The Ritual Infrastructure of Conversation

I sketch a theory of small talk’s structure and function. Small talk enables us to “get to know each other” not through what we say to each other but through the way we conform to social practices in saying it. Through small talk, we indirectly generate evidence about the nature of our underlying practical agency. I show why my analysis predicts small talk’s most striking structural features. I then distinguish between two types of questions: questions about what interlocutors aim to do within a conversational genre and questions about what a conversational genre aims to do. Analytic philosophers of language have ignored the second type of questions. This paper demonstrates their importance.