ABSTRACT
If you engage for long in the study of how human beings relate to one another, especially through the use of language, you are bound to be struck by the importance of ‘transactions’. This is not an easy word to define. I want to signify those dealings which are premised on a mutual sharing of assumptions and beliefs about how the world is, how mind works, what we are up to, and how communication should proceed. It is an idea captured to some extent by Paul Grice’s maxims about how to proceed in conversation, by Deirdre Wilson and Dan Sperber’s notion that we always assume that what others have said must make some sense, by Hilary Putnam’s recognition that we usually assign the right level of ignorance or cleverness to our interlocutors. Beyond these specifics, there remains a shady but important area of sharing-Colwyn Trevarthen calls it ‘intersubjectivity’—that makes the philosopher’s query about how we know Other Minds seem more practical than the philosopher ever intended it to be.
