Conquests of the Common Ground: Mansplaining and Under-Presupposing

Abstract

In ordinary conversations, a lot gets taken for granted. In order to communicate efficiently, speakers make presuppositions, leaving out information that they know or assume their interlocutor already accepts. Speakers try to match their presuppositions to their interlocutor's, so that they presuppose only what is in fact common ground. In practice, of course, speakers' presuppositions are often imperfect matches. They may reflect an overestimation, or underestimation, of the set of propositions presupposed by an interlocutor. Cases involving a speaker who overestimates her interlocutor's presuppositions are commonly discussed in the literature on accommodation and presupposition exploitation, but cases involving speakers who underestimate their interlocutor's presuppositions have largely been ignored. This paper redresses the gap. My paper has two aims. First, a broad aim: I'll demonstrate that under-presupposing is inherently bad for effective communication, because it stunts the growth of the common ground and impedes conversation participants' sense of equal authority over its contents. I'll accomplish this broader aim in the pursuit of my narrower goal: I'll show that mansplanations are paradigm examples of under-presupposing, and use this notion to propose a new, linguistic account of mansplaining. Of recent pop culture neologisms, 'mansplain,' used to call out men who give women unnecessary and unsolicited explanations, has surely been one of the most influential. The term has recently been subject to philosophical analysis, too, with an emphasis on the harms of mansplaining, by way of connection to epistemic injustice (Dular 2021 and Manne 2021) or illocutionary silencing (Johnson 2020). My focus is instead on mansplaining's linguistic modus operandi, in hopes of providing a clear, practical criterion for identifying mansplanations in whatever context they are uttered. On my account, mansplaining necessarily and centrally involves under-presupposing. An utterance is a mansplanation just in case it amounts to under-presupposing, and is uttered by a man in conversation with a woman (or women) in a broader context where women are marginalized.