Elmar Unnsteinsson

Conversations can belong to different types, or genres. We consider four dimensions of variation as case studies: Some conversations are about sharing information, others about making decisions; some are about making firm commitments, others about brainstorming options; some are about sticking to the facts, others involve make-believe; some are highly cooperative, others adversarial. These are orthogonal dimensions of variation which explain why some kinds of speech acts are more felicitous and expected than others in particular conversations. But what are genres, how do they shape conversation, and why do they exist? We argue that genre categories can be understood as types of conversation plans, which are the structures of intentions that we use to organize conversations, and that each of our four genre distinctions corresponds to an independently variable kind of element within these plans. Speakers are under rational pressure to make their communicative intentions cohere with the conversation plan, which gives their interlocutors a powerful extralinguistic resource for interpreting their speech acts. We use this idea to show how several influential pragmatic theories, including Grice’s theory of conversational implicature, Stalnaker’s theory of common ground, and Roberts’ question-under-discussion model, can be generalized to account for more kinds of conversation.

I argue that what speakers mean or express can be determined by their implicit or unconscious states, rather than explicit or conscious states. Further, on this basis, I show that the sincerity conditions for utterances can also be fixed by implicit states. This is a surprising result which goes against common assumptions about speech acts and sincerity. Roughly, I argue that the result is implied by two plausible and independent theories of the metaphysics of speaker meaning and, further, that this is a robust basis on which to make an inference, with a fair degree of confidence, about the relationship between expression and implicit attitudes.

Many theorists assume that a request is sincere if the speaker wants the addressee to perform the act requested. I argue that this assumption predicts an implausible mismatch between sincere assertions and sincere directives and needs to be revised. I present an alternative view, according to which directive utterances can only be sincere if they are self-directed. Other-directed directives, however, can be genuine or fake, depending on whether the speaker wants the addressee to perform the act in question. Finally, I argue that this new perspective opens the door to a satisfying theory of authentic expression, for both assertive and directive utterances. Authenticity consists in the combination of genuine and sincere speech, for example, in the case of assertion, when speakers assert something which they both believe (sincerity) and want the addressee to believe (genuineness).

I argue that introspection recruits the same mental mechanism as that which is required for the production of ordinary speech acts. In introspection, in effect, we intentionally tell ourselves that we are in some mental state, aiming thereby to produce belief about that state in ourselves. On one popular view of speech acts, however, this is precisely what speakers do when speaking to others. On this basis, I argue that every bias discovered by social epistemology applies to introspection and other forms of self-directed representation. If so, it becomes unclear in what sense social epistemology is social.

Gricean intentionalists hold that what a speaker says and means by a linguistic utterance is determined by the speaker's communicative intention. On this view, one cannot really say anything without meaning it as well. Conventionalists argue, however, that malapropisms provide powerful counterexamples to this claim. I present two arguments against the conventionalist and sketch a new Gricean theory of speech errors, called the misarticulation theory. On this view, malapropisms are understood as a special case of mispronunciation. I argue that the Gricean theory is supported by empirical work in phonetics and phonology and, also, that conventionalism inevitably fails to do this work justice. I conclude, from this, that the conventionalist fails to show that malapropisms constitute a counterexample to a Gricean theory.