Relevance theory,pragmatic inference and cognitive architecture

Relevance Theory (RT) argues that human language comprehension processes tend to maximize “relevance,” and postulates that there is a relevance-based procedure that a hearer follows when trying to understand an utterance. Despite being highly influential, RT has been criticized for its failure to explain how speaker-related information, either the speaker’s abilities or her/his preferences, is incorporated into the hearer’s inferential, pragmatic process. An alternative proposal is that speaker-related information gains prominence due to representation of the speaker within higher level goal-directed schemata. Yet the goal-based account is still unable to explain clearly how cross-domain information, for example linguistic meaning and speaker-related knowledge, is integrated within a modular system. On the basis of RT’s cognitive requirements, together with contemporary cognitive theory, we argue that this integration is realized by utilizing working memory and that there exist conversational constraints with which the constructed utterance interpretation should be consistent. We illustrate our arguments with a computational implementation of the proposed processes within a general cognitive architecture.

Abbreviations: ACT-R Adaptive Control of Thought - RationalCOGENT Cognitive Objects within a Graphical ENvironmenTCS/SS Contention Scheduling/Supervisory SystemRBCP Relevance-Based Comprehension ProcedureRT Relevance Theory     

An individual differences perspective on pragmatic abilities in the preschool years

Pragmatic abilities are fundamental to successful language use and learning. Individual differences studies contribute to understanding the psychological processes involved in pragmatic reasoning. Small sample sizes, insufficient measurement tools, and a lack of theoretical precision have hindered progress, however. Three studies addressed these challenges in three- to 5-year-old German-speaking children (N = 228, 121 female). Studies 1 and 2 assessed the psychometric properties of six pragmatics tasks. Study 3 investigated relations among pragmatics tasks and between pragmatics and other cognitive abilities. The tasks were found to measure stable variation between individuals. Via a computational cognitive model, individual differences were traced back to a latent pragmatics construct. This presents the basis for understanding the relations between pragmatics and other cognitive abilities.

Research Highlights

• Individual differences in pragmatic abilities are important to understanding variation in language development.
• Research in this domain lacks a precise theoretical framework and psychometrically high-quality measures.
• We present six tasks capturing a wide range of pragmatic abilities with excellent re-test reliability.
• We use a computational cognitive model to provide a substantive theory of individual differences in pragmatic abilities.

     

Relevance and digressions in argumentative discussion: A pragmatic approach

Digressions in argumentative discussion are a kind of failure of relevance. Examination of what actual cases look like reveals several properties of argumentative relevance: (1) The informational relevance of propositions to the truth value of a conclusion should be distinguished from the pragmatic relevance of argumentative acts to the task of resolving a disagreement. (2) Pragmatic irrelevance is a collaborative phenomenon. It does not just short-circuit reasoning; it encourages a failure to take up the demands of an argumentative task. (3) Pragmatic irrelevance can occur not simply by the absence of a connection between what is said and some standpoint in dispute, but also by the presence of a connection between what is said and a competing use of the information. (4) Pragmatic relevance must be accomplished through communicative action.     

Four‐year‐olds incorporate speaker knowledge into pragmatic inferences

Human communication relies on the ability to take into account the speaker's mental state to infer the intended meaning of an utterance in context. For example, a sentence such as ‘Some of the animals are safe to pet’ can be interpreted as giving rise to the inference ‘Some and not all animals are safe to pet’ when uttered by an expert. The same inference, known as a scalar implicature, does not arise when the sentence is spoken by someone with partial knowledge. Adults have been shown to derive scalar implicatures in accordance with the speaker's knowledge state, but in young children this ability is debated. Here, we revisit this question using a simple visual world paradigm. We find that both 4‐ and 5‐year‐olds successfully incorporate speaker knowledge into the derivation of scalar inferences. However, this ability does not generalize immediately to non‐linguistic communicative contexts. These findings have important implications for the development of pragmatic abilities.     

The pragmatic aspects of linguistic negation: Speech act,argumentation and pragmatic inference

This paper is an attempt to give a general explanation of pragmatic aspects of linguistic negation. After a brief survey of classical accounts of negation within pragmatic theories (as speech act theory, argumentation theory and polyphonic theory), the main pragmatic uses of negation (illocutionary negation, external negation, lowering and majoring negation) are discussed within relevance theory. The question of the relevance of negative utterance is raised, and a general inferential schema (based on the so-called invited inference) is proposed and tested for the main uses of negation discussed in the paper.Translated from French by Anne Reboul and Lyne DaSylva.     

The specificity of terms affects conditional reasoning

Conditional inferences can be phrased with unspecific terms (“If a person is on a diet, then the person loses weight. A person is on a diet. The person loses weight”) or specific terms (“If Anna is on a diet, then Anna loses weight. Anna is on a diet. Anna loses weight”). We investigate whether the specificity of terms affects people's acceptance of inferences. In Experiment 1, inferences with specific terms received higher acceptance ratings than inferences with unspecific terms. In Experiments 2 and 3, we used the same problems as in Experiment 1 but also problems with unspecific terms in the conditional and specific terms in the categorical and vice versa. When the conditional and the categorical had the same specificity, results were as in Experiment 1. When the specificity of the conditional and the categorical mismatched, acceptance ratings were lower. Our results illustrate the importance of phrasing on reasoning.     

Coercion and pragmatic presuppositions

In Category Mistakes, Magidor proposes that sortal restrictions should be viewed as pragmatic presuppositions. This contrasts with recent linguistic theories of successfully resolved category mistakes, e.g. coercions or copredication. It has been argued that for the proper treatment of such examples, sortal restrictions should be expressed by semantic presuppositions since they need to interact with compositional semantics. I explore possible ways in which Magidor’s theory could be extended to explain examples of coercion and copredication. The outcome of the discussion is that incorporation of these facts into Magidor’s pragmatic system might be possible, but ecessitates choices that are far from trivial.     

The Unavoidable Guidance in Language

ABSTRACT

Considering the profoundly collaborative nature of human communication, the notion of guidance needs more careful consideration and foregrounding in the philosophy of language. The practically crucial ideal of a well-balanced, fruitful relationship with a human guide motivates a conception of language as guidance, more specifically as the unavoidably applicable guidance in a communicative situation that language users are always in. The situation has at least three dimensions, with three corresponding forms of the guidance: (1) the performed guidance of the interlocutor in actual speech (cueing the speaker when to stop or change wording, for example); (2) the usage guidance of an available language; and (3) the basic teleology of the collaborative project of building up and maintaining a useful and interesting shared model of life in the world and providing for acceptable relations among communicating subjects.     

Avoiding Authoritarianism: On the Problem of Justification in Contemporary Critical Social Theory

Abstract

Critical social theories look critically at the ways in which particular social arrangements hinder human flourishing, with a view to bringing about social change for the better. In this they are guided by the idea of a good society in which the identified social impediments to human flourishing would once and for all have been removed. The question of how these guiding ideas of the good life can be justified as valid across socio‐cultural contexts and historical epochs is the most fundamental difficulty facing critical social theories today. This problem of justification, which can be traced back to certain key shifts in the modern Western social imaginary, calls on contemporary theories to negotiate the tensions between the idea of context‐transcendent validity and their own anti‐authoritarian impulses. Habermas makes an important contribution towards resolving the problem, but takes a number of wrong turnings.     

Infelicitous Cancellation: The Explicit Cancellability Test for Conversational Implicature Revisited

This paper questions the adequacy of the explicit cancellability test for conversational implicature as it is commonly understood. The standard way of understanding this test relies on two assumptions: first, that that one can test whether a certain content is (merely) conversationally implicated, by checking whether that content is cancellable, and second, that a cancellation is successful only if it results in a felicitous utterance. While I accept the first of these assumptions, I reject the second one. I argue that a cancellation can succeed even if it results in an infelicitous utterance, and that unless we take this possibility into account we run the risk of misdiagnosing philosophically significant cases.     

Is inhibition of return a reflexive effect?

The inhibition of return (IOR) phenomenon is routinely considered an effect of reflexive attention because the paradigm used to generate IOR employs peripheral cues that are uninformative as to where a target will appear. Because the cues are spatially unreliable it is thought that there is no reason for attention to be committed volitionally to them, and hence, the IOR effect is considered reflexive. What has been generally overlooked, however, is that the cues provide reliable temporal information as to when a target will occur. This predictive information is used by participants to prepare volitionally for when a target is likely to appear. We investigated whether the IOR effect is a product of the volitional application of attention to peripheral cues for the use of their temporal information. To test this idea we rendered the temporal information provided by peripheral cues unreliable. While this eliminated participants using the cues volitionally, it did not abolish the IOR phenomenon. These data demonstrate two new findings. First, the IOR effect is fundamentally a reflexive phenomenon. Second, when peripheral cues are not used volitionally, the IOR effect is attenuated. Together, the present findings indicate that the IOR effect can be modulated by volitional (top-down) processes but it is not the product of them. We argue that an intimate link between fronto-parietal regions and the superior colliculus provide a functional neural mechanism for this volitional effect to impact IOR.     

The usability of a Norwegian adaptation of the Children's Communication Checklist Second Edition (CCC-2) in differentiating between language impaired and non-language impaired 6- to 12-year-olds

The aim of the present study was to evaluate if the Norwegian adaptation of the Children's Communication Checklist-2 (CCC-2) differentiates between a language impaired and a non-language impaired population and to make a first evaluation of the psychometric qualities of the questionnaire on a Norwegian sample. A total of 153 children aged 6–12 years participated in the study (45 language impaired and 108 non-language impaired). The Norwegian adaptation of the CCC-2 distinguished language impaired from non-language impaired children and thus seems to provide a useful screening tool for communication impairments in Norwegian children. The reliability of the CCC-2 appeared to be reasonable with internal consistency values ranging from 0.73 to 0.89.     

学习不良儿童社会技能研究的语用视角

80年代以来,语用研究范式逐步为教育和发展心理学所采纳,并为进一步探索学习不良儿童社会技能的规律提供了崭新视角。在对语用的概念进行简要介绍后,对西方近20年有关学习不良儿童语用研究的主要成果从言语行为、语用灵活性、意图推理、指称交际和干预五个方面进行了概括和分析。最后,就语用对学习不良儿童社会技能研究的意义和存在的问题进行了讨论。     

“I think the best athletes use it”: Masculinities and self-compassion among men varsity athletes

We examined how men varsity athletes’ embodiments of masculinities shaped their perceptions and experiences of self-compassion to manage sport-related challenges. Two semi-structured interviews were conducted with 11 men varsity athletes (20 interviews total). Vignettes depiciting athletes low and high in self-compassion were used as talk elicitation tools during interviews. Data were analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis and four themes were identified from the mens’ accounts. Participants utilized self-compassion as a coping strategy in sport and other life-domains to maintain well-being. Self-compassion was used to balance self-criticism to support achievement striving efforts. The experience of contrasting masculine ideologies (hegemonic and inclusive) promoted and constrained the men’s implementation of self-compassion. Traditional masculine narratives created tensions for participants who at times embodied the (mis)belief that self-compassion promotes complacency in the pursuit of athletic achievement. Findings contribute to understandings of men athletes’ experiences of self-compassion and masculinities in relation to sport-related challenges and performance.     

Evidentialism and pragmatic constraints on outright belief

Evidentialism is the view that facts about whether or not an agent is justified in having a particular belief are entirely determined by facts about the agent’s evidence; the agent’s practical needs and interests are irrelevant. I examine an array of arguments against evidentialism (by Jeremy Fantl, Matthew McGrath, David Owens, and others), and demonstrate how their force is affected when we take into account the relation between degrees of belief and outright belief. Once we are sensitive to one of the factors that secure thresholds for outright believing (namely, outright believing that p in a given circumstance requires, at the minimum, that one’s degree of belief that p is high enough for one to be willing to act as if p in the circumstances), we see how pragmatic considerations can be relevant to facts about whether or not an agent is justified in believing that p—but largely as a consequence of the pragmatic constraints on outright believing.