Communication as Joint Action

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Communication as Joint Action

• Taalfilosofie, college 10

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Crucial Players

• Herbert Clark, Using Language, Cambridge UP, 2005
• Robert Stalnaker, Assertion (1978)
• David Lewis, Convention (1969)

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Communication a joint action

• A vocaliseert voor B
• A formuleert uitingen voor B
• A bedoelt iets m.b.t.B

• B heeft aandacht voor As vocaliseringen
• B identificeert Bs uitingen
• B herkent wat A bedoelt voor B.

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Perlocutive effects

• Speakers intend to have certain effects on their
  intended audience
• uptake (coming to believe that p)
• certain actions
• These ulterior effects are not part of the
  communicative process.
• Criterion the same effect could have been caused
  by non-communicative means.

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Joint actions

• A and B doing similar things vs. A and B
  coordinating activity to achieve a common goal.
• Joint actions vs. adaptive actions (A adapts to
  B) vs.deceptive actions (anti-coordinative
  actions).
• Chess, playing tennis, a spy shadowing B,
• Three claims about language use
• Language fundamentally is used for social,
  extra-linguistic purposes (goals). The point of
  communication is not to understand each other,
  but to exchange information, planning,
  transacting business, debating, teaching, . This
  requires understanding.
• Agents have public goals (goals recognized by
  both parties) and private goals, achieved
  invidually)
• Language use is a species of joint coordinative
  action
• Language use (communication mutual
  understanding) is a joint action, composed of
  speakers intentions and hearers recognizing
  speakers intentions.

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Coordination

• Two people have a coordination problem whenever
  they have common interests or goals and each
  persons action depends on actions of the other.
  (Clark 2005, p. 62)

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Joint actions require coordination

• How do agents coordinate their actions?
• Standard answer on the basis of conventions
• But how can conventions come into existence? Not
  by an activity that presupposes language, for
  language presupposes conventions!
• We need a foundational approach that provides an
  independent explanation of how coordination can
  come into existence and how it is reflected in
  language use.

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Schelling games (Thomas Schelling)

• Two agents X, Y try to solve a problem P without
  consulting each other
• Coin game name heads and tails. I you and
  your partner name the same side, you both win a
  prize. Which side to name?
• Guess the same number 100 7 65 78 94
  44
• Where to meet in New York?

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Schelling argued

• What is necessary to coordinate predictions, is
  to read the same message in the common situation,
  to identify the one course of action that their
  expectations of each other can converge on. They
  must mutually recognize some unique signal that
  coordinates their expectations of each other
  (Schelling 1960, p. 54, quoted in Clark 2005, p.
  64)

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Schelling games (II)

• An interesting complication in pure
  coordination, the goals of X and Y are identical.
  What if X and Ys goals are (not too) different?
• The unequal coin game
• A and B are to choose H or T without
  communicating. If both choose H, A gets 3 and B
  gets 2. If both choose T, A gets 2 and B gets
  3. If they choose differently, neither gets
  anything. You are A (or B). Which do you choose?
  (Question whats the best answer?)
• The unequal money game (idem)
• The role of unintended repetition (similar
  situations, similar goals, learning from
  experience and memory of earlier success!)

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(Schelling games contd)

• Most situations perhaps every situation for
  people who are practiced at this kind of game
  provide some clue for coordinating behavior, some
  focal point for each persons expectations of
  what the other expects to be expected to do.
  Finding the key,or rather finding a key any
  key that is mutually recognized as the key
  becomes the key may depend more on imagination
  than on logic it may depend on analogy,
  precedent, accidental arrangement, symmetry,
  aesthetic or geometric configuration, casuistic
  reasoning, and who the parties are and what they
  know about each other (Schelling 1960, p. 57)

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What is common ground? (Robert Stalnaker, David
Lewis)

• Everything we do is routed in information we habr
  about our surroundings, activities, perceptions,
  emotions, plans interests.
• Everything we jointly do with others is also
  rooted in this information, but only in that part
  we think they share with us the common ground.
  To coordinate, with have to appeal to common
  ground.
• Can we be more specific?
• - The concept of context is too vague to
  capture common ground. Not everything in the
  context of two agents X and Y is known by X, Y,
  or shared ground among X and Y.

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Situations, agents, awareness

• Agents think about their current situation, and
  that situation includes that they are awere of
  the current situation self-awareness
• Two agents X and Y in a community C think about
  their current situation s, and that situation
  includes self-awareness of X and self-awareness
  of Y
• It is common ground that p

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Common Ground

• For two agents X and Y in a community C, it is
  common ground that p iff
• X and Y have information that some basis b holds
• Basis b indicates to X and Y that X and Y have
  information that b holds
• Basis b indicates to X and Y that p
• has information believes, knows, is aware
  that, supposes, sees

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Basis b and justification

• The Principle of Justification (Clark 2005, p.
  96) In practice, people take a proposition to be
  common ground in a community C only when they
  believe they have a proper shared basis for the
  proposition in that community.
• Effect we look for a shared basis to justify for
  ourselves common ground, on which we build to
  communicate.
• Example Donnellan, the man with the martini.

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Common Ground (II)

• Once X and Y have established basis b, we can
  derive a second representation that eliminates
  any mention of the shared basis
• That p is common ground for members of C iff
• (i) the members of C have the information that p,
  and (i)

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The Solvability Requirement

• In a coordination problem set by one of the
  participants, all of the intended participants
  can assume (common ground!) that the first party
• Chose the problem
• Designed its form
• Has a particular solution in mind
• Believes that the intended participants can
  converge on that solution.
• (riddles vs. puzzles differ in solvability)

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The Sufficiency Requirement

• In a coordination problem set by one of its
  participants, the participants can assume that
  the first party has provided all the information
  they need (along with the rest of their common
  ground) for solving it.

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The Immediacy Requirement

• In a coordination problem set by one of its
  participants in a time-constrained sequence of
  problems, the participants can assume that they
  can solve it immediately with effectively no
  delay (or a predictive time interval).

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Some coordination devices

• Explicit agreement
• Exploiting existing conventions.
• Clues provided by Mind Reading (recognizing
  intentions)

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Further complications

• Coordination is
• Discrete (one shot coordination)
• Continuous coordination as a process that
  unfolds in time

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Conversation

• Coordination in conversation is unbalanced lead
  by the speaker
• Coordination is alternating (X and Y continuously
  change roles)
• Coordination is aperiodic.
• Principle of processing time people take it as
  common ground that mental processes take time,
  and that extra processes may delay entry into the
  next phase.
• Heuristics for estimating processing
  difficulties rare expressions, lenght of
  expressions, complex syntax, uncertainty about
  formulating the converstational contribution,
  salience of referents
• Content and process are interdependent the more
  complicated the content, the longer the process.

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Meaning and Understanding communication as a
joint action

• Traditional view meaning, saying and implying as
  actions of a speaker (bottom up view)
• Alternative view communicating as a joint
  action, to be analyzed in terms of agents
  contributiong individual actions and mutual
  recognition of communicative intentions on the
  basis of common knowledge. (top down view)
• Methodological motivation
• teleologic approach
• Successful communication as starting point

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Grice speaker meaning vs. signal meaning

• Speaker meaning by presenting s to H, a speaker
  S meant for H that p.
• Signal meaning s means or meant that p
• Presenting s is a deliberate, intentional action
  by S
• P is a proposition (or a paraphrase of the
  content of s)
• Recognizing by H that S means that p by
  presenting s to H is necessary as a reason for
  understanding s as meaning that p.
• Recognizing is the audiences part of the joint
  action of S communicating to H that p
• Signalling and recognizing in communicative acts
  are participatory acts

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Joint action, participatory actions

• In presenting s to H, a speaker S meansnn for H
  that p (to accomplish goal g) iff
• the communicative act r includes 2 and 3
• S presents s to H intending that p as part of r
• A recognizes that p as part of r
• When the joint action was successful, that p was
  communicated is now added to the common ground of
  S and H.

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Second order speaker meaning

• Speaker meaning by presenting s to A with its
  recognized meaning that p, a speaker S meant for
  A that q
• Claim by successfully meaning1 that p, one can
  mean2 that q
• That q was communicated by S to A requires that
  it is common ground among S and A that S meant1
  that p.
• Knowledge of language is becoming common basis
  for two speakers of a community. On that basis,
  further things can be meant.
• The ultimate meaning is speaker meaning!