Abstract
We understand interpersonal reality as consisting of those social facts that are informally created by people for themselves in everyday interactions and involve the collective acceptance of positive and negative deontic powers. We submit that, in the case of interpersonal reality, Gilbert’s concept of a joint commitment is a suitable view of what collective acceptance amounts to. We then argue that creating interpersonal reality, even in common everyday life situations, typically requires conversational exchanges involving several layers of joint commitments and, in particular, joint commitments to projects, joint meaning, and the joint commitments that are constitutive of conversations.
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Notes
- 1.
Hohfeld’s original name for this legal relationship is ‘power’, but we use the term ‘authority’ to avoid confusion with Searle’s ‘deontic powers’, which are probably intended to cover both basic and nonbasic deontic relationships.
- 2.
To avoid repeating the word ‘joint’ twice, this type of joint commitment we shall call a joint commitment to a project.
- 3.
This position appears to be coherent with Gilbert’s point of view on ‘intersubjective’ joint commitments, like those underlying mutual recognition (Gilbert 2007).
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Carassa, A., Colombetti, M. (2013). Creating Interpersonal Reality through Conversational Interactions. In: Schmitz, M., Kobow, B., Schmid, H. (eds) The Background of Social Reality. Studies in the Philosophy of Sociality, vol 1. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5600-7_6
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