On how to make silence meaningful and why we shouldn’t always do it. 

Paweł Zacharewicz

University of Warsaw

There is an ongoing debate in philosophy of language on how to understand and interpret silence. The dominant view is that silence might be meaningful in certain contexts while simultaneously being meaningless in others. Following Pettit (1994), one can argue that the necessary condition for silence to have meaning is the freedom of speech (i.e., the possibility of speaking freely), which is often understood as an implicit permission to disagree with or reject what was said.
A similar line of thought may be found in Goldberg’s (2020) idea of No Silent Rejection, which may be characterised as an account of a silent assent. Goldberg argues that, since (i) all conversational participants are assumed to be cooperative and (ii) silent rejection of public statements is viewed as uncooperative, then the absence of explicit rejection may be taken as assent.
On the other hand, there are authors who oppose such a view and reject the idea of silent assent as a primary explanatory strategy (see Klieber 2024a, 2024b; Langton 2007; Nakane 2012). For instance, Klieber (2024a) directly criticises Goldberg’s idea and shows counterexamples to his theory, where silence is more plausibly interpreted as dissent. She expands her view by developing a model of silent conversational implicatures which is intended to avoid the main problems and provide a reliable framework for interpreting silence and its meaning.
In this talk, I will argue that Klieber’s idea, although it may seem intuitively appealing, is a step towards an anything-goes type of pragmatics, where any given silence could be interpreted in virtually endless ways, resulting in an infinite number of meanings. My argument is twofold: first, I will show that interpreting silence requires extremely detailed contextualisation; second, that the interpreter would have no good reasons to prefer one possible meaning over the other. Ultimately, I will extend my claim to all views that allow the ascription of meaning to silence.

Chair: Irene Lo Faro

Time: 03 September, 16:00 – 16:30

Location: SR 1.006