The Exchange of Words: Speech, Testimony, and Intersubjectivity

by Richard Moran

The capacity to speak is not only the ability to pronounce words, but the socially-recognized capacity to make one's words count in various ways. We rely on this capacity whenever we tell another person something and expect to be believed, and what we learn from others in this way is the basis for most of what we take ourselves to know about the world.

In The Exchange of Words, Richard Moran provides a philosophical exploration of human testimony as a form of intersubjective understanding in which speakers communicate by making themselves accountable for the truth of what they say. The book brings together themes from literature, philosophy of language, moral psychology, action theory, and epistemology, for a new approach to this fundamental human phenomenon.

The account developed here starts from the difference between what may be revealed in one's speech (like a regional accent) and what we explicitly claim and make ourselves answerable for. Some prominent themes include: the meaning of sincerity in speech, the nature of mutuality and how it differs from 'mind-reading', the interplay between the first-person and the second-person perspectives in conversation, and the nature of the speech act of telling and related illocutions as developed by philosophers such as J. L. Austin and Paul Grice.
Everyday dialogue is the locus of a kind of intersubjective understanding that is distinctive of the transmission of reasons in human testimony, and The Exchange of Words is an original and integrated account of this basic way of being informative to and in touch with one another.

256 pages, Paperback

Published May 22, 2018

Reviews

[saml · Rating 4 out of 5]

i'm slowly really beginning to like dick moron. he writes like an ethicist; he refuses to mutilate the text with variables, local technical terms, or definitions. there's something really startlingly ambitious emerging from what he gently teases out, probably involving lots of elisions permitted by his marvellous linguistic facility. nonetheless, this book has a deep problem: it is not a work of epistemology. its loci are austin on illocution and grice on non-natural meaning, which are in fact classici of (a certain kind of) philosophy of language. this is a problem because testimony is an epistemological category, to be investigated on the grounds that it is a source of knowledge. dick moron in fact focuses on a subclass of testimony, communicative telling, on which he loads all sorts of normative labour, on the testifiee's and testifier's behalves. one doesn't need to exploit obscure lackeyan counterexamples about testimony as a generative source to see that this won't quite do as an account of testimony. young children learn by being told, but are in large part incapable of assessing the structure of authority and entitlement which is meant to explain the epistemic credentials of such testimony (as far as i know. maybe they are cleverer than i think). perhaps one could point to the infancy of human normative practice, the state of nature, too. i am also hotly sceptical of the specialness of the first person, and of anscombian practical knowledge—of epistemic specialness in general. anyway, despite all this, what this book says about a distinctive subclass of testimony is absolutely golden. especially good is the last chapter, on soliloquy, for which alone the book is worth reading

[Mar Falcon · Rating 5 out of 5]

great for thesis stuff. thx deak