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On Conversation, Its Modes, Pleasures, and Perils
Stephanie Ross
Abstract
My goal is to explore the pleasures and perils of conversation. After acknowledging some insights from speech act theory and pragmatics, I turn to Paul Grice’s account of conversation as cooperative. I offer some proposals about what makes conversants well-suited and their exchanges pleasant and successful, examine conversational style, contrast in-person with online communication, and close by examining some practices that can undermine conversational exchange. I suggest that imbalances of power and the phenomenon of being talked at are especially destructive.
Key Words
consilience; conversants; flow; Paul Grice; interaction; journey; persuasion; style; talking at
1. Purposes and allure
My aim in this article is to explore various modes of conversation, tracing both its pleasures and its perils. I am particularly interested in determining what makes someone an ideal conversational partner for another, though to avoid repetition of the cumbersome phrase ‘conversational partner’ I will recruit the term ‘conversant’ to flag that role. While my own deficits prompt this project, I don’t aspire to produce a how-to piece that presents practical tips. Rather, I hope to assemble examples and apercus in a way that will foster analysis, insight, and theory-building.
We engage others in conversation for a variety of purposes. We speak in order to share information. But we also exchange words to ask questions, forge connections, change attitudes, vent emotions, gain status, urge action, share stories, pass the time, advise, amuse, comfort, challenge, negotiate, demean, and much, much more. I suspect we each have unique conversational styles—preferred subject matters, typical tones, habits with regard to listening and taking up verbal space. So any analysis of conversation should be indexed to an appropriate set of background variables. Still, my interest is to seek commonalities that can indicate which conversations are likely to seem pleasurable and rewarding, and which instead are off-putting and objectionable.
An anecdote that flags the pull of conversation comes from Vivian Gornick’s review of Sherry Turkle’s memoir, The Empathy Diaries. As Gornick tells the story, Turkle’s husband, the MIT professor Seymour Papert, was “expected home for a dinner party he and Sherry are giving, he is hours late; then, instead of appearing he calls to say he’s at the airport because a conversation with a mathematician doing work in Tunisia has grown so compelling he is flying to Tunis with him. Dinner party? What dinner party?…”[1] It is surely extraordinary that a chance conversation should have enough allure to prompt one of the participants to make an impromptu trip to Tunisia. For a start, who among us can afford to impetuously book such a costly flight? Clearly Papert is an outlier when it comes to conversation. Gornick frames her story by noting that he “was something of a sociopath” and notes that “[his] inability to put himself in Sherry’s place was monumental.” But still, for me this example serves as a vivid marker of the magnetic power of good conversation.
In what follows, I will first discuss some philosophical accounts of verbal communication, then survey various aspects of present-day practice in an attempt to pinpoint the structure and rewards of successful conversation. After contrasting face-to-face interaction with both written and electronic exchanges, I will close by examining some challenges that threaten to derail this enterprise.
2. Some theoretical accounts of conversation
Looking to the history of Western philosophy, there are moments when speech and conversation were fruitfully examined. Of course Socrates’ conversations with his interlocutors were among the earliest instances of recorded exchanges. While his discussants seem eager and engaged, I’m not sure how pleasant it is to be at the receiving end of Socratic instruction. Eighteenth-century British philosophers fixated on impressions and ideas would have taken successful conversations to be those that moved the relevant cluster of ideas from one conversant’s head to another’s. Unfortunately, the problem of other minds suggests we can never entirely confirm uptake. What could show that another had fully grasped our meaning? Moreover, later developments in the philosophy of language show that more is involved in successful conversation than the standard meaning of the words exchanged.
Turning to recent times, J. L. Austin’s How to Do Things with Words (1962) and subsequent forays into pragmatics on the part of a variety of clever philosophers are noteworthy twentieth-century benchmarks. Austin distinguished three different sorts of speech acts, that is, three different ways we can put language to use. He labelled them locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary acts. The latter class, which Austin called ‘performatives,’ is the most radical. It involves using words to accomplish something specific in the world. Examples would include binding yourself by uttering “I promise,” and becoming married by uttering “I do.” Note that the expected consequences can only unfurl when certain conditions are met. Think of the many surprise factors that can invalidate a marriage ceremony.
Austin’s analysis of speech acts reminds us of the many things we can accomplish through speech, but his taxonomy seems more applicable to individual utterances than to the give and take of an ongoing conversational exchange. Still, an important take-away from this period is an awareness of the role of context in creating meaning. In his Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article, “Speech Acts,” Mitchell Green distinguishes content from force, where content is the proposition semantically tied to a particular string of words, while force is the meaning that emerges on particular utterance occasions. Pragmatic theories similarly distinguish utterance meaning from utterer’s meaning. Robert Stecker’s vivid example, “The bus is coming,” has always driven this distinction home for me. The utterance can mean two entirely different things depending on whether it urges the listener to run towards the bus stop in order to clamber onto the vehicle or to jump up onto the curb in order to avoid being flattened. A variety of other factors can also displace words from their expected traditional meanings. Examples include irony, satire, and the idioms prevalent in particular cultures.
While our quotidian conversations might involve some components that Austin would deem perlocutionary, that does not seem to be the staple making up everyday exchanges. And as noted above, illocutionary force varies widely depending on context. In 1975, philosopher H.P. Grice published a seminal paper, “Logic and Conversation,” that focused on aspects more relevant to the theme I’m pursuing here. Noting that successful conversation is a cooperative enterprise rather than a series of disconnected remarks, Grice proposed that certain shared expectations are in place greasing the skids of our conversational give and take. In particular, he announced a Cooperative Principle—“make your conversational contribution such as is required at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged”—that was observed by following four maxims, of Quantity (be informative), Quality (be truthful), Relation (be relevant), and Manner (be clear).[2] For Grice, we communicate by intending that others recognize our intentions to do so. Communication can be undermined if we violate any or all of the maxims: if we offer less information than is required or too much information that distracts; if we make false claims or claims for which we lack evidential support; if we embark on tangents; if we formulate obscure or ambiguous remarks; or if we are prolix or disorganized. The distinction between natural and non-natural meaning is central to Grice’s theory. He offers “spots mean measles” as an example of the former, while the ordinary parsing of my previous sentence is an example of the latter. I am primarily concerned with non-natural meaning, the semantic content delivered by our utterances in a given context. Though some of the features that help us determine others’ feelings and moods—facial expression, tone of voice, and so on—clearly belong in the natural category.
Following Grice’s maxims helps ensure that our utterances convey the meaning we intended. But this is far from guaranteeing conversational success. Not only must the speaker choose words properly, but the speaker’s conversant must be open to receiving them. What makes for a receptive interlocutor? It helps to be willing, interested, intrigued, perhaps also deferential. Grice’s emphasis on cooperation is crucial. Both parties to a conversation must want it to succeed. Grice posits a structure of mirrored and iterated intentions that facilitate conversational exchange. They explain how conversants, working together, can explore a subject matter or perform a task. Of course the division of labor will never be exactly equal. But I suspect that successful and satisfying conversation results when participants share a communicative goal, enjoy at least a minimal match of manner and style, and accommodate one another’s interests, moods, and needs.
3. Conversation in practice
If Grice’s theory offers a model of our use of words to not only exchange but also cooperatively construct meaning, then it seems to provide the backbone for a useful analysis of conversation. But I would like to delve more deeply into the hallmarks of success. When are conversations enjoyable and worth pursuing? One promising suggestion comes from Noël Carroll. In a discussion following a presentation on criticism, he proposed that effective critical conversation flows.[3] This trope, grounded in the movement of water, which can be inexorable but also engrossing and compelling, brings to mind the work of another theorist, the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Initially pursuing the study of happiness, Csikszentmihalyi turned his attention to creativity and asked what exactly went on when thinkers, artists, athletes, and more were “in the zone,” that is, when they seemed to be operating at peak capacity. He dubbed this ‘flow.’ In such moments, processes seem to proceed on autopilot in that actors don’t need to consciously log each step they take to advance their endeavors. In a TED Talk, Csikszentmihalyi offered a set of hallmarks, traits that establish the presence of this desirable state. These include features like the following: concentrated focus, serenity, clarity and control, ease, suitable fit of challenge to skill, ecstatic feeling tone, and, finally, a sense of intrinsic reward.[4]
Does any of this account transfer to conversation? If the movement of water is Csikszentmihalyi’s underlying trope, the one we should consider taking up is that of a shared journey. Are conversants at least sometimes embarking on a journey where they share responsibility for the manner and direction of travel? While advancing a conversation might not seem on a par with the activities Csikszentmihalyi examined, it does require insight, the ability to forge new connections, the Wittgensteinian knowledge of how to go on. I have in mind some of Wittgenstein’s examples from the Philosophical Investigations, where he ponders how we are able to continue a certain series or how a builder’s assistant knows to bring his master a certain slab. Such knowledge figures in Kalle Puolakka’s account in his 2017 paper, “The Aesthetics of Conversation.”[5] Puolakka draws on the philosophy of John Dewey to foreground the notion of interaction as all-important. He suggests that conversation exhibits a developmental structure, unfolding as “there runs a sense of growing meaning conserved and accumulating toward an end that is felt as accomplishment of a process…” On this view, how a given remark accords with what preceded it becomes crucial. Progress ensues when interlocutors are well-suited and understand one another. In such cases, “imagination … build[s] a picture of what will make a good next move in the conversation, given how it has proceeded, that will either further it or serve as a meaningful conclusion.”[6] Puolakka invites us to consider a range of possible next moves: unexpected, foreseeable, appropriate, inappropriate, ground-breaking, banal, and more. The participants’ overall assessment of a conversation in which they are engaged surely is affected by the modifiers characterizing each addition to the conversational stream.
Puolakka aims to track specific conversations, those with aesthetic value. I will have more to say about the aesthetics of conversation in section 4, below. But I believe his attention to how one conversant’s response complements or clashes with what came before is central to the analysis of all conversations, not just those with positive aesthetic value. Return to our trope of a shared journey. We have acknowledged that a certain degree of creativity is needed to sustain such an endeavor. While a shared destination or goal need not be in place at the start, conversation advances only when participants offer supportive responses, rejoinders consilient with what has gone before. Once one conversant has made a statement, any number of rejoinders can offer an appropriate continuation establishing one of many possible trajectories forward from that point. By contrast, non sequiturs would not be welcome as they would block conversational progress. The presence of flow is not essential for conversational success; as one anonymous referee has pointed out, a noxious conversation between two racists might exhibit admirable flow. Instead, conversation succeeds when each juncture—each of the interactional units to which Puolakka our attention—helps conversants advance along an acceptable path. My overall take-away is this. Relative to any of the conversational tasks I listed at the start, participants who fruitfully work together can establish and attain their journey’s destination, though it isn’t required that an endpoint is established at the start, or at anywhere along the way!
There are further questions about how pleasurable such interactions should be. Some conversations aim to achieve practical goals: to impart information, solve problems, comfort, persuade. Sometimes these goals can be achieved with a certain degree of flash, and certain conversations can exist primarily to dazzle—‘scintillating’ is a familiar modifier in such cases. We can cite certain past cultural moments renowned for loci of scintillating conversation. Consider the salons of seventeenth-century France or the coffeehouses of eighteenth-century Britain. Both allegedly involved bravura performances where wit and erudition were on display. Of course quotidian conversation needn’t match these models. For a start, not all conversations involve the element of ease. Some conversations proceed haltingly, with pauses or a perceived degree of difficulty. In Csikszentmihalyi’s terms, they fail to flow. Social scientist Sherry Turkle seconds this view, noting that “Conversation, like life, has silences and boring bits.”[7] And, in fact, I suspect many of us spend time mired in sub-par conversation. Consider verbal exchanges within our profession. Presumably philosophers are in the business of analysis and persuasion. These endeavors can be difficult and taxing. One might even characterize persuasion as inherently hostile, since it aspires to remake an aspect of another. That is, successful persuasion changes its target recipient, inculcating beliefs that weren’t previously endorsed. This is especially challenging when the newly instilled belief is an outlier that doesn’t cohere with one’s other pre-existing beliefs, requiring that they be reassessed and perhaps jettisoned. Nevertheless, likemindedness is a valued trait. So the endpoint of both conversation and argumentation can be welcome when each ushers in a degree of agreement that is properly prized. Ted Cohen’s engaging analysis of jokes makes this central to their success.[8] To get someone’s joke is to be bonded by a shared sense of humor. As Cohen puts it, “A point in telling a joke is the attainment of community.”[9] My point is simply that getting there, achieving agreement, is not always a smooth process.
Let me turn to a related worry. Can there be too much agreement? It is becoming a commonplace nowadays to observe that many of us inhabit “informational silos” and only acknowledge views that cohere with our own. A companion trend, equally alarming, is a tendency for mere repetition to persuade listeners of the truth of what is said. Consider the claim that Donald Trump won the 2020 election, fortified by endless chants of “Stop the steal!” The unfortunate result—some conversational gaps perhaps can’t be bridged. Take discussion between a MAGA Republican and a progressive Democrat—or even one pitting an analytic against a continental philosopher. An organization called Braver Angels tries to address this plight by offering participants practice in talking across such gaps. Braver Angels arose in response to the realization that US politics had become unacceptably partisan. Its website contains this invitation: “Connect with fellow Americans from different backgrounds in guided 1:1 conversations to better understand contrasting views, find common ground, and share practical ways to strengthen our country.”[10] While the impetus behind Braver Angels seems admirable, it appears to offer an arduous and piecemeal solution to a widespread societal problem. The organization’s posted tenets and online workshops seem to privilege respectful disagreement—understanding others’ differing opinions—over bringing them around to share one’s views. For example: “The goal of political conversation is to learn about the other person’s position and find accurate disagreement—not to persuade them to change their mind.”[11] So is this another instance where persuasion is properly vilified and left behind?
While persuasion does retain some connotation of force, recall Aristotle’s advice to orators. He urged them to tailor their words to what they knew about their target audience in order to make uptake more likely. Identifying three modes of persuasion, he characterized the second as “’putting the audience into a certain frame of mind” and noted the necessity of employing “notions possessed by everybody” when addressing people who can’t be instructed.[12] Thus persuasion might be rooted in knowing our interlocutors especially well as opposed to simply browbeating them. Presumably disputants must come to agree about first principles and underlying assumptions before doxastic change can occur. In ordinary exchanges, as opposed to arenas (professional philosophy? political debate?) that highlight disputation, conversation flows when contributors come up with consilient responses that are welcomed by their interlocutors. Though again, appropriate responses can reorient conversations in a variety of directions.
Are conversational journeys most prized and most successful when the participants make roughly equal contributions to the endeavor? Perhaps the answer is that each conversant should engage to the extent that his or her personal style allows. But this invites a new question. Typical components of personal style might include the clothes one wears, the haircut one sports, the interiors once inhabits, the movies and books one consumes … Does this extend to our manner of conversing? Let us pause to consider whether the notion of a personal conversational style has traction.
4. Conversational style
In examining conversational style, we enter the realm of the aesthetic. Alexander Baumgarten introduced this term in 1735 to demarcate sensible as opposed to theoretical knowledge. In his 1959 essay, “Aesthetic Concepts,” Frank Sibley approached the task of definition by offering a now-famous list of exemplars and then proclaiming that such qualities are not condition-governed.[13] In referring to conversations as lilting or compact or open-ended or ferocious, we are attributing aesthetic qualities to the exchanges. Note that these modifiers encompass sensory, semantic, and emotional attributes. But the components of conversational style are even more wide-ranging. In “The Status of Style,” Nelson Goodman reminded us that style is not simply a matter of surface appearance, details of form as opposed to content. Speaking of literature, he proposed that “some notable features of style are features of the matter rather than the manner of the saying. In more ways than one, subject is involved in style.[14] Across the arts, the subjects to which certain artists repeatedly return is as much a component of their style as is their manner of treating those subjects. Consider Claude Monet’s multiplied cathedrals and haystacks, John Updike’s signature sagas of suburban infidelity, Sergio Leone’s revisionist Westerns with violent plots and amoral characters.[15] While artists are generally free to select the subjects they pursue,[16] our construal of conversation as a cooperative enterprise complicates a similar approach to conversational style. Those engaged in a genuine conversation, as opposed to a one-sided monologue, can’t always set the agenda. At least some of the time their conversational partners introduce the topic under discussion. Still, each conversant can respond with a distinctive and highly personalized set of images, examples, concerns, and more. That is, we can introduce predictable content even when responding to the conversational gambits of others. And of course we get to select the manner of our response. But what determines these through-lines?
Richard Wollheim’s distinction between general and individual style offers some hints. He classed general style, that of schools, periods, ateliers, as taxonomic, while maintaining that individual style of necessity had “psychological reality.”[17] I believe Wollheim’s approach was Freudian at base. He believed that markers of individual style arose from genuine aspects of who we are. He insisted that adequate style descriptions must be generative rather than taxonomic, meaning that they stem from processes characteristic of the artist’s creative actions.[18] While Wollheim cautioned that his analysis is meant to apply solely to the pictorial arts, his exposition certainly does not rule out the applicability of individual style across the arts.[19] I believe we can also extend it to the art of conversation, loosely construed, though I would add that conversational style must be indexed to the many different conversational purposes and occasions set out at the start of this essay. Thus we might exhibit different patterns and regularities when performing different conversational tasks, when interacting with different conversational partners, when conversing in different venues. These markers may take the form of subject matter—topics to which we return—but we also might display predictable patterns with regard to emotion, self-regard, control of conversational flow. These conditions do frequently obtain. Granted, people differ in their levels of conversational engagement. Some are taciturn and need to be drawn out, others are prone to logorrhea and hog verbal space. Interest, admiration, and attraction can all facilitate conversational give and take. Pheromones are not to be discounted! While it can be fun to engage in a conversation where participants riff on a theme like jazz instrumentalists performing solos, there can also be a value to routinized, repetitive conversations. In hard times, these can be needed to reinforce our sense of self, deliver comfort, reaffirm the bonds that form our social network.
Wollheim focuses on the art of painting in his paper. While conversation lacks the institutional framework that permeates Wollheim’s account of style in painting—he mentions apprenticeship and tradition, the medium and structural/compositional principles[20]—I believe considering its parallel in written passages can make the notion of conversational style more plausible. Our relationship to our own and others’ words animates both arenas. So let me briefly use the written word as a foil in hopes of generating some take-aways for the art of conversation.
Style certainly finds a home in literature. Esteemed authors are generally accorded distinctive styles that interpreters, critics, and appreciators take into account when assessing their works. Consider Jenefer Robinson’s account of the mannerisms making up Henry James’ distinctive style.[21] Ernest Hemingway is generally credited with a terse, spare style that we might well associate with stereotypical notions of masculinity. Contrast that with the florid prose style of Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, its passages replete with alliteration and personification, or the dense poetic descriptions of earth as seen from space in Samantha Harvey’s Orbital, both books winners of the Booker Prize. Word choice and grammatical structure play clear roles here in addition to distinctive subject matter. Considering a related task, that of translation, helps highlight the richness that can be conveyed through writing. Acclaimed translations of famous literary works aspire to capture not only the core meanings of those works but also their tone, structure, rhythms, resonances, and implications.[22]
The notion of prose style applies not only to works of art but also to more pedestrian cases, as evidenced by our proprietary attitude towards our own formulations. Many readers might share my indignation when others have occasion to edit what we’ve written. My overwhelming sense is one of affront. That isn’t what I said, how I chose to say it. Rather, I wanted to use precisely those words in exactly that array. The deeper question is what gave rise to that selection? I doubt it was a conscious affair. Rather, we simply find ourselves inclined to make certain choices. We know they will please us without being sure just why. This reaction supports Wollheim’s insistence on the psychological reality of style.
Return now to conversation. Are there equivalent markers of style in this realm? In her book, Conversational Style, Deborah Tannen attempts to extract an overview of this topic by analyzing a two-hour, forty-minute conversation amongst six guests around a Thanksgiving table. She groups features of conversational style into nine categories. These include subject matter, auditory aspects, overall enthusiasm, use of questions, pacing, repetition, cohesion, and more.[23] Evaluative notions make their way into Tannen’s fifth category, pacing, as the first entry is “cooperative vs. obstructive overlap.” The same can be said of finishing another’s statement, one of the entries under her sixth category, repetition. Jumping in to complete a conversant’s statement might have a variety of motivations ranging from friendly and helpful (I see where you’re going and want to voice my understanding) to somewhat hostile (I’m impatient and can’t be bothered to let you complete your own thoughts!).
One might object that Tannen’s catalogue of conversational devices is insufficiently systematic. For a start, it is based on a single group gathering. Any such compilation should surely be indexed to broad cultural categories—age, race, class, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, and more—as these shape our background assumptions and expectations. But our responses are also determined by specifics of the situations in which in our conversations arise—context, purpose, feelings, moods. In the end, our words both spoken and written reflect who we are. Tannen emerges from her examination of the Thanksgiving conversation with a contrast between two predominant conversational styles, the first of which she calls high-involvement, the second high-considerateness. We are not told whether these styles are typical nor whether this division is exhaustive. In my opinion, the high involvement speakers—Tannen identified herself as one of three present that evening—would be unpleasant interlocutors as their common traits seem to be interrupting, speaking loudly, telling more stories, in short, generally dominating the conversation.
5. In-person vs. online exchanges
In pondering the workings of everyday talk, I have considered in-person exchanges paradigmatic. But it is important to acknowledge alternative modes of communication. In this section, I will examine some challenges posed by electronic devices. My guide here is Sherry Turkle, whose book, Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age, is a screed against the ubiquity of digital connection. She foregrounds two deleterious consequences of our infatuation with our devices: a palpable lack of empathy and a waning of authenticity. Turkle is a social scientist who documents numerous studies she has conducted purporting to show how being glued to our smart phones—at parties, around dinner tables, in the classroom—has changed how we interact and, as a result, who we are. For Turkle, such scenarios where participants all clutch cellphones illustrate a clear downside to our romance with and addiction to technology. The ever-present devices encourage multi-tasking and bring about divided attention. However, her main objections concern not how technology alters our relations to the world around us but how it impairs our relations to one another. That is, Turkle believes that technology provides a degraded mode of communication that impairs our ability to truly know our conspecifics.
Turkle was called in to consult at schools whose faculty felt that students evidenced a clear and disconcerting decline in empathy. Consider what is missing when conversants switch to primarily electronic exchange. For a start, we lose the ability to read body language, facial expression, and tone of voice, and all that these reveal about others’ emotions.[24] It’s commonly claimed that determining the emotional tone of electronic exchanges is extremely difficult. Thus our reliance on emojis and abbreviations—lol (laugh out loud), jk (just kidding), smh (shaking my head) and the like—to pinpoint senders’ feelings. Turkle repeatedly contrasts conversation with what she calls mere connection. I struggle to understand the exact force of this distinction, but clearly connection that links us through electronic devices is meant to represent a falling off from conversation. It obtains when we exchange messages with people we do not, and cannot, know fully. However, we can converse (in Turkle’s valorized sense!) with people who lie, evade, dissemble, as well as with individuals who are deluded or self-deceived. In these cases, too, we would fail to truly know our interlocutors. But Turkle seems to think that conversations, even those that are misleading or impoverished, offer opportunities to remedy these deficits.
Readers might wonder how conversation can be subject to rigorous scientific scrutiny. One example Turkle cites provides some illumination. She describes a tool called the Sociometric Badge that Ben Weber, a graduate of MIT’s Media Lab, developed in order to study workplace collaboration.[25] Aspects of conversation monitored by the Sociometric Badge include “who [employees] talk to, for how long, on what topic, with what pace of speech, with what tone of voice, and how often they interrupt one another.”[26] Clearly the variables Weber took into account in formulating his measure of workplace interaction overlap with a number that emerged as I ruminated about conversational style and conversational success. The core question Turkle invites us to ponder is whether exchanges conducted through electronic devices fall short of counting as conversations as understood in this paper. I am willing to grant the difficulty of determining the emotions underlying textual exchanges.[27] However it is not clear that we are all that proficient at reading others’ emotions when face to face. Some people can dissemble, some can be clueless. So we can question the superiority of the paradigm Turkle champions.
I have characterized conversation as a shared journey whose route, pace, and ultimate destination is constantly renegotiated as the participants reply to one another. Turkle assumes that this process succeeds only when conversants can come to know one another, and I believe she would claim this cannot proceed when their emotions are not discernible. Yet, Turkle maintains that cell phones and the like provide an additional impediment to true conversation. Because they offer the opportunity to edit our responses, she claims they allow us to present false versions of ourselves. As she explains “… online communication makes us feel more in charge of our time and self-presentation. If we text rather than talk, we can have each other in amounts we can control. And texting and email and posting let us present the self we want to be. We can edit and retouch.”[28] She goes on to affix a memorable label to this phenomenon: “I call it the Goldilocks effect … We can’t get enough of each other if we can have each other at a digital distance – not too close, not too far, just right.”[29]
I am loathe to accept Turkle’s overall argument about authenticity because the very feature she deems an impediment I consider a virtue. I appreciate the opportunity to pause, consider alternatives, and come to a measured decision about what to say and, more important, about how to present myself. Authenticity strikes me as a positive quality, one we should valorize. But how it applies in this context may depend on which theory of the self we endorse. Do we each have some enduring self that we display in moments of authenticity? If so, then responses that distance us from this version are problematic. But if the self is something variable, multilayered, evolving, then edited responses can play an essential role in maintaining and constructing that self. Whether we embrace Hume’s bundle theory, some type of narrative theory, or either of Galen Strawson’s time-sensitive formulations, I believe our self must be viewed as ever evolving. Each new experience we log can require that we recontextualize all that has come before. New patterns of influence and foreshadowing can emerge. On this view of what it is to be—and to come to know—a self, reflection and editing would seem to be not only virtues but also essential components of the constructive process.
6. Benefits and harms
Why do some conversations seem pleasant, others off-putting? Certain purposes and certain conversational styles seem inimical to satisfactory conversation. While some successful speakers seek to build up their conversational partners, others aim to belittle. Different attitudes towards a subject matter, different levels of knowledge, differences in how one’s day is going can all affect conversational flow and value. Someone who is especially knowledgeable or especially entertaining merits attentive listening, but not someone out to assuage her ego or score points. And as already acknowledged, there are chasms that simply can’t be bridged. In sum, not all exchanges are cooperative in the manner Grice had hoped. In considering some ways they can fall short, we enter the realm of morality. In the discussion that follows, I take morality to be concerned above all with the distribution of benefits and harms, though this inevitably takes into account the relation of self to others as well as theories of eudaimonia or human flourishing dating back to Aristotle. I intend my discussion to be neutral with respect to competing moral theories, that is, to competing ways of fleshing out these notions. Let me start with the charge that conversational content itself can harm participants.
In a 1981 piece, “How Words Hurt: Attitude, Metaphor, and Oppression,” I sought to refute the old nursery rhyme, “Sticks and stones may break my bones but names can never hurt me.”[30] I built on Robert Baker’s analysis in “’Pricks’ and ‘Chicks’: A Plea for Persons” to indicate one way specific words and phrases can deliver harm. We both argue that dead metaphors, for example, using the verb ‘screw’ to reference sexual activity or financial interactions, can convey dismissive and demeaning attitudes. Luvell Anderson has devoted much of his philosophical career to the analysis of hate speech, especially words and phrases that convey racial animus. His co-authored Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on this topic contains sections on slurs (defined as “a type of insult that targets race, gender, sexual orientation, nationality, ability, politics, immigrant status, geographic region, and other categories”), code words, and dog whistles. Each of these modes of address disparages those to whom it refers. Presumably they trade on misleading stereotypes rather than having any basis in fact. It seems inescapable that conversations employing hate speech, rather than merely mentioning the phrases in question, invite moral condemnation.
Morally flawed conversations can go unrecognized. In the cases of objectionable content just considered, conversants might be unaware of possible harm. But current theorists have introduced a new category to monitor, microaggressions, where this is not the case. While the modifier ‘micro’ suggests comments that seem innocuous, too fleeting to register, microaggressions are noticed by those they target. Yet those delivering them are unaware of the effects of their words, in all likelihood because they convey deep-seated and inadequately examined assumptions and attitudes, many of them socially shared.[31] Author Ella Washington defines microaggressions as situations where “someone says or does something that feels hostile or offensive to some aspect of our identity—and the person doesn’t even realize it.”[32] In a Psychology Today piece on micro-inequalities, Berit Brogaard assembles a number of examples from her home discipline of philosophy. Here is one that speaks to me: “I have been ignored, talked over, and talked down to on many occasions. When I gave an objection to a view in a philosophy seminar, just ten minutes later, the teacher credited and praised a male student for having come up with the objection.”[33] Note that the trio of traits mentioned—being ignored, talked over, talked down to—can figure in the characterization of what Deborah Tannen labelled a high-involvement conversational style. They are features of conversational manner as opposed to conversational content.[34] Each conveys a lack of respect for one’s interlocutor. Philosopher Jill Delston has proposed a companion category of microaffirmations.[35] Surprisingly she argues that these too can be unwelcome. They can harm when doled out inequitably; they can also accord undue influence to those who habitually dispense them.
The authors mentioned above make it clear that engaging in conversation can be an opportunity to hurt or harm someone due to the content conveyed. There can also be instances where withholding information is just as deleterious as including unwelcome content.[36] But I am especially interested in aspects of conversational practice that can be damaging in and of themselves, irrespective of the words employed. Accordingly, I would like to close by tracing some deleterious effects that flow from imbalances of power and mismatches in style rather than from the meaning—literal, figurative, or implied—of speakers’ words.
Power differentials between conversants play a key role in who speaks, who listens. Gender is clearly relevant here, since power is not equally distributed across this dimension. Thus Deborah Tannen framed her best-seller, You Just Don’t Understand (1990), by claiming that conversations between men and women closely resemble anthropologists’ accounts of cross-cultural exchanges. That is, men and women inhabit different worlds with starkly different values and expectations. Tannen proposes that women view conversation as an opportunity to network and connect, while men instead talk in order to gain status and put others down. Thus, under a section heading that announces “Male-Female Conversation is Cross-Cultural Communication,” Tannen explains, “If women speak and hear a language of connection and intimacy while men speak and hear a language of status and independence, then communication between men and women can be like cross-cultural communication, prey to a clash of conversational styles.”[37] Of course there are exceptions to this brusque generalization, but Tannen offers evidence, both real-life examples and cases from fiction, to show that her framework often holds true. For example, exploring the phenomenon she calls troubles talk, she says that men generally try to offer a quick fix for whatever problem is being broached, while women tend to respond in the first person, telling of their own experiences that resemble the problem the speaker has described.[38] While this might make the women appear self-involved rather than caring, Tannen invites us to reconceive these exchanges suggesting they are in effect attempts to connect.
In all likelihood we could analyze troubles talk in terms of Grice’s cooperative thesis. But one habit threatens to definitively sink cooperation: the phenomenon of being talked at. In general, we tend to differ in how eager we are to take up verbal space. Some like to hold forth, while others prefer to draw out their fellow conversants. Many self-help books advise taking an interest in others and showing this by asking questions. We often defer to experts, acknowledging their greater or special life experience. But being talked at is neither reciprocal nor chosen, and it is almost always belittling. It treats the listener as an acolyte instead of a conversant engaged in a shared enterprise. In his encyclopedia article, “Hate Speech,” Luvell Anderson quotes Judith Butler’s remark that “[w]hat hate speech does … is to constitute the subject in a subordinate position.” Rebecca Solnit’s famous piece, “Men Explain Things to Me,” presents an extreme version of this phenomenon.[39] At a dinner in Aspen, Solnit’s host asked her to stay after other guests had left. He began to praise a book from which he thought she might profit. It was about the career of nineteenth-century British photographer Eadweard Muybridge. The man held forth at great and unwelcome length as Solnit’s companion tried repeatedly to let him know that Solnit was in fact the author of the book in question!
Solnit first published her piece about that evening in 2008. She summarized the incident as follows: “That I was indeed the author of the very important book it turned out he hadn’t read, just read about in the New York Times Book Review a few months earlier, so confused the neat categories into which his world was sorted that he was stunned speechless–for a moment, before he began holding forth again.”[40] Musing about the prevalence of such behavior, she noted that “the out-and-out confrontational confidence of the totally ignorant is, in my experience, gendered. Men explain things to me, and other women, whether or not they know what they’re talking about.” It was Solnit’s readers who coined the barbed word, “mansplaining,” that so wryly captures this phenomenon. It underscores the suggestion that such “gendered” behavior can be primitive, natural, second-nature for many men. I consider it an instance of what I’ll label the Pygmalion Syndrome, the view that others, women in particular, are vessels to be shaped or filled.[41] This attitude requires that they listen and absorb rather than attempt to hold forth themselves. This clearly runs counter to self-development and self-realization and deprives women of agency in these important realms.
We might rank conversants on how passive they tend to be, where passivity correlates with not claiming verbal space. In all likelihood, we would score differently depending on whom we have engaged in conversation and on the attendant circumstances. However, it seems likely that more passive conversants are more likely to be interrupted, harangued, in short, talked at. We can of course endeavor to change our conversational style. For example, at meetings I sometimes try to force myself to ask a question or offer a comment at each session I attend in order to combat my inclination to simply listen and take it all in. But overall, exchanges where one participant feels unwilling or unable to contribute to a degree that matches his or her preferred conversational style should count as worrisome.
Are there remedies for mismatches in conversational style? Can we persuade conversants whose style we find unwelcome to alter their behavior? As indicated throughout this paper, our conversational practices and needs are highly situational. They vary with varying venues, purposes, partners, and more. Ella Washington advocated mindfulness as a means of combatting microaggression. Persuading others that their very manner of conversing, as opposed to the content conveyed, can harm those they address may pose quite a high bar. But we can aspire to model alternatives attractive enough that our interlocutors would be drawn to imitation. And of course we can always seek exchanges that match us with partners suited to the topics we hope to explore and also to the changing variables that shape our conversational practice from occasion to occasion.[42]
7. Closing thoughts
Let me close on a more positive note. Good conversation should be valued. We can all find ways to enhance our conversational skills. The connection between conversation and friendship seems a real one. Satisfying conversation promotes existing friendships and can help cement new ones. Finding new conversational partners encourages us to assess their conversational style and find ways to make ours complementary. We should always seek to converse. Some of our exchanges might be entirely in our heads—imaginary conversations with individuals we haven’t encountered in real life or “re-dos” of actual conversations that didn’t go as we’d hoped. We should also aspire to engage with a variety of individuals and groups, both those who are a good fit for our conversational style and those whose manner and style is quite distant from our own, as there is much to learn about ourselves, others, and the world through a full range of actual encounters. And finally, in our electronic age we should welcome that variant of conversation that proceeds through the exchange of texts or website posts. These contexts provide time to think, reconsider, ponder, and edit before committing to a rejoinder. This allows those who aren’t quick on their feet to still make valuable contributions to an ongoing exchange. It also allows those who might make rash remarks to “count to ten” and consider the consequences of what they might say. Sites with word limits encourage users to master precision, and the panoply of online forums allows users to find audiences for almost any conversational topic imagined. In sum, there are clear benefits to these many modes of connecting with others, all opportunities for conversation to flourish.
Stephanie Ross
sross@umsl.edu
I am a Professor Emerita of Philosophy at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. I am the author of What Gardens Mean (1998) and Two Thumbs Up: How Critics Aid Appreciation (2020), both University of Chicago Press, in addition to numerous articles, chapters, and encyclopedia entries in the areas of aesthetics and environmental ethics.
Published on September 14, 2025.
Cite this article: Stephanie Ross, “On Conversation, its Modes, Pleasures, and Perils,” Contemporary Aesthetics, Volume 23 (2025), accessed date.
Endnotes
[1] Vivian Gornick, “Once More with Feeling,” New York Times, April 4, 2021.
[2] H. P Grice, “Logic and Conversation,” in Syntax and Semantics 3: Speech Acts, ed. Peter Cole and Jerry L. Morgan, (Academic Press, 1975), 45-6.
[3] Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (Harper Perennial, 1990), 4.
[4] Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, “Flow,” TED Talk, 2004.
[5] Kalle Puolakka, “The Aesthetics of Conversation,” Contemporary Aesthetics (2017).
[6] Pointing to similarities in Ted Cohen’s account of metaphor, Puolakka notes that “making an imaginative next move in a conversation can require detailed knowledge of the interlocutors’ mental lives and of their linguistic capacities.”
[7] Sherry Turkle, Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age (Penguin Books, 2016,) 327.
[8] Ted Cohen, “Jokes,” in Pleasure, Preference, & Value: Studies in Philosophical Aesthetics, ed. Eva Schaper (Cambridge University Press, 1983), 120-136.
[9] Cohen, 124.
[10] www.braverangels.org. The organization’s name is derived from a remark in Abraham Lincoln’s First Inaugural Address.
[11] From the PDF, “Quick Tips for Braver Conversations,” sent out from the website to those indicating interest in Braver Angels’ mission.
[12] Aristotle, The Rhetoric and Poetics of Aristotle (Modern Library, 1984), Book One Chapter Two 24, 22.
Unfortunately, we need to set aside the present-day tendency that sees people persuaded by simple repetition, often of the most egregious falsehoods. See my comments about informational silos and conversational gaps above.
[13] Frank Sibley, “Aesthetic Concepts,” in Approaches to Ethics: Collected Papers on Philosophical Aesthetics (Oxford, 2001), 1,4. Here is Sibley’s list: Unified, balanced, integrated, lifeless, serene, somber, dynamic, powerful, vivid, delicate, moving, trite sentimental, tragic.
[14] Nelson Goodman, “The Status of Style,” Critical Inquiry 1, no.4 (1975), 799.
[15] Thanks to Cynthia Freeland for suggesting this last example.
[16] Commissions from patrons constitute an exception of sorts, though of course artists remain free to refuse or to try to rejigger the constraints.
[17] Richard Wollheim, “Pictorial Style: Two Views” in The Concept of Style, ed. Berel Lang (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1979), 134.
[18] Wollheim, 135.
[19] “… it seems to me that the function, and the importance – possibly even the nature – of individual style are things that differ as we move from one art to another,” Wollheim, 131. He goes on to catalog factors relevant to the case of painting, for instance, “the role of the medium…, the degree of apprenticeship required to be a practitioner…, the significance of tradition, the involvement of bodily techniques, the character of the structural or compositional principles employed.”
[20] Nelson Goodman, “The Status of Style,” 799.
[21] Jenefer Robinson, “Style and Personality in the Literary Work,” Philosophical Review 94, no. 2 (1985): 227-247.
[22] For example, Emily Wilson’s recent versions of the Iliad or the Odyssey, Robert Pinsky’s and Dorothy Sayers’ takes on Dante’s Inferno, Richard Wilbur’s renditions of Moliere.
[23] Deborah Tannen, Conversational Style (Oxford University Press, 2005), 181-2.
[24] I’m not sure whether Turkle would consider Facetime equivalent to actual face-to-face conversation.
[25] Sherry Turkle, Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age (Penguin Books, 2015), 252.
[26] Turkle, 252. Turkle offers this summary: “The badges can analyze intimate aspects of conversation such as body language, interest and excitement, and the amount of influence people have on each other.”
[27] The emotional valence of words and phrases is not fixed in our language. It varies with context. Moreover, attitudes like irony and sarcasm can cancel or reverse habitual associations
[28] Turkle, Reclaiming Conversation, 21.
[29] Turkle, 21. I find myself inclined to contest the spatial metaphor that prompted Turkle to adopt this label. In calibrating our responses, I don’t think that we’re always selecting a middle road that avoids two different ways of getting things wrong, one to each side of the chosen route. The version of ourselves we choose to present on reflection may well be a more extreme version of that first proposal rather than a tempered description that reins in any excesses.
[30] Stephanie Ross, “How Words Hurt: Attitude, Metaphor, and Oppression” in Sexist Language: A Modern Philosophical Analysis, ed. Mary Vetterling-Braggin (Littlefield, Adams, 1981), 194-213. I note towards the start, “Certainly words can be used to taunt and defame, to voice threats and instill fear, to express discriminatory edicts and tyrannical decrees” (195). Versions of the nursery rhyme differ according to whether the second clause mentions words or names. I take it the overall import is the same.
[31] Interestingly, this reverses the pattern with the subliminal ads allegedly screened in movie theaters in the 1950s to bring patrons to the concession stands during intermissions!
[32] Ella F. Washington, “Recognizing and Responding to Microaggressions at Work,” Harvard Business Review, May 10, 2022. Washington’s proposed remedies include mindfulness and a willingness to make things right by acknowledging the offense and apologizing for the harm. She notes, “Building inclusive workplaces requires candid, authentic conversations on tough subjects, like sexism, homophobia, and racism.” Of course with DEI under unrelenting attack these days, it is harder to envision successful implementation of her proposal.
[33] Berit Brogaard, “Micro-Inequalities: 40 Years Later: How to overcome implicit biases in the workplace,” Psychology Today, April 20, 2013.
[34] As argued in section 4 above, both contribute to conversational style.
[35] Jill Delston, “The Ethics and Politics of Microaffirmations.” Philosophy of Management (2021).
[36] I’ve always found it extremely disturbing to find out, in hindsight, that a conversant did not share relevant information. A classic example would be when friends all know, but don’t say, that one’s romantic partner has been cheating.
[37] Deborah Tannen, You Just Don’t Understand, (Ballantine, 1990), 42.
[38] Tannen., 49-61.
[39] Rebecca Solnit, “Men Explain Things to Me” reprinted in Guernica magazine Aug. 20, 2012.
[40] Rebecca Solnit, “Men Explain Things to Me.”
[41] Solnit uses a related trope a little later in her essay: “explaining men still assume I am, in some sort of obscene impregnation metaphor, an empty vessel to be filled with their wisdom and knowledge.”
[42] Mood, setting, interests, needs, and more.