Allocating Voice

From early Greece to present-day researchers in communication, the belief is strong that the concepts the members of an audience hold of a speaker do affect how they respond to what is being said. (Cripe 1985: 348)

Part of conversation consists in allocating voice—that is, determining who has standing to demand responses from us within the conversation and who has not. For example, we must decide which questions we are warranted in ignoring (for example, if they derail the conversation, if they change topic in an authoritarian way, etc.) and which we must respond to. In general, if a speaker has standing, she has the responsibility of displaying (and sometimes, even signaling) such standing and the hearers have the responsibility of recognize her standing.

Allocation of voice is important because ignoring people can be, well, horrible:

To be ignored is to be excluded while physically present. One's opinions are unsolicited, comments unwanted, approval unneeded. It is the violation of the expectations built up in daily social intercourse. In the extreme, being ignored is a form of powerlessness. It means that a person cannot exert social control over the situation. One's attention or lack of attention, leaving or staying will make no difference; one's comments are unimportant as are one's reactions to the comments of others. (Geller et al. 1974: 541)

But, of course, we are fallible and misallocation of voice is common. Non-ideal philosophy of language needs to account to how and why this happens, i.e., who is responsible for our speech acts achieving their goals or failing to do so. This includes performing implicit and explicit evaluations of standing. 

In conversation, we usually say that we do not believe or trust other participants in the conversation, or question the motivations of their actions within the conversation. This is explicit evaluation of standing. But we also do it implicitly; mostly, by ignoring certain contributions and not others, i.e., acting as if other people's actions or presence did not make a difference or can be brushed off. Here is an example of a student being unduly ignored in class by his teacher, Ms. Town:

A boy then tried to modify the topic by proposing a causal explanation: "Is it from like, is it stag nant water?" Ms. Town responded, "Well that helps, yeah." The boy wasn't satisfied with this answer, however, and he asked: "Is that what makes it though, or?" Ms. Town answered, "Well it's not what makes it so, necessarily, but we'll talk about algae in a minute, OK." With that, she changed the topic to mosses, and did not return to discuss algae further. (Carlsen 1992: 17)

In the other direction, here is an example where a speaker is not allowed to ignore a question she should have:

One of the questions M. Regine asked me was whether I "pray." Being put on the spot I had no choice but to say no. She responded with a smile and a gesture saying "I thought so." Why, damn it, should I be put on the spot? And am I reacting the way I do only because I fear losing contact and rapport? I only have to imagine someone in my everyday surroundings asking such a question [meaning: I would express resentment and brush off questions of that kind]. (Fabian 1995: 45)

Explicit evaluations may also be argued for within the conversation. We may not only say that we do not trust other participants, but also say why we do; we may not only question their actions within the conversation, but also give reasons for our suspicions.

Consider the following exchange, a fragment of a dialogue from the Argentinean film "Nueve Reinas":

Juan: Escucháme una cosa, yo no soy ni el más vivo, ni el más rápido, pero conozco lo suficiente la calle como para saber que nadie regala nada, y menos un tipo como vos. ¿Qué querés?

Marcos: Ya te dije.

Juan: Probá decirme la verdad.

Juan: Listen to me—I’m not the sharpest or the quickest guy around, but I know the streets well enough to know that nobody gives anything away for free, especially a guy like you. What do you want?

Marcos: I already told you.

Juan: Try telling me the truth. 

Here, Juan is responding to Marcos argument with a meta-argument as to why he is not engaging directly with Marcos' reasons but instead is justifying his mistrust of Marcos.

Unfortunately, these argumentations can easily become or be mistaken for ad-hominem fallacies. Posion-the-well arguments are a good example of this. Juan response above, for example, could be misdiagnosed as a fallacious Poison-the-Well. However, it seems an appropriate response since his suspicion that Marcos is trying to swindle him is justified. This is part of the main point behind Stevens' work on these fallacies. Posion-the-Well moves are the unavoidable and direct result of the need of managing voice through argumentation. When we do it wrong  –that is, when we negligently fail to recognize our interlocutors' standing –, it is fallacious; when we do not, it is not.