Материал: 62. Bara, B.G. Cognitive pragmatics the mental processes of communication 2011

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Cognitive pragmatics:

The mental processes of communication

Bruno G. Bara

1.Introduction

The basic idea behind this work is that communication is essentially a cooperative activity between two or more people in which the meanings of each transaction are constructed by all those actors together engaged in the shared task of reciprocally attending to the other communicants’words. The aims of the actors engaged in an interaction may differ, but to be able to say that communication has taken place successfully, all the participants must share a set of mental states. The responsibility for communication falls on the shoulders of eachandeveryparticipant,fortheyacttogetherinordertorealizecommunication. Focusing on stereotypical roles such as speaker and hearer, or emitter and receiver, confounds the issue by fragmenting into isolated blocks, an activity that acquires meaning precisely from being global and collective. Moreover, I shall claim that human beings, unique among animals, possess a basic communicative competence that sustains both the linguistic and the extralinguistic way of expressing it. Furthermore, if we are to speak of communication and not simply of information transmission, then agents must devote themselves intentionally to such common activity.

The cognitive emphasis that can be seen in the titles both of the paper and of the book is justified by the fact that communication will not be examined here from the viewpoint of an external observer, as happens in linguistics and in the philosophy of language, where attention is focused on the finished product, whether this be an utterance or a discourse. Instead, I will take a standpoint within the mind of the individual participants, trying to explain how each communication­ act is generated mentally — before being realized physically  — and then comprehended mentally by the other interlocutors. In the text, by the term “cognitive pragmatics” I shall refer to the theory presented in the following­ and to the related research program.

My intention is to describe the mental states of the participants in a communicative interaction. In addition to an analytical description, I will also furnishaformaldefinitionofthevariousmentalstates,suchasbeliefandintention,­

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offering a number of innovations compared to traditional treatments, thereby offering solutions to problems that have hitherto not found satisfactory explanations. The mental states introduced will then come to constitute a logical model that accounts for both the production and the comprehension of communication acts in the ongoing process of their construction.

With regard to individual development, the central point is to define the stages in the acquisition of pragmatic competence, from the first few seconds ofbirthtoadulthood.Hence,setsofexperimentaldatatakenfromtheliterature and from my own work will be presented to support cognitive pragmatics. A valid theory should be able to correlate with the neurosciences, predicting how communicative capacities may decline with age, or suffer damage as a conse- quenceofgivenpathologiesthatmaybegeneral — asinAlzheimer’sdisease —  or focal — as is the case with brain injury. I will support my theory with data from neuropragmatics and from brain imaging studies.

1.1. Linguistic and extralinguistic communication

The issues raised with regard to the differences between verbal and nonverbal behaviorhavebeenhistoricallyimpreciseratherthancontroversial,forthedistinctions that have been made are, first, based on intuitions and, second, contradictory. The difference between the two forms is founded principally on the nature of the input: Spoken language is defined as verbal, as is generally the case also with written language. Nonverbal language refers to all other forms: posture, facial expressions, gestures, space ( between conversants), and time ( between two following communication acts) (Hinde 1972).

This distinction creates many problems, all of which are substantial. The most serious is that the nonverbal category includes structured languages such as those for the deaf (for instance, ASL, American Sign Language). Other issues­ also produce devastating criticisms, highlighting the weakness of input as a distinguishing criterion:Why should the visual medium be assigned to the verbal category in the case of writing and to the nonverbal category in the case of observed behavior or of gestures? To which category should Braille, the language of the blind, be assigned? Since it is written, it should be classified as verbal; however, since it exploits tactile medium, it may be equally correctly categorized as nonverbal. In general terms, placing so much weight on the acoustic medium thus seems excessive; in particular, this excessiveness is underscored­ by the fact that the criterion is not applied in absolute terms: Prosody, which incontestably employs the voice, is classified as nonverbal.

I will therefore advance an alternative to the distinction based on input that is based instead on the way data are processed: linguistic communication is based on the communicative use of a system of symbols, whereas extralinguistic communication consists of the use of a set of symbols (Bara and Tirassa

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Cognitive pragmatics: The mental processes of communication  445

2010). Intuitively, the essential difference lies in the principle of compositionality: Language may be subdivided into smaller constituent components bearing autonomous meaning, that is to say words, whereas extralinguistic communication comes about through the use of components that cannot be decomposed into smaller, autonomous units: A smiling face is a smiling face, and not the sum of many small parts each of which is smiling. I shall present brain-imaging evidence in favor of my distinction in section 2.4, after introducing the theoretical concepts in need.

1.1.1.  Linguistic communication: Compositional.  Linguistic communication may be defined as the communicative use of a system of symbols. This means that language is an entity based on compositionality: Language is built up recursively from separate components that may be joined together (Chomsky 1957). Some linguistic expressions have an atomic structure; that is, they may not be subdivided into smaller, constituent units. Other expressions have a molecular structure; that is, they are composed of smaller constituents that may in their turn be either atomic or molecular. The semantic content of an expression — be it atomic or molecular — depends both on its global structure and on the semantic content of its constituents.

1.1.2.  Extralinguistic communication: Associative.  Passing on now to extralinguistic communication, this form of communication may be considered the communicative use of a set of symbols. This mode is essentially non-­ compositional;thatis,itconsists of parts andnotof constituents.Extralinguistic signals are molecular blocks that cannot be decomposed any further, inasmuch as they are equipped with intrinsic, global significance. The parts do not possess atomic meanings into which they may be further subdivided. The pirouetteperformedbyaballerinaisapirouetteperformedbytheentirebody,and not a pirouette that is performed by the left leg plus a pirouette that is performed by the right leg plus the torsion of the trunk and so forth.

2. Mental states for communication

Human beings possess, at any given time, a series of mental states. These may be both emotional and cognitive, and both of these may be either conscious or unconscious. Here we will deal only with those states that are relevant for an understanding of the process of communication; that is, states that are causally relevant in interactions between humans. I omit some states on the assumption that they do not constitute primitive notions that form part of the process of the production and comprehension of communication acts.

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446  Bruno G. Bara

I analyze in the book the following states: attention, belief, knowledge, and consciousness. Volitional primitives are also dealt with: intentions, goals, plans, and motivations. Although all are important, I shall focus here only on the concepts of shared belief and of communicative intention.

2.1. Shared belief

Theconceptsofknowledgeandbeliefarecloselyconnectedintheliteratureon pragmatics. Such concepts are standardly formalized as predicates or modal operators. Traditionally, belief is employed as a primitive. The properties of a beliefaredefinedbyasetofaxiomsderivedfromthetheoryoflogicdeveloped by Jaakko Hintikka (1962, 1966). Knowledge, by contrast, is a derived concept, that is, a sort of abbreviation of true beliefs about the world.

To introduce the concept of shared beliefs — a concept that is indispensable when we are dealing with mental states in communication — I must first differentiate between three types of beliefs: individual, common (also called mutual ), and shared. I will do so in an intuitive fashion, allowing myself a certain definitional leeway.

In some cases the agents believed a certain thing, or believes that the other agents believes a certain thing, but in a totally autonomous fashion, with no connection existing between the agents themselves. We will call this type of belief individual belief.

Often, however, in a given context, all the agents have the same individual beliefs:Allagentsgenerallyshareknowledgeoftheirsurroundingenvironment,­ or a certain amount of knowledge that is culturally transmitted. For instance,A may share with B a love of opera, and, with all pacifists, the opinion that all atomic weapons should be banned, and, with all humans, the evidence that we arebornofamotherandafather.Muchhumaninteractionisbasedonthistype of belief, which is spread over a more or less wide group of people, and which we will call common belief or mutual belief.

Clark (1996) speaks of common ground, meaning the sum of knowledge, beliefs, and suppositions that two or more people share. Common ground enables us to identify a series of cultural communities, which may be classified according to the type of beliefs a community shares.

However,havingcommonbeliefsisnotasufficientconditionenablingcommunication to take place. Suppose that a person is in a foreign country whose languageshedoesnotknow,andshewishestoconveyhermentalstatetoother interlocutors: She will not employ a gesture whose meaning she is familiar with unless she thinks the other participants are also cognizant of its meaning. There is no point in making a gesture with which only she is familiar. At the outside, everyone present might happen to know the gesture at an individual level,andyetneveruseitbecausetheyarenotawarethatalltheothersarealso

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Cognitive pragmatics: The mental processes of communication  447

aware of the meaning it conveys. The conclusion, therefore, is that in order to communicate,inadditiontopossessing common beliefs,each participant must also be aware of the fact that all the other participants possess those very same common beliefs.

I define a shared belief as that belief that is not only common to all the participants engaged in the speech event, but of which each participant is aware is possessed by all the other participants. From a psychological standpoint, sharedbeliefhasacrucialfeature:Itissubjective,andnotobjective,asiscommon belief. In actual fact, no one can ever be certain that another person has knowledge of a certain type: She may at most assume that he has it, and may be convinced that they share it. To be certain, or to have true knowledge, as Hintikka would say, she should in some way be able to observe the mental states of others in some direct manner, and not simply infer them from circumstances. In theory, I might pretend to share with others the belief that the earth is round, but be privately convinced that it is flat, without anyone ever suspecting what is really going on in my mind. Taking up a subjective position in which shared belief is concerned means, fundamentally, assuming that each agent has a space of shared beliefs that contains all the beliefs the agent herself is convinced she shares with a given partner, or with a group of people, or with humanity in its entirety.

Theformalconnectionbetweenbeliefandsharedbeliefisestablishedbythe so-called fixpoint axiom (Harman 1977), which captures the circularity of mutual belief:

(1)  SHAB p ≡ BELA (  p SHBA p)

where SHAB means that both the agents A and B reciprocally hold the belief that p. What formula (1) expresses is that when actressAtakes p as shared by B and herself, this means that on the one hand she herself takes p as being true, and that on the other hand she believes that B also takes p as being shared by both of them. Circularity derives from the fact that sharedness is present on both sides of the formula, both in the definiens and in the definiendum. By distributingbeliefBELA ontheconjunction,infiniteimplicationsofthefollowing type may be obtained from formula (1):

(2)SHAB p BELA p

SHAB p BELA p BELB p

SHAB p BELA p BELB p BELA p SHAB p . . .

The symbol “ ” corresponds to the concept “implies.” Formula (2) expresses the possibility of generating a theoretically infinite sequence of individual beliefs, starting from a shared belief. The following constitutes a more intuitive translation:

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