Tim Kenyon: Audience Accommodation and Testimonial Complication

Cooperative impulses in communication stand in some tension with widespread assumptions in the epistemology of testimony. One example is the phenomenon of speakers unintentionally tuning the content and valence of their testimony to fit their audience’s preconceptions. This shaping of the messages can then influence communicators’ own subsequent impressions and testimony on that topic. In tuning the message for their audience, speakers also tune themselves. This sort of phenomenon fits into a familiar framework of cooperative principles for communication; but it suggests that the content of perfectly normal testimony is mutable, context-sensitive, and contingent on some relatively arbitrary factors – and, therefore, that recipients of testimony most reasonably treat it that way.  The various kinds of two-way traffic between communicator and audience in determining the content of testimony – the “saying is believing” (SIB) effect, audience tuning, and the potential role of a sense of shared reality between communicator and audience in mediating these – provide an additional healthy complication to our understanding of what social epistemology ought to explain, as it moves, very unevenly, towards a non-ideal approach.