I used to play this party game of who would play who in “Analytic Philosophy the Hollywood blockbuster”, and one of my most confident castings was 70s Gene Hackman as Ted Sider. I hope Ted doesn’t mind. It had to be Gene Hackman as he was in the 70s when he was cool, youthful, funky - I think the model was as he was in The French Connection.
But anyway, Gene Hackman isn’t nearly as cool as that in The Conversation, but it is one hell of a good movie.
The plot revolves around how Hackman’s character, who is a professional spy / PI type, overhears a pair of other characters, who he’s being employed to spy on, say something that changes his life. Only he’s radically misunderstood what they meant. Without wanting to spoil the film, intonation makes a big difference to the resolution of a structural ambiguity that dramatically changes (nay reverses) the significance of what he’s heard. (Twist!)
Is the difference a semantic one? Is it simply a matter of activating an implicature of some kind? To be honest I’m not sure - it’s a real puzzle case. To my knowledge this is the only film ever made whose central plot point is a fiddly detail of Gricean pragmatics. Have fun explaining it to your students.
Philosophical themes: Conversational pragmatics
Filmic awesomeness: 70s Gene Hackman, Francis Ford Coppola, 70s psychological thriller
Until September 2016 I am a Tutorial Fellow in Philosophy at Corpus Christi College and an Associate Professor in the Oxford Philosophy Faculty. From then on, I'll be a Senior Adviser at the New Zealand Ministry of Transport.
My intellectual interests are mainly in metaphysics, philosophy of language, and ethics, and of course transport policy.
