Against (Gricean) intentions at the heart of human interaction
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Robert B. Arundale
Abstract
Human communication has long been explained as a speaker's encoding of meanings using linguistic forms, and a hearer's decoding those forms to recover the speaker's meanings. Contemporary theorists in language pragmatics reject this encoding/decoding model as descriptively inadequate. Drawing on Grice's philosophical analysis, they argue instead that communication occurs when the hearer recognizes the speaker's meaning-intention. I argue that intention recognition explanations are likewise descriptively inadequate because they are framed within the same conceptualization of communication as encoding/decoding models. Drawing on a model of communication grounded in empirical research on ordinary conversation, I develop an alternative to the view that intentions and intention recognition lie at the heart of human interaction.
© 2008 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, D-10785 Berlin
Articles in the same Issue
- Intention in pragmatics
- Expressing, meaning, showing, and intending to indicate
- “MeaningNN” and “showing”: Gricean intentions and relevance-theoretic intentions
- Verbal information transmission without communicative intention
- Intentionality and mens rea in police interrogations: The production of actions as crimes
- Intention and diverging interpretings of implicature in the “uncovered meat” sermon
- Against (Gricean) intentions at the heart of human interaction
Articles in the same Issue
- Intention in pragmatics
- Expressing, meaning, showing, and intending to indicate
- “MeaningNN” and “showing”: Gricean intentions and relevance-theoretic intentions
- Verbal information transmission without communicative intention
- Intentionality and mens rea in police interrogations: The production of actions as crimes
- Intention and diverging interpretings of implicature in the “uncovered meat” sermon
- Against (Gricean) intentions at the heart of human interaction
