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I have been attempting to make a case for understanding various aspects of our 'subjectivity" as interpersonally negotiable; for construing the social setting and its participants as primary in the ascription and ratification of the mental predicates discussed so far. Even if we feel secure in our private moments, once we make public disclosure of our thoughts, understandings, intentions, recollections, perceptions, motives and sensations, we place ourselves within a social orbit of appraisal and judgment; our subjectivity becomes analyzeable within a shared, situated frame of reference. We must "live up to" the requisites of others, satisfy their contextual, presuppositional and biographical analyses, locate our cognition within the topic-frames of discourse, and become (albeit defeasibly) transparent. Our opacities are preserved only at varying interactional costs and on pain of perversity; we sustain our presumptively "incorrigible" self-ascriptions against the circumstantially criterial rebuttals of our interactants only if we disdain the judgments afforded by our common culture. We may actively court, or not know enough to avoid, the ascription of ignorance of the concept, deceit, pretence, lying, joking, and a host of negative or down-grading counter-assertions wherever we fly in the face of the grammar of mental-predicate disclosure.

DOI: 10.1007/978-1-349-09379-3_7

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