting interpretations will simply be juxta-
posed with a shrug at the end of the day. Indeed, we do not want there to
be an end of the day or a last word. For we are not trying to achieve
consensus or to arrive at the end of inquiry.13 What we are doing, in-
stead, is bringing our respective self-, other-, and world-interpretations
into a sort of discursive and imaginative contact that has the potential to
alter them. Such alteration need not take the form of one of us persuad-
ing the other that our antecedent interpretation is correct. I might em-
brace your interpretation of me, not as a description of what I am
already like, but as a vision of what I might yet become. I might come
to a new understanding of myself, not by embracing, but by rebelling
against your understanding of me. Or I might simply notice—perhaps
only in distant retrospect—that our conversations have gradually altered
my understanding of myself, without being able to say exactly why or
how. Indeed, our conversations might gradually alter my habits of self-
12
I am not, of course, suggesting that I should decline to correct demonstrable factual
errors. If I know that I was born in New Orleans, I can straightforwardly cite my own
autobiographical expertise in correcting my friend’s false belief that I was born in New
Brunswick. What we can abdicate is interpretive sovereignty, the claim to have the last word
on the subject of myself qua object of interpretation—of the broadly humanistic, ethically
‘thick’ (Williams 1985) sort that is called for in asking, for instance, whether I am nostalgic for
New Orleans, or whether my years in New Orleans were happy ones. The question of where I
was born requires no such interpretation, and is subject to the same epistemic dynamics as
other such workaday facts; in case there is some special reason to doubt memory and testi-
mony, it can be settled with reference to public records. (This is not to say that it is clear
exactly which aspects of human life are to be counted as matters of ‘workaday fact’ in this
way.)
13
Even when our conversations do end up leading us to converge in one respect or another,
it is important to my account that in interpersonal inquiry (as against, for example, joint
deliberation), convergence is not the point. Cocking and Kennett (1998, p. 504) make a similar
point about friendship: our receptivity to our friends might mean that we end up sharing
some of their views and interests, thus coming to resemble them more than we did before; but
what matters to their philosophical account of friendship is not this outcome, but rather ‘the
distinctive kind of responsiveness to the other, which mediates any such move toward simi-
larity’. Anthony Laden (2012) makes an analogous point in the context of an ambitious cri-
tique of individualist accounts of rationality; for Laden, human reasoning is best understood as
a social activity that aims at interpersonal connection and mutual responsiveness, rather than
at settling questions or reaching consensus.
Mind, Vol. 131 . 521 . January 2022 ß Dover 2021The Conversational Self 203
representation without my ever consciously noticing this change at all.
Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/mind/article/131/521/193/6482035 by University of California, Los Angeles user on 24 January 2022
In the latter two cases, a willingness to take your perspective on me
into account in my conscious thinking about myself has opened the door
to further influence that takes place under the radar of conscious intro-
spection. This last point is important. I have not abdicated my interpret-
ive sovereignty if I am committed to holding out against any influence
from you pending a conscious, reflective vetting process. This would be
to treat your perspective on me as mere evidence, or as mere suggestions
to ‘take or leave’ depending on how they fare with respect to my own
antecedent commitments, values and self-conceptions. Abdicating inter-
pretive sovereignty would not be psychically challenging or ethically
significant in the ways I am about discuss if it left the trumping authority
of conscious reflection and deliberation entirely intact. After all, our
interpretive activities draw upon all kinds of sources, human and other-
wise; barring special grounds for self-protection or mistrust of one’s
interlocutor, to refuse to abdicate interpretive sovereignty in this thin
sense would often appear to be merely ad hoc. Abdicating interpretive
sovereignty in the fuller sense I have in mind amounts to more than just
not ignoring or dismissing you outright; it involves relaxing my grip on
the rudder, allowing myself to change in response to you in unpredict-
able and perhaps even untraceable ways.14
To sum up: to abdicate interpretive sovereignty is to be willing to
allow your interpretation of me to influence my interpretation of my-
self. This willingness can be manifest in conscious processes and choices
(such as how I choose to respond to what you have said, or whether and
how I remember and reflect on our conversation). But it also involves an
openness to being changed in ways that I cannot entirely control or even
anticipate.15 The abdication of interpretive sovereignty consists, not in
14
At the same time, as noted above, we are dealing here with conversations that we choose
to have in the context of elective relationships that we choose to sustain, and it is up to us
how we approach these conversations. So although abdicating interpretive sovereignty involves
a real loss of control, it is not a fully passive surrender.
15
Conversation in which we abdicate our interpretive sovereignty has this in common with
the ‘transformative experiences’ theorized by L. A. Paul (2014): it involves openness to un-
predictable changes in our values and self-conceptions. Unfortunately, I do not have space
here to explore the details of Paul’s view, but I will note two important contrasts. First, Paul is
ultimately concerned with ‘big life choices’ (2014, p. 123)—such as the decision to have a
child—whose life-changing momentousness is antecedently obvious: we know that such
choices will change us in profound ways, although we do not know precisely how they will
change us. By contrast, although a certain openness to change is required in order to engage in
conversations in which we take one another seriously (and although such conversations may,
on the whole, be likelier to change us than conversations in which we insist on interpretive
Mind, Vol. 131 . 521 . January 2022 ß Dover 2021204 Daniela Dover
the actual occurrence or course of such changes, but in the attitude to
Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/mind/article/131/521/193/6482035 by University of California, Los Angeles user on 24 January 2022
conversation that makes them possible in the first place, namely, a will-
ingness to loosen my grip on myself by loosening my grip on my ante-
cedent self-understanding.
(3) Reciprocity. Finally, in taking you seriously I not only adopt the
above two stances toward you; I also want, and at least implicitly
encourage, you to adopt them toward me. That is, (a) I want and
encourage you to treat my self-understanding as relevant to your
understanding of me, and (b) I want and encourage you to take my
understanding of you into account in your thinking about yourself.
4. Who, what, where, when?
So far, I have given a merely stipulative description of the syndrome of
attitudes that I call ‘taking one another seriously’.16 I have not said any-
thing about why anyone might wish to adopt these attitudes. When you
and I take one another seriously, we each suppose that neither of us is
the authoritative interpreter of either of us. As noted above, we do not
do this in order to bring about any particular extra-conversational out-
come. Instead, we do it because we value our conversational activity itself
and the distinctive ways of relating to one another that this activity
creates and reveals.
In §5, I will present two examples which are meant to illustrate the
appeal of taking one another seriously. I should first emphasize, how-
ever, that I do not mean to suggest that this prospect is, or should be,
salient to us on every occasion. When a Scientologist accosts me at the
farmer’s market, I am confident from the outset that my self-
understanding will be untouched by his understanding of me as an
immortal ‘thetan’ capable of shedding my body for a stroll on Mars
(Wright 2013). Even when we are dealing with more eligible
sovereignty), such conversations need not necessarily change us; nor must we consciously
anticipate or expect that they will. Second, Paul ultimately argues that we ought to choose
whether to have transformative experiences based on ‘whether [we] want to discover how
[our] life will unfold’ in their wake (2014, p. 120). By contrast, I do not think that we should
choose to enter into conversations in which we take one another seriously primarily ‘in order
to discover who [we]’ll become’ (2014, p. 119); individual transformation and discovery are,
for me, potential consequences of an essentially interpersonal practice. For this reason, Paul’s
important points about the inadequacy of standard decision-theoretic models in transforma-
tive decision-making are remote from my concerns here.
16
I borrow the metaphor of a ‘syndrome’—an interrelated set of dispositions and procliv-
ities—from Samuel Scheffler’s (2010) theory of valuing.
Mind, Vol. 131 . 521 . January 2022 ß Dover 2021The Conversational Self 205
conversational partners, our attentional and emotional finitude places
Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/mind/article/131/521/193/6482035 by University of California, Los Angeles user on 24 January 2022
limits on the contexts in which we can take one another seriously: as
we will see, to take another person seriously can be time-consuming,
intellectually and emotionally demanding, and psychically risky.
In thinking through questions about whom to take seriously and
when, it helps to break down the three conditions again in order to
consider what it takes to fulfil each one individually. Notice that in
the context of interpersonal inquiry as I have defined it, the input-
seeking and reciprocity conditions normally fall into place for free, so
to speak. It is natural to hope to influence other people’s thinking about
us, and maddening when they suppose that they can understand us from
the outside without our input. So it is typically quite easy to meet the
first half of the reciprocity condition, since typically I do want you to
treat my self-understanding as relevant to your understanding of me.
The second half of the reciprocity condition—wanting you to take
my understanding of you into account in your thinking about your-
self—is also often easy to meet. For it is often gratifying when other
people are sufficiently interested in our interpretations of them to treat
these interpretations as potential challenges to their own autobiograph-
ical narratives.17 As we reach a point in a relationship with someone
where we find ourselves strongly disagreeing with them about their self-
interpretations, we often come to wish that they would take in what we
have to say, rather than pulling rank by insisting on their own inter-
pretive sovereignty.
The input-seeking condition—the requirement that I take your
understanding of yourself into account in forming my understanding
of you—is also easily met if we are truly motivated by the sort of
curiosity that sets interpersonal inquiry apart from merely instrumen-
tal modes of inquiry into human beings. For any deep curiosity about
you will, of course, involve curiosity as to how you think about
yourself.
17
I say in the text that it is often psychologically ‘easy’ to meet this condition, but it can
also be ethically fraught, especially when we have particular reason to worry that our inter-
locutor is disposed to accept our interpretation too readily. But worrying that our interlocutor
will be too quick to take our interpretation on board need not preclude our wanting them to
consider it. To fail to meet the second condition at all would be to aspire to avoid having any
sort of observer effect on our interlocutor; this would indeed evade concerns about undue
influence, but at the cost of precluding many valuable forms of personal relationship, includ-
ing those that are at the centre of my inquiry here (see §1 above). Many thanks to Kieran
Setiya for pressing me on this point.
Mind, Vol. 131 . 521 . January 2022 ß Dover 2021206 Daniela Dover
Of the three conditions for taking each other seriously, then, the
Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/mind/article/131/521/193/6482035 by University of California, Los Angeles user on 24 January 2022
second—the abdication of interpretive sovereignty—tends to be the
hardest to satisfy. For it is tempting to try to control the stories people
tell about us. We enjoy being deferred to about all sorts of things, and
perhaps most of all about a subject in which we have so much interest,
and so much at stake. Indeed, it can be tempting to moralize this
desire for deference, reflexively regarding those who question our
autobiographical narratives as presumptuous or disrespectful.
To be sure, sometimes people who question our autobiographical
narratives are indeed being presumptuous or disrespectful—or ma-
nipulative, or even abusive. To recognize the appeal of taking one
another seriously is not to deny that interpersonal inquiry contains
as much potential for misbehaviour as the next human activity. Nor is
it to deny that the act of challenging another person’s self-
interpretation is particularly fraught. Talia Bettcher offers an insight-
ful discussion of the ethical risks of questioning an interlocutor’s
‘first-person authority’.18 Bettcher’s (2009, p. 101) notion of first-
person authority is similar to Jaeggi’s notion of interpretive sover-
eignty in that it is ‘strictly an . . . ethical phenomenon’, not an epi-
stemic authority based on expertise.19 As an example of the violation
of ethical first-person authority, she considers a case in which some-
one simply tells his date, on the basis of her anxious foot-tapping, that
she wants to go home. The speaker here is ‘inappropriately treating his
own interpretive assessment as authoritative’ (p. 103).
Notice that this speaker’s behaviour is ruled out by our description
of taking one another seriously, which requires that neither interlocu-
tor treats their own interpretation as authoritative. The speaker has
not met the input condition.20 So while I agree with Bettcher that this
speaker’s behaviour is objectionable, this is not a strike against the
practice of abdication of interpretive sovereignty within the context of
interpersonal inquiry in which both interlocutors take one another
seriously. In this case, such inquiry has already been ruled out from
the start by one party’s unilateral refusal to meet the input condition.
The same is true in the cases with which Bettcher is ultimately
18
Special thanks to Ann Garry for pointing me toward Bettcher’s essay.
19
For another illuminating account of first-person authority as an ethical phenomenon, see
McGeer (2008).
20
He would meet it were he instead to ask—as Bettcher imagines him doing in what she
presents as an unproblematic variant—‘Do you want to go home? Because it seems like you
do’ (Bettcher 2009, p. 102).
Mind, Vol. 131 . 521 . January 2022 ß Dover 2021The Conversational Self 207
concerned, in which, for instance, a trans woman’s self-identification
Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/mind/article/131/521/193/6482035 by University of California, Los Angeles user on 24 January 2022
is met with ‘the claim “You are really a man”’ (2009, p. 115), or a
woman’s ‘no’ is interpreted not as ‘a real refusal but [as] a coy flir-
tation’ (p. 113). Bettcher’s discussion illustrates that reluctance to take
another person seriously often stems from a fear that they will not
take you seriously—a fear that is amply warranted in the scenarios
Bettcher considers. More precisely, when I am reluctant to meet the
abdication condition in conversation with you, it is often because I
have good reason to believe that you will not meet the input condition
in conversation with me. Insisting on my interpretive sovereignty is
sensible in such cases because the spirit of open-ended mutual curi-
osity that animates interpersonal inquiry has already been abandoned.
I figure, ‘One of us will inevitably end up having the last word here; if
I don’t want it to be you, I had better be sure it is me’. At such times,
demanding that you defer to me—or simply refusing to engage with
you altogether—is often the only way for me to avoid deferring, or
seeming to defer, to you. Taking one another seriously would instead
require both of us to abandon the idea of deference altogether.
Choices about when to do this and with whom must, I believe, be
left to the discretion of individual interlocutors. As noted above (n. 2),
this paper makes no claim to the effect that anyone is morally obli-
gated to engage in—or even to attempt to initiate—this practice.
Interpersonal inquiry in which interlocutors take one another serious-
ly is an emotionally demanding form of social engagement that entails
mutual vulnerability. The remainder of this paper will, I hope, help to
illuminate what might motivate someone to pursue, or to withdraw
from, such engagement. But decisions in this arena ultimately have to
be made in light of the psychic and bodily vulnerabilities of the indi-
vidual interlocutors, the material and emotional stakes of their rela-
tionship, and the larger social context in which that relationship is
embedded.
5. Why?
In order to illustrate the ethical appeal of taking one another seriously,
in this section I look in detail at two characters who exhibit, respect-
ively, a policy of outright refusal and a habit of marked eagerness to
engage in it. Let me flag an issue that will recur shortly. Both of the
characters I am about to describe arguably suffer from psychiatric
conditions; in any event, each would likely attract at least one clinical
Mind, Vol. 131 . 521 . January 2022 ß Dover 2021208 Daniela Dover
diagnosis in the United States in 2021. In thinking about these cases,
Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/mind/article/131/521/193/6482035 by University of California, Los Angeles user on 24 January 2022
we should keep in mind the contestable relationship between claims
about mental illness and claims about ethics, as well as the contestable,
and sometimes self-fulfilling, nature of psychiatric models themselves
(see Hacking 1995a, 1995b, 2007). My aim is to encourage readers to
recognize aspects of themselves and people they know in these char-
acters, who display—in an extreme and therefore vividly illustrative
fashion—habits and traits of character that most people exhibit in
more modest forms.
First, consider a character for whom the defence of interpretive
sovereignty is a point of pride and a matter of principle. Here is
how Mr Bridge, the protagonist of Evan S. Connell’s 1965 novel of
middle-American bourgeois misery, describes himself at midlife:
I know very little about other men . . . although I go through life
assuming that I do. I know only myself, but I do believe I know
myself . . . In any case, whatever I feel or think or see or believe is
a consequence of my own sensibility, not that of some other man
. . . I can be grateful for this, at least: that I have kept myself. I
have not once dressed up in a costume. There may be stronger
consolations, but not many. Be that as it may, I cannot live
differently than I do . . . So, early tomorrow, I must get up again
to do what I have done today. I will get up early to do this, and
tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, and there is nothing to
discuss. (Connell 2005, p. 106, emphasis added)
In this moment of reflection, Bridge acknowledges not just how little
he knows about ‘other men’, but how little he cares to know. Lacking
curiosity about the people around him, he largely declines to engage
in interpersonal inquiry at all. A fortiori, he declines to engage in
interpersonal inquiry in which he and his interlocutors might take
one another seriously.
It is useful to spell out the ways in which Bridge avoids meeting the
input and abdication conditions. Bridge staunchly refuses to abdicate
his interpretive sovereignty: he does not treat others’ understanding of
him as relevant to his understanding of himself. For he insists that he
can know himself despite knowing ‘very little about other men’—
including, presumably, what other men think of him. He thus refuses
to concede that he might depend on others for the self-knowledge on
which he so prides himself; he thinks he can get it from introspection
alone. This reliance on introspection affords Bridge a measure of
Mind, Vol. 131 . 521 . January 2022 ß Dover 2021The Conversational Self 209
psychic stability: since he seldom has to reckon with contrasts between
Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/mind/article/131/521/193/6482035 by University of California, Los Angeles user on 24 January 2022
how he sees himself and how others see him, he has few occasions to
call his self-understanding into question.
Bridge also skirts the input-seeking condition: he declines to elicit
other people’s self-understanding in forming his interpretations of
them, instead ‘going through life assuming’ that he already knows
them well enough to get by. One might do this out of sheer laziness,
but one might also do it because one is afraid of what one might find
out. Perhaps one would learn things that would make it difficult to ‘go
on as before’ in one’s relations with others. Retreat from this facet of
interpersonal inquiry helps to preserve our social equilibria, the stable
ways we have found of coping with the particular others with whom
we frequently engage. So each of these two ways of refusing interper-
sonal inquiry has its psychosocial uses.
These conversational habits become more troubling when we con-
sider how they might be related to two further features of Bridge’s
character that emerge with striking clarity in this short passage. First,
there is his rigidity. Bridge plans, ‘tomorrow and tomorrow and to-
morrow’, to get up again to do what he has done today. Indeed, he
feels that he ‘must’ do so; he ‘cannot live differently’.
Bridge’s rigidity is partly explained by his remarkable fear of influ-
ence. Bridge conceives of all interpersonal influence as play-acting: if
he has changed as a result of his interactions with another person, it
must be because he has cravenly ‘dressed up in a costume’ to please
them. Integrity thus requires impermeability: whatever Bridge ‘feel[s]
or think[s] or see[s] or believe[s]’ must be ‘a consequence of [his]
own sensibility, not that of some other man’. This determination not
to allow himself to be influenced by others leads Bridge to celebrate—
indeed, to congratulate himself on—his rigidity: ‘I can be grateful for
this, at least: that I have kept myself . . . There may be stronger con-
solations, but not many’. For Bridge, to have ‘kept himself’ is at once
to have kept himself the same across time and to have kept himself
safe from contamination by others.21
21
As an anonymous referee for Mind has pointed out to me, Bridge’s xenophobic fear of
contamination by others has, over time, left him so socially alienated that he might no longer
be capable of changing in response to another person, even if his determination to resist
interpersonal influence were to waver. Sheer interpersonal estrangement is often more than
enough to condemn a human being to the sterile monotony of doing the same thing ‘tomor-
row and tomorrow and tomorrow’. It is noteworthy that the soliloquy from Macbeth to which
Connell here alludes occurs immediately after Macbeth has declared himself numb to ‘the cry
of women’ (‘Direness . . . / Cannot once start me’) (Macbeth V.v.).
Mind, Vol. 131 . 521 . January 2022 ß Dover 2021210 Daniela Dover
What, if any, are the connections between not caring to know more
Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/mind/article/131/521/193/6482035 by University of California, Los Angeles user on 24 January 2022
about others and not wanting to be changed by them? Connell here
relies on the reader’s horse sense that the above-noted tendencies of
Bridge’s—his rigidity, his fear of influence, his social isolation, his
belief in the sufficiency of introspection for self-knowledge, and his
lack of curiosity about the people around him—all ‘hang together’,
folk-psychologically speaking. That is what allows Connell to sketch
them so deftly in a single paragraph, confident that the paragraph will
help to illuminate and precisify, rather than muddying, Bridge qua
fictional character in a straightforwardly realist novel. How might this
cluster of dispositions lead to Bridge’s grim conclusion that conver-
sation is pointless, that ‘there is nothing to discuss’?
To get a better sense of how Bridge’s implicit picture of the self is
related to his refusal to engage in certain forms of conversation, let us
turn from a character for whom there is ‘nothing to discuss’ to one for
whom seemingly everything is up for discussion. The case of Hannah
Upp, the subject of a profile by Rachel Aviv in the New Yorker,
illustrates what conversation can look like for someone vastly more
conversable than Mr. Bridge. Upp experiences dissociative fugues, in
which she forgets who she is for days or weeks at a time. Her family’s
and friends’ extraordinary fondness for her—five interviewees inde-
pendently told Aviv that Upp ‘lights up the room’—leaves many of
them ambivalent about the psychiatric classification of Upp as suffer-
ing from a dissociative identity disorder. For they regard Upp’s gen-
eral suppleness or permeability of identity—as one of her friends put
it, Upp seems to have ‘no barriers’—as inseparable from her extraor-
dinary generosity and open-heartedness.
The fugue episodes themselves are of course quite dangerous; in-
deed, Upp is currently missing. But what interests me about Upp is
her interpersonal openness—what some might, pejoratively, call her
‘impressionability’—a trait she shares with many others who do not
experience dissociative fugues. As Etzel Cardeña, author of a textbook
on rare psychological phenomena, put it to Aviv, ‘In our culture, we
have a nice narrative that personality is stable’, but experiences like
Upp’s undermine this narrative, revealing ‘an exaggerated version of
the way we all are’ (Aviv 2018). As we will see, Upp’s atypical psych-
ology allows her to do with ease something that for most of us is done
only with difficulty, namely, abdicate her interpretive sovereignty in
conversation. I am not presenting Upp as a moral paragon or suggest-
ing that we should aspire to emulate her whole personality. Rather, I
am suggesting that we have something to learn from Upp’s approach
Mind, Vol. 131 . 521 . January 2022 ß Dover 2021You can also read
