The Normative Common Ground: Blame and Communication

Many theories of responsibility claim that holding someone responsible is “incipiently communicative,” but it has been difficult to pin down just what this amounts to. We offer an account of (1) a distinctive sense in which blaming is communicative, (2) what is communicated, and (3) how communication is achieved. Building on the work of Miranda Fricker and others, our account is that blaming is communicative in the sense that it updates a body of mutually represented expectations—normative common ground—which happens via a process of presupposition accommodation.