Expressing Oneself

Guy Longworth (Warwick University)

Adult speech, and other expressive behaviour, is often under intentional control: we speak, smile, etc., in the ways that we do because we intend to. It has been suggested that this induces a worry about how we can exploit expressive behaviour in order to find out what others think or how they feel, because e.g. someone might intentionally smile whether or not they were happy. I’ll discuss the worry, and consider some ways in which it can be addressed.

(People might want to look at Paul Grice’s paper “Meaning Revisited” in his ‘Studies in the Way of Words’.)