Your Attention Please!

Sanford Goldberg

Northwestern University

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There are various ways through which we try to capture another person's attention.  One of these ways – a particularly sophisticated way! – is to address them.  After trying to highlight what it is to address another person, I argue that doing so generates a reason (for you, as addressee) to attend to the act.  When the act of address is a speech act, matters are further complicated by the expectations parties bring, and (I argue) are entitled to bring, to an (anticipated) speech exchange.  If this is correct, then the act of address itself generates the most basic form of conversational pressure: in cooperative exchanges speakers who address an audience have a claim on the audience's attention.  To fail to attend to a speaker who addresses you and whose claim on your attention is part of a (would-be) cooperative exchange, I argue, is to disrespect her as a rational subject.