Herbert Clark argues that language use is more than the sum of a speaker speaking and a listener listening. It is the joint action that emerges when speakers and listeners, writers and readers perform their individual actions in coordination, as ensembles. In contrast to work within the cognitive sciences, which has seen language use as an individual process, and to work within the social sciences, which has seen it as a social process, the author argues strongly that language use embodies (...) both individual and social processes. (shrink)

In everyday joint activities, people coordinate with each other by means not only of linguistic signals, but also of material signals – signals in which they indicate things by deploying material objects, locations, or actions around them. Material signals fall into two main classes: directing-to and placing-for. In directing-to, people request addressees to direct their attention to objects, events, or themselves. In placing-for, people place objects, actions, or themselves in special sites for addressees to interpret. Both classes have many subtypes. (...) Features of material signals were examined in pairs of people who were videotaped as they assembled TV stands, built Lego models, planned furnishings for a house, played piano duets, or bought coffee at Starbucks. In these activities, the pointing and placements were often sustained, creating three phases of signals – initiation, maintenance, and termination – each with its own interpretation. (shrink)

Social robots serve people as tutors, caretakers, receptionists, companions, and other social agents. People know that the robots are mechanical artifacts, yet they interact with them as if they were actual agents. How is this possible? The proposal here is that people construe social robots not as social agents per se, but as depictions of social agents. They interpret them much as they interpret ventriloquist dummies, hand puppets, virtual assistants, and other interactive depictions of people and animals. Depictions as a (...) class consist of three physical scenes with part-by-part mappings between them: a base scene, the depiction proper, and the scene depicted. With social robots, evidence shows, people form the same three scenes plus mappings: They perceive the raw machinery of a robot, construe it as a depiction of a character, and, using the depiction as a guide, engage in the pretense that they are interacting with the character depicted. So, with social robots, people also recognize three classes of agents—the characters depicted, the intended recipients of the depictions, and the authorities responsible for the robots. Construing social robots as depictions, we argue, accounts for many phenomena not covered by alternative models. (shrink)