References
- Jon Schonsheck has pointed out to me that moral considerations may override conversational ones on the side of forbidding interruptions in cases in which we place a high value on the fact of a speaker's contribution's taking place, as opposed to the content of that contribution, e.g., the speaker may be a pathologically shy person whom we wish to encourage to talk whenever possible, no matter how inefficiently he stammers, stumbles, gropes for words, repeats himself, etc.
- Strawson . 1964 . “Intention and Convention in Speech Acts” . Philosophical Review , LXXIII It is interesting to note that rules of etiquette or politeness seem to lie along a spectrum of a fairly familiar type: On one end are the rules that are motivated entirely by natural considerations of personal kindness and good will, such as those which proscribe chewing with one's mouth open, spitting unpalatable food back onto the tablecloth, and gratuitously insulting a fellow guest or emptying his plate into his lap. We might call these rules of natural politeness, in that they would naturally be obeyed by any kind and benevolent person who knew the rudimentary empirical facts of normal humans’ psychological aversions to certain sorts of events and who wanted to spare other people aesthetic and personal pain, whether or not that person had ever explicitly been taught such rules by a parent governess, or schoolteacher. At the other end of the spectrum are rules which are (almost) entirely conventional, such as those requiring a gentleman to tip his hat to a lady or a lady to respond on expensive notepaper to social invitations issued to her family as a whole. Rules of this second sort are observed only by persons who have been taught them by rote, whether or not these persons are kind and benevolent by nature, and they are frequently not observed by people who nevertheless are kind and benevolent; further, the specifics of such rules cannot be justified except by direct appeal to the operative conventions themselves. All other rules of politeness fall somewhere between these two extremes; most rules’ justifications depend on (variously intermediate) mixtures of natural and conventional factors. The sort of spectrum I have limned here neatly parallels the “natural"/"conventional” spectrum concerning speech acts and communication discovered by
- This paper has benefited enormously from suggestions by Mary Lycan (personal communication); she should be regarded almost as a co‐author. I am also indebted to Arnold Zwicky for helpful advice.