Knowledge in Social Interaction: Rights and Responsibilities
| Number: | P38 |
| Organizer: | Sidnell, Jack |
| Co-Organizer: | John Heritage |
| Abstract: | |
| This panel focuses on the intersection of three issues: 1) how people in their communicative behavior mark and negotiate their access to knowledge (‘epistemics’), 2) the social and moral responsibilities that inform such behavior, and 3) analyses of how epistemic issues become part of processes of social affiliation and disaffiliation. In social interaction, knowledge (or lack of knowledge) is continuously presupposed, denied and claimed through the format of speaker’s utterances. For instance, in asking a question speakers, typically, claim to be ignorant of the matter asked about and at the same time suggest that the recipient might be informed. Different question formats convey subtle distinctions within this basic framework. For instance, “You’re not coming tonight are you” conveys that its speaker is rather more informed than the questioner who asks “What are you doing tonight?” The panel develops the topic of knowledge in interaction in the following ways: First, it suggests that knowing is a normative field in the sense that people treat other people as having a responsibility to know particular facts, as raising expectations about what they should know, or as knowing something with particular authority. Second, in examining how individuals in interaction manage the rights, responsibilities and accountability of knowing in and through social interactions, it also addresses the relationship between this management and speaker-recipient affiliation. Taken as a whole, we show that knowledge is at least partially governed by a moral order. Third, the panel investigates this domain across a variety of languages that have different sorts of linguistic resources for communicating what is known, with what authority, certainty and means. |
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