ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the nature and characteristic psychology of audience sensitivity. Audience sensitivity is conceptualized as a tendency to fit one’s communications to the distinctive features of one’s audience, out of a motivation to promote their epistemic goods for its own sake. The relevant features of one’s audience include its distinctive needs, interests, views, abilities, and dispositions. Such sensitivity toward one’s audience is prompted by the sensitive person’s judgment, however inchoate, that which communications of theirs will most effectively promote the most valuable epistemic goods for their audience will depend in part on distinctive features of that audience. The chapter compares audience sensitivity so understood to similar virtues such as intellectual empathy and open-mindedness, identifying what these traits share in common and what is distinctive about audience sensitivity. It also contrasts audience sensitivity with opposing vices such as self-consciousness, judgmentalism, and vicious rhetoric, illuminating how the patterns of attentiveness or inattentiveness to one’s audience characteristic of these traits differ from those characteristic of virtuous audience sensitivity.
