Unification of Talking-About and Talking-To

Abstract This paper proposes a new condition for the correct use of the second-person singular pronoun “you.” The current consensus among philosophers is that a mutual awareness between a speaker and her audience is the condition for the felicitous use of “you.” However, existing proposals based on this consensus are unsatisfactory. They either confuse a condition for the correct use of “you” with a condition for a successful conversation, or are not well defended. The proposal presented by this paper is called the unification condition, which brings together two constituents: what a speaker intends to talk about and whom a speaker talks to. This condition is more accurate compared with other proposals, and it can respond to challenges to which other proposals fail to respond.