On "Revolutionary Road": A Proposal for Extending the Gricean Model of Communication to Cover Multiple Hearers The paper addresses the problem of multiple hearers in the context of the Gricean model of communication, which is based on speaker meaning and the Cooperative Principle, together with its subordinate maxims, legitimately flouted to yield implicatures. Grice appears to have conceived of the communicative process as taking place between two interlocutors, assuming that the speaker communicates meanings, while (...) the hearer makes compatible inferences. A thesis propounded here is that this dyadic account must undergo a number of fundamental modifications to cover a variety of hearer types, both ratified and unratified, partaking in polylogic interactions. (shrink)

This dissertation may be divided into two parts. The first part is about the Extended Gricean Model of information transmission. This model, introduced here, is meant to better explain how humans communicate and understand each other. It has been developed to apply to cases that were left unexplained by the two main models of communication found in contemporary philosophy and linguistics, i.e. the Gricean (pragmatic) model and the code (semantic) model. In particular, I (...) show that these latter two models cannot apply to cases where one communicate through spontaneous emotional expressions and how the Extended Gricean Model of information transmission does. The second part of the dissertation is about what emotional signs mean, in various senses of the term ‘mean'. I review existing theories of meaning and see how they apply to emotional signs, i.e. signs which give us information about the affective state of the sign producer. (shrink)

Abstract.Since the gene splicing debates of the 1980s, the public has been exposed to an ongoing sequence of genetic and reproductive technologies. Many issue areas have outcomes that lose track of people's inner values or engender opposing religious viewpoints defying final resolution. This essay relocates the discussion of what is an acceptable application from the individual to the societal level, examining technologies that stand to address large numbers of people and thus call for policy resolution, rather than individual fiat, in (...) their application. A major source of guidance is the “Genetic Frontiers” series of professional dialogues and conferences held by the National Conference for Community and Justice from 2002 to 2004. Genetic testing, human gene therapy, genetic engineering of plants and animals, and stem cell technology are examined. While differences in perspective on the beginning of life persist, a stepwise approach to the examination of genetic testing reveals areas of general agreement. Stewardship of life, human co‐creativity with the divine, and social justice help define the bounds of application of genetic engineering and therapy; compassionate care plays a major role in establishing stem cell policy. Active, sustained dialogue is a useful resource for enabling sharing of religious values and crystallization of policies. (shrink)

Grice’s analysis of human communication has proven to be highly influential among many philosophers and cognitive scientists, both past and present. At the same time, it has long been recognized that his analysis faces some difficult objections. In particular, a number of theorists have objected to the account Grice provides of the mental states and processes of those engaged in communication. For these theorists, communication as conceived of by Grice has seemed too mentally demanding and complex to (...) be a good general model of human communication. In this article, I consider this challenge afresh from the perspective of Dan Dennett’s intentional stance theory. More specifically, I consider some recent remarks Dennett has made in this area, seeking to pin down and clarify his view. I then argue that while Dennett’s thinking is on the right track, his view stands in need of both a substantive adjustment and more positive detail. I seek to provide such improvements here. Finally, I consider some of the implications of this improved Dennettian account of Gricean communication for how great ape and human communication are related. (shrink)

The field of language evolution has recently made Gricean pragmatics central to its task, particularly within comparative studies between human and non-human primate communication. The standard model of Gricean communication requires a set of complex cognitive abilities, such as belief attribution and understanding nested higher-order mental states. On this model, non-human primate communication is then of a radically different kind to ours. Moreover, the cognitive demands in the standard view are also too high (...) for human infants, who nevertheless do engage in communication. In this paper I critically assess the standard view and contrast it with an alternative, minimal model of Gricean communication recently advanced by Richard Moore. I then raise two objections to the minimal model. The upshot is that this model is conceptually unstable and fails to constitute a suitable alternative as a middle ground between full-fledged human communication and simpler forms of non-human animal communication. (shrink)

Persons of diminished capacity, especially those who are still legally competent but are de facto incompetent should still be able to participate in moderately risky research projects that benefit the class of persons with similar diseases. It is argued that this view can be supported with a modified communitarianism, a philosophy ofmedicine that holds that health care is a joint responsibility that meets foundational human needs. The mechanism for obtaining a substituted consent I call ``community consent,'' and distinguish this from (...) the usual family or surrogate consent for treatment. Care givers are included in the community that might consent for an individual who has no identifiable family members. (shrink)

Complementing earlier efforts to scrutinize the uses of models in the field of media and communication studies, this volume reassesses old perspectives and delineates new theoretical options for communication inquiry. It is the first book to undertake a philosophical investigation of the significance of modelling in the study of the varying phenomena, processes, and practices of communication. By homing in on the manifestations and purposes of modelling in ordinary discourses on communication as well as in theoretical (...) expositions, the essays collected in this book cast new light on the importance of models for communication inquiry. This volume challenges received view of communication models as mere diagrams and opens up new paths of conceptual inquiry in communication research. (shrink)

In this paper I discuss a generalization of communication theory. I sketch a model of the communication situation sufficiently general to subsume all models of particular aspects of communication. Several definitions and lines of inquiry are proposed. It will be evident that much of what I say has been influenced by Bar-Hillel, and also that this paper goes beyond Bar-Hillel's both in generality of scope and in details of analysis. The more general aim of the paper (...) is to suggest a reconstruction of our intuitions regarding communication. In particular, I argue that we should drop the idea that anything is “conveyed” in communication. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Semiotica Jahrgang: 2018 Heft: 224 Seiten: 269-293.

Having a satisfactory definition of behavioural deception is important for understanding several types of evolutionary questions. No definition offered in the literature so far is adequate on all fronts. After identifying characteristics that are important for a definition, a new definition of behavioural deception is offered. The new definition, like some other proposed attempts, relies on formal game-theoretic models of signalling. Unlike others, it incorporates explicit consideration of the population in which the potentially deceptive interactions occur. The general structure of (...) the definition satisfies many of the characteristics that were problematic for other definitions, and others are satisfied by explicitly incorporating information about the population in which interactions occur. Examples are given for chick begging in the Sir Philip Sidney game and other situations. 1 Introduction2 Deception in Formal Models2.1 Formal models of signalling2.2 Deception as dishonesty2.3 Deception as negative value of information2.4 Deception as misinformation with payoff conditions3 A Revised Definition3.1 Technical definitions3.2 Begging behaviour and the Sir Philip Sidney game3.3 ‘Universal’ deception and a possible objection3.4 One-on-one interactions3.5 Lucky errors4 Discussion and Conclusions. (shrink)

Journal Name: Semiotica Issue: Ahead of print.

In this paper we review the critical reception given by Niklas Luhmann's General Theory of Social Systems to the classical Information Theory, as basis of its postulation of a General Sociological Theory entirely founded on the Theory of Communication. Our hypothesis suggests that the formulation of the synthetic model of communication re-formulates the classical model of Shannon, through a replacement of tele-communicative accents by sociological accents. En este trabajo revisamos la recepción crítica dada por la teoría (...) de sistemas sociales de Niklas Luhmann a la teoría de la información clásica, en el marco de su postulación de una teoría general de la sociología fundada en la teoría de la comunicación. La hipótesis que defendemos es que la formulación del modelo sintético de la comunicación reformula el modelo clásico de Shannon, mediante una sustitución de los acentos telecomunicativos por acentos sociológicos. (shrink)

This article investigates the member units of sign systems used in contemporary Iranian advertising slogans according to the Organon Model introduced by Karl Bühler. In dealing with this subject, the writer introduces Bühler’s Organon Model and provides a short definition of the term advertising slogan. The next part of this article shows the three types of conative functions with regard to such slogans. The corpus of this study is the slogan of a hundred contemporary Iranian advertising messages used (...) in Iranian markets which have not been studied from a semiotic perspective. The result of this research shows the tendencies of Iranian advertising messages to lean towards the descriptive type of conative function. (shrink)

Strawson style counterexamples to Grice’s account of communication show that a communicative intention has to be overt. Saying what overtness consists in has proven to be difficult for Gricean accounts. In this paper, I show that a common explanation of overtness, one that construes it in terms of a network of shared beliefs or knowledge, is mistaken. I offer an alternative, collectivist, model of communication. This model takes the utterer’s communicative intention to be a we-intention, (...) a kind of intention with a distinctive content that cannot be reduced to an intention in favor of an individual action. I show that the collectivist model can explain overtness in terms of a general feature of we-intentions, namely the requirement that the participants in a shared activity are to intend to act in accordance with meshing subplans. (shrink)

Together, the code and inferential models of communication are often thought to range over all cases of communication. However, their prevailing versions seem unable to fully explain what I call underdeterminacy without ostension. The latter is constituted by communication where stimuli that are not (nor appear to be) produced with communicative or informative intentions nevertheless communicate information underdetermined by the relevant codes. Though the prevailing accounts of communication cannot fully explain how communication works in such (...) cases, I suggest that some version of the inferential model can—if we allow it to extend to non‐ostensive, non‐intentional behaviors. (shrink)

Awareness is a concept that has been frequently studied in the context of Computer Supported Cooperative Work. However, other fields of computer science can benefit from this concept. Recent research in the multi-agent systems field has highlighted the relevance of complex interaction models such as multi-party communication and context awareness for simulation and adaptive systems. In this article, we present a generic interaction model that enables to use these different models in a standardized way. Emerging as a first-order (...) abstraction, the environment, in the sense of a common medium for the agents, is a suitable paradigm to support the agents’ awareness. We present an operational model, called Environment as Active Support of Interaction, to take into account all the agents that can be interested in a communication. This model is then extended for the regulation of multiagent systems interactions. Priority policies are given to manage the rules governing the context (un-)awareness of the agents. We also present a new AUML connector to create protocols that take into account the agent awareness to implement proactive behaviour, and several communication scenarios are proposed to show practical applications of this model. (shrink)

Reflection on the natural/artificial, real/imaginary, subjective/objective dicotomies is increasingly the subject of debate on systems of communication, which make more and more widespread use of expert and/or intelligent advanced technologies.This paper analyses different forms of communication operating in a socio-technical system. The analysis is concerned with changes in creativity and participation of the human being in the decision and production processes within various contexts of social life. It is thus important to verify the possibility of an interpolation between (...) vital world, social system, and information technologies in order to understand a possible interrelation between therational and therelational components in the presentsocio-technical system. (shrink)

The analysis of social communication in other-than-human animals poses several theoretical challenges due to the complexity of individual and extra-individual variables. Some previous studies have found a valuable solution in Uexküll’s work by expanding and adapting its usage for the study of communication in a heurtistic manner. An Umwelt analysis provides a theoretical toolbox, which allows researchers to take an emic perspective on the lives and phenomenal world of other animals. However, Umwelt and its elaborations do not allow (...) for a clear distinction between acts of perception and communication and seem to ignore factors that escape the specific communication contexts under analysis. Thus, moving away from the existing linear and cyclical approaches to communication, we propose a complementary approach to the study of social communication by combining Barnlund’s transactional model of communication with Umwelt theory and the functional circle more specifically. Our elaborated model conceives social communication as the process of creating meaning through the interaction of two subjects and emphasizes the role of species-specific and individual features in its creation. Our goal is to re-evaluate the research on social communication of other-than-human animals by advocating for the theoretical and empirical potential of Umwelt, especially pertaining to animals with complex Umwelten. Our model offers a valuable solution to the analysis of intraspecies communication that accounts for the role of private and public cues as well as the subjects’ specific behaviors, messages, and context in the creation of meaning. (shrink)

In Imagination and Convention, Ernest Lepore and Matthew Stone claim that there are no conversational implicatures. They argue that the scope of the conventional is wider and the scope of communication narrower than followers of Grice tend to assume, and so, there is simply no room for the sort of indirect communication based on reasoning about intentions conversational implicatures are supposed to exemplify. This way they seek to rehabilitate the old Lockean model of linguistic communication. I (...) argue that while the book is successful in undermining a number of Gricean analyses, the core cases of conversational implicature resist recasting in terms of disambiguation or creative interpretation. Granting that linguistic communication relies more heavily on conventions and that interpretation is more frequently open-ended than it is usually thought cannot save the Lockean model. (shrink)

In the past few years, social epistemologists have developed several formal models of the social organisation of science. While their robustness and representational adequacy has been analysed at length, the function of these models has begun to be discussed in more general terms only recently. In this article, I will interpret many of the current formal models of the scientific community as representing the latest development of what I will call the ‘Kuhnian project’. These models share with Kuhn a number (...) of questions about the relation between individuals and communities. At the same time, they also inherit some of Kuhn’s problematic characterisations of the scientific community. In particular, current models of the social organisation of science represent the scientific community as essentially value-free. This may put into question both their representational adequacy and their normative ambitions. In the end, it will be shown that the discussion on the formal models of the scientific community may contribute in fruitful ways to the ongoing debates on value judgements in science. (shrink)

This paper analyses conceptual and experimental work in synthetic biology on different types of interactions considered as minimal examples or models of communication. It discusses their pertinence and relevance for the wider understanding of this biological and cognitive phenomenon. It critically analyses their limits and it argues that a conceptual framework is needed. As a possible solution, it provides a theoretical account of communication based on the notion of organisation, and characterised in terms of the functional influence exerted (...) by the sender upon the receiver. It shows that this account can be operationalised in synthetic biology, and that it can supply criteria and guidelines for the design and evaluation of synthetic models. (shrink)

This article analyses the consequences that disinformation phenomena have for a model of communication, focusing on the dangers that disinformation poses to democratic societies, especially when it is disseminated by the media. Disinformation is examined here from the perspective of social cognitive psychology, with special attention to the role played by motivated reasoning and confirmation bias in human cognition. From this perspective, disinformation phenomena should be studied not only through an analysis of how the media operate, but also (...) through an understanding of how we process information and what we use it for from a social cognitive point of view. This article emphasizes the role that intuition and affective persuasion play in communication processes, as key elements of motivated reasoning, and argues that once this cognitive dimension is integrated into communication theory, preventive strategies can be designed to protect democracies from the dangers caused by disinformation. Ideological polarization and a lack of consensus are highlighted here as being among the biggest dangers, preventing agreement on issues that affect the proper functioning of democracy. While a certain conception of communication posits reasoning, the media and education as the tools for resolving conflicts and preventing disagreements, this article concludes that the success of disinformation phenomena points to the need for a model that includes the cognitive elements mentioned above. (shrink)

The main objective of this study is to propose, from a theoretical approach, an alternative model of the communication process that includes intentionality, interest, identification, and exchange as part of the internal process of decoding the message experienced by the receiver. The proposal includes the subdivision of the responses offered by the receiver into two possible categories: one simple, which can mean the programmed response to a specific code; and another complex, which can mean a change and/or significant (...) transformation in different aspects associated with the recipient. Through a qualitative methodology, with emphasis on documentary review, and inferential and deductive reasoning, the proposed theoretical model has been developed and explained, highlighting the added value that it could offer to the understanding of communication. (shrink)

Debates about global justice tend to assume normative models of global community without justifying them explicitly. These models are divided between those that advocate a borderless world and those that emphasize the self-sufficiency of smaller political communities. In the first case, there are conceptions of a community of trade and a community of law. In the second case, there are ideas of a community of nation-states and of a community of autonomous communities. The nation-state model, however, is not easily (...) justified and is one that has been criticized extensively elsewhere. The model of a community of trade underlies both advocates of market-oriented development and exponents of global schemes of redistribution of resources and incomes. I analyze the work of Charles Beitz, Peter Singer, and Thomas Pogge to show that the assumption that global interdependence is beneficial is poorly justified. The model of a community of law, as seen in the work of Henry Shue and others, is the basis for arguments against state sovereignty and in favor of international human rights regimes. I argue that this model suffers either from a problem of practicability or of hegemony. Finally, the model of a community of autonomous communities uses notions of patriotism and sovereignty to maintain that disengagement and independence are the best routes to global peace and justice. (shrink)

It is fundamental assumption in nursing theory that it is important for nurses to understand how patients experience states of ill health. This assumption is often related to aims of empathic understanding, but normative principles of social interpretation can have an important action‐guiding role whenever nurses seek to understand patients’ subjective horizons on the basis of active or passive expressions of meaning. The aim of this article is to present a philosophical theory of concept possession and to argue that it (...) can shed light on how nurses should seek to understand patients’ subjective perspectives on the meaning of illness. The two basic ideas in the theory are that patients’ beliefs and thoughts about their experiences involve concepts and that concepts can be communicated on the basis of shared implicit conceptions of what they mean. These conditions of understanding have a striking application: nurse‐patient communication is limited by many contextual factors, but it is often possible for nurses to detect shared implicit conceptions of the meaning of concepts of disease and illness. Furthermore, by acting as sympathetic linguistic experts and creating an atmosphere for dialogue, nurses can make patients feel comfortable about deferring to medical explanations of meaning that can constitute a communicative platform. The last part of the article uses a number of cases studies to show how these implications can be implemented as conceptual tools for securing meaningful communication about illness experiences in patient dialogue. (shrink)

There Is Method in the Humorous Speaker's Madness: Humour and Grice's Model The interdependence between humour and the Cooperative Principle appears to be a bone of contention in pragmatic studies on verbal humour. The wellentrenched approach advocated by Raskin and Attardo is that jokes constitute the non-bona-fide mode of communication standing vis-à-vis the Gricean model and governed by a humour-CP, and that they violate, not merely flout, the maxims and even the CP. The aim of the (...) article is to shed new light on the interdependence between humour and the CP with a view to substantiating that the authors who regard humour as an independent communicative mode and as an intrinsic violation of maxims and the CP appear to labour under a serious misapprehension. It will be argued that the Gricean model of cooperative rationality does allow for humorous verbalisations, which normally rely on maxim flouts. (shrink)

Open peer commentary on the article “Negotiating Between Learner and Mathematics: A Conceptual Framework to Analyze Teacher Sensitivity Toward Constructivism in a Mathematics Classroom” by Philip Borg, Dave Hewitt & Ian Jones. Upshot: Borg et al. provide a framework that contributes to a growing body of research on how radical constructivism can help teachers and researchers to understand the complexity of classroom interactions. The bulk of my commentary is written to clarify theoretical points that I think are important to the (...) endeavor that Borg et al. set out for themselves. My points come in part from thinking about how non-constructivist readers may interpret what Borg et al. outline in their article. (shrink)

We compare a number of influential approaches to human communication with the aim of understanding what it means for interpersonal communication to be a form of social action. In particular, we discuss the large-scale social normativity advocated by speech act theory, the view of communication as small-scale social interaction proper of Gricean approaches, and the intimate connection between communication and cooperation defended by Tomasello. We then argue in favor of a small-scale view of communication (...) capable of accounting for the normative effects of communicative acts; to this purpose, we introduce the concept of interpersonal normativity and analyze its relationship with communicative intentions. (shrink)

Despite recent increasing support for the brain disease model of alcohol and drug addiction, the extent to which the model may clinically impact addiction treatment and client behaviour remains unclear. This qualitative study explored the views of community-based clinicians in Australia and examined: whether Australian community-based clinicians support the BDM of addiction; their attitudes on the impact the model may have on clinical treatment; and their views on how framing addiction as a brain disease may impact addicted (...) clients’ behaviour. Six Australian community-based clinicians participated in semi-structured in-depth interviews that were analysed using thematic analysis. Whilst the BDM was not fully supported by this purposive sample of Australian community-based clinicians, there was acceptance that addiction neuroscience formed a key part of a wider addiction framework. Participants believed the BDM ignored key social, psychological and environmental factors important for successful treatment. The BDM was seen as potentially irrelevant for certain client types, however the model was believed to integrate with particular therapies. Participants believed that for clients viewing their addiction in terms of a brain disease, there were potential positive and negative impacts on client behaviour. Implications for addiction treatment practice and public health policy are discussed. (shrink)