Situated Communicative Acts: A Deontic Approach

Situated Communicative Acts: A Deontic Approach Antonella Carassa (antonella.carassa@lu.unisi.ch) Faculty of Communication Sciences, University of Lugano, Via Giuseppe Buffi 13 6900 Lugano, Switzerland Marco Colombetti (marco.colombetti@lu.unisi.ch) Faculty of Communication Sciences, University of Lugano, Via Giuseppe Buffi 13 6900 Lugano, Switzerland Department of Electronics and Information, Politecnico di Milano, Piazza Leonardo da Vinci 32 20133 Milano, Italy Abstract We delineate a theory of communicative acts as situated ac- tions, through which agents co-construct a viable situation by creating or otherwise manipulating deontic affordances. We rely on Gilbert’s theory of plural subjects to introduce the concept of joint meaning as a type of joint commitment. We then show that our approach allows for an innovative treat- ment of indirect speech. Keywords: Situated communicative act; joint commitment; joint meaning; deontic affordance; indirect speech. Introduction Language is an indispensable tool for human interaction. If we are interested in the relationship between what is said, the mental representations of the interacting agents, and the situation in which the interaction takes place, a fundamental contribution has been given by Speech Act Theory. After entering the Cognitive Science world in the late 1960s (Co- hen & Perrault, 1979), models based on Speech Act Theory have been worked out to deal with language understanding (Allen, 1983), language generation (Appelt, 1985), dialogi- cal exchanges (Airenti et al., 1993), and so forth. Already in the early 1980s, however, Stephen Levinson (1981) argued that Speech Act Theory is inherently inade- quate to account for real communicative interactions; more recently, Herbert Clark (1996) criticized Speech Act Theory for neglecting the intrinsic participatory nature of communi- cation; and Jacob Mey (2001), to make another example, insists on the need to replace the concept of a speech act with the concept of a pragmatic act, because in general the communicative contribution of an utterance cannot be re- duced to a well-identified illocutionary act, not even if the notion of an indirect speech act is brought into play. Scholars who express discontent with Speech Act Theory often defend a situated approach to linguistic communica- tion (Mey, 2001). The idea is that the communicative con- tribution of an utterance can be understood only if the over- all situation in which the interaction takes place is taken into account. However, this type of claims are more of a research program than a fully-fledged theory: in our opinion, no sa- tisfactory treatment of what it means for a communicative interaction to be situated has been developed yet. In this paper we submit what we take to be a step to a theory of situated communicative interactions. In our view, the situations in which interactions take place are partly given and partly collectively constructed by the agents themselves during the interaction. A crucial aspect of a situ- ation, from the point of view of communication, is its deon- tic component, which can be treated in terms of joint com- mitments (Gilbert, 1996, 2000, 2006). We suggest that an agent’s communicative acts may be regarded as actions that enrich the current situation with new deontic affordances, which can be accepted, rejected of further negotiated by the other agents. According to this view, a substantial compo- nent of the force of a communicative act lies in its power to enrich or modify the network of commitments that bind the interacting agents. While we are not the first to deal with the deontic dimension of communication (see for example Traum & Allen, 1994; Walton & Krabbe, 1995; Clark, 2006; Searle, 2007), our treatment of meaning in terms of joint commitments appears to be novel. The paper is structured as follows. In the next section we defend a situated and deontic approach to communicative acts; in particular we introduce Gilbert’s concept of a joint commitment and analyze its relationship with communica- tion. Then we show how our approach can be applied to deal with an important aspect of communication, namely indirect speech. Finally we draw some conclusions and de- lineate possible directions for further research. Situated Communicative Acts If communication is to be understood within a situation, what is a situation? Obviously the physical setting is impor- tant; moreover the context in which an interaction is carried out is crucial to set the values of indexicals like now, here, I, and so on. But this is going to play a marginal role, if any, in determining the communicative force of an utterance. It is widely accepted that situations are best regarded as sources of affordances (Gibson, 1979; Norman, 1988; Ca- rassa et al., 2005), that is, of action possibilities that are per- ceived by the agents. Such affordances may exist in a situa- tion before the agents start to carry out an interaction. More interestingly, agents often produce new affordances that enrich the current situation. Consider for example Ann and Bob walking in a wood in search of mushrooms; suddenly Ann, who at the moment is somewhat far from Bob, shouts, (1) “Hey, there are some gorgeous ones here!”