PPIG: Philosophy, Psychology, and Informatics Group

Presenter: Bart Geurts (University of Nijmegen)

Title: Communication as commitment making


Abstract: Fred says to Wilma: “I’ll do the dishes.” One way of construing Fred’s utterance is that it expresses his intention to do the dishes. On this construal, speech acts serve to convey information about what’s on the speaker’s mind. Alternatively, we can adopt a social perspective and say that the purpose of Fred’s promise to Wilma is to coordinate their actions: as a result of uttering, “I’ll do the dishes”, Fred becomes committed to Wilma to do the dishes, so that she can plan her activities accordingly.

These two stances need not exclude one another, and some theories seek to accommodate both, but in general the emphasis is on the psychological rather than the social aspects of communication. It is well known, however, that a psychology-first approach raises developmental issues. If understanding a promise is primarily a matter of divining the speaker’s intentions, it would seem that children must know what intentions are before they can learn to understand promises. But how likely is that two-year olds know what intentions are, and how could they learn about intentions and other psychological states if not through communication?

I propose a theory which is predicated on the assumption that communication is, first and foremost, a matter of negotiating social commitments. This reversal of emphasis is motivated in part by the expectation that a commitment-based approach offers a sounder basis for understanding language learning than a psychology-first approach. Furthermore, I believe it is also of interest in its own right to see how much explanatory mileage we can get out of a commitment-based approach. In that spirit, I will consider three major aspects of communication, arguing in each case that the commitment-based approach is at least as successful as its psychology-first competitors: speech acts, common ground, and conversational implicature.