Abstract
Political solutions to problems like global warming and social justice are often stymied by an inability to productively communicate in everyday conversations. Motivated by these communication problems, the paper considers the role of the virtuous listener in conversations. Rather than the scripted exchanges of information between individuals, we focus on lively, intra-active conversations that are mediating events. In such conversations, the listener plays a participatory role by contributing to the content and form of the conversation. Unlike Miranda Fricker’s negative virtue of testimonial justice, which neutralizes the listener’s identity-prejudices in their credibility judgments of the speaker’s testimony, we consider the positive virtues of a good listener. These positive virtues enable listeners to productively contribute to the conversation by helping create the fertile epistemic space of a non-adversarial, caring relationship that facilitates critical and creative thinking.
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Notes
For another example of how a listener may silence a speaker, see Dotson (2011).
Fricker’s (2007) concerns about the secondary harms of testimonial injustice reveal a way in which conversations can have a lasting impact on the speaker.
This modification can take the form of epistemic smothering in which the speaker truncates their speech based on the audience’s epistemic competences (Dotson 2011).
An eventful conversation, however, is not a good in itself and, as such, is not a sufficient standard to ground conversational virtues. There is nothing about eventful conversations that ensures these becomings will necessarily lead to a positive sense of change. Consequently, there needs to be an overarching conception, i.e. norms, that distinguishes good from bad eventful conversations.
This is different than Roberts and Wood’s (2007) argument in which the role of epistemic virtues in conversations is to serve the intellectual end of coming up with new answers and definitive conclusions to questions.
Karen Jones (2012) has shown how intellectual self-trust is affected by social relations. Unjust social interactions can lead to epistemic injustice, which can in turn damage intellectual self-trust.
See Harding (2007).
For example, Alcoff (2007) argues that a diversity of perspectives can maximize scientific progress because each unique perspective offers unique ways of interpreting data, using certain metaphors, setting up of experiments and applying and formulating hypotheses and theories.
To be sure, selective hearing does not have to have a negative connotation since it makes the listener attentive to different things that can enrich the conversation.
Depending on the situation, meekness is not always a vice. It can act as a catalyst for the speaker’s epistemic agency. Meekness would be appropriate when talking with a modest or self-depreciating speaker, or one that has been historically subject to systemic testimonial injustice. However, when meekness is adopted as a universal attitude, it may give rise to an arrogant and a domineering speaker.
For more on the role of care in epistemic relations, see Dalmiya (2001).
Being critical ultimately serves no purpose if what is being critiqued is a misrepresentation of the speaker’s view.
See John Stuart Mill (1978).
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Piñeiro, J., Simpson, J. Eventful Conversations and the Positive Virtues of a Listener. Acta Anal 35, 373–388 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-020-00429-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-020-00429-x