The Morality of Knowledge in Conversation

by Edited by Tanya Stivers , Lorenza Mondada , Jakob Steensig

• ISBN13: 9780521194549
• ISBN10: 0521194547
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2011-07-11
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

Each time we take a turn in conversation we indicate what we know and what we think others know. However, knowledge is neither static nor absolute. It is shaped by those we interact with and governed by social norms - we monitor one another for whether we are fulfilling our rights and responsibilities with respect to knowledge, and for who has relatively more rights to assert knowledge over some state of affairs. This book brings together an international team of leading linguists, sociologists and anthropologists working across a range of European and Asian languages to document some of the ways in which speakers manage the moral domain of knowledge in conversation. The volume demonstrates that if we are to understand how speakers manage issues of agreement, affiliation and alignment - something clearly at the heart of human sociality - we must understand the social norms surrounding epistemic access, primacy and responsibilities.

Table of Contents

List of contributors	p. ix
Preface	p. xi
Acknowledgements	p. xiii
List of transcription and glossing symbols	p. xiv
Introduction
Knowledge, morality and affiliation in social interaction	p. 3
Affiliational consequences of managing epistemic asymmetries
The management of knowledge discrepancies and of epistemic changes in institutional interactions	p. 27
Claiming epistemic primacy: yo-marked assessments in Japanese	p. 58
Morality and question design: "of course" as contesting a presupposition of askability	p. 82
Addressing epistemic incongruence in question-answer sequences through the use of epistemic adverbs	p. 107
The epistemics of make-believe	p. 131
Epistemic resources for managing affiliation and alignment
Territories of knowledge, territories of experience: empathic moments in interaction	p. 159
The terms of not knowing	p. 184
Proposing shared knowledge as a means of pursuing agreement	p. 207
Ways of agreeing with negative stance taking	p. 235
Epistemics and embodiment in the interactions of very young children	p. 257
Toward a framework
Sources of asymmetry in human interaction: enchrony, status, knowledge and agency	p. 285
References	p. 313
Index	p. 333
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