Giving Uptake

I first encountered the concept of Giving Uptake in Nancy Nyquist Potter's How Can I Be Trusted?. She said there that giving uptake is necessary for someone to be trustworthy. Uptake is when someone renders valid the thing that you say, renders it fully said. For instance (from Stanford Encyclopdia of Philosophy):

Other attempts at speech acts might misfire because their addressee fails to respond with an appropriate uptake: I cannot bet you $100 on who will win the election unless you accept that bet. If you do not accept that bet, then I have tried to bet but have not succeeded in betting.

One can see how this applies to areas other than betting. If you say "no" to someone and they interpret it as though you didn't really mean it, you learn that saying "no" is ineffective, and it looks like the other person is right -- you really weren't serious, it's made to seem, about not wanting what they wanted to do. Refusing to give uptake is a means of exerting power on other people. And people can fail to be able to give uptake because they're deadened.

When you don't understand someone else, how can you give them uptake consistently? But then they won't communicate with you as openly. And then you don't trust them as much, a spiral of trusting less and less.

Failing to give uptake is related to gaslighting. Gaslighting denies memory, while failing to give uptake denies speech in the moment.

It's not always necessary to signal uptake, as long as it's a reality, but signaling it can help, if the signaling is backed up by reality. If you allow people to not signal uptake in contexts where it could be ambiguous (like over the Internet), you trust them to act on the basis of giving you uptake. Maybe justified, maybe not, depending.