Relevance Theory (II): Mutuality

So here’s the second part of my summary of Chapter 1 of Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilsons (1987) book on Relevance Theory. The Semester has just begun and there’s already so much stuff I have to do which keeps me from posting more on this blog. I am still planning on writing a bit more on Chomsky’s Universal Grammar, as well as on perspective and cognitive development, but I’m still stuck with my term paper on The Maltese Falcon, having to read Nietzsche and other things.

As I wrote in my last post, Sperber and Wilson (S&W) want to go beyond the “dualistic code model” which treats communication as the encoding and decoding of a meaningful signal. They stress that there are other parts of the communicative process also important for the interpretation of meaning which are less obvious and not directly encoded in the signal, but which have to be inferred from other contextual sources.

S & W define context as the premises that I use when interpreting an utterance, i.e. my assumptions on how communication and the world in general work. (15)

But there is a problem: although we may generally share the same implicit standards on how to communicate, how to infer the meaning of an utterance, this may not be so if we come to our knowledge about the world, our conceptual knowledge. Although there is a lot of basic knowledge and experience that we share, “beyond this common framework, individuals tend to be highly idiosyncratic.” (16).

S & W take the example of eyewitness testimonies of car accidents, which can differ enormously, although all witnesses have seen the same events, not only on the level interpretation, but sometimes even on the level of the basic physical fact. (see e.g. Wells & olson 2003)

All in all, as cognitive science has shown in the last decades, remembering and ‘recalling’ something is much more a process of active (re)construction, than of actually ‘remembering’ it, which means that basically every time I remember a specific instance of my life history, ie. my first kiss, it deviates from what the event really was like and gets more and more laden with my current interpretations of it. This means that memories are unstable, unreliable, that you recreate, rebuilt them every time you think of them. The more you think of a memory, the more you are likely to change it. The more I think of something, the more these memories become about me, the less they become about what actually happened.

Also, subjective experience does not reflect sensory input directly, but draws heavily on the construct of an internal dynamic “world model” (Cruse 2003: 138, see also Metzinger 2004: 37f.)).

In general this means that although the rule system of language, as well as the rule system for pragmatic inferences may stabilizes sometime during ontogeny, the context we perceive changes constantly, and is different for everyone.

If this is, so then “A central problem for pragmatic theory is to describe how, for any given utterance, the hearer finds a context which enables him to understand it adequately.” (16)

What we have to realize first is that there isn’t a failsafe mechanism which guarantees understanding, but there the array of mechanism we employ to communicate make successful communication probable, without ever guaranteeing it. (17)

Consider a host who asks his guest whether he’d like a cup of coffee. If the guest says something like:

“Coffee would keep me awake”

it would be subject to two interpretations, depending on whether we think the guest wants to stay awake or not. In this example, it would be easy to check for whether the guest wants to stay awake or not, but as complexity rises there are more and more variables for which we have to assume whether someone knows them, or has the same interpretation of them.

Given that we have a lot of different assumptions on various things, there must be a way to ensure that we are talking about the same thing. But how do we do that?

Basically, in order to communicate perfectly, we would have to know everything the other knows, and also that he knows that we know, and vice versa. But ultimately, this leads to an infinite regress, because we would have to check for every possible assumption someone could have. (A knows that o, B knows that A knows that p, A knows that B knows that A knows that p, and so on)

“Knowledge of this infinitely regressive sort was first identified by Lewis (1969) as common knowledge, and by Schiffer (1972) as mutual knowledge.' The argument is that if the hearer is to be sure of recovering the correct interpretation, the one intended by the speaker, every item of contextual information used in interpreting the utterance must be not only known by the speaker and hearer, but mutually known.” (18)

Because we can’t check for every single assumption implicit in an utterance there is never any guarantee that we might understand each other. To cut a long story short, basically this means that there must be some other way of understanding each other, which doesn’t presuppose that we assume that the others has knowledge of this and that sort, and that the other assumes that we have certain knowledge of some sort or other. The question would be which principles we actually use in understanding each other.

We can get insight into this phenomenon by looking at cognitive development.

Consider the following experiment. Two experimenters an infant and their mother sit in a room together. Experimenter 1 (E1), and the infant play with two objects that were in a box, then E1 leaves the room. E2 then shows the infant a third object, and they play with it. Then E1 returns, points in the general direction of the three objects, and says something like. “Oh, Look! can you give it to me?” Now which of the object does the infant hand to E1? Impressively, by 12 Months of age, infants already hand E1 the third object, the one they haven’t seen. But they do this only if E1 and the infant both manipulated the object manually in a joint attentional scene. Only by 14 months of age is joint visual engagement sufficient for infants to make out which item she and E1 have experienced together (see, e.g. Tomasello & Haberl 2003, Moll et al. 2006, Moll et al. 2007).

The question directly relates to what I’ve written before. Because children of course face the same problem as adults when it comes to knowing (in the sense of ‘being familiar with’ or being ‘acquainted with’ (Moll et al. 2007) what the other intends to express with his utterance.

As Henrike Moll and her colleagues remark:

“Somehow the other’s knowledge state becomes ‘transparent’ in joint engagement (Eilan, 2005); but how?” (Moll et al. 2007: 834)

One key of this process seems to be that at some time in development, infants have to understand others as intentional agents with goals. (Tomasello 1999) It’s also necessary that they be able to realizes that the intentions and goals of the other, and therefore also certain perspectives on things, can be shared (Moll et al. 2007, Tomasello et al. 2005). In a joint attentional scene with implicit shared intentions (like, playing with a toy together) mutual knowledge and mutually shared intentions thus become ‘mutually manifest’ in the immediate situation, as S & W call it in a later chapter of their book.

Although S & W don’t address this point, it seems highly compatible with their approach, given that their major starting point is the H.P. Grice’s definition of meaning, which he describes as as:

'[S] meant something by x' is (roughly) equivalent to '[S] intended the utterance of x to produce some effect in an audience by means of the recognition of this intention'. (Grice 1957/1971: 58)

I’ll return to this point in my next post.

References:

Cruse, Holk. (2003)“The Evolution of Cognition – A Hypothesis.” Cognitive Science 27 : 135–155

Eilan, N. (2005). Joint attention, communication, and mind. In N. Eilan, C. Hoerl, T. McCormack, & J. Roessler (Eds.), Joint attention: Communication and other minds Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Grice, H. P. (1957), 'Meaning'. Philosophical Review 66: 377-88. Reprinted in Steinberg and Jakobovits 1971: 53-9 and Grice 1989: 213-23.

Metzinger, Thomas. (2004)“The Subjectivity of Subjective Experience: A Representationalist
Analysis of the First-Person Perspective.” Networks 3-4 : 33-64.

Moll, Henrike., Cornelia Koring, Malinda Carpenter, und Michael Tomasello (2006): Infants Determine Others’ Focus of Attention by Pragmatics and Exclusion. In: Journal of Cognition and Development 7.3, 411-430.

Moll, Henrike, Malinda Carpenter und Michael Tomasello (2007): Fourteen-month olds Know What Others Experience only in Joint Engagement. In: Developmental Science 10.6, 826-835.

Sperber, Dan and Deirdre, Wilson (1995): Relevance: Communication and Cognition. Second Edition. Malden et al.: Blackwell.

Tomasello, Michael (1999): The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition. Cambridge, Massachusetts; London, England: Harvard University Press.

Tomasello, M., & Haberl, K. (2003). Understanding attention: 12- and 18-month-olds know what’s new for other persons. Developmental Psychology, 39, 906 – 912.

Tomasello, M., Carpenter, M., Call, J., Behne, T., & Moll, H. (2005). Understanding and sharing intentions: the origins of cultural cognition. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 28, 675– 735.

Wells, G. L. and E. A. Olson (2003). Eyewitness testimony. Annual Review of Psychology 54, 277–295.

Relevance Theory

This semester I’m attending a course on Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson's (1987) Relevance Theory, a major theory of how communicative understanding arises in the pragmatic satiation of face to face discourse. I think I’ll write a bit about it time and again, and especially look at how their proposals relate to the stuff I usually write about on this blog.

In the first Chapter, on Communication, Sperber and Wilson pose the basic question:

“How do human beings communicate with one another?” (1)

But to answer this question, we first need to know what exactly is meant by the fuzzy term ‘communication’. Sperber and Wilson define it as a process that involves two “information-processing devices” (i.e. people, their mind/brains or what have you) in which one of the devices ‘modifies’ the others physical environment in some way or other. Taking the example of speech, If I talk to you, I modify your acoustic environment by sending acoustic speech signals out into your surroundings.

If you read this blog (Hi dad!), I modify your visual environment by presenting colored marks against a white background which you have to decipher. What happens as a result is that you (given that your are the second, receiving “information-processing device”) construct a (mental) representation which bears resemblance to the representation that is stored in my head (or in the “first device”).

It is difficult to say how similar our mental representation of what I’ve said or written are exactly, but we’ll come to that again, and presumably, there is to be some overlapping of representations, given that we both speak English, live in the same physical world, have basically the same general neural architecture, a similar genetic makeup, and similar basic cognitive skills (that is, we at least both know how to sit down, how to switch on a computer, how to type and how to read, for otherwise how would you’ve gotten her in the first place? (Yes I know, you wouldn’t necessarily need to be able to type if you bookmarked my blog or read it via a newsfeed (I know that there are thirty of you somewhere out there…) but that would be nitpicking)

Coming back to the theory, the basic questions now are:

1. What exactly it is that is communicated? Sperber and Wilson postpone an elaborate answer to a later chapter, and suffice it to say that what is transmitted are thoughts, i.e. “conceptual representations", and assumptions, i.e. claims about a factual state in the real world, or information, which isn’t really defined at that point.

2. How is communication, i.e. the establishment of functionally overlapping mental representations, achieved exactly?

To answer this question, Sperber and Wilson first draw our attention to the paradigm of semantics they are opposed to, namely the “dualistic code model.” This model proposes that

“communication is achieved by encoding and decoding messages.” (2)

Sperber and Wilson champion another approach, developed by philosophers such as Paul Grice and David Lewis, called the inferential model, according to which,

“communication is achieved by producing and interpreting evidence.” (2)

Both models aren’t totally opposed to each other, but lay different emphasis on which parts of understanding are really important. What Sperber and Wilson argue is that these two ways of understanding are independent of each other.

But first, let’s look a bit closer at the code model. Sperber and Wilsin define the three key elements of the model as such:

Code: “a system which pairs message with signals, enabling two information-processing devices (organisms or machines) to communicate.” (3f.)

Message: “a representation internal to the communicating devices.” (4)

Signal: “a modification of the external environment which can be produced by one device and recognised by the other.“ (4)

A classical example of such a way of information transmission would be the morse code. Sperber and Wilson also give the example of honeybees, who have been shown to be able to communicate the location of nectar they’ve found by ‘dancing’. To be able to do so, a honeybee, seen as an information-processing device, has to possess the following properties: a) some kind of memory, from which the relevant information about where the nectar is and how to get there can be taken or put b) some kind of “encoder-decoder device“ which can pair the message of the flight plan with the signal of ‘dancing’. (5)

The ‘semiotic’ code model goes way back to the ancient greeks, and is also endorsed by Ferdinand de Saussure, one of the founders of modern linguistics:

“Language is a system of signs that express ideas” (Saussure 1974: 16)

But Sperber and Wilson claim that there is the model is deficient, especially when it comes to complex devices (i.e. us) processing and transmitting information. If we interpret a linguistic signal, we do indeed encode a message, but the information that we get as a whole, our representation of it, doesn’t only come from the encoding of the message alone. In some situations there needn’t be a ‘coded message’ at all. As the authors argue

“What a better understanding of myth, literature, ritual, etc., has shown is that these cultural phenomena do not, in general, serve to convey precise and predictable messages.”. (8)

But how then can we explain this apparent

“gap between the semantic representations of sentences and the thoughts actually communicated by utterances” (9) ?

First, Sperber and Wilson differentiate between ‘sentence’ and ‘utterance’. An utterance is the actual communicative act in a given situation with all its linguistic and non-linguistic (e.g. situational) properties, whereas a sentence is meant to describe the more abstract general semantic of a content.

Consider the following examples:

(1) I write a lot about Zombies

(2) George likes brains

(3) Michael is glad that the members of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology haven’t been eaten by zombies

if we ask what the content of these ‘sentences’ is, i.e. what their general semantic representation is we only get that (1) An agent writes a lot about Zombies. The same holds for (2). In (3) without any situational, pragmatic content, we just don’t know who this Michael guy is. Therefore, for the interpretations of these ‘utterances’ to be successful, they need to

“involve an interaction between linguistic structure and non-linguistic information.” (10)

Moreover, "utterances are used not only to convey thoughts but to reveal the speaker's attitude to, or relation to, the thought expressed” (10f.)

In fact in a lot of utterances there is a lot of ambiguity judging from the linguistic material alone. Consider for example, irony (which of course can be partly interpreted due to prosodic features of an utterance such as tone of voice, stress, etc.), or Chomsky’s famous example that

“flying planes can be dangerous.”

In general, it can be said that there is an amount of semantic flexibility in the signal for which the hearer must compensate by non-linguistic considerations such as situational/pragmatic cues. Often, a linguistic signals' meaning isn’t exhausted by its semantic content, but has to be combined with a lot of contextual information they carry implicitly, such as “Do you know what time it is?”, by which we of course mean, ‘Please tell me what time it is if you know”.

If we want to delve even deeper, we can now ask what exactly the mechanisms are that allow us to successfully draw inferences as to the full representational content of an utterance. However, most rules aren’t as simple as

(4) “Substitute for 'I' a reference to the speaker.”

(5) “Substitute for 'tomorrow' a reference to the day after the utterance.” (12)

This of course would work for sentences such as 'I write a lot about Zombies', so that we would get that it is me, Michael Pleyer, who writes a lot about Zombies (well, in fact I think, my amount of Zombie references is moderate).

But according to Sperber and Wilson, it is hard to think of an exhaustive list of such ‘decoding principles’, and then it still seems dubious that such an endless process of feature checking and decoding would be psychologically plausible.

As most pragmatists, Sperber and Wilson advertise the view that comprehension is in fact an inferential process.

To get a clear view for the differences between the inferential model and the code model, they give the following definitions:

“An inferential process starts from a set of premises and results in a set of conclusions which follow logically from, or are at least warranted by, the premises” (12f.)[1]

“A decoding process starts from a signal and results in the recovery of a message which is associated to the signal by an underlying code” (13) [2]

To achieve successful communication(i.e. partly overlapping mental representations), then, two people need to have the same basic premises and use the same inferential mechanism. How exactly this comes about is addressed in later sections, but to hint at the basic principle, Sperber and Wilson think that one of the most basic premises of interactions is that of relevance, i.e. that we only try to draw attention to propositions, thoughts, assumption, information. etc. that wee deem relevant, i.e. of interest to you and me.

I’ll post a bit more on the book some time in the future.

References:

Saussure, Ferdinand de (1974): Course in general linguistics. Translated from the French (1916) by Wade Baskin. London: Peter Owen.

Sperber, Dan and Deirdre, Wilson (1995): Relevance: Communication and Cognition. Second Edition. Malden et al.: Blackwell.

---

[1] The most classic inference process is the following:

All men are mortal

Socrates is a man

Therefore Socrates is mortal.

[2] Sperber and Wilson’s discussion of the relation between inferential models and the code model is actually quite complicated, because in their view, inferential models can be used to decode messages, but not vice versa, as you will see in this example