Strategic Conversation

International audienceModels of conversation that rely on a strong notion of cooperation don’t apply to strategic conversation — that is, to conversation where the agents’ motives don’t align, such as courtroom cross examination and political debate. We provide a game-theoretic framework that provides an analysis of both cooperative and strategic conversation. Our analysis features a new notion of safety that applies to implicatures: an implicature is safe when it can be reliably treated as a matter of public record. We explore the safety of implicatures within cooperative and non cooperative settings. We then provide a symbolic model enabling us (i) to prove a correspondence result between a characterisation of conversation in terms of an alignment of players’ preferences and one where Gricean principles of cooperative conversation like Sincerity hold, and (ii) to show when an implicature is safe and when it is not

Scalar implicature and the child’s logic

The acquisition of scalar implicature has been recurring theme among researchers interested in testing the limits between semantic and pragmatic comprehension of children. The subjects of our experiment were nine years olds acquiring Brazilian Portuguese. Analogous sentences containing weak scalar terms were read to them in lower-bound and upper-bound contexts, therefore we had the opportunity of testing the child’s capacity of interpreting scalar terms in a strictly semantic way (lower-bound) or as scalar implicature (upper-bound) depending solely of contextual influences. We identified contextual sensitivity on subjects, inasmuch as they showed semantic or scalar implicature interpretation depending on the given context. However, an unexpected difficulty was exhibited by subjects: since the stories elaborated as lower-bound contexts contained portions whose understanding required calculation of logical consequences, children were less successful in interpreting such portions. Thus, we find evidences of a well-developed inferential logic in children when facing challenges of linguistic interpretation, such as those of scalar implicature – shown from 4 years old, according to Papafragou and Tantalou (2004) –, and evidences of poor inferential skills when dealing with certain non-linguistic inferences, related to contextual objects or events, still exhibited by nine years old. We propose the exclusive component of linguistic inferences that justifies children’s success in its computation is mindreading, the ability of identifying others’ intentions. It is a proposal that finds support in the Relevance Theory’s hypothesis about the existence of a mindreading sub-module dedicated to linguistic inferences in human cognition

Enthymemes and Topoi in Dialogue

In Enthymemes and Topoi in Dialogue, Ellen Breitholtz presents a novel and precise account of reasoning from an interactional perspective. The account draws on the concepts of enthymemes and topoi, originating in Aristotelian rhetoric and dialectic, and integrates these in a formal dialogue semantic account using TTR, a type theory with records. Argumentation analysis and formal approaches to reasoning often focus the logical validity of arguments on inferences made in discourse from a god’s-eye perspective. In contrast, Breitholtz’s account emphasises the individual perspectives of interlocutors and the function and acceptability of their reasoning in context. This provides an analysis of interactions where interlocutors have access to different topoi and therefore make different inferences. Readership: All interested in the pragmatics-rhetoric interface and in theories of meaning and coherence in dialogue and discourse

Shakespeare’s Iago as a Counter-Example to the Traditional Definition of Lying

Cilj je rada propitati tradicionalnu definiciju laži. U radu ne pružam vlastitu definiciju te pojave, ali pokušavam pokazati da je tradicionalna definicija laži, po kojoj je za laganje nužno iskazivanje neistinitih tvrdnji, neadekvatna. Kako bih to učinila, u prvom dijelu predstavljam teoriju Herberta Paula Gricea o razgovornim implikaturama, čije su hotimično neistinite inačice izrijekom isključene iz tradicionalne definicije. U nastavku, pozivajući se na teoriju o zadanim značenjima, odbacujem rašireni stav da se govornik uvijek može ograditi od pragmatički prenesene poruke. Potom, predstavljam standardnu definiciju laži i sagledavam koju ulogu u njoj imaju govornikova namjera i slušateljeva odgovornost. U drugom dijelu, dotadašnje uvide primjenjujem na Shakespeareovu tragediju Otelo. Nakon kratkog predstavljanja odnosa između Otela i Jaga, razlažem tri dramska primjera onoga što smatram lažima ostvarenima razgovornom implikaturom. Takva analiza ima dvojaku ulogu. Prva joj je zadaća pokazati nedostatnost tradicionalne definicije laži kroz tvrdnju da Jago, iako ne izgovara neistine, laže. Druga je zadaća ukazivanje na ograničeni doseg mogućnosti poništavanja pragmatički prenesene poruke; Jagove pragmatičke poruke toliko su snažne da se, iako to pokušava učiniti, od njih ne uspijeva ograditi.This paper aims to question the traditional definition of lying. I do not present my definition of this phenomenon. Instead, I try to show that the traditional definition – to lie one must utter a false claim – is inadequate. To do that, in the first part of the paper, I present Herbert Paul Grice’s theory of conversational implicatures, which are explicitly excluded from the traditional definition. Next, relying on the theory of default meanings, I reject the widespread idea that the speaker can always distance themselves from a pragmatically conveyed message. Then I present the traditional definition of lying and the role that the intention of the speaker and the responsibility of the hearer play in it. In the second part, I apply the insights gathered by that point to Shakespeare’s tragedy Othello. After a brief presentation of the relation between Othello and Iago, I present three examples of dialogues from the play that I consider to be the cases of lying accomplished with conversational implicatures. This kind of analysis has a dual role. The first one is to show the inadequacy of the traditional definition of lying. Even though Iago does not utter a single false claim, he is lying. The second one to point to the limited scope of the possibility of denying a pragmatically conveyed message. Iago’s pragmatic messages are so strong that he cannot distance himself from them, even when he tries to

A Multimodal Discourse Analysis of Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight: A Cooperative and Cinematic Discourse Perspective

Master'sMASTER OF ART

‘Cognitive systemic dichotomization’ in public argumentation and controversies

We describe and analyze an important cognitive obstacle in inter- and intra-community ar-gumentation processes, which we propose to call \u27Cognitive Systemic Dichotomization\u27 (CSD). This social phenomenon consists in the collective use of shared cognitive patterns based upon dichotomous schemati-zation of knowledge, values, and affection. We discuss the formative role of CSD on a community’s collec-tive cognition, identity, and public discourse, as well as the challenges it raises to reasoned argumentation, and how different approaches to argumentation undertake to face this obstacle to the reasonable debate of issues of public concern

Philosophical approaches to communication

The current interest in communication studies is understandable given the proliferation of communication technologies that are part and parcel of today‘s world. However, while this interest tends to focus on the media applications of communication technologies, the concept of communication that underlies these technologies remains unexamined. The purpose of this text is to provide an overview of the different aspects that are entailed by the concept of communication. The early theories of communication adopted a relatively simple model to explain the process of communication. Known as the process or linear model of communication, it assumed a sender who transmitted a message to a receiver; in a slightly more complex version of this model, the sender encoded a message that was transmitted to the receiver who in turn decoded it to understand the message. Understanding the message entailed that the receiver would be able to understand what the speaker intended to mean when he/she communicated his/her message. Although popular, this model of communication is too simple as it fails to take into account the situation within which communication takes place: communication is not an abstract activity dislocated from a context of conventions, rules or a way of life.peer-reviewe