In ordinary conversation, speakers disagree not only about worldly facts, but also about how to use language to describe the world. For example, disagreement about whether Buffalo is in the American Midwest, whether Pluto is a planet, or whether someone has been canceled, can persist even with agreement about all the relevant facts. The speakers may still engage in “metalinguistic negotiation”—disputing what to mean by “Midwest”, “planet”, or “cancel”. I first motivate an approach to metalinguistic negotiation that generalizes a Stalnakerian (...) theory of communication by including linguistic commitments in the conversational common ground. Then, I turn to cases where the very status of a disagreement as metalinguistic or factual is unclear or contested. For example, after the publication of the New York Times Magazine’s 1619 Project, some responses claimed to identify factual errors, while others took those same “errors” to be matters of interpretation. I’ll consider how to extend our theorizing about metalinguistic negotiation to this type of (even more) “meta” disagreement, using the discussion following the 1619 Project as a case study. On my view, in most such cases, there will be a metalinguistic negotiation going on. Still, I explain several ways in which, despite a dispute being metalinguistic, the factualist side can sometimes receive important vindication. I also discuss why it can make sense for speakers to contest the status of a dispute. (shrink)

In both co-authored and solo-authored work over the past decade, we have developed the idea of “metalinguistic negotiation”. On our view, metalinguistic negotiation is a type of dispute in which speakers appear to use (rather than explicitly mention) a term in conflicting ways to put forward views about how that very term should be used. In this paper, we explore four possible dimensions of variation among metalinguistic negotiations, and the interactions among those dimensions. These types of variation matter for understanding (...) the nature, and the potential range, of the phenomenon of metalinguistic negotiation. As an illustration of the latter, we argue in our concluding section that understanding the full range of forms that metalinguistic negotiations can take has implications for debates about the “implementation” of conceptual engineering proposals. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that metalinguistic negotiations are not as common as David Plunkett and Timothy Sundell assume. They make two related controversial claims: the claim that speakers don’t know what they say and the claim that they directly communicate metalinguistic contents. These two claims generate two challenges that the metalinguistic-negotiation view should meet. Firstly, it should clarify why speakers are oblivious to what they are saying and communicating, and secondly, it should explain the mechanism that transforms what seems (...) like a typical object-language disagreement into a metalinguistic dispute. I argue that the way in which Plunkett and Sundell meet these challenges is unsatisfactory. Regarding their answer to the first challenge, I’ll argue that the theoretical cost of postulating massive semantic and pragmatic blindness in otherwise competent speakers is too high. Regarding what they say in relation to the second challenge, I’ll claim that metalinguistic contents can only be conveyed when speakers uttering apparently contradicting claims know that they are using terms with different meanings. If my arguments are correct, then metalinguistic negotiations are certainly not ubiquitous. (shrink)