Noah Betz-Richman

Research

Publications

Lying, hedging, and the norms of assertion

I argue that a speaker can lie while hedging her assertion with a first-person epistemic verb phrase in parenthetical position, such as "It's raining outside, I think." I then argue that this data cannot be accommodated by a recent theory that defines lying in terms of the Knowledge Norm of Assertion.

[Under review] A paper offering an analysis of cases of linguistic injustice related to speakers' usage of socially-meaningful linguistic expressions.

My tortoiseshell cat Cosmo

Dissertation

My dissertation focuses on stylistic variation (or style shifting). As socially competent speakers, we use different words (e.g. rabbit/bunny), sounds (e.g. walking/walkin’), and syntactic structures (e.g. there aren’t any bagels/ain’t no bagels) as we move between social contexts. What are speakers doing when they shift styles, and why is this behavior rational? I argue that we should understand these choices in terms of speakers’ efforts to conform to (or deliberately violate) social norms. That is, we use linguistic forms we think are appropriate (or manifestly inappropriate) for members of our community to use in our present social context. Stylistic variation is a mechanism for interlocutors to coordinate on shared expectations for social interaction. My view thus treats stylistic variation as embedded within a larger system of rational, cooperative, norm-governed conversational behavior, rather than as an independent mechanism for social expression. This approach shows how sociolinguistic phenomena can be integrated into philosophy of language while preserving standard assumptions and explanatory frameworks. My approach also has implications for other socially-meaningful forms of speech, including slang, honorifics, slurs, and dogwhistles.

Works in Progress

(email me for drafts)

Taxonomizing socially meaningful linguistic content. Some expressions, like slang, jargon, and sociolinguistic variants, carry social meaning and play socially-important functions in discourse. By analogy with honorifics, one might think these expressions conventionally encode secondary, use-conditional contents. They do not encode secondary, use-conditional contents, but not for the reasons that have been recently proposed in the literature.

The problem of dialect continua for the ontology of languages. Dialectologists observe cases in which linguistic differences increase cumulatively as one travels from village to village in a particular direction. While adjacent villages can communicate, distant villages cannot; but there is no non-arbitrary location to place a border between languages. I propose a pluralist solution, inspired by the work of David Lewis, according to which the linguistic behavior of a single 'monolingual' speaker may be a part of many overlapping linguistic conventions.

Other Projects

A paper defending Lewisian Conventionalism against the objection that it cannot explain socially-motivated changes to linguistic conventions.

A paper arguing against recently proposed Semantic Expressivist theories of metalinguistic negotiation.

A paper on the semantics, pragmatics, and dynamics of counterfactual conditionals in discourse context.

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