Eva Picardi on Language, Analysis and History by Annalisa Coliva & Paolo Leonardi & Sebastiano Moruzzi

Author:Annalisa Coliva & Paolo Leonardi & Sebastiano Moruzzi
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783319957777
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

3 Coordination

Conventional content, together with the collaborative rationality of all joint activity, allows interlocutors to use utterances to contribute propositional information to a conversation. A key feature of linguistic content is that it is objective and publically retrievable. When we say, ‘It’s raining,’ we normally contribute that it’s raining to the conversation, or at least that we think it is. We might also be contributing—more indirectly—that we think our addressee should bring her umbrella. The semantics and pragmatics of discourse work together to explain how these contents become contributed. When we say, ‘That was a great lecture,’ contingent on the prosody we use to articulate our utterance, an audience may come away thinking we believe the lecture was great or that we are speaking sarcastically and intend to contribute ‘the opposite’. There is a matter of some dispute in the literature over whether the latter inference is fixed by the semantics of English or the pragmatics of collaborate conversation. But one way or another, we usually succeed in retrieving what our interlocutor is trying to contribute to our joint conversational record.

It’s traditional to cash out this idea of the retrieval of any sort of meaning —semantic or pragmatic—in Gricean terms (Grice 1989), that is, meaning must be calculable: it must be capable of being worked out on the basis of (i) the linguistically coded content of the utterance, (ii) the Gricean (1989) Cooperative Principle and its maxims, (iii) the linguistic and non-linguistic context of the utterance, (iv) background knowledge, and (v) the assumption that (i)–(iv) are available to the participants of the exchange and they are all aware of this. However, when we need to tease apart the content of utterances from what speakers merely reveal, prompt, or invite, then Grice’s framework becomes quite difficult, if possible at all, to apply. It is better, in our view, to focus on the distinctive role for coordination in communication, following Lewis (1969).

Coordination can occur when agents face a coordination problem. These sorts of problems crop up wherever there are situations of inter-dependent decision by at least two agents, where coincidence of interest predominates, and where there are at least two coordination equilibria, i.e. at least two ways participating agents can coordinate their actions for their mutual benefit. Agents solve a coordination problem when each acts so as to achieve an equilibrium. They do so by coordination when, if confronted by multiple options for matching their behaviors, they exploit their mutual expectations in settling on one equilibrium (where each agent does as well as he can given the actions of others) to the exclusion of all others.

Lewis illustrates this sort of practice with Hume’s example of two men, A and B, in a rowboat: to move, they must coordinate their rowing patterns. There are almost a limitless number of speeds at which each can row, but to row effectively, they need to settle on a single speed, which, interestingly, they can achieve without an explicit agreement. They may stumble on to it; or one might mimic the other.

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