A philosopher’s case for the importance of good—if ethically questionable—humor. A good sense of humor is key to the good life, but a joke taken too far can get anyone into trouble. Where to draw the line is not as simple as it may seem. After all, even the most innocent quips between friends rely on deception, sarcasm, and stereotypes and often run the risk of disrespect, meanness, and harm. How do we face this dilemma without taking ourselves too seriously? (...) In Wisecracks, philosopher David Shoemaker examines this interplay between humor and morality and ultimately argues that even morally suspect humor is an essential part of ethical life. Shoemaker shows how improvised “wisecracks” between family and friends—unlike scripted stand-up, sketches, or serials—help us develop a critical human skill: the ability to carry on and find the funny in tragedy. In developing a new ethics of humor in defense of questionable gibes, Wisecracks offers a powerful case for humor as a healing presence in human life. (shrink)

The study examines the argumentative competencies of people with Asperger syndrome (AS) and compares this with those of normal – or what are called neurotypical (NT) – subjects. To investigate how people with AS recognise, evaluate and engage in argumentation, we have adapted and applied the empirical instrument developed by van Eemeren, Garssen and Meuffels to study the conventional validity of the pragma-dialectical freedom rule (van Eemeren, Gars- sen & Meuffels 2003a; 2003b; 2005a; 2005b; van Eemeren & Meuffels, 2002). Our (...) paper begins with some background information on Asperger syndrome and how it impacts upon communication and argumentation; then it addresses the research questions and methods used; thirdly, it presents some initial findings; finally, it will conclude with some im- plications for those people with AS, for those they come into contact with and for the pragma-dialectic model in general. (shrink)

A central diagnostic and anecdotal feature ofautismis difficulty with socialcommunication. We take the position that communication is a two-way,intersubjectivephenomenon—as described by thedouble empathy problem—and offer uprelevance theory(a cognitive account of utterance interpretation) as a means of explaining such communication difficulties. Based on a set of proposed heuristics for successful and rapid interpretation of intended meaning, relevance theory positions communication as contingent on shared—and, importantly,mutuallyrecognized—“relevance.” Given that autistic and non-autistic people may have sometimes markedly different embodied experiences of the world, we (...) argue that what is most salient to each interlocutor may be mismatched. Relevance theory would predict that where this salient information is not (mutually) recognized or adjusted for, mutual understanding may be more effortful to achieve. This paper presents the findings from a small-scale, linguistic ethnographic study of autistic communication featuring eight core autistic participants. Each core autistic participant engaged in three naturalistic conversations around the topic of loneliness with: (1) a familiar, chosen conversation partner; (2) a non-autistic stranger and (3) an autistic stranger. Relevance theory is utilized as a frame for the linguistic analysis of the interactions. Mutual understanding was unexpectedly high across all types of conversation pairings. In conversations involving two autistic participants, flow, rapport and intersubjective attunement were significantly increased and in three instances, autistic interlocutors appeared to experience improvements in their individual communicative competence contrasted with their other conversations. The findings have the potential to guide future thinking about how, in practical terms, communication between autistic and non-autistic people in both personal and public settings might be improved. (shrink)

Grice (1957) drew a distinction between natural(N) and non–natural(NN) meaning, and showed how the latter might be characterised in terms of intentions and the recognition of intentions. Focussing on the role of natural signs and natural behaviours in communication, this paper makes two main points. First, verbal communication often involves a mixture of natural and non–natural meaning and there is a continuum of cases between showing and meaningNN. This suggests that pragmatics is best seen as a theory of intentional verbal (...) communication rather than a theory of meaningNN. Second, some natural behaviours have a signalling function: they are, in effect, natural codes. Such behaviours do not fit easily into Grice's distinction between natural and non–natural meaning, which suggests it is not exhaustive. (shrink)

The pattern of impairments exhibited by some individuals on the autism spectrum appears to challenge the relevance-theoretic account of metaphor ( Carston, 1996, 2002 ; Sperber and Wilson, 2002 ; Sperber and Wilson, 2008 ). A subset of people on the autism spectrum have near-normal syntactic, phonological, and semantic abilities while having severe difficulties with the interpretation of metaphor, irony, conversational implicature, and other pragmatic phenomena. However, Relevance Theory treats metaphor as importantly unlike phenomena such as conversational implicature or irony (...) and like instances of ordinary literal speech. In this paper, I show how Relevance Theory can account for the prima facie incongruity between its treatment of metaphor and the case of individuals with autism. (shrink)

Autistic individuals are commonly said – and also consider themselves – to be excessively literalist, in the sense that they tend to prefer literal interpretations of words and utterances. This literalist bias seems to be fairly specific to autism and still lacks a convincing explanation. In this paper we explore a novel hypothesis that has the potential to account for the literalist bias in autism. We argue that literalism results from an atypical functioning of the predictive system: specifically, an atypical (...) balance between predictions and error signals in language processing may make individuals more uncertain about their own predictions. Such uncertainty is then often resolved by resorting to the safest interpretation, that is, the literal one. We start by reviewing existing explanations of other autistic traits that appeal to predictive processing. We then apply these insights to language, by showing that predictions play a key role in everyday comprehension and that a low level of confidence in one’s own predictions is likely to escalate comprehension difficulties. Finally, we take a deeper look at non-literal uses of language by discussing the case of metaphors, to illustrate how a predictive processing account offers a promising explanation of the literalist bias in autism. (shrink)

This article explores how high-functioning children with autism navigate in the social world, specifically how they orient in the realm of norms and standards. In particular, this investigation focuses on rule violations episodes and sheds light on how these children account for their conduct and position themselves in the moral framework. This analysis shows that high-functioning children with autism can actively engage in discourse about norms and transgressions in an initiatory capacity, thereby displaying a mastery of social rules as a (...) guide for appropriate conduct and interpretation of others’ behavior. Furthermore, this article argues that these social skills are linked with the ability to operate with sequentially based understandings: Prior courses of action constitute for the autistic children the fundamental source for reaching an understanding of the normative mechanics of everyday life, and subsequently for constructing their own lines of conduct and themselves as moral agents. (shrink)

The central problem for pragmatics is that sentence meaning vastly underdetermines speaker’s meaning. The goal of pragmatics is to explain how the gap between sentence meaning and speaker’s meaning is bridged. This paper defends the broadly Gricean view that pragmatic interpretation is ultimately an exercise in mind-reading, involving the inferential attribution of intentions. We argue, however, that the interpretation process does not simply consist in applying general mind-reading abilities to a particular (communicative) domain. Rather, it involves a dedicated comprehension module, (...) with its own special principles and mechanisms. We show how such a metacommunicative module might have evolved, and what principles and mechanisms it might contain. (shrink)

This article offers an anthropological perspective on autism, a condition at once neurological and social, which complements existing psychological accounts of the disorder, expanding the scope of inquiry from the interpersonal domain, in which autism has been predominantly examined, to the socio-cultural one. Persons with autism need to be viewed not only as individuals in relation to other individuals, but as members of social groups and communities who act, displaying both social competencies and difficulties, in relation to socially and culturally (...) ordered expectations of behavior. The article articulates a socio-cultural approach to perspective-taking in autism in three social domains: participating in conversational turn-taking and sequences; formulating situational scenarios; and interpreting socio-cultural meanings of indexical forms and behavior. Providing ethnographic data on the everyday lives of high-functioning children with autism and Asperger syndrome, the article outlines a cline of competence across the three domains, from most success in conversational turn-taking to least in inferring indexical meanings. Implications of these abilities and limitations are considered for theoretical approaches to society and culture, illuminating how members of social groups are at once shaped by, and are agents of, social life and cultural understanding. (shrink)

This study investigated the understanding of underinformative sentences like “Some elephants have trunks” by children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The scalar term ‘some’ can be interpreted pragmatically, ‘Not all elephants have trunks’, or logically, ‘Some and possibly all elephants have trunks’. Literature indicates that adults with ASD show no real difficulty in interpreting scalar implicatures, i.e., they often interpret them pragmatically, as controls do. This contrasts with the traditional claim of difficulties of people with ASD in other pragmatic domains, (...) and is more in line with the idea that pragmatic problems are not universal. The aim of this study was to: a) gain insight in the ability of children with ASD to derive scalar implicatures, and b) do this by assessing not only sensitivity to underinformativeness, but also different degrees of tolerance to violations of informativeness. We employed a classic statement-evaluation task, presenting optimal, logical false, and underinformative utterances. In Experiment 1, children had to express their judgment on a binary option ‘I agree’ vs ‘I disagree’. In Experiment 2, a ternary middle answer option ‘I agree a bit’ was also available. Sixty-six Flemish-speaking 10-year-old children were tested: 22 children with ASD, an IQ-matched group, and an age-matched group. In the binary judgment task, the ASD-group gave more pragmatic answers than the other groups, which was significant in the mixed effects logistic regression analysis, although not in the non-parametric analysis. In the ternary judgment task, the children with ASD showed a dichotomized attitude towards the speaker’s meaning, by tending to either fully agree or fully disagree with underinformative statements, in contrast with TD children, who preferred the middle option. Remarkably, the IQ-matched group exhibited the same pattern of results as the ASD group. Thanks to a fine-grained measure such as the ternary judgment task, this study highlighted a neglected aspect of the pragmatic profile of ASD, whose struggle with social communication seems to affect also the domain of informativeness. We discuss the implications of the dichotomized reaction towards violations of informativeness of these two groups in terms of the potential role of ASD and of cognitive and verbal abilities. (shrink)

A number of studies have demonstrated pragmatic language difficulties in people with Schizophrenia Spectrum and Other Psychotic Disorders. However, research about how people with schizophrenia spectrum and other psychotic disorders understand scalar implicatures is surprisingly rare, since SIs have generated much of the most recent literature. Scalar implicatures are pragmatic inferences, based on linguistic expressions like some, must, or, which are part of a scale of informativeness. Logically, the less informative expressions imply the more informative ones, but pragmatically people usually (...) infer that the presence of a less informative term implies that the more informative term was not applicable. In one of the few existing studies with people with schizophrenia spectrum and other psychotic disorders, Wampers et al. observed that in general, people with schizophrenia spectrum and other psychotic disorders were less likely to derive SIs than controls. The current study has three main aims. First, we want to replicate the original finding with the scalar terms some-all. Second, we want to investigate how these patients deal with different scalar terms, that is, we want to investigate if scalar diversity is also observed in this clinical group. Third, we investigate the role of working memory, often seen as another important mechanism to enable inferring SIs. Twenty-one individuals with a psychotic disorder and 21 matched controls answered 54 under-informative statements, in which seven different pairs of scalar terms were used. In addition, working memory capacity was measured. Patients with schizophrenia spectrum and other psychotic disorders did not make more logical interpretations when processing quantifiers, disconfirming Wampers et al.. However, certain scalar scales elicited more pragmatic interpretations than others, which is in line with the scalar diversity hypothesis. Additionally, we observed only partial evidence for the role of working memory. Only for the scalar scale and-or, a significant effect of working memory was observed. The implications of these results for patients with schizophrenia spectrum and other psychotic disorders are discussed, but also the role of working memory for pragmatic inferences, as well as the place of SIs in experimental pragmatics. (shrink)

Talk about Beliefs Mark Crimmins, 1992 Cambridge, MA, MIT Press xi + 214 pp., $25.00The Roots of Thinking Mahne Sheets‐Johnstone, 1990 Philadelphia, PA, Temple University Press ix + 389 pp.Varieties of Moral Personality: Ethics and Psychological Realism Owen Flanagan, 1991 Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press 393 ppBehavioral Endocrinology Jill S. Becker, S. Marc Breedlove & David Crews, 1992 Cambridge, MA, MIT Press xxiii + 574 ppLanguages of the Mind: Essays on Mental Representation Ray S. Jackendoff, 1992 Cambridge, MA: MIT Press/Bradford (...) Books i‐ix, 1–200 pp., ISBN 0–262–10047–9Parapsychology: A Concise History John Beloff, 1993 London: Athlone Press xiv + 330 pp ISBN 0 485 11405 4 hb, £32.00 ISBN 0 485 12096 8 pb, £12.95. (shrink)

Glüer and Pagin (2003) have claimed that autistic speakers are a counterexample to HOT theories of meaning and communication. Through analysis of their argument and a re‐examination of the literature, I show that autistic speakers are not a counterexample to HOT theories, but, conversely, that such theories are necessary to account for their communicative peculiarities.

Glüer and Pagin (2003) have claimed that autistic speakers are a counterexample to HOT theories of meaning and communication. Through analysis of their argument and a re-examination of the literature, I show that autistic speakers are not a counterexample to HOT theories, but, conversely, that such theories are necessary to account for their communicative peculiarities.

In this case report, we studied Theory of Mind and figurative language comprehension in a 7.2-year-old child, conventionally named RJ, with isolated and complete agenesis of the corpus callosum, a rare malformation due to the absence of the corpus callosum, the major tract connecting the two brain hemispheres. To study ToM, which is the capability to infer the other’s mental states, we used the classical false belief tasks, and to study figurative language, i.e., those linguistic usages involving non-literal meanings, we (...) used tasks assessing metaphor and idiom comprehension. RJ’s intellectual level and his phonological, lexical, and grammatical abilities were all adequate. In both the ToM false belief tasks and novel sensory metaphor comprehension, RJ showed a delay of 3 years and a significant gap compared to a typically developing control group, while in idioms, his performance was at the border of average. These outcomes suggest that RJ has a specific pragmatic difficulty in all tasks where he must interpret the other’s communicative intention, as in ToM tasks and novel sensory metaphor comprehension. The outcomes also open up interesting insights into the relationships between ToM and figurative language in children with isolated and complete ACC. (shrink)

Any form of overt communication, be it gestural or linguistic, involves pragmatic skills. This article investigates the social–cognitive foundations of pragmatic development from infancy to late childhood and argues that it is driven by, among other things, the emergence of the capacities to assess the communicator's competence (e.g. perceptual access, epistemic states) and honesty. We discuss the implications of this proposal and show how it sheds new light on the developmental trajectory of a series of pragmatic phenomena, with a specific (...) focus on the development of irony comprehension. (shrink)

Decades of research have investigated the complex role of source credibility in attitude persuasion. Current theories of persuasion predict that when messages are thoughtfully scrutinized, argument strength will tend to have a greater effect on attitudes than source credibility. Source credibility can affect highly elaborated attitudes, however, when individuals evaluate material that elicits low attitude extremity. A recently proposed model called the guru effect predicts that source credibility can also cause attitudinal change by biasing the interpretation of pragmatically ambiguous material. (...) The present studies integrate models of explanatory pragmatics and persuasion in order to empirically assess these hypotheses. Experiment 1 found that text difficulty and attitude neutrality reflect independent persuasion variables. Experiment 2 found that higher source credibility causes more favorable attitudes toward messages eliciting low attitude extremity. Text difficulty was not found to have a significant effect on attitudes. These results confirm the predictions of prior social cognition research but no do not support the guru effect model. The implications of these studies for pragmatics and persuasion research as well as the value of interdisciplinary research between these fields are discussed. (shrink)

The South China Sea territorial dispute has been a contentious issue in the international community. In the course of 3 years, China and the Philippines had undergone arbitral proceedings over the maritime rights and entitlements in the South China Sea. As the Permanent Court of Arbitration reached its decision, this paper aims to examine the interpretation process of the Arbitral Tribunal in the judgment of the South China Sea conflict between China and the Philippines. The primary objective of the study (...) is to reconstruct or explain how the Tribunal came up with its interpretation of the written arguments presented by the parties involved and to distinguish whether such reconstruction the Tribunal has successfully interpreted or made sense of the said arguments and submissions. Doing so would necessitate a pragmatic analysis– the relevance-theoretic account of human communication and cognition. Data analyzed include written submissions and arguments as well as the legal documents used during the arbitral process. Using content analysis, the data were evaluated through applying the tool of interpretation based on the criteria set by the three conditions of the relevance theory: logical condition, pragmatic condition, and condition of optimal relevance. This paper argues that in order for the addressee of an utterance, in this case the Arbitral Tribunal, to attain a successful interpretation, it should meet these three conditions. This study found that the reconstruction of the interpretation based on the three conditions showed that the Tribunal had attained a valid and correct interpretation of the Philippines’ and China’s arguments. Furthermore, the paper asserts that implied conclusion and the contextual assumptions can be a guiding principle for the cognitive comprehension or interpretation of legal texts. (shrink)

According to the Interpersonal View of Testimony, testimonial justification is non-evidential in nature. I begin by arguing that the IVT has the following problem: If the IVT is true, then young children and people with autism cannot participate in testimonial exchanges; but young children and people with autism can participate in testimonial exchanges; thus, the IVT should be rejected on the grounds that it has over-cognized what it takes to give and receive testimony. Afterwards, I consider what I take to (...) be the two best motivations for the IVT and argue that they both fail. The overarching lesson, then, is that the IVT is unmotivated and false; we should think of testimonial justification as being evidential in nature. (shrink)

The work reported in this paper investigated the putative functional dependence of pragmatic language skills on general mind‐reading capacity by testing theory‐of‐mind abilities and understanding of non‐literal speech in patients with schizophrenia and in healthy controls. Patients showed difficulties with inferring mental states on a false‐belief picture‐sequencing task and with understanding metaphors and irony on a story‐comprehension task. These difficulties were independent of low verbal IQ and a more generalised problem inhibiting prepotent information. Understanding of metaphors and understanding of irony (...) made significant and independent contributions to discriminating patients from controls, suggesting that metaphor and irony make distinct pragmatic demands. (shrink)

Pragmatic deficits of persons with autism spectrum disorders [ASDs] are often traced back to a dysfunction in Theory of Mind. However, the exact nature of the link between pragmatics and mindreading in autism is unclear. Pragmatic deficits in ASDs are not homogenous: in particular, while inter-subjective dimensions are affected, some other pragmatic capacities seem to be relatively preserved. Moreover, failure on classical false-belief tasks stems from executive problems that go beyond belief attribution; false-belief tasks require taking an alternative perspective on (...) the reality. While this capacity is functional in typically developing young children, it is impaired in ASDs. Typically developing children are capable of taking their interlocutor's perspective into account when communicating, whereas poor cognitive flexibility makes it difficult for persons with ASDs to grasp the inter-subjective character of communicative stimuli. This analysis predicts that those pragmatic processes that amount to merely taking into account salient contextual facts during utterance interpretation, without necessarily adopting the interlocutor's perspective, may be preserved in ASDs. (shrink)

Some theories of linguistic meaning, such as those of Paul Grice and David Lewis, make appeal to higher–order thoughts: thoughts about thoughts. Because of this, such theories run the risk of being empirically refuted by the existence of speakers who lack, completely or to a high degree, the capacity of thinking about thoughts. Research on autism during the past 15 years provides strong evidence for the existence of such speakers. Some persons with autism have linguistic abilities that qualify them as (...) speakers, but manifest a severely impaired capacity to understand what it is to have beliefs. (shrink)

Background: Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) have pronounced difficulties in attending to relevant visual information during social interactions. Method: We designed and evaluated the feasibility of a novel method to train this ability, by exposing participants to virtual human characters displayed on a screen which was entirely blurred, except for a gaze-contingent viewing window that followed participants’ eyes direction. The goal was to incite participants to direct their gaze towards the facial expressions of the virtual characters. Twenty-one adolescents with (...) ASD who attended ordinary school were randomized to either an experimental group, who was trained during a month and a half, or to a control group. Social communicative abilities were assessed during pre, post and follow-up tests. Results: After training, the experimental group showed significantly more interest in facial expressions on a test which involved understanding a dialogue. Significant differences were not found for the other tests used. Conclusions: This outcome suggests that the training method fostered participants’ awareness of the relevance of facial expressions. (shrink)

Neuroeconomics is a science pledged to tracing the neurobiological correlates involved in decision-making, especially in the case of economic decisions. Despite representing a recent research field that is still identifying its research objects, tools and methods, its epistemological scope and scientific relevance have already been openly questioned by several authors. Among these critics, the most influential names in the debate have been those of Faruk Gul and Wolfgang Pesendorfer, who claim that the data on neural activity cannot find place in (...) economic models, which should on the contrary be solely based on the data produced by choices. This paper aims at countering the gloomy and unsubstantiated claims of these two authors and those who believe that neuroscience cannot provide new and useful insights to the established knowledge of standard economics. The main point stressed here is that this perception is the product of a general misunderstanding of the advances made by neuroscience, which are incidentally of crucial importance. (shrink)