Jennifer Nagel
University of Toronto
Mon June 11th, 2024
17.00 - 18.30 hrs
Location: Hörsaal 2, Hauptgebäude, Universitätsring 1, 1010 Wien
Please mind that this time the event will take place at the main building of the University of Vienna.
Abstract:
Recent work in the sociology of conversation suggests that human communicative exchanges are generally structured around epistemic imbalances. One might wonder how empirical work on the representation of knowledge in conversation relates to philosophical work on the nature of knowledge itself. I argue that the best theoretical understanding of knowledge makes sense of the relevant empirical findings. If we take knowledge to be an essentially factive mental state, we can model conversation as a generative adversarial structure between speaker and addressee; this model explains why so much human conversation is curiosity-driven, and why human beings spend so much time in conversation with each other.
