Interactional negotiation. In: L. Caponetto and P. Labinaz (Eds.), Sbisà on Speech as Action, London: Palgrave Macmillan 2023, 97-119 (Philosophers in Depth).

Abstract

In this chapter, I employ Marina Sbisà’s idea of interactional negotiation to consider what it is for conversing agents to follow language conventions or to act “as conforming to a convention”. Specifically, I use the Austinian notions of uptake and response as well as the Lewisian concept of accommodation to discuss a few examples of force negotiation and develop a model of its underlying mechanisms. I also suggest that interactional negotiation plays a key role in the functioning of all language conventions — phatic, rhetic, illocutionary, etc. — construed as families or lineages of linguistic precedents in the sense outlined by Ruth G. Millikan.