Cognitive Pragmatics 6.1. Pragmatism and Pragmatics 6.1.1. Pragmatism 6.1.2. Pragmatics 6.1.2.1. Speech Acts 6.1.2.2.

Relevance Theory 6.2. Cognitive Pragmatics 6.3. Overview 6.1. Pragmatism and Pragmatics 6.1.1. Pragmatism It is, probably, less difficult to assume that some people might identify pragmatics with pragmatism than to make the same people see how the two are inter-related; whence the necessity of a parallel presentation. First developed in the 19 th century be Charles Sanders Peirce as a theory of verification, pragmatism was then given a psychological and almost mystical turn by William James and a social-scientific, social-democratic one by John Dewey, with Richard Rorty at the end, in the 20th century, who added his literary turn. Suspicions toward the epistemological and ontological problems defining the philosophical tradition in general, pragmatism is fundamentally anti-essentialist and sustains that ideas (philosophical, general or particular) derive their meaning from their utility and thus become guides to behavior; as inquiring animals situated in an interactive cultural environment, people need to recognize the primacy of action over contemplation, the primacy of praxis over theoria (prassein=to act, to do; pragma=deed, matter). What might be termed classical pragmatism was associated in America with progressivism and derived many of its tenets from Darwinism around the middle of the 19 th century; William James, George Herbert Mead and John Dewey all see personal development as adaptive behavior; they are followed by such logical positivists and empiricists as R. Carnap and Ch. Morris for whom meaning is the cash-value of an idea. Experimentalism and verification occupy an essential place with W. V. O. Quine, for whom no amount of information can determine which of the many conceptual frameworks we use to interpret our experience is better or truer apart from our problems and purposes; immediately, a problem-centered model for thinking is developed through an experimental model by Peirce, who significantly distinguishes truth from meaning, and knowledge from belief. At about the same time, James narrows the gap between meaning and truth (true is what is good in the way of belief) and brings in the psychological empiricism of Locke, Hume, and Mill in his effort toward a subjectification of pragmatism. He proposes a holistic, probabilistic, field theory of the mind (consciousness is a blooming, buzzing confusion, whence also the stream-of-consciousness so much made of by a number of writers at the beginning of the 20th century), which is no longer a passive recorder, but a fighter for ends. Dewey comes with a shift from individual interpretation to collective reconstruction and simply views humans as problem-solving animals, as already suggested here; Darwins

adaptationism tells him that the world of work and experimental method, suppressed by aristocratic politics and philosophy, is to be liberated and rationally transformed by democratic culture, and hence by a philosophy that assimilates theoretical to practical and productive reason; very much like organs, ideas are tools and instruments (instrumentalism) of adaptation. Drawing on Hegels philosophy of individuation (identifying participatory democracy through socialization), he sees the essence of Americanism in this combination of individualism with democracy; socially cooperative persons living in a democratic society will necessarily become more highly individual and autonomous than the isolated and merely reflective egos of class-stratified societies. As far as logic is concerned (1903, Studies in Logical Theory), together with the Chicago philosophers (Mead), Dewey sees it as a tool of discovery, mediating between problematic situation and problem-solving response; techne has primacy over praxis, and praxis over theoria. Rortys literary turn beings about an emphasis on literature rather than philosophy as provider of images and stories that reveal the truth about our nature and the world; literary people rather than philosophers have a special insight into important questions and problems; novelists and poets have more important things to tell us than philosophers do, while narrative as such is preferable to argument and theory; ;the traditionally conceived philosophy is an obsolete game that might as well be called off; philosophy should rather blur into literary and cultural criticism and cede the moral high ground to novelists and poets. In consequences of Pragmatism (1982) Rorty even speaks of a postphilosophical culture in which edifying (i.e. literary) philosophers like Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Foucault replace the systematic philosophers in their pursuit of absolute certainty; the former are concerned with culture, history, aesthetic experience and self-transformation, while conveying their ideas ironically and metaphorically, in aphorisms, satires, narratives and poetic meditations rather than in logical arguments; what we need are storytellers whose writing gives examples of self-transformation, as well as poets and poetic philosophers who generate new metaphors for imagining ourselves in the world. It was images of freedom conveyed through magazines and movies that finally brought down the Berlin Wall (Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity) so all we can do is try to make the advantages of liberal values imaginatively vivid; liberalism rests on imagination, no theory: there is no theoretical way to reconcile public story with our private stories, so we cannot make our public liberal values blend with our private aesthetic ones. In universities themselves science has gradually turned into one genre of literature (see Turners literary mind as the fundamental mind), while objective scholarship and rational discussion have been replaced by an aggressive cultural relativism. Following James rather than Dewey, Rorty sees fragments of the field of experience as made meaningful by the invention and deployment of ever more novel vocabularies, all of which, from serious scientific theories, to novels, plays, and poems have prima facie equal epistemic status. As we can easily see, cognitivism takes over in both sciences and the arts, which, of course, also accounts for the development of pragmatics. 6.1.2. Pragmatics Throughout its development, pragmatics has obviously been steered by the philosophical practice of pragmatism, especially in terms of the above mentioned distinction between

truth and meaning and the democracy of meaning; as a matter of fact, most of the definitions and characterizations of pragmatics will implicitly or explicitly point in that direction. Thus, a branch of linguistics, developed in the 1970s, pragmatics is concerned with language in use, and is often discussed in it relationship with semantics; ;thus, if semantics examines the relationship between a word and its sense and with sentence meaning in general, pragmatics deals with speakers meaning and how that is achieved in some kind of context (referents and discourse entities); in fact, the study of how context influences interpretation is absolutely essential, and this context may include both the speakers intention and the receivers understanding of the message; otherwise, if semantics covers the literal meaning of an idea, pragmatics refers to the implied meaning of that idea; decoding processes are a matter of semantics, therefore, while inference processes belong to pragmatics. Thus, it might be said that pragmatics is concerned with bridging the interpretative gap between sentence meaning and speaker meaning, with context inbetween and all around, i.e. all of the psychological, environmental, social or discourse factors that one cares to bring in. Another way to put it is that pragmatics is concentrated on the dynamic aspect of meaning in context. Though the terms pragmaticos/pragmaticus come from ancient Greece and Rome, the pragmatic interpretation of verbal communication only dates back to Charles Morris Foundations of the Theory of Signs (1938), and it kept absorbing more and more adherents until, in 1987, the International Pragmatic Association was founded in Antwerp; its working document described it as the intellectual effort of looking into language use from all dimensions. It has also come to focus on interlanguage and on how non-native speakers comprehend and produce communicative acts in another language, with multiple implications in (foreign) language teaching practices. Among its topics of inquiry are, first of all, what came to be described as speech acts, then deixis, conventional implicatures, context of course, irony, intention, agency, discourse structure, metaphor, relevance theory, etc. 6.1.2.1. Speech Acts Though it seems that the first comprehensive and systematic work on speech acts had been done by the phenomenologist Adolf Reinach (1913), it was the British philosopher John Langshaw Austin (1911-1960) who, starting form the distinction between the realm of semantics (what is really said) and that of pragmatics (what is accomplished beyond saying}, who was especially interested in how people can use words to do different things (like describe something, ask a question, make a request or order, make a promise); what words can do depends not only on their literal, dictionary meanings, but mostly on the speakers intention and the context in which they are used; so, the reference of the words is one thing, while the speech acts performed with them is another. One other distinction Austin proposes in How to Do Things with Words (1962) is the one between constatives (simply saying something that is either true or false) and performatives (performingsimultaneously with the sayingacts of the same kind named by the verb; performatives therefore are both utterances and actions, and are neither true nor false (to nominate, to fire, to sentence, to bet, to guarantee, to warn); so they can be, at most, felicitous and infelicitous.

So, once again, there are two levels, which consist in saying something and in doing a number of things by saying something; and thus, the third distinction is that between the act of saying something, what one does in saying it, and what one does by saying it; the first is the locutionary act, the second is the illocutionary act, and the third is the perlocutionary act (the locutionary act in Bring your dictionaries next time is that the students are asked by the lecturer to bring along their dictionaries; the illocutionary act is a warning that they might have to write a test paper; and the perlocutionary act is that the students got a message about what and how they have to contribute to the subject; step back is simply telling someone to step back, but it also has the contextual function of warning him about some danger, and it further makes the listener become alerted to a falling object). Austins American student at Oxford (England), John R. Searle focuses on illocutionary acts (Speech Acts: An Essay in the philosophy of Language, 1969) and develops a theory of constitutive rules for these acts; his main premise, very much like Austins, is that understanding an utterance is not merely a matter of decoding it, but much, much more. These rules are classified as propositional content rules, preparatory rules, sincerity rules, and essential rules; the propositional content rules put conditions of the propositional content of illocutionary acts (a future action, a conditional one, an imperative); preparatory rules tell what the speaker will imply in the performance of an illocutionary act (belief, normality, naturalness); sincerity rules obviously tell something about the psychological state of the speaker (joke, irony); essential rules tell us what the action really consists in. Later Searle proposes a classification of illocutionary acts into five categories: representative or assertive (Its rainingspeaker committed to the truth of the propositional content), directive (the speaker is commanding someone to get out), commissive (commitment to the act, promisingIll do it!), expressive (Im glad, Im sorry), and declarative (he represents himself as performing the very action of the verbI baptize thee). Kent Bach and Michael Harnish (Linguistic Communication and Speech Acts, 1979), on the premise that each type of illocutionary act is individuated by the type of attitude expressed (with casual constraints on the content as well), find only four major categories of illocutionary acts: constatives (statements), directives (requests), commissives (promises), and acknowledgements (apology). A more detailed presentation would show that constatives and commissives are borrowed from Austin, directives and acknowledgements (expressive) from Searle, with a more specific vocabulary for each: constativesaffirm, allege, announce, answer, attribute, claim, classify, confirm, deny, disagree, disclose, dispute, identify, inform, insist, predict, rank, report, state, stipulate; directivesadvise, admonish, ask, beg, dismiss, excuse, forbid, instruct, order, permit, request, require, suggest, urge, warn; commissivesagree, guarantee, invite, offer, promise, swear, volunteer; acknowledgementsapologize, condole, congratulate, greet, thank, accept. 6.1.2.2. Relevance Theory What Herbert Paul Grice (1913-1988) really proposes (in his posthumous collection of papers on meaning, language, and communication titled Studies in the Way of Words, 1989) is a theory of conversation if we may say so, based upon the types of distinction

mentioned above: between what words mean, what the speaker really says while using these words, and what the speaker intends to communicate (hence the concept of conversational implicatures). There is no implication without a common knowledge of several things about the topic and tenor of a conversation, so that Grice introduces the presence of a Cooperative Principle between speaker and listener/s, a principle that is implemented by some maxims and submaxims (even supermaxims) that refer to quantity (informativeness: your contribution should be as informative as necessary, neither more, nor less), quality (truthfulness: state what is true, not what you believe to be true, and ground your statement on evidence), relation (be relevant), and manner (clarity, perspicuity): some submaxims refer to the avoidance of obscurity, ambiguity, disorderliness, and prolixity and to the fact that the speaker should facilitate the appropriate reply. Grice also identifies three characteristics of implicatures (cancelable, non-detachable you cannot say exactly the same thing in different words and have the same implicatures--, and calculablecan be worked out); further on he distinguishes between particularized conversational implicatures and generalized ones. His main focus throughout remains on speakers meanings, i.e. communicative intentions, which are characterized in three ways: they are always oriented toward some addressee: they are thus intended as to be recognized by the addressee (cooperative principle); and their satisfaction consists precisely in being recognized by the addressee. Contemporary pragmatic theory is almost totally neo-Gricean, in that it accepts his three important contributions: what the speaker says is one thing and what he implicates is another; there is a set of principles (maxims) governing linguistic communication; the communicative intention needs to be recognized by the receiver. What neo-pragmatists owe to Grice mostly is a second inferential model of communication developing between sender and receiver ;as intention-recognition and discovery (as compared to the Saussurean model of sender-code-channel-decoding-receiver). No doubt an utterance is a linguistically coded piece of evidence, and the element of decoding is essential, but the meaning recovered by this decoding is ony part of the inference process that yields and interpretation of the speakers meaning. So, what inferential pragmatics does is to show how the recipient infers the senders meaning on the basis of certain evidence, and one of Grices central claims is that any utterance almost automatically creates expectations that guide the hearer toward the speakers meaning. Grice also insists on the fact that an input is relevant to an individual when its processing (in a context of available assumptions)yields a positive cognitive effect, such that the greater the positive cognitive effect achieved by the hearer in processing and input, the greater its relevance will be; and, conversely, the greater the processing effort required, the less relevant the input. Which means that relevance may be assessed in terms of cognitive effects on one hand, and of processing effort on the other. Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson (Relevance: Communication and Cognition, 1986, 1995) see relevance as a psychological phenomenon basic to the lives not only of humans, but of all animals that are able to pick among choices in their environment (an animal may get cues from the environment and thus enrich its information) so that the phenomenon of relevance in language is only one manifestation of a more general one. What they basically think is, first, that communication involves intentions on the part of the speaker that go beyond what is being coded in the language, and, second, that inferences on the part of the listener go beyond decoding that language. What Sperber and

Wilson really do is to replace Grices cooperative principle and his conversational maxims with this principle of relevance; in fact, with two principles of relevance: First (Cognitive) Principle of Relevance: Human cognition tends to be geared to the maximization of relevance, which basically means that human cognitive processes are naturally aimed at processing the most relevant information in the most relevant way or, complementarily at the achievement of as many contextual, cognitive effects as possible for as little processing effort as possible; speakers will always try, by a variety of means, to ensure that their utterances have the maximum cognitive effects, while, at this end, the hearer interprets an utterance choosing the context that maximizes its cognitive effects. Sperber and Wilson write here about ostensive inferential communication, i.e. the intention is both informative (the intention to inform an audience of something) and communicative (the intention to inform an audience of ones informative intention). The Second (Communicative) Principle of Relevance: Together with the concept of optimal relevance, this communicative principle is the key to the Sperber-Wilson relevance theory; it states that Every act of ostensive communication communicates a presumption of its optimal relevance; i.e. every utterance, as a matter of fact, conveys a presumption of its own relevance. By optimal relevance is meant that an ostensive stimulus is relevant if, and only if, it is relevant enough to be worth the audiences processing effort and, at the same time, it is the most relevant one compatible with the speakers abilities and preferences. 6.2. Cognitive Pragmatics With Austin and Searle, Grice and Sperber-Wilson, we have already come into the realm of cognitive pragmatics. Any cognitive theory of language use will provide insight in the ways speech acts are understood, planned and performed, as well as into the appropriateness of speech acts in certain contexts; how this appropriateness is assigned by speakers and listeners in communicative contexts is, again, one important task of cognitive pragmatics. Thus, it may not be surprising to note here that pragmatic conditions in general have a cognitive basis, and that among these conditions frames play an important role (they also correspond, with various writers, to scripts, scenarios or schemata), as well as analysis and knowledge of context, of course (they may be intentional or formal, private, public, or informal). A more systematic approach would lead us into looking at two main periods or trends in the evolution of pragmatic theories: traditional pragmatics on one hand, with its emphasis on socio-cultural norms for communicative processes (language as a social product), and cognitive pragmatics, with its insistence on various kinds of principles (language as a cognitive ability). From this perspective, with his cooperative principle, Grice isis not a real cognitivistat least a precursor of cognitive approaches; and so are Sperber and Wilson with their first (cognitive) principle, and second (communicative) principle. And for that matter, so is Stephen Levinson (Presumptive Meanings. The Theory of Generalized Conversational Implicature, 2000), with his Q-, M-, and I-principles for inferring conversational implicatures, each with its Speakers Maxim (SM) and Recipient Corrolary (RC): The Q-principle: SMDo not provide a statement that is informationally weaker than your knowledge of the world allows, i.e. what the informationally strongest

paradigmatic alternate that is consistent with the facts; RCTake it that the speaker made the strongest statement/alternate consistent with what he knows; The M-principle: SM Indicate an abnormal, non-stereotypical situation by using marked expressions that contrast with those you would use to describe the corresponding normal, stereotypical situation: RCWhat is said in an abnormal way indicates an abnormal situation, or marked messages indicate marked situations; The I-principle: SMthe maxim of Minimization, Say as little as necessary, i.e. produce the minimal linguistic information sufficient to achieve your communicational ends; RCthe Enrichment rule, i.e. amplify the informational content of the speakers utterance by finding the most specific interpretation, up to what you judge to be the speakers m-intended point, unless he, the speaker, has broken the maxim of Minimization by using a marked or prolix expression. What we are witnessing here is the movement of pragmatics from its place of origin in philosophy to a new location within cognitive science; the recovery of the speaker meaning, both explicitly and implicitly communicated, falls now into the domain of a cognitivescientific view of pragmatics as a mental processing system responsible for interpreting communicative impulses; pragmatics has become a capacity of the mind, sort of an information-processing system for interpreting the phenomena of human communicative behavior; what is still expected is evidence from childrens communicative development (well return), from investigations on humans with communicative difficulties and deficits, from psycholinguistic experiments on comprehension and from other mental capacities responsible for our beliefs, desires, and intentions. As a result, semantics is in a process of gradually falling into a background where its role is diminished to that of an evidential, rather than a fully determining one in the identification of what the speaker explicitly communicated. And thus, cognitive pragmatics properly speaking is concerned with the mental processes involved in intentional communication and one of its main tasks is that of describing and explaining the structure and properties of the knowledge that underlies language use; in other words, those characteristics of the mind that allow human beings to communicate with each other; so, the main question is what foes on in the mind of an agent who engages in a communicative interaction with another? (Austin, Searle, and Grice very much in the background). If in this respect you read an author like Maurizio Tirassa (Brain and Language, 1968: 419-441) who writes about communicative competence and the architecture of the mind/brain you may come upon the supposition that the brain areas involved in communication are not the same as those involved in language (the Broca-Wernicke area), a dissociability between communication and language that might mean that communication is an independent faculty, representing a distinct innate competence; but this still remains to be proved. This is a larger issue in mentalist theories of pragmatics, that are basically distinguished from one another on whether they take communication as a competence or performance (as distinct from the same processes in Chomskyan linguistics). From another perspective, cognitive pragmatics has developed an intuition of Wittgensteins (Philosophical Investigations, 1953) according to which communication as a behavior game is based upon a shared plan between the actors; communication is thus situated (Rita B. Ardito, Bruno G. Bara, Enrico Blanzieri, etc) and manifests itself on the borderline between cognitive processes and phenomena studied by social psychology. Ardito et all. Introduce the concepts of scene, scenery, and scenario side by side with

situation, starting from the premise that not only the idea of cooperation (Grice) is a key element for the communicative interaction, but also that of shared belief, i.e. the two agents need to share not only intentions and desires, but also beliefs (BDIbeliefs, desires, intentionshas already become a familiar acronym). As far back as 1987, L. Suchman (Plans and Situated Action, Cambridge: CUP) had introduced this notion of communication as plan recognition and shared knowledge in the context of situated communication, with the interesting observation: it appears that much in the construction of situated language that has been taken to reflect problems of speaker performance, instead reflects speaker competence in responding to cues provided by the listener. (p.71) Ardito et all. find that this shared-plan approach is not enough in understanding the complexities of situation, and thus appeal to a number of re-definitions or new concepts in order to reflect the influences of the environment and of various other actions; situation is the relative position or combination of circumstances at a certain moment, and it thus considers the directly perceived world and possible actionsthe perceived context (the perception of a room, an elevator, a street corner), the here and now; also concrete and real is the scene, the place of an occurrence or action, the world and its affordances, the context in an objective sense (a kitchen and whatever it contains, a lecture room); the scenario refers to a possibly simulated, a hypothetical state of affairs, the metarepresented scenery; scenery was adopted also for the representational level of the world and the plans (representation of a place and the possibilities of action it offers potentially). Their premise in introducing these cognitive concepts is that a complete theory of situated communication requires a consideration of the interaction between environment and actions at all levels: objective, as perceived, representational and metarepresentational; the aim is that of giving an account of the interaction between mental states involved in communication and the various subjective representations of the state of the world. Other attempts in cognitive pragmatics propose such things as a cognitive coherence theory as a new communication layer over already classical BDI agents (Philippe Pasquier et al., 2005) or a pragmatics of manipulation (which involves many interesting cognitive processes: Louis de Saussure et al., 2005), but the general feeling is that many such theories contain many intricate and debatable elements, and, what is worse, even their own fundamentals (we have partly noted) are far from reaching a consensus; a lot of work still remains to be done, both in empirical research, as well as in the complementary areas of philosophy or artificial intelligence or what has come to be termed as neuropragmatics. 6.3. Overview Two subtle distinctions are in order: that between semantics (word and its sense and sentence meaning) and pragmatics (speakers meaning and how that is achieved in context: reference and discourse entities) and between pragmatism and pragmatics. Pragmatism maintains that ideas derive their meaning from their utility and thus become guides to behavior; pragmatics also distinguishes between truth and meaning and maintains that ideas have both literal and implied meanings; and these implied meanings can be

circumscribed by taking into account as many psychological, environmental, social, and discourse factors as possible. Speech acts and relevance theory prepare the way to present-day cognitive pragmatics, which is basically concerned with the mental processes involved in intentional communication and with explaining the structure and properties of the knowledge that underlies language use; since it has to appeal to elements, principles, methods and insights coming from philosophy, artificial intelligence studies and neuropragmatics, much work in the field still remains to be done, especially in developing an integrated theory of social and inferential approaches. DRAGOS AVADANEI -COGNITIVE SCIENCE AND THE HUMANITIES, Ed. Universitas XXI, Iai, 2010