Workshop - Perspectives on Communication

0915 - 0930      Welcome

0930 - 1040      Talk 1: Ingrid Lossius Falkum

1040 – 1050      Break

1050 – 1200      Talk 2: Austin Baker

1200 – 1330      Lunch

1330 – 1440      Talk 3: Anna Drożdżowicz

1440 – 1450      Break

1450 – 1600      Talk 4: Andrew Peet

1600 – 1610      Break

1610 – 1720      Talk 5: Fintan Mallory

1900                   Workshop Dinner (for speakers)

0930 - 1040      Talk 6: Catarina Dutilh Novaes

1040 – 1050      Break

1050 – 1200      Talk 7: Hugo Mota

1200 – 1330      Lunch

1330 – 1440      Talk 8: Joey Pollock

1440 – 1450      Break

1450 – 1600      Talk 9: Paula Rubio-Fernandez

Abstracts

Ingrid Lossius Falkum – ‘Investigating the development of irony comprehension’

In verbal irony, the speaker is tacitly echoing a thought she attributes to another source and expressing a dismissive attitude to that thought (Wilson & Sperber, 2012). Irony has been found to be a relatively late acquisition, not emerging until around the age of 6 years. Children’s difficulty with verbal irony has typically been explained as a result of the complexity of the phenomenon – in particular, that it requires an ability for second-order metarepresentation. However, it is slightly puzzling why irony should be so challenging to children given their early sensitivity to other types of language use (e.g., humor, jokes, pretense) that share some of irony’s features (e.g., salient tone of voice, dissociation from explicit/literal utterance content). Some of children’s apparent difficulties with irony could also be due to artifacts of the experiments used to tap their comprehension. Some methodological challenges are differences in operational definitions of irony as well as the types and properties of tasks used to tap irony comprehension in children. Also, variability in the extent to which children are exposed to irony, as well as expectations raised by the experimental setting itself, make irony comprehension particularly challenging to investigate in laboratory experiments. In this talk I present results from some irony comprehension experiments with children. I discuss, from a methodological point of view, the challenges and advantages of different types of irony comprehension tasks and suggest ways to improve them in future research.

Austin Baker - 'Outgroup Disfluency: How Cognitive Processing Load Affects (Individual and Institutional) Discrimination'

Members of dominant social groups frequently report experiencing discomfort and anxiety when interacting with members of minority groups (Plant & Devine, 2003; Amodio 2009; Bright 2023). But what is the mechanism for this and can it be avoided? My talk will identify and give an account of this phenomenon, which I've termed ‘outgroup disfluency’. According to the model I’ve developed, outgroup disfluency occurs during certain types of intergroup interactions and is brought about by a relative increase in what’s referred to in the empirical literature as ‘cognitive processing load’ (Sweller 2011; Paas & Merrënboer 2020). This means that intergroup interactions—compared to intragroup interactions—tend to involve more computationally taxing varieties of processing. As such, intergroup interactions are often experienced as relatively difficult and uncomfortable, thereby negatively reinforcing future interactions between groups. I'll argue that this increase in processing load can subtly motivate distinctive patterns of discrimination that disadvantage members of marginalized groups. In sections 1 and 2, I’ll introduce outgroup disfluency and demonstrate how it gives rise to what I call ‘disfluency-induced-discrimination’. In section 3, I'll defend a virtue-theoretic proposal for debiasing intergroup interactions, arguing that the harmful effects of outgroup disfluency can be lessened by promoting meaningful interactions between members of different social groups (see e.g., Pettigrew & Tropp 2006; Joyce & Harwood 2012; and Gonzales, Steele, & Baron 2017). I'll conclude by suggesting that my empirically-grounded proposal has normative implications for both interpersonal communication (e.g., who we, as individuals, should talk to) and large-scale social organization (e.g., how we, as social collectives, should structure our societies).

Anna Drożdżowicz - 'Judging speaker from their voice'

Voice is a powerful social cue. Upon hearing a speaker’s voice, listeners are not only able to track and recognize it as familiar (Belin et al. 2011), but will also form spontaneous voice-based impressions about various speaker characteristics (e.g. Schweinberger et al. 2014). For example, interlocutors may form an impression that the speaker is male or female (e.g., Owren et al. 2007), that they are of a certain age (Mulac & Giles 1996), that they are competent (Rakic et al., 2011), have parenting skills (Fasoli & Maass 2020), or a certain personality trait (McAleer et al. 2014, Baus et al. 2018).

What is the nature of voice-based impressions? And what roles do they play in communication? In this talk, I will first discuss an approach that focuses on how voice-based impressions fall on the perception and cognition divide and suggest that it has some important limitations. Next, I will propose that we can characterize the phenomenology and motivational pull of voice-based impressions in terms of their salience and valence. The listener’s attention is often directed, whereby certain experienced speaker characteristics become salient in the listener’s overall experience. Moreover, I will argue that some voice-based impressions involve a particular kind of good or bad feeling, i.e., they are valenced.

Andrew Peet – ‘Understanding Gricean Communication’

Grice, in attempting to provide an analysis of meaning, identified an important species of communication – what we might call “Gricean communication”. Grice’s own analysis of the intentions that underwrite Gricean communication faces a number of well-known challenges. In this talk I focus on three: 1. The irrationality of Gricean intentions given contextual under specification, 2. The problem of lucky communication, 3. The problem of Strawsonian deception. I will provide a new analysis of the intentions underwriting Gricean communication that resolves all these problems and integrates into a novel picture of interpretation and utterance understanding that I am currently developing.

Fintan Mallory - 'Common Ground, Computation, and Compression'

The common ground approach to formal pragmatics is rarely presented as what it is, a computational level theory in the sense developed by David Marr and widely used throughout cognitive science. In this talk, I will present identify some computational claims made within the common ground framework and argue that we can productively think of the relationship between an assertion and a subject matter (or QUD) in terms of efficient coding. In the process, I will present two case studies of the kinds of computations which philosophers of language have identified, enrichment and exculpature, and are that they allow for efficient coding of a speaker’s contents.

Catarina Dutilh Novaes – ‘Argumentation, between reason and power’

Rational argumentation, understood as the exchange of reasons, facts and evidence to support claims, permeates many important spheres of human life: politics, science, law, education (among others). But how well arguments ‘work’ in these different domains is a matter of contention. Many theorists maintain that arguments can change minds, and in the right direction; wrong opinions are filtered out through discussion. Others, by contrast, retort that facts and evidence do not change minds on topics of significance (especially political, societal and moral questions), and that argumentation may instead lead to polarization and disinformation. What to make of these divergent assessments of the impact of arguments on our lives? In this talk, which is based on a book that I am currently writing, I present an account of argumentative processes that investigates the conditions under which the exchange of arguments is likely to be fruitful, or else futile or even harmful. This means that, rather than considering only the actual exchanges, we must also look into what happens before argumentation occurs. Who is in a position to engage in argumentation with whom? How do we decide who to exchange arguments with, among different options? What is the role of trust in these processes? These are some of the questions I will address, thus offering a more realistic account of arguments in real-life situations than the available alternatives, in particular by incorporating the role of power relations in argumentative processes.

Hugo Mota - Power structures and oppression within deep disagreements: towards a reconceptualization

There is a gap in the deep disagreement literature (Pritchard 2021; 2023; Siegel 2019; Lynch 2010; Johnson 2022; Patterson 2014; Shields 2021; Cartlidge 2022) which stems from the inappropriate prioritization of the epistemic and an unfruitful focus on rational resolution. In order to address this gap, we should also analyze other aspects of the disagreement beyond the epistemic. This has traction in the political deep disagreement literature (Lagewaard 2021; Aberdein 2020; Kloster 2021; de Ridder 2021); their overall approach, which I have named the symptomatic view, consists of expanding the definition of deep disagreement by considering more symptoms of the conflict. I consider that simply expanding the definition of deep disagreements is not enough. The process of expanding the definition of deep disagreement without questioning the assumptions from the traditional theories leads to shortcomings. Thus, I propose that we must go further and reconceptualize deep disagreement as a complex multi-dimensional phenomenon. By especially considering the interconnected cognitive and non-cognitive dimensions (Longino 1996), we are able to understand and analyze deep disagreements across several of its layers. This allows us to correct the flow of investigation from solely looking into propositions and beliefs towards also looking at perspectives (Camp 2019; Yumuşak 2022), attention (Watzl 2022), salience biases (Munton 2021; Whiteley 2022), and values (Mason 2023). One of the main benefits of this move is being able to use the concept of deep disagreement more adequately to account for conflicts involving power structures and oppression, which can in turn lead to a better understanding of these complex cases. Understanding and potentially addressing the challenges brought to the surface by them requires us to review our current models of argumentation. I suggest that Dutilh Novaes’ (2020) three-tiered model of epistemic exchanges is the best available, and conclude by proposing the addition of an extra-argumentative form of communication that could further improve the model.

Joey Pollock - 'Testimonial pessimism'

 It is typically assumed that we gain a great deal of knowledge through the speech of others. However, an increasing number of views of communication in philosophy of language appear to entail varying degrees of testimonial pessimism. Pessimistic and sceptical consequences have traditionally been seen as compelling reasons to reject the views that entail them. In this talk, I offer an account of knowledge communication that embraces testimonial pessimism: we get much less knowledge through testimony than is popularly thought. I argue that, although this view offers quite a different picture of the role of testimony in our epistemic ecology, it nonetheless coheres well with certain plausible theses about the nature and value of knowledge, and with contemporary work on the nature of communication.
 

Paula Rubio-Fernandez – ‘Common ground as a naïve model of rational memory’

Human communication is built around interlocutors’ common ground (CG), or the information they assume to share. Despite having been the focus of intense interdisciplinary research for more than 60 years, we do not yet understand how CG works, or even what exactly it is. In this talk I will introduce a new research program that is essential to understanding CG: I propose to study CG as a product of cultural evolution. This approach requires identifying (i) those cognitive capacities that are required for the emergence of CG in human cognition, and (ii) how those capacities interact in (a) the development of CG through children’s social learning across cultures; (b) its formation through social interaction across the lifespan, and (c) its management in conversation across languages. I hypothesize that forming and using CG is a complex human ability that emerges from the interaction of three cognitive capacities — joint attention, joint memory, and the use of reference systems — under a rationality principle.