posted byCarrie Jenkins

Hi all - and thanks Ken and John for the invitation to be on the show today and to write for this blog.

I liked Ken's Gricean point about the flirter requiring the intention that his/her intention be recognized by the flirtee, and I just wanted to follow up on that a bit. One case I at first thought this promised to help with is the case of the "hypno-flirt" (which was first suggested to me by David Wall at the Australian National University). The hypno-flirt is a mad scientist who playfully and knowingly inserts electrodes into your brain with the intention of stimulating those parts of the brain which will cause you to think about having sex with her. There's some reason to doubt she's flirting, but if all she needs is the playfulness, the knowingness, and the intentions I talk about in my paper (plus the belief that the subject can respond, e.g. with the appropriate beliefs and perhaps emotions), then she ought to count as flirting.

However, one thing lacking from this case is the intention that her intentions be recognized by the subject. So I though maybe introducing your requirement would deal with the case. But then I thought, one could complicate the case so that the hypno-flirt now also stimulates the required parts of the subject's brain to make him believe that she has the intention to make him think about sex with her. It's still a bit uncomfortable to say she is flirting.

因此，我还不确定如何解决“催眠调情”的问题，尽管我怀疑我的描述可能需要一些复杂的东西。这个案例，我认为，提出了一些和你的“危险的桥梁”案例相同的问题，与将浪漫/性凸显出来的方法的偏差或不标准有关。但我还不确定，总的来说，一个调情者需要有这样的意图，即她想要突出浪漫/性的意图得到认可。我认为我可以通过做一些我知道会让他觉得我有多可爱的事情来调情，即使我知道(并且打算)他没有意识到我在做什么。

Suppose I decide to bat my eyelids at Clueless Clive, knowing that he will as a result think of me in a slightly more sexualized way than before, but that because he's so clueless he will have no idea why his attitude to me has changed. If my partner then accuses me of flirting with Clueless Clive, he's got a point. But I certainly agree that in typical cases of flirtation this intention that one's intention be recognized is present.

(Incidentally, I don't know who told you I was an "expert flirter", but personally I'd put myself more at the Pepe Le Pew end of the spectrum than the Brigitte Bardot end ... )