Speech and coordination

from social to private

Abstract

The informational paradigm of communication stipulates that agents talk to convey non-redundant information to other agents. If we turn to self-directed talk and, in particular, to private speech, however, we find a clear counterexample. After all, in self-directed speech, the roles of speaker and hearer coincide in the same agent. My goal here is to search for an alternative paradigm that explains private speech in its various intrapersonal and intersubjective uses. To that end, I consider two alternatives, the dispositional and the deontic paradigms, which assume respectively that we talk to generate dispositions and to negotiate commitments in coordinated actions. In comparing their merits, I show that the second one is preferable because it explains private uses of language with phatic function better than the first one. Such uses show that communication can turn to aspects of its own infrastructure; regrettably, they have been systematically neglected in the philosophical literature, even though they seem to be a crucial part of a complete answer to the question “Why do we talk?”.