Epistemic action and language : a cross-linguistic study (original) (raw)
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Epistemics in Action: Action Formation and Territories of Knowledge
Research on Language & Social Interaction, 2012
This article considers the role of grammatical form in the construction of social action, focusing on turns that either assert or request information. It is argued that the epistemic status of a speaker consistently takes precedence over a turn's morphosyntactically displayed epistemic stance in the constitution of the action a turn is implementing. Insofar as asserting or requesting information is
Action formation and its epistemic (and other) backgrounds
2013
This article reviews arguments that, in the process of action formation and ascription, the relative status of the participants with respect to a projected action can adjust or trump the action stance conveyed by the linguistic form of the utterance. In general, congruency between status and stance is preferred, and linguistic form is a fairly reliable guide to action ascription. However incongruities between stance and status result in action ascriptions that are at variance with the action stance that is otherwise conveyed in the turn. This argument is presented, first, in relation to epistemic status and stance where the process is argued to be both fundamental and universal across all declarative and interrogative utterances. Some consequences of this way of viewing action are discussed. The argument is then briefly extended to deontics and benefactives.
Cross-linguistic Studies in Epistemology
The Blackwell Campanion to Epistemology, Third Edition, 2024
Linguistic data are commonly considered a defeasible source of evidence from which it is legitimate to draw philosophical hypotheses and conclusions. Linguistic methods popular amongst philosophers include linguistic tests, standard and comparative semantic analysis, testing language usage and use frequency with the help of language corpora, and the study of syntactical structures and etymologies. Epistemologists have applied linguistic methods to a wide range of philosophical issues, including epistemic contextualism, epistemic norms of assertion and practical reasoning, the nature of know-how, whether beliefs are states or performances, whether belief is a weak or a strong attitude, and what kind of gradability is instantiated by theoretical rationality and epistemic justification. Traditionally epistemologists have relied almost exclusively on linguistic data from western languages, with a primary focus on contemporary English. However, in the last two decades there has been an increasing interest in cross-linguistic studies in epistemology. Several factors may have contributed to what we may call a cross-linguistic turn in contemporary epistemology. One factor is the recent expansion and growing popularity of this discipline across most regions of the world, and in particular in South and East Asia. This is apparent when we consider the target languages of such studies, most of which focus on Asian languages such as Mandarin Chinese, Japanese, Sanskrit and Hindi. Another important driving force of this turn is attributable to the so-called challenge from cross-linguistic diversity of epistemic terms (Stich &
At the intersection of epistemics and action: Responding with I know
We examine I know as a responding action, showing that it claims to accept the grounds of the initiating action, but either resists that action as unnecessary or endorses it, depending on the epistemic environment created by the initiating action. First, in responding to actions that presume an unknowing addressee (e.g., correcting, advising), speakers deploy I know to resist the action as unnecessary while accepting its grounds. Second, in responding to actions that presume a knowing addressee (e.g., some assessments), speakers use I know to endorse the action, claiming an independently reached agreement (in this way, doing “being on the same page”). Data are in American and British English.
Assertions, joint epistemic actions and social practices
Synthese, 2015
In this paper I provide a theory of the speech act of assertion according 1 to which assertion is a species of joint action. In doing so I rely on a theory of joint 2 action developed in more detail elsewhere. Here we need to distinguish between the 3 genus, joint action, and an important species of joint action, namely, what I call joint 4 epistemic action. In the case of the latter, but not necessarily the former, participating 5 agents have epistemic goals, e.g., the acquisition of knowledge. It is joint epistemic 6 action that assertion is a species of. 7
At the intersection of epistemics and action: Responding with I know, 2017
We examine I know as a responding action, showing that it claims to accept the grounds of the initiating action, but either resists that action as unnecessary or endorses it, depending on the epistemic environment created by the initiating action. First, in responding to actions that presume an unknowing addressee (e.g., correcting, advising), speakers deploy I know to resist the action as unnecessary while accepting its grounds. Second, in responding to actions that presume a knowing addressee (e.g., some assessments), speakers use I know to endorse the action, claiming an independently reached agreement (in this way, doing “being on the same page”). Data are in American and British English.
Using discourse markers to negotiate epistemic stance: A view from situated language use
Journal of Pragmatics, 2021
In this paper, I analyse the usage of a discourse marker =mari, belonging to the epistemic paradigm attested in Upper Napo Kichwa (Quechuan, Ecuador). I show that the use of =mari indicates that the information is known well to the speaker, but also to some extent familiar to the addressee. In situated language use, the marker contributes to creating a knowing epistemic stance of the speaker. The analysis presented here is based on a 13-h documentary corpus of interactive Upper Napo Kichwa discourse, recorded on audio and video. For the purpose of the paper, the relevant utterances are analysed in their broad interactional context, including not only the surrounding text, but also relationships between the interlocutors, their shared life experience and possible shared knowledge derived from other sources. First, I analyse the semantic and pragmatic contribution of =mari to the conversational turn it occurs in, drawing on conversations extracted from the corpus. Following on from that, I show how tokens of =mari are situated in interactional sequences, and examine how the semantics/pragmatics of the clitic contributes to the discursive actions achieved by the turns which contain it.
The Linguistic Construction of Epistemological Difference
2014
How are beliefs about the nature of knowledge reflected and reproduced in language use? It is clear that some linguistic resources, e.g. the modal verbs may and must, indicate one’s epistemic stance with respect to a proposition, i.e. one’s judgement of how likely it is to be true. What is less clear is how the use of such resources relates to speakers’ beliefs about the nature of knowledge per se, i.e. their epistemic policies (Teller 2004). To investigate the putative relationship between epistemological variation and linguistic variation, I examine samples of written and spoken English from a community that is particularly epistemologically diverse: academia. I synthesize research on social epistemology, sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, and Academic English (AE) to propose an explanatory model of variability in the expression of epistemic stance. Then, using AE as a case study, I evaluate the predictions of this model both quantitatively via corpus analysis of research ...