2.1 Social or Interpersonal Problems

The ethical importance and ethical challenges of civility and everyday social interaction, central topics in early Confucian moral philosophy (see Olberding Reference Olberding2016, Reference Olberding2015; Cline Reference Cline2016; Sarkissian Reference Sarkissian2010; Lai Reference Lai2006), have begun to receive more attention in contemporary ethics (see, for example, Calhoun Reference Calhoun2000; Stohr Reference Stohr2012; Olberding Reference Olberding2019; Bejan Reference Bejan2017; Sherman Reference Sherman2005; McPherson Reference McPherson, Harrison and Walker2018). Unhelpful comments can be interpersonally problematic. That is, they can be (among other things) rude, impolite, discourteous, or uncivil. It will be worthwhile here to pause and examine why rudeness and politeness are especially salient here.

To appreciate the connection between politeness and conversational helpfulness, we need to appreciate the degree to which the very practice of conversation embeds the social nature of having a personal project. The having of a project is often a social having (I am thankful to Amy Olberding for suggesting this point). So long as we were not born on a desert island, we cannot create or develop projects from scratch, in a complete social vacuum. In no small way, we learn our goals and the strategies and means we can consider for reaching them from others. Further, our personal projects are often meant and made to be shared in some form or another, and thus the success of projects in general depends on our willingness to take up the projects that others share with us. Conversation is typically a cooperative endeavor, but that cooperation requires that we acknowledge and respond to others’ projects and to the antecedent fact that others have projects. When we feel that our projects are not being seen, are not taken seriously, or are being undermined or dismissed or derailed in conversation, we feel disrespected, insulted, and demoralized. Politeness, at its heart, is the practice of ‘symbolically [demonstrating] pro-social values’ (Olberding Reference Olberding2019: 10), of communicating and displaying with our immediate verbal and nonverbal behavior that we acknowledge and treat others as persons. Unhelpful comments can and often do communicate just the opposite: that we cannot be bothered with another person's project to make the effort of engaging it (or them) directly.

Thus, it is important to appreciate how unhelpful comments are often (though to varying extents) demoralizing to the people at whom they are directed. They make people feel less interested in, motivated by, or enthusiastic about a project and its chances of success. For example, in our first case of the professor's unhelpful feedback on the graduate student's paper, the graduate student very well might come to feel demoralized, deflated, unenthused, and disheartened about her project, her capabilities, and herself. Of course, not all unhelpful comments are demoralizing or are equally demoralizing in practice because (among other reasons) the degree to which anything is demoralizing is partly subjective. A highly confident or even highly oblivious person might not become demoralized by something that many or most others would find very demoralizing. Still, we should take special note not only of unhelpful comments that actually demoralize someone but also, more loosely, those that in relevant contexts could be demoralizing for some significant and relevant broad array of people or, more perniciously, those that were intended to demoralize proponents of a project. Further, such comments might not, in certain circumstances, demoralize a person about their own projects, but about other people in general. This can lead to complex and intriguing internal tensions, such as when a thoroughly misanthropic scholar writes articles and essays for an audience she holds in complete disdain and conversely, it suggests the need to exercise fair judgment in our expectations of others and how helpful they are likely to be. (For a related discussion, see Jacquette [Reference Jacquette2014], an article suggested by an anonymous reviewer who also pointed out this possibility.)

2.2 Moral Problems

In addition to being interpersonally problematic, unhelpful comments can be morally problematic in other ways. Importantly, many morally problematic unhelpful comments are not morally problematic because they are unhelpful (or not solely because they are unhelpful), but primarily because they are straightforwardly hurtful or damaging, because they undermine some morally important cause or demoralize its proponents, or because of some other reason entirely. Such comments happen to be unhelpful but criticizing them as unhelpful does not indicate what is most or most fundamentally morally problematic about them. Recall the case of the white internet commenter dismissing the claim that the American justice system is racist because his white cousin also received an unjustly harsh prison sentence for a minor drug crime. The fact that the comment was unhelpful in the context of the conversation in which it occurred is not what is most problematic about the comment.

It is worth pointing out, however, that while criticizing otherwise problematic unhelpful comments might not amount to the most direct diagnosis of what is most morally problematic about them, doing so might be rhetorically effective. We can respond to certain problematic comments by criticizing them as unhelpful to dismiss them and thus deftly steer the conversation back to its original projects. In fact, doing so can often be more effective than criticizing such a comment directly, say as racist, xenophobic, or generally prejudiced, because doing so might steer the conversation toward analysis of the particular comment and thus give a platform for the maker of the unhelpful comment to take control over the conversation. I will return to this point shortly.

Some unhelpful comments of this more generally problematic sort deserve special attention because they lean on widespread unreflective or misinformed beliefs and perspectives and thus seem to large groups of people to not only be true but also to be helpful, when they are in fact neither. To take an all-too-familiar example, consider a conversation about racial injustice in America and the Black Lives Matter movement in which someone butts in and pedantically asserts that ‘All lives matter’. This comment does not advance the project of addressing the problem of conscious and unconscious racially motivated police violence because (among other reasons) it totally mistakes the relevant project's commitment (treating it as ‘only Black lives matter’ or ‘Black lives matter more’ rather than ‘Black lives matter too’). But this is a misunderstanding ready and waiting to happen, given prevalent attitudes among white Americans primed toward uncharitably interpreting certain kinds of claims. In short, some unhelpful comments are dangerous because they are catchy to large groups of people—and the way in which they are catchy is closely tethered to the way in which they are unhelpful and to the ways in which they are harmful. Again, in such cases, criticizing these comments as unhelpful does not necessarily reflect what is most or most fundamentally problematic about them, but it can sometimes be rhetorically effective because those in peril are already in a rhetorical bind due to damaging and dangerous widespread beliefs and perspectives.

However, there are circumstances in which conversational unhelpfulness itself does seem to be a key part of the moral problem. For example, when a speaker has a special obligation to support a project or to encourage the person behind the project, failing to be helpful can be morally problematic. We saw this in our first case of the professor's unhelpful comments on the graduate student's paper: teachers by virtue of their role can hold (defeasible) special obligations to be conversationally helpful. Similarly, people, such as therapists, counselors, and physicians in caregiving roles whose caregiving relies on conversation, either as the medium of care or to gather information requisite for successful care, can hold (defeasible) special obligations of conversational helpfulness.

There is also a special obligation toward vulnerable projects and people. Consider again the graduate student receiving feedback on a project from the professor: the graduate student is vulnerable across a wide array of dimensions. Not only is she vulnerable generally for being a graduate student in academia, she is vulnerable in seeking feedback from her professor, whose support would be very valuable for her personal and professional growth. Further, people like the graduate student in this scenario are highly vulnerable to demoralization and its consequent harms. Nearly all academic projects are vulnerable in their early stages, and graduate students are especially susceptible to the harms of imposter syndrome (see Hawley Reference Hawley2019; Paul Reference Paul2019). Of special importance here are projects that are vulnerable because they are the projects of the marginalized and oppressed and the projects that resist marginalization and oppression because such projects can be easily and unjustly dismissed by those with the social power to steer conversations. Even when such projects are not immediately dismissed, their ultimate success would require those with social power to understand and appreciate information that they are currently ignorant of or resistant to (see, for example, Mills Reference Mills, Sullivan and Tuana2007; Dotson Reference Dotson2012; Pohlhaus Jr. Reference Pohlhaus2012). But this issue is both moral and epistemic, and so I will turn in more detail to the epistemic problems of unhelpful comments.

2.3 Epistemic Problems

Unhelpful comments can be epistemically problematic insofar as they put obstacles and roadblocks on the paths to knowledge generation and sharing: they (to borrow a phrase) ‘get in the way of knowledge’ (Medina Reference Medina2013: 30). It is useful here to divide the epistemic harms and losses generated by unhelpful comments into two rough categories. First, unhelpful comments can cause fairly direct and straightforward epistemic harm or loss by leaving potential knowledge gains on the table. Second, unhelpful comments can play key roles in more complex, pernicious, and deep epistemic harm or loss in that they contribute in their own small ways to structures and systems of epistemic injustice, oppression, and marginalization.

The first category of more straightforward epistemic harm and loss can occur in nearly any conversational context but can be felt acutely in circumstances where a central and salient goal of a conversation is to make some epistemic progress (such as academic and scholarly conversations). In these conversations, failure to attend to or advance the projects of a conversation hinders, impedes, or even undermines potential epistemic gains. In these circumstances, people often do not even realize that their comment is not helpful, either because they mistakenly believe that their comment is helpful or because it never occurred to them that they should care at all whether their comments are helpful or not. A person giving an unhelpfully nitpicky comment might believe they are providing a helpful pointed criticism worth addressing. A person who mounts their own hobby horse during a conversation, leading that conversation far afield from any beneficial direction for the original project might believe they are drawing a genuinely interesting connection between the speaker's project and their own. A person who thinks they are situating a speaker's view within broader debates might just be broadcasting or signaling their own allegiances in those debates. A person who fills in the details of a less-than-fully specified example or case uncharitably so that the case fails to show what it was intended to (when other, more charitable specifications were quite readily available) might believe that they have provided a helpful counterexample. A person who arrogantly and ignorantly dismisses an entire field of research or category of intellectual projects might believe that they have helpfully redirected a conversation away from lost causes.

To be clear, the problems here in practice are often based in a lack of concern with identifying the project of a conversation and a lack of concern about understanding whether and how one's own comment would help or hinder that project (or boost the morale of or demoralize its proponents). In failing to do so, we leave epistemic progress on the table. Importantly, these effects percolate. Not only do they cause the immediate negative epistemic implications we have just seen, but they also permeate social spaces, such as particular academic departments, conferences, research subfields or debates. Thus, in addition to immediate epistemic damage directly caused by unhelpful comments, downstream epistemic damage is produced via social spaces that undervalue conversational helpfulness or fail to disincentivize (or even valorize) conversational unhelpfulness. These types of social spaces are especially prone to certain epistemically problematic practices and especially hospitable to certain epistemically vicious patterns and participants. If conversational helpfulness is not adequately valued in a social space, other virtues (or, more likely, vices) will be valued instead. Such social spaces will repulse those who do care for helpful comments, and thus these spaces might eventually be filled by those who do not, creating a negative epistemic feedback loop. This repulsion might have long-term effects because those causing and affected by these behaviors can enter and exit these particular social spaces. For example, experiences of severely unhelpful comments and questions might make people who are already deeply uncomfortable with entering into and participating in conversations feel even more uncomfortable doing so. Social and epistemic norms for cooperation, charity, and support are fragile enough without those in positions of epistemic authority flouting them, and a lack of wariness regarding unhelpfulness can pervert our ideals and exemplars (it can lead us to thinking of the good philosopher as the most quick, clever and belligerent critic or to valorizing and emulating Socrates the Gadfly rather than Socrates the Midwife). The relevant epistemic harm in both these immediate and downstream cases is fairly straightforward. Reliable epistemic progress via conversation typically requires some degree of mutual understanding. But in practice a lack of concern with conversational helpfulness is often accompanied by a lack of concern in understanding others’ projects and how one's own comments would advance or undermine them. Undervaluing conversational helpfulness (and its attendant requirements to understand and respond to the actual projects of others) forces epistemic progress via conversation to depend too much on chance.

Of course, one might worry that a commitment to conversational helpfulness might strongly discourage (justified) critical comments. This could be especially relevant in epistemically oriented conversations, such as academic and scholarly discussions, where critical comments are often necessary for epistemic progress. Typically, a key signal and component of the quality of academic work is how well it can be defended against critique, and sometimes it actually is the project of a speaker to learn about new potential objections to a project to be able to rebut them better in the future. Further, if an overemphasis on critique can lead us astray, surely so, too, can an underemphasis on it: norms that would demand high degrees of conversational helpfulness risk leading to conversational spaces that are dangerously uncritical, that obsequiously favor flawed projects, or that amount to echo chambers (see Nguyen Reference Nguyen2018, Reference Nguyen2019). However, these concerns seem misplaced. Vitally, a commitment to conversational helpfulness would not at all preclude critique. Some helpful comments are helpful critiques. My claim was not that critical comments are necessarily unhelpful or incompatible with a commitment to conversational helpfulness, but instead that conversational spaces that prize certain kinds of critique over conversational helpfulness risk pernicious epistemic consequences. For example, Phyllis Rooney (Reference Rooney2012: 324–25) has insightfully described how the strong ‘default skeptical stance’ of academic philosophy conversations can disincentivize sharing information that one has good reason to prefer not be met with immediate skepticism. The question of whether or not to critique a project thus is distinct from the question of whether or not to provide a helpful comment for that project, and social spaces that value conversational helpfulness are not necessarily uncritical (though their participants should be wary of becoming so).

Unhelpful comments also often contribute, in their own small but serious way, to patterns of epistemic oppression. Of course, a great deal more could be said on this front than I will be able to say here, but my main focus is on demonstrating that unhelpful comments are often intertwined in patterns of epistemic injustice, and so I will set aside the project of exploring each of the these phenomena in as much detail as they deserve. In particular, I will only briefly mention five of the most well-known and widely discussed types of deep epistemic wrong that play critical roles in epistemic marginalization and injustice (testimonial injustice, gaslighting, hermeneutical injustice, contributory injustice, and motivated ignorance) with the hope that readers’ familiarity with the scholarship on these topics will mitigate the lack of detail I can go into here. The upshot is that characteristically unhelpful comments often play important roles in sustaining these patterns and practices.

Unhelpful comments can and sometimes do actively undermine the credibility of an individual participant in a particular conversation. But they can also sustain and support widespread opinions about the credibility (or lack thereof) of groups of people and thus maintain patterns of testimonial injustice (Fricker Reference Fricker2009; Wanderer Reference Wanderer, Kidd, Medina and Pohlhaus2017). Testimonial injustice occurs when people are given unearned excesses of credibility or when they suffer a credibility deficit due to prejudices about their robust social identities (Fricker Reference Fricker2009: 1). For example, recall our earlier case of a father advising his daughter to ‘just think less negatively’ to overcome her severe clinical depression. People experiencing various forms of physical and mental illness are susceptible to testimonial injustice, especially in terms of their ability to report their own experiences reliably (see Carel and Kidd Reference Carel and Kidd2014). Comments dismissing these reports are characteristically unhelpful. They fail to advance, and in fact undermine, the project of seeking support, and when they come from trusted loved ones or healthcare authorities, they can easily be demoralizing to their recipients. Additional examples abound. First, consider the case of children struggling to articulate in detail their own experiences and having their testimony (which does contain clear, actionable information) dismissed in this way by doctors or other caregivers (‘Oh, she is complaining about blurred vision but that's probably just because she isn't wearing her glasses’; see Carel and Györffy Reference Carel and Györffy2014). Second, consider doctors and male partners dismissing new mothers’ descriptions of what would come to be called post-partum depression as just being ‘down’ (Fricker Reference Fricker2009: 149). Third, consider a jury that dismisses the true and well-corroborated testimony of a convicted felon because of his criminal history (‘Well, we can't really trust that type of person’). Further, recall our earlier discussion of pernicious catchy unhelpful comments such as the ‘all lives matter’ criticisms of the Black Lives Matter movement. These types of unhelpful comments function as what we might call ‘epistemic dismissers’—they allow conversational participants to dismiss entirely some claim or argument by portraying it as so obviously flawed that only the foolish and therefore highly un-credible would put it forward.

Relatedly, there has been growing scholarly interest in examining various (epistemic and nonepistemic) forms of gaslighting, some of which may be forms of testimonial injustice (see, for example, Abramson Reference Abramson2014; Spear Reference Spear2019; Ivy Reference Ivy, Kidd, Medina and Pohlhaus2017; Stark Reference Stark2019). Broadly speaking, gaslighting occurs when people or institutions unjustifiably and systematically undermine a person's confidence in their own experience or judgment to a severe degree. For example, consider a new assistant professor who reports to a colleague that their department chair has repeatedly made misogynistic remarks to her. Her older colleague unhelpfully responds ‘Oh, that's just his [the department chair's] sense of humor, don't take it seriously. He doesn't mean it’. Part of the project of the conversation was to inform and discuss the comments as problematic, and the colleague undermined that project (and did so in a way that could easily be demoralizing). In doing so, the colleague undermined both the credibility of the new assistant professor and her ability to trust her own experience (Ivy discusses a structurally similar case; see Ivy Reference Ivy, Kidd, Medina and Pohlhaus2017: 168).

Third, in circumstances where conversational helpfulness is not valued and understood, a preponderance of unhelpful comments and a lack of ready terminology or opportunity to criticize them as such can contribute to patterns of hermeneutical injustice. Hermeneutical injustice occurs when oppressed people, due to the circumstances of their oppression, lack the interpretive resources to conceptualize and understand aspects of that oppression (see Fricker Reference Fricker2009; Medina Reference Medina, Kidd, Medina and Pohlhaus2017; Goetze Reference Goetze2018). Think here of how doctors’ and husbands’ unhelpful dismissals of new mothers’ reports of experiencing severe difficulties after childbirth as merely being ‘down’ delayed an understanding of post-partum depression and inhibited appreciating how severely isolated new mothers often are (Fricker Reference Fricker2009: 148–49; see also Mauthner Reference Mauthner1998). The dismissals of their experiences were characteristically unhelpful comments, and those dismissals in turn contributed to social circumstances that made it much more difficult to develop the hermeneutical tools to recognize that they were experiencing post-partum depression. Combating hermeneutical injustice typically requires social spaces that take the conversational projects of marginalized people seriously and facilitate advancing them through discussion (see Fricker Reference Fricker2009: 148–52).

Fourth, and relatedly, unhelpful comments can and often do play a key role in maintaining what Dotson (Reference Dotson2012) has called ‘contributory injustice’. Contributory injustice occurs when marginalized people understand perfectly well the conditions of their oppression (unlike circumstances of hermeneutical injustice) but are kept from communicating them to members of empowered groups because members of the empowered groups lack the hermeneutical resources (or the motivation) to understand that oppression—though I present them here as plainly distinct phenomena, there are thorny issues regarding how we should understand the relation between hermeneutical and contributory injustice (see Goetze Reference Goetze2018 for a nice summary). We saw earlier that certain unhelpful comments are especially dangerous because they are catchy or because they are especially effective at reinforcing widespread problematic beliefs and perspectives. It is exactly this type of comment that can be especially pernicious in sustaining contributory injustice. For example, imagine a conversation about privilege, in which a straight, cis-gendered, physically abled middle-class white man makes the unhelpful comment ‘my family was fairly poor growing up, and I'm certainly not rich now—I don't have any privilege’. The comment expresses a non-accidentally common misunderstanding of the concept of privilege, and some of the same features that make the comment unhelpful allow it to sustain patterns of contributory injustice. Additionally, as we saw earlier, conversational spaces that fail to value conversational helpfulness can be generally repulsive. But they might be (and often are) especially repulsive to people whose conversational projects would be oriented toward coming to understand the marginalization and oppression they face. Thus, a person might self-silence or smother their own testimony (see especially Dotson Reference Dotson2011; Rooney Reference Rooney2012) in conversational spaces where unhelpful comments abound. For example, a philosopher who is a member of a historically marginalized social group and who is working on philosophy of race might have avoided large gatherings at national philosophy conferences, or if she was compelled to attend, she might avoid discussing her work to avoid a barrage of unhelpful comments aimed at it (and thus at her, her expertise, and her ability to know and communicate knowledge of her own experience of oppression). Thus, a lack of appreciation for conversational helpfulness also plays a role in patterns of contributory injustice via encouraging testimonial self-silencing.

Fifth, widespread patterns of motivated ignorance are often sustained by unhelpful comments. The patterns of motivated ignorance we are most interested in here are those of dominant groups resisting and dismissing evidence of the past and present existence of oppression, domination, marginalization, harm, and injustice (Mills Reference Mills, Sullivan and Tuana2007; Alcoff Reference Alcoff, Sullivan and Tuana2007; Code Reference Code2004; Pohlhaus Jr. Reference Pohlhaus2012; Medina Reference Medina2013). Of course, there is a close connection between motivated ignorance and contributory injustice: motivated ignorance is typically a major component of contributory injustice. However, it is worth discussing motivated ignorance for a moment because unhelpful comments are often simply the verbalized expression of the internal patterns of rationalization a person uses to maintain their ignorance. Recall again our case of the white online commenter who reports that because his white cousin served time in prison for selling marijuana, the American justice system was not inherently racist. This comment was an expression of motivated ignorance in action—of the commenter resisting countervailing evidence to his entrenched perspective.

There are several immediate points I would like to make about these examples. First, I want to be careful to avoid misinterpretations here. My claim is not that epistemic injustice is sustained entirely, primarily, or largely via unhelpful comments. My claim is much weaker—that unhelpful comments are one of the many, many contributors to patterns of epistemic injustice. However, because so many unhelpful comments are quotidian or normalized in particular conversational spaces, their ordinariness makes them sometimes difficult to notice in the moment (see Shklar Reference Shklar1984), and thus as in the case of microaggressions, their weight can add up quickly. Second, as we saw earlier, criticizing unhelpful comments that contribute to epistemic marginalization can sometimes be a rhetorically effective strategy and epistemically useful tool. Of course, doing so will not, on its own, halt ingrained patterns of injustice, but it is often easier to notice, understand, criticize, or communicate how a comment is unhelpful (that is, how it fails to advance the relevant project of the conversation taking place) than it is to notice, understand, criticize, and communicate how that comment sustains epistemic injustice. However, pointing out that a comment is unhelpful might help us analyze these relevant situations more deeply and thus come to understand them better. Even when closer examination is not possible or does not succeed, criticizing certain comments as unhelpful can allow them to be dismissed before they do much of their damage or derail a conversation (which is often enough the goal of certain unhelpful comments). In short, criticizing a comment as unhelpful can be rhetorically and epistemically useful. Thus, calling out such comments as unhelpful can slow or disrupt undesirable patterns in a conversation. It can allow us to ignore certain comments entirely or, as Rae Langton (Reference Langton, Fogal, Harris and Moss2018) has insightfully investigated, block certain presuppositions from taking hold in the conversation. And (just as importantly) calling out such comments can open opportunities for closer examination of the more fundamental and initially opaque issues behind certain problematic comments. Third, these types of cases point to a key feature of criticisms of comments as unhelpful. When the daughter criticizes her father's misinformed advice for combatting depression as unhelpful, she is not merely criticizing the comment for failing to be useful to her or for being demoralizing. Further, she is not criticizing her father for intending to undermine her project because he intended to help. Instead, she is criticizing her father for not listening, for not considering her or her testimony, for not taking her and her projects seriously. The criticism is not merely that her father's suggestion failed to advance her projects, but that he did not bother to put in the epistemic effort required to do so. Similarly, when participants in an online conversation about racism in the justice system dismiss the ‘sometimes it's just not about race’ comment as unhelpful, they are in part criticizing that commenter for not putting in the epistemic effort in seeing how the existence of unfair punishments of white drug offenders fails to undermine claims of systemic racism in the justice system. When the junior faculty member thinks of her senior colleague's unhelpful dismissal of her reports of misogynistic remarks, she is critical of that colleague's lack of empathetic effort or effort to see outside of their perspective about the department chair's sense of humor. These cases strongly suggest another potential component for our account of conversational unhelpfulness. When people criticize comments as unhelpful, part of that criticism often seems to be that the comments stem from epistemic laziness on the part of the commenter. The commenter did not put in the cognitive, emotional, empathetic, or intellectual effort to be in a place where they understood the project of a conversation or how their comment would advance or undermine it. Often enough a root cause of this lack of effort is the concomitant underlying epistemic vice of intellectual laziness, but it is worth pointing out that other epistemic vices, such as intellectual arrogance or dogmatism can also lead to the types of lazy unhelpful comments that we feel compelled to criticize (and, as an anonymous reviewer rightly emphasized, this blameworthy lack of effort can stem from sources other than epistemic vices).

Now, none of this is to say that we should praise every helpful comment and criticize every unhelpful comment we notice. Obviously, sometimes other considerations are more important. Some comments might technically be helpful or unhelpful but not to a degree or in a way worth remarking on. Further, if one immediately grasps how a comment is unhelpful or demoralizing or lazy or otherwise flawed, often one could simply point that out instead. The way in which we call out helpful or unhelpful comments should vary widely given our underlying goals. In some cases, we might not aim for any substantial change in the conversation. We might simply be expressing quick gratitude for a helpful comment. In other cases, we might hope for a substantial change in the conversation or its participants but not expect it, and so we might call out a comment as unhelpful just to express disapproval that we feel obligated to express. Other times, when we sense that something has gone amiss but cannot quite identify or articulate it, calling out the comment as unhelpful will succeed when it leads to identifying what has gone wrong. When we know exactly how a comment is unhelpful and our interlocutors have some responsibility to provide helpful comments, calling the comment unhelpful could encourage them to do so. In these circumstances, the person ideally realizes they have made a mistake and adjusts. Finally, in still other circumstances, our goal might be to redirect or block an avenue of conversation or to dismiss a comment altogether, and the success of the callout depends on our ability actually to redirect the conversation.