It is sometimes claimed that Gricean communication is necessarily a form of cooperative or ‘joint’ action. A consequence of this Cooperative Communication View is that Gricean communication could not itself contribute to an explanation of the possibility of joint action. I argue that even though Gricean communication is often a form of joint action, it is not necessarily so—since it does not always require intentional action on the part of a hearer. Rejecting the (...) Cooperative Communication View has attractive consequences for our theorising about human cognitive development, since it opens up the possibility of appealing to communicative interaction to explain the emergence of joint action in phylogeny. (shrink)

On standard readings of Grice, Gricean communication requires (a) possession of a concept of belief, (b) the ability to make complex inferences about others’ goal-directed behaviour, and (c) the ability to entertain fourth order meta-representations. To the extent that these abilities are pre-requisites of Gricean communication they are inconsistent with the view that Gricean communication could play a role in their development. In this paper, I argue that a class of ‘minimally Gricean acts’ (...) satisfy the intentional structure described by Grice, but require none of abilities (a)-(c). As a result, Gricean communicative abilities may indeed contribute to the development of (a)-(c) – in particular, by enabling language development. This conclusion has important implications for our theorising about cognitive development. (shrink)

Humans alone acquire language. According to one influen- tial school of thought, we do this because we possess a uniquely human ability to act with and attribute “Gricean” communicative intentions. A challenge for this view is that attributing communicative intent seems to require cognitive abilities that infant language learners lack. After considering a range of responses to this challenge, I argue that infant language development can be explained, because Gricean communication is cognitively less demanding than many suppose. (...) However, a consequence of this is that abilities for Gricean communication are unlikely to be uniquely human. (shrink)

Gricean communication is communication between utterers and their audiences, where the utterer means something and the audience understands what is meant. The weak transmission idea is that, whenever such communication takes place, there is something which is transmitted from utterer to audience; the strong transmission idea adds that what is transmitted is nothing else than what is communicated. We try to salvage these ideas from a seemingly forceful attack by Wayne Davis. Davis attaches too much significance (...) to the surface structure of sentences of the type ‘S communicates the belief (desire …) that p to A’ by assuming that the communicated entity is denoted by the grammatical object following ‘communicates’. On our proposal, what is communicated in all Gricean cases is a thought. And since S communicates the thought that p to A only if S means that p and A understands what S means, the thought that p will be transmitted from S to A. (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)

The Gricean distinction between natural meaning and non-natural meaning has generally been taken to apply to communication in general. However, there is some doubts that the distinction exhaustively accounts for all instances of communication. Notably, some animal communication seems to be voluntary, though not implying double-barrelled intentions, i.e., falling neither under natural nor under non-natural meaning. Another worry is how the audience can distinguish between that kind of 1st order voluntary communication and non-natural meaning. The (...) paper shows that the Gricean distinction is not exhaustive and that the second intention characteristic of non-natural meaning is presupposed on the basis of the cost of interpretation in linguistic communication given its semantic underdetermination. (shrink)

Gricean intentionalists hold that what a speaker says and means by a linguistic utterance is determined by the speaker's communicative intention. On this view, one cannot really say anything without meaning it as well. Conventionalists argue, however, that malapropisms provide powerful counterexamples to this claim. I present two arguments against the conventionalist and sketch a new Gricean theory of speech errors, called the misarticulation theory. On this view, malapropisms are understood as a special case of mispronunciation. I argue (...) that the Gricean theory is supported by empirical work in phonetics and phonology and, also, that conventionalism inevitably fails to do this work justice. I conclude, from this, that the conventionalist fails to show that malapropisms constitute a counterexample to a Gricean theory. (shrink)

Callender and Cohen have proposed to apply a “Gricean strategy” to the constitution problem of scientific representation, taking inspiration from Grice’s reduction of linguistic meaning to mental states. They suggest that scientific representation can be reduced to stipulation by epistemic agents. This account has been criticised for not making a distinction between symbolic and epistemic representation and not taking into account the communal aspects of scientific representation. I argue that these criticisms would not apply if Grice’s actual strategy were (...) properly employed. I present Grice’s account of linguistic meaning and transpose his actual strategy and method to epistemic representation. This results in a reduction of epistemic representation to mental states that does not fall prey to the same criticisms. The main novelty of the resulting account is a distinction between contextual representational use and general representational status, which I address using the notion of indexicality. (shrink)

Some philosophers oppose recent arguments for the Knowledge Norm of Assertion by claiming that assertion, being an act much like any other, will be subject to norms governing acts generally, such as those articulated by Grice for the purpose of successful, cooperative endeavours. But in fact, Grice is a traitor to their cause; or rather, they are his dissenters, not his disciples. Drawing on Grice's unpublished papers, I show that he thought of asserting as a special linguistic act in need (...) of its own norm, and he tied his maxim of Quality to knowledge. I also develop a simple Gricean-inspired argument showing that the Quality maxim is not dependent on the Cooperative Principle. If it is not thus dependent, then the Cooperative Principle cannot be the explanation of, or source of normativity for, the Quality maxim. Thus, leveraging the insights informing the maxim of Quality actually provides the resources for a distinctive positive case that knowledge is the constitutive norm of assertion. (shrink)

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)

My aim in this paper is to contribute to the debate on the foundations of semantics and pragmatics by developing an Austinian alternative to the Gricean programme. The Gricean approach has been criticised by Ernie Lepore and Matthew Stone who claim that most of the interpretive effects that are usually accounted for as inferentially recognized aspects of meaning are in fact determined by grammar. I argue, however, that it is the Austinian perspective rather than the extended-grammar outlook, that (...) constitutes a genuine alternative to the Gricean programme. Viewed from the Austinian perspective, using language is a social practice that consists of performing conventional speech acts: acts done conforming to a convention. Unlike the Griceans and the proponents of the extended-grammar outlook, however, the Austinians assume that following a convention is not an algorithmic procedure, but a socially controlled process that involves interactional negotiation. They claim, namely, that each language convention — phatic, rhetic, illocutionary, rhetorical, procedural, etc. — is a lineage of reproduced precedents that put some constraints on what can be regarded as saying and doing the same, but underdetermine the exact properties of its new members. (shrink)

Psychologists' work on conversational pragmatics and judgment suggests a refreshing approach to charitable interpretation and theorizing. This charitable approach—what I call Gricean charity —recognizes the role of conversational assumptions and norms in subject-experimenter communication. In this paper, I outline the methodological lessons Gricean charity gleans from psychologists' work in conversational pragmatics. In particular, Gricean charity imposes specific evidential standards requiring that researchers collect empirical information about (1) the conditions of successful and unsuccessful communication for specific (...) experimental contexts, and (2) the conversational norms governing communication in experimental contexts. More generally, the Gricean turn in psychological research shifts focus from attributional to reflexive, situational explanations. Gricean charity does not primarily seek to rationalize subject responses. Rather, it imposes evidential requirements on psychological studies for the purpose of gaining a more accurate picture of the surprising and muddled ways in which we weigh evidence and draw. Key Words: Gricean charity • methodological rationalism • interpretation • principle of charity • cognitive psychology • conversational pragmatics • heuristics and biases • reflexive analysis. (shrink)

In Spence v. Washington, the Supreme Court devised a two-part test for determining whether a nonverbal action is expressive conduct protected by the First Amendment. According to the Spence test, a nonverbal action is expressive if and only if: (1) it is intended to communicate a particularized message; and (2) in the circumstances in which the action is performed, the likelihood is great that the message will be understood by observers. -/- In subsequent cases, however, the Court has made clear (...) that the category of "expressive conduct" embraces a much wider variety of nonverbal behaviors than a literal reading of the Spence test would suggest. It includes, for example, such behaviors as composing instrumental music, creating nonrepresentational visual artworks, penning nonsense verse, and dancing in the nude for the entertainment of others. -/- Drawing on the work of Paul Grice, one of the twentieth century's most influential philosophers of language, this Comment develops a two-part expressive conduct test that captures the expressive character of this wider variety of behaviors. It shows that the Gricean test displays striking consistency with the Supreme Court's particularized judgments about which sorts of nonverbal conduct are expressive and which sorts are not. (shrink)

The task of explaining language evolution is often presented by leading theorists in explicitly Gricean terms. After a critical evaluation, I present an alternative, non‐Gricean conceptualization of the task. I argue that, while it may be true that nonhuman animals, in contrast to language users, lack the ‘motive to share information’ understoodà laGrice, nonhuman animals nevertheless do express states of mind through complex nonlinguistic behavior. On a proper, non‐Gricean construal of expressive communication, this means that they (...) show to their designated audience (without intentionally telling)—and their designated audience recognizes (without rationally inferring)—both how things are in the world and how things are with them. Recognizing that our nonhuman predecessors were already proficient—though non‐Gricean—sharers of such information would free us to focus on the more tractable problem of explaining how linguistic expressive vehicles came to replace, augment, and transform the nonlinguistic expressive means to which nonhuman animals are consigned. (shrink)

a comprehensive, somewhat Gricean theory of speech acts, including an account of communicative intentions and inferences, a taxonomy of speech acts, and coverage of many topics in pragmatics -/- .

Orthodoxy has it that language evolution requires Gricean communicative intentions and therefore an understanding of nested metarepresentations. The problem with this orthodoxy is that it is hard to see how non-linguistic creatures could have such a sophisticated understanding of mentality. Some philosophers like Bar-On (The Journal of Philosophy 110 (6): 293-330, 2013a; Mind and Language 28 (3): 342-375, 2013b) have attempted to develop a non-Gricean account of language acquisition building on the information-rich and subtle communicative powers of expressive (...) behaviours. This paper argues that this approach shares a number of instructive similarities with the literature on the cognitive conception of language. It shows how expressive accounts (and others) can learn from insights in that tradition and identifies a problem with the role of intentional actions in expressive accounts that can be solved by understanding expressive behaviours more as cognitive rather than communicative tools. (shrink)

RÉSUMÉ : Dans son récent recueil d’articles Language, Truth and History, Donald Davidson semble pencher en faveur d’une philosophie du langage mettant l’accent sur la notion de l’intention communicative du sujet parlant; en quoi il se rapproche du point de vue de Paul Grice. Si cela est juste, la pensée de Davidson se serait dégagée de l’approche sémantique formelle qu’il soutenait dans ses Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation. Dans cet article, je soutiens que, bien qu’il y ait beaucoup de similitudes (...) entre ces deux penseurs, Davidson n’a pas abandonné ses précédentes vues sur le langage. (shrink)

The only way to be successful now days in every field of life is the effective use of verbal expression. Language serves as a toolkit to inform, reveal, explore, expose, explain, manipulate, exaggerate, intensify, mitigate and what not. It has every hidden potential to serve its users. Significance of this toolkit of language can also be a bravura feature in gaining comic and/or tragic effects in media. The language of the media violates its few communicative principles which can be termed (...) as Gricean cooperative principle, to serve the specific interests via playing upon the common use of language. The present study explores the intricacies involved in any communication to achieve comic effects. For this purpose, Gricean maxims have been investigated thoroughly with the help of Pakistani comedy show “Bulbulay” which is a famous TV series all over the country. The TV series is considered to be popular among the masses due to its different and unique language that is achieved by flouting the maxims in Gricean’s terminology. The study explains the inimitable ways of achieving comic effects in series and also suggests further work on other areas regarding the unusual use of language to achieve desired results. (shrink)

A pragmatic account of referential communication is developed which presents an alternative to traditional Gricean accounts by focusing on cooperativeness and efficiency, rather than informativity. The results of four language‐production experiments support the view that speakers can be cooperative when producing redundant adjectives, doing so more often when color modification could facilitate the listener's search for the referent in the visual display (Experiment 1a). By contrast, when the listener knew which shape was the target, speakers did not produce (...) redundant color adjectives (Experiment 1b). English speakers used redundant color adjectives more often than Spanish speakers, suggesting that speakers are sensitive to the differential efficiency of prenominal and postnominal modification (Experiment 2). Speakers were also cooperative when using redundant size adjectives (Experiment 3). Overall, these results show how discriminability affects a speaker's choice of referential expression above and beyond considerations of informativity, supporting the view that redundant speakers can be cooperative. (shrink)

Recent discussions of animal communication and the evolution of language have advocated adopting a ‘pragmatics-first’ approach, according to which “a more productive framework” for primate communication research should be “pragmatics, the field of linguistics that examines the role of context in shaping the meaning of linguistic utterances”. After distinguishing two different conceptions of pragmatics that advocates of the pragmatics-first approach have implicitly relied on, I argue that neither conception adequately serves the purposes of pragmatics-first approaches to the origins (...) of human linguistic communication. My main aim in this paper is to motivate–and begin to articulate–an intermediary conception whose scope is narrower than Carnapian pragmatics but broader than Gricean pragmatics. To do so, I first spell out what I take to be the key insight offered by proponents of the Gricean approach concerning the emergence of linguistic communication, namely, its being communication ‘from a psychological point of view’. I then develop this insight using key elements from the anti-Gricean ‘biosemantic’ account of linguistic communication due to Ruth Millikan, Philosophical Perspectives 9, Ridgeview Publishing, Atascedero CA, 1995, Millikan R Varieties of Meaning. Mass.: The MIT Press, Cambridge, Millikan, Beyond concepts: unicepts, language, and natural information, Oxford University Press, Oxford UK, 2017, and elsewhere). I argue that the intermediary pragmatics-first approach that I propose, which draws on both Gricean and Millikanian resources, would be better equipped to serve the purposes of those who search for potential precursors of human linguistic communication in animal communication. (shrink)

In this paper, I focus on the alleged distinction between speaker’s reference and semantic reference. I begin by discussing Saul Kripke’s notion of speaker’s reference and the theoretical roles it is supposed to play, arguing that they do not justify the claim that reference comes in two different sorts and highlighting that Kripke’s own definition makes the notion incompatible with the nowadays widely endorsed Gricean project, which aims at explaining semantic reference in terms of speaker’s reference. I then examine (...) an alternative account of speaker’s reference offered by Michael Devitt within his causal theory and express some doubts about its suitability for explaining proper name semantic reference. From all this, I conclude that there is at least some tension between Kripke’s chain of communication picture and the attempt to explain (Griceanly, so to say) semantic properties in terms of speakers’ mental states. (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)

Since Grice introduced the distinction between what is said and implicature, the literature shows a widespread interest in the delimitation of these notions. In this paper, I will identify and specify the criteria with which Grice distinctly determines the factors of the speaker’s meaning and I will use these criteria to compare the Gricean minimalist notion of what is said with the Relevance theoretic notion of explicature. In drawing this comparison, I aim to make it clear that the two (...) approaches have different commitments and motivations. Finally, taking these commitments into account, I will argue that the philosophical notion of saying fits harmlessly in the cognitive account of linguistic communication by Relevance Theory and thus it can coexist with the notion of explicature. (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)

This chapter investigates the computational consequences of a broadly Gricean view of language use as intentional activity. In this view, dialogue rests on coordinated reasoning about communicative intentions. The speaker produces each utterance by formulating a suitable communicative intention. The hearer understands it by recognizing the communicative intention behind it. When this coordination is successful, interlocutors succeed in considering the same intentions— that is, the same representations of utterance meaning—as the dialogue proceeds. In this paper, I emphasize that these (...) intentions can be formalized; we can provide abstract but systematic representations that spell out what a speaker is trying to do with an utterance. Such representations describe utterances simultaneously as the product of our knowledge of grammar and as actions chosen for a reason. In particular, they must characterize the speaker’s utterance in grammatical terms, provide the links to the context that the grammar requires, and so arrive at a contribution that the speaker aims to achieve. Because I have implemented this formalism, we can regard it as a possible analysis of conversational processes at the level of computational theory. Nevertheless, this analysis leaves open what the nature of the biological computation involved in inference to intentions is, and what regularities in language use support this computation. (shrink)

In this article, I discuss the historical imperative for art to create new forms. This imperative has become especially pronounced in the Age of the Avant-Garde. For that reason, I focus on the way in which avant-garde creativity typically proceeds. To that end, I rely on Paul Grice’s theory of communication.

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)

Research on the evolution of language is often framed in terms of sharp discontinuities in syntax and semantics between animal communication systems and human language as we know them. According to the so-called “pragmatics-first” approach to the evolution of language, when trying to understand the origins of human language in animal communication, we should be focusing on potential pragmatic continuities. However, some proponents of this approach (e.g. Seyfarth and Cheney Animal Behavior 124: 339–346, 2017) find important pragmatic continuities, (...) whereas others (e.g. Origgi and Sperber 2000) find sharp discontinuities. I begin (in Section 1) by arguing that this divergence is due to the fact that the proponents implicitly rely, respectively, on two different views of pragmatics, corresponding to different conceptions of what is involved in context-dependence – one “Carnapian”, the other “Gricean”. I argue that neither conception is fit to serve the purposes of pragmatics-first approaches to the evolution of language. In Section 2, I examine a recent formal “semantic-pragmatic” analysis of monkey calls, due to Philippe Schlenker et al. (in, e.g., Linguistics and Philosophy 37 (6): 439–501, 2014, Trends in Cognitive Science 20 (12): 894–904, 2016a, Theoretical Linguistics 42 (1–2): 1–90, 2016b), which appears to improve on the Carnapian and Gricean conceptions. However, I argue that the appearances are misleading and that the S-P analysis is no better suited than Carnapian analyses for the purposes of those seeking to establish human-nonhuman pragmatic continuities. Understanding why this is so will point the way toward my preferred, genuinely intermediate conception of pragmatics (as defended in Bar-On Biology & Philosophy 36 (6): 1–25, 2021), which – I argue in Section 3 – is better fit for these purposes. Drawing on recent discussions of chimpanzee communication, I briefly indicate which aspects of extant primate call communication – both gestural and vocal – could potentially count as pragmatic according to this conception. (shrink)

Brian Loar [1976] observed that, even in the simplest of cases, such as an utterance of (1): ‘He is a stockbroker’, a speaker's audience might misunderstand her utterance even if they correctly identify the referent of the relevant singular term, and understand what is being predicated of it. Numerous theorists, including Bezuidenhout [1997], Heck [1995], Paul [1999], and Récanati [1993, 1995], have used Loar's observation to argue against direct reference accounts of assertoric content and communication, maintaining that, even in (...) these simple cases, the propositional contribution of a referring expression must be more than just its referent. -/- I argue here that, while Loar's observation is correct, the conclusion he and others have sought to draw from it simply does not follow. Rather, his observation helps to remind us of an important Gricean insight into the nature of communicative acts—including acts of speaker-reference—namely, that there is more to understanding a communicative act than merely entertaining what a speaker is intending to communicate thereby. Once we remember this insight, we see that the phenomenon to which Loar is calling our attention should actually be expected given the direct reference theorist's assumptions, together with independently plausible Gricean principles concerning how we make our referential intentions manifest in communication. More generally, the Gricean strategy for explaining the challenge posed by Loar cases suggests a novel way to account for certain crucial anti-direct reference intuitions—one requiring no modification of the original theory (e.g., no invocation of ‘descriptive enrichments’ as in Soames [2002]), thereby allowing for a direct reference account of what is asserted in utterances of ‘simple sentences’ such as (1). (shrink)

Paul Grice’s account of the nature of intentional communication has often been supposed to be cognitively too complex to work as an account of the communicative interactions of pre-verbal children. This chapter is a (fairly uncritical) review of a number of responses to this challenge that others have developed. I discuss work on Relevance Theory (by Sperber and Wilson), Pedagogy Theory (by Gergely and Csibra), and Expressive Communication (by Green and Bar-On). I also discuss my own response to (...) the challenge of Gricean communication. (shrink)

Brian Loar [1976] observed that communicative success with singular terms requires more than correct referent assignment. For communicative success to be achieved, the audience must assign the right referent in the right way. Loar, and others since, took this to motivate Fregean accounts of the semantics of singular terms. Ray Buchanan [2014] has recently responded, maintaining that, although Loar is correct to claim that communicative success with singular terms requires more than correct referent assignment, this is compatible with direct reference (...) approaches, as long as one also endorses an independently motivated Gricean view of communicative intentions. This paper argues that Buchanan's Gricean view cannot account for the full range of Loar cases. In doing so, it aims to explicate the structure of Loar's cases and thus to clarify the conditions that a theory must meet in order to adequately meet his challenge. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to support the position that what is implicated is not determined by speaker intention, a claim which runs counter to the widely accepted position that what is implicated is determined by speaker intention. This article argues for the conclusion that communication of conversational implicatures can be unintended by presenting three examples in which Grice’s criteria for the completion of conversational implicature are satisfied but the speaker does not intend to implicate anything. The article (...) ends with the suggestion that rules governing implicatures are importantly normative and that linguistic communal norms account for their normativity. (shrink)

Joint attention occurs when two (or more) individuals attend together to some object. It has been identified by psychologists as an early form of our joint engagement, and is thought to provide us with an understanding of other minds that is basic in that sophisticated conceptual resources are not involved. Accordingly, it has also attracted the interest of philosophers. Moreover, a very recent trend in the psychological and philosophical literature on joint attention consists of developing the suggestion that it holds (...) partially in virtue of communication: it is because we share our thoughts or feelings about an object that our individual attention becomes joint. This paper unpacks the communicative suggestion in a way that accounts for joint attention's basicness. (shrink)

In the first part of this paper I consider the Gricean account of communication, as structured by the Cooperative Principle and the four maxims. Several authors, including Jean Goodwin [10], Fred Kauffeld [17], Michael Gilbert [7], Ernie Lepore and Mathew Stone [22], among others, argue that the Gricean view of communication fails in as much as it pretends to offer an account of all such human interactions. As Goodwin and Kauffeld suggest, a more promising starting point (...) is to consider the variety of contextually determined presumptions that we make about speakers and that we rely upon in interpreting utterances. These presumptions are established in various ways, and are dropped, or defeated, in certain conditions. In order to clarify these aspects we need to inquiry into the nature of presumptions. I argue that Kauffeld’s [18], [19], [20] account of presumptions is useful in this context. In the second part of the paper I look at what this account tells us about how, and in what conditions, presumptions in communication are rebutted. (shrink)

In this paper we analyze and discuss Jennifer Saul’s account of the famous Gricean notions of ‘what is said’ and ‘what is implicated’ and the alleged conflict between them and the so- called Speaker- Meaning Exhaustiveness Thesis (SMET), which is standardly attributed to Grice in the literature. SMET declares that speaker- meaning divides exhaustively into what is said and what is (conventionally or nonconventionally) implicated by the speaker. After a detailed interpretation of Saul’s position, we argue that her analysis (...) partly misconstrues the relation between Grice’s theory of speaker- meaning and his normative account of conversational implicature. First of all, because SMET is not a genuine part of the Gricean theory of language and meaning – Grice was never committed to it. Secondly, Saul’s interpretation of the Gricean account of conversational implicature does not reflect accurately his original ideas. Although we agree with Saul that conversational implicature has an essential normative aspect, her account cannot capture well the real nature of this normativity, since it does not identify its source and does not delineate its scope. Finally, we present an alternative, speaker- oriented normative interpretation of Grice’s account of conversational implicatures, and argue that it fits better with the Gricean picture of communication and handles better the various problematic cases of conversational implicature than Saul’s mainly audience- oriented interpretation. (shrink)

The paper addresses itself to the "Homeric struggle" in the theory of meaning between those (e.g., Grice) who try to analyze declarative meaning in terms of an intention to induce a belief and those (e.g., Davidson) for who declarative meaning consists in truth conditions. (The point of departure is Strawson's celebrated discussion of this issue, in his Inaugural Lecture.) I argue that neither style of analysis is satisfactory, and develop a "hybrid" that may be-although what I take from the (...) class='Hi'>Gricean side in the struggle is not the notion of an intention, but that of somebody's reason for speaking as he does. The paper applies the hybrid analysis to resolve certain problems connected with the rationale for compositional, truth-theoretic semantics. (shrink)

The concept of recognition (Anerkennung in German) has been in the center of intensive interest and debate for some time in social and political philosophy, as well as in Hegel-scholarship. The first part of the article clarifies conceptually what recognition in the relevant sense arguably is. The second part explores one possible route for arguing that the „recognitive attitudes‟ of respect and love have a necessary role in the coming about of the psychological capacities distinctive of persons. More exactly, it (...) explores the possibility that they are necessary in the kind of intersubjective relationship in which normal human infants engage in the pre-linguistic communicative practice of pointing things to others, as described by Michael Tomasello. If an incapacity to participate in the already Gricean communicative practices of pointing makes it also impossible for the infant to learn symbolic communication, and if without the immediately intrinsically motivating other-regarding attitudes of recognition communicative pointing does not get off the ground (at least among the most intelligent animals currently known to exist), then the capacity for recognition may be a decisive difference between humans and their closest non-human relatives. That is, it may be why only human infants, but no other animals, are capable of embarking on a developmental journey that normally leads to full-fledged psychological personhood. If this is so, then the concept of recognition, today mostly discussed in social and political philosophy and Hegel-studies, could turn out to be a very useful tool in cognitive scientific work interested in specifically human forms of social intentionality, cognition, volition and so forth. (shrink)

Adviser: Professor Stefan Baumrin In the first chapter I introduce the distinction between metaethics and normative ethics and argue that metaethics, properly conceived, is a part of cognitive science. For example, the debate between rationalism and sentimentalism can be informed by recent empirical work in psychology and the neurosciences. In the second chapter I argue that the traditional view that one’s theory of semantics determines what one’s theory of justification must be is mistaken. Though it has been the case that (...) there are ‘typical’ combinations of semantic and justificational theories this is by no means forced on one. In the third chapter I examine two current kinds of expressivism; that of Blackburn and Copp. Each gives us an example of different combinations of semantic and justificatory theory. In Blackburn’s case he combines a use theory of meaning with a classic emotivist theory of justification, In Copp’s case it is a neo-Gricean philosophy of language with a realist’s theory of justification. I find both of these wanting as they ultimately collapse into relativistic subjectivism. In the fourth and fifth chapter I turn to developing Emotive Realism. The basic idea behind this view is that when someone says ‘x is wrong/right’ that person has (a) expressed a moral emotion about x and at the same time (b) expressed the belief that the emotion in (a) is the correct one to have. The belief expressed in (b) will be true or false depending on one’s theory of justification. In the fourth chapter I argue that we need separate semantic theories for thoughts and sentences. In the fifth chapter I fill in the details of Emotive Realism as I see it. (shrink)

The concept of recognition has been in the center of intensive interest and debate for some time in social and political philosophy, as well as in Hegel-scholarship. The first part of the article clarifies conceptually what recognition in the relevant sense arguably is. The second part explores one possible route for arguing that the 'recognitive attitudes' of respect and love have a necessary role in the coming about of the psychological capacities distinctive of persons. More exactly, it explores the possibility (...) that they are necessary in the kind of intersubjective relationship in which normal human infants engage in the pre-linguistic communicative practice of pointing things to others, as described by Michael Tomasello. If an incapacity to participate in the already Gricean communicative practices of pointing makes it also impossible for the infant to learn symbolic communication, and if without the immediately intrinsically motivating other-regarding attitudes of recognition communicative pointing does not get off the ground, then the capacity for recognition may be a decisive difference between humans and their closest non-human relatives. That is, it may be why only human infants, but no other animals, are capable of embarking on a developmental journey that normally leads to full-fledged psychological personhood. If this is so, then the concept of recognition, today mostly discussed in social and political philosophy and Hegel-studies, could turn out to be a very useful tool in cognitive scientific work interested in specifically human forms of social intentionality, cognition, volition and so forth. (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)

Philosophers are often beholden to a picture of language as a largely static, well-defined structure which is handed over from generation to generation by an arduous process of learning: language, on this view, is something that we are given, and that we can make use of, but which we play no significant role in creating ourselves. This picture is often maintained in conjunction with the idea that several distinctively human cognitive capacities could only develop via the language acquisition process, as (...) thus understood. This paper argues that the phenomenon of homesign, i.e., spontaneous gesture systems devised by deaf children for the purpose of communicating with their non-signing peers, can shed valuable empirical light on these convictions. Contrary to grounding assumptions of Wittgensteinian, Gricean, and Peircean approaches to language, homesign shows how core properties of language—including semantic properties—can be built from the ground up in idiosyncratic ways to serve the communicative needs of individuals. (shrink)

In this pioneering book Kasia Jaszczolt lays down the foundations of an original theory of meaning in discourse, reveals the cognitive foundations of discourse interpretation, and puts forward a new basis for the analysis of discourse processing. She provides a step-by-step introduction to the theory and its application, and explains new terms and formalisms as required. Dr Jaszczolt unites the precision of truth-conditional, dynamic approaches with insights from neo-Gricean pragmatics into the role of speaker's intentions in communication. She (...) shows that the compositionality of meaning may be understood as merger representations combining information from various sources including word meaning and sentence structure, various kinds of default interpretations, and conscious pragmatic inference. Among the applications the author discusses are constructions that pose problems in semantic analysis such as referring expressions, propositional attitude constructions, presupposition, modality, numerals, and sentential connectives. She proposes solutions to cutting edge problems in the semantics/pragmatics interface - for example, how many levels of meaning should be distinguished; the status of underspecification; how much contextual information should be placed in the representation of the speaker's meaning; whether there are default interpretations; the stage of utterance interpretation at which pragmatic inference begins; and whether compositionality is a necessary feature of the theory of meaning and if so how it is to be defined.The book is for students and researchers in semantics, pragmatics, computational linguistics, and philosophy of language at advanced undergraduate level and above. (shrink)

Procedural metacognition is the set of affect-based mechanisms allowing agents to regulate cognitive actions like perceptual discrimination, memory retrieval or problem solving. This article proposes that procedural metacognition has had a major role in the evolution of communication. A plausible hypothesis is that, under pressure for maximizing signalling efficiency, the metacognitive abilities used by nonhumans to regulate their perception and their memory have been re-used to regulate their communication. On this view, detecting one’s production errors in signalling, or (...) solving species-specific trade-offs between informativeness, processing effort, clarity, or urgency depend on a form of procedural metacognition, called “metacommunication”. How does this view relate to Gricean theories of human communication? A parallel between procedural trade-offs and conversational maxims is discussed for its evolutionary implications. Rather than accepting radically discontinuist interpretations, in which mindreading operates a full reorganization of pragmatics, it is proposed that procedural forms of regulation are entrenched in all forms of human communication. According to contextual demands, humans adopt and monitor more or less demanding informational goals, such as factual updating, clarifying, explaining, proving, and reaching consensus in collective matters. Under time pressure, only part of these goals require adopting others’ viewpoint. Efficiency in collective decision-making, in particular, might have been considerably raised by an ability to interpret others’ intentions and motivations. (shrink)

Those in the Gricean tradition take it that successful human communication features an audience who not only arrives at the intended content of the signal, but also recognizes the speaker’s intention that they do so. Some in this tradition have also argued that there are yet further conditions on communicative success, which rule out the possibility of communicating by luck. Supposing that both intention-recognition and some sort of anti-luck condition are correctly included in an analysis of human (...) class='Hi'>communication, this article asks what the value of events satisfying these conditions is. I present a puzzle concerning the value of intention-recognition which is analogous to the Meno Problem in epistemology, but ultimately argue that this puzzle is solveable: the signaling-relevant value of intention recognition can be vindicated. However, I argue that the version of this puzzle that concerns the further proposed luck-proofing conditions on communication can not be answered. I argue therefore that communication, as analyzed by many, is no more valuable qua signal than a proper subset of its conditions. Human communication is thennot a uniquely valuable signaling event. (shrink)

A prevailing view is that while human communication has an ‘ostensive-inferential’ or ‘Gricean’ intentional structure, animal communication does not. This would make the psychological states that support human and animal forms of communication fundamentally different. Against this view, I argue that there are grounds to expect ostensive communication in non-human clades. This is because it is sufficient for ostensive communication that one intentionally address one’s utterance to one’s intended interlocutor – something that is both (...) a functional pre-requisite of successful communication and cognitively undemanding. Furthermore, while ostension is an important feature of intentional communication, the inferences required in Gricean communication may be minimal: ostension and inference may come apart. The grounds for holding that animal communication could not be Gricean are therefore weak. I finish by defending the idea that a ‘minimally Gricean’ model of communication is a valuable tool for characterising the communicative interactions of many animal species. (shrink)

Today, the earth is an interconnected globe humming with electronic transmissions-a chattering planet nestled in the provident silence of space. The ethical question is whether this is contributing to authentic human development and helping individuals and peoples to be true to their transcendent destiny. The new media are powerful tools for education, cultural enrichment, commercial activity, political participation, intercultural dialogue and understanding. They also can serve the cause of religion. Yet the new information technology needs to be informed and guided (...) by solidarity in the service of the common good bridging the digital divide within and among nations. The value-laden message of Western secular culture to people and traditional societies in many cases ill-prepared to evaluate it leads to widespread crisis, for example, in regard to marriage and family life. This technology can be a means for solving human problems, promoting the integral development of persons, creating a world governed by justice, peace, and love. It also can help men and women in their age-old search for self-understanding. Like today's world itself, the world of media, including the Internet, has been brought by Christ, inchoately yet truly, within the boundaries of the kingdom of God and placed in service to the word of salvation. (shrink)

What is it to understand a sentence of a language? This question lies at the very heart of philosophy of language due to its intimate connections with two other issues: the nature of linguistic meaning and the workings of linguistic communication. This book presents a systematic attempt to explicate the concept of sentence understanding, guided by two questions: What exactly is the role played by states of sentence understanding in enabling linguistic communication? And what do such states have (...) to be in order to play that role? Adopting a broadly Gricean picture of communication as background, the book reviews some main proposals from the literature and then develops an original line of Argument for a non-standard version of the view that understanding a sentence consists in possessing propositional knowledge of its meaning. A key to a satisfactory account of this sort, it is argued, lies in a particular view of the nature of propositional attitude states. Apart from dealing successfully with a number of challenges, the resulting account also forms part of an attractive general picture of how philosophers of language may go about explaining our use and interpretation of language. (shrink)

A central goal of typological research is to characterize linguistic features in terms of both their functional role and their fit to social and cognitive systems. One long-standing puzzle concerns why certain languages employ grammatical gender. In an information theoretic analysis of German noun classification, Dye, Milin, Futrell, and Ramscar enumerated a number of important processing advantages gender confers. Yet this raises a further puzzle: If gender systems are so beneficial to processing, what does this mean for languages that make (...) do without them? Here, we compare the communicative function of gender marking in German to that of prenominal adjectives in English, finding that despite their differences, both systems act to efficiently smooth information over discourse, making nouns more equally predictable in context. We examine why evolutionary pressures may favor one system over another and discuss the implications for compositional accounts of meaning and Gricean principles of communication. (shrink)

This article addresses the issue of non-verbal communication in the light of the Gricean conceptualisation of intentionally conveyed meanings. The first goal is to testify that non-verbal cues can be interpreted as nonnatural meanings and speaker meanings, which partake in intentional communication. Secondly, it is argued that non-verbal signals, exemplified by gestures, are similar to utterances which generate the communicator's what is said and/or conversational implicatures, together with their different subtypes and manifestations. Both of these objectives necessitate (...) a critical overview of Grice's work on the focal aspects of meaning and communication, also on the strength of neo-Gricean research. (shrink)