Intention in pragmatics (original) (raw)
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Intention(ality) and the conceptualization of communication in pragmatics
Australian Journal of Linguistics (Vol.29, pp.91-113), 2009
It is commonly assumed in (linguistic) pragmatics that communication involves speakers expressing their intentions through verbal and nonverbal means, and recipients recognizing or attributing those attentions to speakers. Upon closer examination of various pragmatic phenomena in discourse, however, it appears the situation is actually much more complex than the standard conceptualization of communication in pragmatics allows. In particular, it is suggested in this paper that the focus on expressing and recognizing/attributing (speaker) intentions underestimates the dynamic nature and complexity of cognition that underpins interaction. The notion of "dyadic cognizing" (Arundale and Good 2002; Arundale 2008) is thus introduced as a way of reconceptualizing the inferential work that underlies communication. It is suggested that such inferential work is "directed" and thus is inherently "intentional" in the sense proposed by Brentano, but need not necessarily be "directed" towards the "intentions" of speakers.
"Intention (Including Speech Acts)", The Routledge Handbook of Pragmatics, 2017
This chapter deals with some of the different senses that the term ‘intention’ has in pragmatics, and the way they are related to each other. I shall begin by distinguishing one employment of the term, which belongs to our folk psychological practices of understanding actions in terms of reasons, from a more technical use, related to the aboutness of language.After a brief historical sketch, I describe the intentional approach to pragmatics as an attempt to account for the inten¬tionality of language (its aboutness) in terms of intentional action. I will do so by explaining the basic tenets of two very influential proposals: the Gricean theory of conversation and speech act theory.This chapter finishes with a review of contemporary debates on the foundations of pragmatics where intentions have a predominant role to play.
Pragmatics and Cognition: Intentions and Pattern Recognition in Context
International Review of Pragmatics, 2009
The importance of intention reading for communication has already been emphasized many years ago by Paul Grice. More recently, the rich debate on “theory of mind” has convinced many that intention reading may in fact play a key role also in current, cognitively oriented theories of pragmatics: Relevance Theory is a case in point. On a close analysis, however, it is far from clear that RT may really accommodate the idea that intention reading drives comprehension. Here I examine RT’s difficulties with that idea, and propose a framework where intention reading is actually assigned a signifi cant role. This framework is compatible with RT’s account of a unified, automatic mechanism of interpretation in lexical pragmatics, to the extent that the account shares many features of associative and constraint-based explanations of other linguistic phenomena. In fact, my suggestion is that our sensitivity to others’ intentions depends crucially on the availability of specific patterns of intentional behaviour grounded in social regularities. In other words, intention reading would be just a case, though a very special one, of pattern recognition.
Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 1995
This article inquires into the role of meaning in linguistic pragmatics (conceived in its widest interdisciplinary sense as a cognitive, social, and cultural perspective on language and communication). With reference to earlier discussions of the relationship between meaning and intention, especially in the anthropological linguistic literature, two case studies are adduced in order to further demonstrate the need to allow for types of meaning which do not depend exclusively or primarily on individual intentionality (even when dealing with language use in a mainstream Western context), and also to show how taking nonintentional forms of meaning into account can be done systematically in a theoretically and methodologically justifiable way. The first one focuses on the dynamics of interactional processes, the second on different degrees of salience which even result in direct contradictions between the level of implicit meaning and communicatively transparent information. The conclusion is that a straightforward pragmatic perspective allows linguists to return to the question, What is the meaning of expression X in context Y?, rather than to stick with the Gricean question, What did the language user intend X to mean in context Y?, even though the latter provided a major impetus for the development of the field of pragmatics in the first place.
“MeaningNN” and “showing”: Gricean intentions and relevance-theoretic intentions
Intercultural Pragmatics, 2008
A much discussed feature of Grice's (1957) account of intentional communication is the line he drew between showing and meaning NN , where meaning NN typically involves a linguistic convention or code. This distinction has had substantial effects on the development of pragmatics: pragmatists have focused on the notion of meaning NN and abstracted away from cases of showing. This paper explores the central differences between Gricean meaning NN intentions and relevance theory intentions. Firstly, relevance theory does not attempt to draw the line Grice drew, and recognises both showing and meaning NN as instances of overt intentional or ostensive-inferential communication. Rather than there being a sharp cutoff point between the two notions, there is a continuum of cases in between. Secondly, in contrast to the kind of intention proposed by Grice, the relevance-theoretic informative intention is not characterised as an intention to modify the hearer's thoughts directly-'to produce a particular response r'. This intention, it is argued, is not always reducible to an intention to communicate simply a single proposition and propositional attitude (or even a small set). This second move sheds new light on how better to analyse some of the weaker, vaguer aspects of communication, including the communication of impressions, emotions, attitudes, feelings and sensations.
2009
Let intentionalism be the view that what proposition is expressed in context by a sentence containing indexicals depends on the speaker’s intentions. It has recently been argued that intentionalism makes communicative success mysterious and that there are counterexamples to the intentionalist view in the form of cases of mismatch between the intended interpretation and the intuitively correct interpretation. In this paper, I argue that these objections can be met, once we acknowledge that we may distinguish what determines the correct interpretation from the evidence that is available to the audience, as well as from the standards by which we judge whether or not a given interpretation is reasonable. With these distinctions in place, we see that intentionalism does not render communicative success mysterious, and that cases of mismatch between the intended interpretation and the intuitively correct one can easily be accommodated. The distinction is also useful in treating the Humpty Dumpty problem for intentionalism, since it turns out that this can be treated as an extreme special case of mismatch.
Intentions in Spoken Communication. Strong and Weak Interactionist Perspectives
Speaking has traditionally been reputed an intentional activity. From St. Augustin's theory of sign to Grice's pragmatic theory, the presence of intentions has often been conceived as a defining feature of human verbal communication. However, it is one thing to make an intuitive appeal to the notion of intentionality, but quite another to give to that notion a clear explanatory role in pragmatic accounts of spoken communication. This latter task may appear difficult to accomplish, and in fact many have questioned that it is feasible at all. Various arguments have been proposed in order to show that the very notion of individual intention is problematic, if not untenable, as an explanation of spoken communication. One major line of reasoning consists in emphasizing the role of social interaction, conceived of as prior to and constitutive of individual intentions. In other words, individual intention would be something which needs to be explained as a product of communication, rather than something in terms of which communication could be explained. This argument, however, admits of a variety of more or less radical interpretations. For instance, in a weak interpretation what is rejected is simply the idea that the action of speaking is generally prompted by an explicit representation of the communicative goal to be pursued, and that the hearer has explicitly to recover that representation in order to understand the message conveyed. Such an interpretation does not preclude the possibility that individual intention plays some explanatory role, on condition that intentions are not conceived of in terms of explicit representations. Yet, some scholars embrace a stronger interpretation according to which human communication does not involve individual intentions in any interesting sense, and we had better substitute that very notion with a different one, let us say, with the notion of collective intentionality, or the like. Elsewhere I have explored and defended the weak interpretation, with regard both to the speaker's and hearer's point of view respectively, in Mazzone and Campisi (in press) and Mazzone (2009; in press). However, in those previous papers I did not directly compare weak and strong interpretations, or address in any detail the arguments proposed by the latter. A closer analysis and a rebuttal of the strong interpretation is precisely the aim of the present work. This analysis, however, does not have an exclusively negative motivation: on the contrary, an accurate evaluation of the arguments in favour of a strongly social perspective on intentional communication allows a better understanding of the subtle interweaving of social and individual aspects in communicative intentionality. In particular, one major conclusion I will draw from the present analysis is that a robust comprehension of the actual individual intentions involved in speaking is a key component of communicative interactions, even under the assumption that those interactions may in turn play a significant role in determining communicative intentions.
Language
Defining pragmatics (DP) is a survey and evaluation of definitions of pragmatics. Ariel rejects all except a contrast between grammar/code and inference/pragmatics: 'it's a grammatical code if it correlates between some linguistic expression and some meaning or use in a conventional manner. It is pragmatic if the correlation between the form and the meaning or use is mediated by some inference' (19). This implies that pragmatics is nonconventional-a peculiar interpretation if one accepts the definition of convention in Lewis 1969. A writes, 'the goal of a grammar/pragmatics division of labor is to distinguish two types of explanations for linguistic utterances, not to argue for their absolute psycholinguistic separation under all circumstances' (110). DP does not succeed in distinguishing grammar as code from pragmatics as inference, partly because, as A admits, '[m]ost, if not all language use involves both grammatical and pragmatic aspects' (144; see also p. 19). DP consists of nine chapters. An introductory chapter, 'What's under the big-tent pragmatics?', answers the title question as follows: 'anything relating to discourse and communication (exclusive of pure language structure)' (11). A distinguishes PROBLEM SOLVERS from BORDER SEEKERS. The former focus on problems that had no solutions according to extant formal grammars; A lists