Plenary Speakers

“Florida Man Makes Announcement”: Humor as Eristic Discourse in the Age of the Internet

Humor has a positive image, generally speaking. Not only is it considered to have positive psychological effects, but it is associated with progressive political views, especially in the case of political satire. However, there is a darker side to the use of humor, which I will explore in this presentation. In particular, I will focus on two aspects: 1) the use of the use of the alt-right of humor to proselytize and 2) the use of humor as eristic argumentation. To the first point, the core function of humor that is exploited to normalize nazi and fascist ideas is the deniability of humor (simplistically, by claiming that one was “just kidding”). It should be noted that under close examination this supposed deniability falters. Nonetheless, as a tactic it is quite effective, especially online. To the second point, humor can be used to mock an opponent and simultaneously prevent an effective counter by putting them in a position of being accused of lacking a sense of humor if they take the mockery seriously. As a rhetorical argument mockery is shown to be an eristic, i.e., non-cooperative discursive move.

Conversation without Common Ground

This talk will report on ongoing work that argues for and develops an alternative to the dominant model of conversation, in which common ground plays the central theoretical role. According to this model, due to Stalnaker (1974, 1978 i.a.), there is a single body of information, the common ground, which speech acts are aimed at updating and which constitutes the information available to interlocutors for interpretation. This talk focuses on the issue of availability, arguing that availability is better modeled by positing that each agent in a conversation maintains a model of the information state of their interlocutor. I will offer an alternative conversational model based on this proposal, drawing on a variety of proposals already in the literature, and will offer replacement accounts of various conversational effects that to date have been explained by reference to common ground.