Publications

Articles (peer-reviewed):

Dänzer, L., Rinner, S., Kulakova, E. (2025). Conversational Scorekeeping. Philosophy Compass (open access).

Recent philosophy of language has seen a growing interest in what is often called the dynamics of conversation or conversational scorekeeping, that is, the ways in which speech and context mutually interact in the course of a conversation. This paper provides an introduction to the scorekeeping approach to linguistic interaction and its different developments and applications. Starting from the seminal work of Stalnaker and Lewis in the 1970s, it looks at subsequent proposals for enriching and extending their conceptions of context or conversational score to account for various linguistic phenomena. In addition, it discusses different, and sometimes conflicting, interpretations of the idea of conversational scorekeeping; the prospects for integrating the scorekeeping approach with two other prominent frameworks in pragmatics, namely, Grice's theory of conversational implicatures and speech act theory; and applications of the approach in the area of social and political philosophy of language.

Rinner, S. (2025). Scorekeeping in a Therapeutic Language Game, Philosophy (open access). (Essay Prize of the Royal Institute of Philosophy)

In 'Scorekeeping in a Language Game', David Lewis famously compares conversations to playing baseball. Just like baseball, conversations have a score which, together with rules for correct play, determines which utterances are acceptable or even true in the course of a conversation. For all similarities, however, there is a crucial difference between conversations and baseball games. Unlike the score of a baseball game, conversational score adjusts in such a way that the utterances made in the course of a conversation count as correct play. This is also known as accommodation. Starting from this scorekeeping approach to language use, the overall aim of the present paper is to provide a better understanding of how the methods and interventions of talking therapies work from a linguistic point of view. According to the scorekeeping model, the methods and interventions of talking therapies are effective by changing the score of the therapeutic conversation, in particular in the form of accommodation. This has significant implications for the therapeutic practice, as it highlights the importance of training therapists in the linguistic aspects of therapeutic methods, in particular in the use of accommodation.