Conversations and Attitudinal Change

Program

October 28, 2025

10am – 1pm (R11 T04 C69, Campus Essen UDE)

Welcome address: Therapeutic Conversations and Attitudinal Change (Stefan Rinner)

Teresa Marques (University of Barcelona): Adding affects to structured contexts

Lars Dänzer (University of Duisburg-Essen): Fitting attitudes in(to) the conversational score

2pm – 5pm (R11 T04 C54, Campus Essen UDE)

Dirk Kindermann (University of Vienna): Emotional commitment

Eleonore Neufeld (University of Massachusetts Amherst): How does pornography change desires? A pragmatic account (with Junhyo Lee)

Registration: stefan.rinner@uni-due.de

Abstracts

Teresa Marques: Adding affects to structured contexts

Recent research on slurs has made important advances by incorporating new developments in semantics and pragmatics. Some authors suggest that slurs have a not-at-issue directive content, whereas others suggest that slurs have a not-at-issue expressive normative content, each of which would update contexts in different ways — as part of speakers' To-Do lists or as part of a different class of (affective) contents to which speakers are committed in different modes. Here, I raise some challenges to both kinds of view and offer a proposal of how to make room for affective or emotional contents in conversational contexts. The main limitation of directive views is that they are at odds with a feature of slurs: repeatability, i.e., the fact that the repetition of a slur reinforces its derogatory power, rather than make it redundant or less intense. On the other hand, there appears to be no extant theory about how contexts can include shared commitments to affective attitudes. Drawing from recent work on collective emotions, I propose a way of representing the addition of affects to structured contexts.

Lars Dänzer: Fitting attitudes in(to) the conversational score

One purpose for which we use language is to influence each other's attitudes, such as desires and emotions. In recent years, philosophers of language have paid increasing attention to this aspect of linguistic communication, and a number of proposals have been made for how to capture it in a model of conversational dynamics of the sort familiar from the work of Robert Stalnaker and David Lewis. My talk aims to contribute to this debate in two ways. On the one hand, I will have a critical look at some of the proposals that have been offered in this area. On the other, I want to motivate and describe an alternative model that is based on two basic ideas: First, one central way to influence the attitudes of our interlocutors is by influencing their views about what attitudes are fitting. Second, views about the fittingness of attitudes are not reducible to factual beliefs, but involve a distinct kind of non-cognitive mental state. Based on these assumptions, I offer a proposal for how to think of the content of views about fittingness and then show how to incorporate that proposal into a model of the conversational score. The resulting picture sheds light, I suggest, on at least one central mechanism by which we can change each other's attitudes in conversation.

Dirk Kindermann: Emotional commitment

Orthodox philosophy of language works within a cognitivist paradigm, in which affect and emotion play little to no explanatory role. In this talk, I look at a number of ways in which affect and emotions are communicated in conversation, including pejoratives, moral language and predicates of personal taste. I'll argue that the standard distinction between expressive and referential meaning is insufficient to capture the communicative role of affective meaning. With reference to Bühler's (1934) early distinction between three functions of language, I will argue that some of the expressions taken to express emotion in fact also serve to appeal emotionally to the hearer, who is invited to join in the emotion or reject it. To capture the appealing effect of speech, I introduce the notion of emotional commitment for both speaker and hearer and develop its contribution to conversational dynamics by extending well-known dialogue models. I close by exploring the ways in which this model can make sense of some of the emotional-affective dynamics in therapist-client conversation. Overall, I hope to provide some exemplary motivation for philosophy of language to look at the emotional-affective dimension of meaning in conversation.

Eleonore Neufeld: How does pornography change desires? A pragmatic account (with Junhyo Lee)

Rae Langton and Caroline West famously argue that pornography operates like a language game, in that it introduces certain views about women into the common ground via presupposition accommodation. While this pragmatic model explains how pornography has the potential to change its viewers' beliefs, it leaves open how pornography changes people's desires. Our aim in this paper is to show how Langton and West's discourse-theoretic account of pornography can be refined to close this lacuna. Using tools from recent developments in discourse theory, we propose that pornography issues implicit directives, and thereby introduces bouletic components into the discourse.