The Background of Social Reality pp 91-104 | Cite as
Creating Interpersonal Reality through Conversational Interactions
Abstract
We understand interpersonal reality as consisting of those social facts that are informally created by people for themselves in everyday interactions and involve the collective acceptance of positive and negative deontic powers. We submit that, in the case of interpersonal reality, Gilbert’s concept of a joint commitment is a suitable view of what collective acceptance amounts to. We then argue that creating interpersonal reality, even in common everyday life situations, typically requires conversational exchanges involving several layers of joint commitments and, in particular, joint commitments to projects, joint meaning, and the joint commitments that are constitutive of conversations.
Keywords
Joint Activity Everyday Interaction Collective Intentionality Joint Commitment Legal RelationshipReferences
- Arendt, Hannah. 1958. The human condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
- Brinck, Ingar, and Peter Gärdenfors. 2003. Co-operation and communication in apes and humans. Mind & Language 18: 484–501.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
- Carassa, Antonella, and Marco Colombetti. 2009a. Joint meaning. Journal of Pragmatics 41: 1837–1854.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
- Carassa, Antonella, and Marco Colombetti. 2009b. Situated communicative acts: A deontic approach. In Proceedings of CogSci 2009, Amsterdam, ed. N. Taatgen and H. van Rijn, 1382–1387.Google Scholar
- Carassa, Antonella, Francesca Morganti, and Maurizio Tirassa. 2005. A situated cognition perspective on presence. In Proceedings of CogSci 2005, Stresa, Italy, ed. B.G. Bara, L. Barsalou, and M. Bucciarelli, 510–516.Google Scholar
- Carassa, Antonella, Marco Colombetti, and Francesca Morganti. 2008. The role of joint commitments in intersubjectivity. In Enacting intersubjectivity: Cognitive and social perspectives to the study of interactions, ed. F. Morganti, A. Carassa, and G. Riva, 187–201. Amsterdam: Ios Press.Google Scholar
- Clark, Herbert H. 1996. Using language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
- Gibson, James J. 1977. The theory of affordances. In Perceiving, acting, and knowing: Toward an ecological psychology, ed. R. Shaw and J. Bransford, 67–82. Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum.Google Scholar
- Gibson, James J. 1979. The ecological approach to visual perception. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.Google Scholar
- Gilbert, Margaret. 1987. Modeling collective belief. Synthese 73: 185–204.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
- Gilbert, Margaret. 1989. On social facts. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
- Gilbert, Margaret. 1996. Living together: Rationality, sociality, and obligation. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield.Google Scholar
- Gilbert, Margaret. 2000. Sociality and responsibility: New essays in plural subject theory. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield.Google Scholar
- Gilbert, Margaret. 2006. A theory of political obligation. Oxford: Clarendon.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
- Gilbert, Margaret. 2007. Mutual recognition, common knowledge, and joint attention. In Hommage à Wlodek: Philosophical papers dedicated to Wlodek Rabinowicz, ed. T. Rønnow-Rasmussen, B. Petersson, J. Josefsson, and D. Egonsson. http://www.fil.lu.se/hommageawlodek/site/papper/GilbertMargaret.pdf. Accessed 6 Sept 2011.
- Gräfenhain, Maria, Tanya Behne, Malinda Carpenter, and Michael Tomasello. 2009. Young children’s understanding of joint commitments. Developmental Psychology 45: 1430–1443.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
- Hohfeld, Wesley N. 1923. Fundamental legal conceptions as applied in judicial reasoning. New Haven: Cook.Google Scholar
- Norman, Donald A. 1988. The psychology of everyday things. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
- Norman, Donald A. 1999. Affordances, conventions, and design. Interactions 6: 38–43.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
- Rakoczy, Hannes. 2006. Pretend play and the development of collective intentionality. Cognitive Systems Research 7: 113–127.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
- Rakoczy, Hannes. 2007. Play, games, and the development of collective intentionality. In Conventionality in cognitive development: How children acquire representations in language, thought and action. New directions in child and adolescent development, vol. 115, ed. C. Kalish and M. Sabbagh, 53–67. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.Google Scholar
- Searle, John R. 1983. Intentionality: An essay in the philosophy of mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
- Searle, John R. 1990. Collective intentions and actions. In Intentions in communication, ed. P.R. Cohen, J. Morgan, and M.E. Pollak, 401–415. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
- Searle, John R. 1995. The construction of social reality. New York: Free Press.Google Scholar
- Searle, John R. 2007. Social ontology: The problem and steps toward a solution. In Intentional acts and institutional facts: Essays on John Searle’s social ontology, ed. S.L. Tsohatzidis, 11–28. Dordrecht: Springer.Google Scholar
- Tomasello, Michael. 2008. Origins of human communication. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
- Tomasello, Michael. 2009. Why we cooperate. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
- Tuomela, Raimo. 2005. We-intentions revisited. Philosophical Studies 125: 327–369.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
- Tuomela, Raimo. 2007. The philosophy of sociality. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
- Warneken, Felix, Frances Chen, and Michael Tomasello. 2006. Cooperative activities in young children and chimpanzees. Child Development 77: 640–663.CrossRefGoogle Scholar