stefano discusses why he was moving away from clarks' theory of grounding. In sum, he said that in the pragmatic are of psycholinguistics there are 2 school:- 'code' school: derived from cybernetics/shannon. Clark is part of that - 'inference' school: sperber, wilson, lakoff, grice...
The 'inference' school criticized the grounding theory since they state that a common ground is not necessary for communication (the rely on studies on communication between locutors of different culture/language). They state that: - common ground does not exist and it is not needed - communication is based on inferences
Communication according to them is: - X acts (according to his beliefs) - Y infers a meaning from this
This needs 2 levels: - the intention of emitter's communication must be obvious, there are special techniques human beings use to show the communication intent. this is how the commmunication can be opened - sending the content, which is understood by the receiver according to his knowledge (his 'library').
This school relates communication to action, that is why they are close to 'distributed cognition' theory (cognition is not only on people's mind, artifacts are important since people can infer meaning from them and rely on them for cognitive task like memory).
- read stuff about cognitive aspects of communication (sperber and wilson's book 'relevance...'), read overviews because we juste need the mechanism, - check what is done at 'institut jean nicod' - check francesco cara's work
There are three zones: - action theory (and its subset activity theory): nardi, engeström, suchman - distributed cognition (subset: situated cognition and spatial cognition): properties of objects and the way they express meaning: Hutchins and others. problem: lack of methodology (maybe we should chek theureau). This theory does not take communication into account. - relevance/inference theory: sperber, wilson, grice
Our concern will be to connect those 3 zones
We need to have strong ideas about: - action - communication - context - role of artifacts in the activity - role of artifacts in communication
-- References: 'Mutual Knowledge': collection of papers, argument betwenn Clark and Sperber. Moeschler and reboul 'la pragmatique aujourd'hui'
-- stefano's phd tricks: - read introductory books to get the general idea of a field, to have a 'map' of the big names, the communities... - write glossaries that can even incorporate different definitions for a single term (since we are into multidisciplinary fields, terms have several definitions) - write regular 'checkpoints' (like... evrey 6 months, to be sent to phd supervisor, friends, authors...) with: my current beliefs (and why I state that)/what I want to prove/where I am stuck (with the reason)