Thesis Chapters by Patrick Connolly
This thesis is a comparison of face-to-face and written digital conversation. I start with the in... more This thesis is a comparison of face-to-face and written digital conversation. I start with the intuition that face-to-face conversation can often appear more engrossing and satisfying than its digital counterpart. I argue that one of the most promising ways of understanding this difference can be seen when we consider the contrasting coordinative structures of these two types of conversation. In face-to-face conversation the task of communication is at all times spread between participants whereas in digital conversation the burden of communication is passed almost entirely from one to the other. One notable result of this is that it gives us good reason to think that communication in digital conversation is in many ways more difficult. I then argue that the difference in coordination in digital conversation has consequences for the nature of the cooperation we find in such interactions. I argue that these consequences of the different structures of face-to-face and digital conversation are what best explains the starting intuition.
Drafts by Patrick Connolly
Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Language Volume 2 (Lepore, E. & Sosa, D. eds.), 2021
There is a well-established social practice whereby we hold one another responsible for the thing... more There is a well-established social practice whereby we hold one another responsible for the things that we say. So, if someone utters the sentence “There are biscuits in the cupboard” or “Saddam Hussein developed weapons of mass destruction” they are likely to be held liable for the truth of the content they express and they can be sanctioned and/or held to be unreliable or devious if it turns out, say, that there are no biscuits in the cupboard or no WMDs in Iraq. In this paper we argue that a better understanding of this fundamental socio-linguistic practice – of ascribing what we will term (following Borg (2019)) ‘linguistic liability’ – helps to shed light on a core debate in semantics and pragmatics, concerning how and where to draw the line between different kinds of content.
(This paper was co-written with Emma Borg however this particular portal won't allow me to add this detail into the 'authors' section without providing a co-author's email address. It also makes no mention of how it will use this data! So that's why it just lists me as author.)
The Journal of Social Philosophy, 2021
'Trolling' has become a term to denote a wide range of behaviour we find in internet communicatio... more 'Trolling' has become a term to denote a wide range of behaviour we find in internet communication, ranging from what appear to be harmless japes through to bullying, abuse and hate speech. I argue that by using tools from the philosophy of language, and by considering trolling as a type of speech act, we can start to see some of the structural similarities between these seemingly disparate acts. Once these similarities become clearer, we can then understand better what trolling is and why it has become such a pervasive feature of internet discussion. Viewing trolling in such a way leads us to understand the importance of the trolling dilemma: that is, in many acts of trolling the directions of reply are either to respond seriously to an utterance and so be trolled, or to acknowledge it as an unserious act of trolling, and so dismiss it as mere trolling. 0. Introduction The acceptance of trolling as a feature of internet communication, and the clustering together of behaviours that range from playfulness to abusive bullying under the term 'trolling' has interesting moral implications.
Papers by Patrick Connolly
The problem I consider in this chapter emerges from the tension we find when we look at the desig... more The problem I consider in this chapter emerges from the tension we find when we look at the design and architecture of chatbots on the one hand and consider their conversational aptitude on the other. In the way that LLM chatbots are designed and built, there seems no good reason to suppose they possess second-order capacities such as intention, belief or knowledge. Yet we have developed theories of conversation that make great use of secondorder capacities of speakers and their audiences to explain how aspects of conversation succeed. As we can all bear witness to now though, at the point of use chatbots appear capable of performing language tasks at a level close to that of humans. This creates a tension when we consider something like, for example, the classic Gricean theory of implicature. On a broad summary of this type of account, to utter p and implicate q requires the reflexive occurrence of an audience supposing a speaker believes that q, and the speaker believing that their audience can determine they believe it when they utter p. So taken at face value, if a chatbot doesn't have the capacity for belief, then either in their role as speaker or audience, they would not seem capable of either generating or comprehending implicatures. As will be shown later, though, on the surface it does seem that chatbots are capable of dealing with (some) implicatures, and as such it raises questions about how we should then correlate this with what we think occurs in cases of implicature with chatbots. 1 Many thanks are owed to Jenny Saul for early discussions on this and to Sandy Goldberg and Jenny for very helpful feedback on an earlier draft. Also thanks to the members of the Digital Pragmatics and Epistemology Reading Group where I've been shaping these ideas.
This thesis is a comparison of face-to-face and written digital conversation. I start with the in... more This thesis is a comparison of face-to-face and written digital conversation. I start with the intuition that face-to-face conversation can often appear more engrossing and satisfying than its digital counterpart. I argue that one of the most promising ways of understanding this difference can be seen when we consider the contrasting coordinative structures of these two types of conversation. In face-to-face conversation the task of communication is at all times spread between participants whereas in digital conversation the burden of communication is passed almost entirely from one to the other. One notable result of this is that it gives us good reason to think that communication in digital conversation is in many ways more difficult. I then argue that the difference in coordination in digital conversation has consequences for the nature of the cooperation we find in such interactions. I argue that these consequences of the different structures of face-to-face and digital conversation are what best explains the starting intuition.
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Thesis Chapters by Patrick Connolly
Drafts by Patrick Connolly
(This paper was co-written with Emma Borg however this particular portal won't allow me to add this detail into the 'authors' section without providing a co-author's email address. It also makes no mention of how it will use this data! So that's why it just lists me as author.)
Papers by Patrick Connolly
(This paper was co-written with Emma Borg however this particular portal won't allow me to add this detail into the 'authors' section without providing a co-author's email address. It also makes no mention of how it will use this data! So that's why it just lists me as author.)