Spring Session 2016
Giampietro Gobo
May 16 MON — 10.30-12.30
Sala "Enzo Paci" — Direzione del Dipartimento (Via Festa del Perdono 7, Milano)
Text and social context. Why linguistics needs ethnography.
Abstract:
One (of the many points of) contact between linguistics and social sciences is the ‘theory of speech act’ by Austin (1962) and Searle (1969).
However speech act theory, and its related concept of ‘context’, has been widely criticized by linguistic anthropologists (Hymes, Gumperz, Goodwin, Duranti, Ochs), linguistics (Labov) cultural anthropologists (Geertz), pragmalinguistics (Levinson, Brown), sociologists (Goffman), phenomenologists (Schutz), ethnomethodologists (Garfinkel), cognitive sociologists (Cicourel) and conversation or discourse analysts.
However the criticism acknowledges the importance of this theory, and aims to improve it through the contributions of other disciplines.
In this talk I will focus on the non-linguistic pre-conditions of communication. In other terms, there is a force of language that exists even before understanding the meaning of words (before interpreting the utterances from a denotative or performative point of view), even before the pragmatics of deictic/indexicality, even before the conventions that guide the performative: this force pertains the possibility to create a dialogue, even before having a dialogue. This possibility comes before any communication or particular interpretation.
These non-linguistic conditions or assumptions are both the pre-linguistic intersubjectivity or non-linguistic presuppositions or basic features of common understandings (interpretive procedures), and the physical features and design of the setting. Both can be discovered though ethnography only, because they do not appear in the linguistic texts performed in an interaction. This is why linguistic studies cannot do without ethnography.
Michael Devitt (Graduate Center, City University New York)
April 27 WED — 14.00-16.00
Sala "Enzo Paci" — Direzione del Dipartimento di Filosofia (Via Festa del Perdono 7, Milano)
Why Propositions?
Diana Mazzarella (Institut des Sciences Cognitive 'Marc Jeannerod', Lione)
April 11 MON — 10.30-12.30
Sala "Enzo Paci" — Direzione del Dipartimento (Via Festa del Perdono 7, Milano)
Believing what you are told: Politeness and scalar inferences
Abstract:
Recent behavioural studies in experimental pragmatics investigate the effect of contextual manipulations on the derivation of scalar inferences (e.g. ‘Not all X-ed’ from ‘Some X-ed’). Among these, Bonnefon and colleagues suggest that scalar inferences are less likely to be derived in face-threatening contexts (Bonnefon et al., 2009, 2011; Feeney & Bonnefon, 2012). (1) A: What impression did I make during dinner? B: Some of the guests thought you drank too much. Bonnefon et al. argue that in such contexts A would be less likely to derive the pragmatic inference that not all of the guests thought you drank too much from B’s utterance. Furthermore, contrary to evidence showing that enrichments come with extra cost (since Bott & Noveck, 2004), they suggest that, in this context, the semantic interpretation -- at least some of the guests thought you drank too much -- is arrived at slowly and effortfully. The focus on the derivation of scalar inferences (as part and parcel of the comprehension process) has obscured the fact that scalar inferences may be derived as part of the speaker’s intended meaning and yet fail to be accepted as true by the addressee. The gap between comprehension and acceptance is typically bridged by epistemic trust (Sperber et al., 2010). Crucially, in face-threatening contexts, the addressee may have reasons to doubt the truth of what the speaker communicates because he thinks that she is trying to be kind and polite (rather than strictly honest). We tested our hypothesis through a series of MTurk studies inspired by Bonnefon et al.’s task which asked participants to read a face-threatening (or face-boosting) vignette containing a scalar utterance ‘Some X-ed’ and to answer to a yes-no question concerning the possibility that all X-ed. Our main innovation is that, unlike Bonnefond et al., we separated the presentation of the scalar utterance from participants’ evaluation of it. In this way, Reaction Times to each part could be measured separately. Importantly, our results replicate Bonnefon et al’s finding showing that participants are more likely to answer ‘yes’ in the face-threatening condition than in the face-boosting one. They also show that latencies are significantly longer in the epistemic assessment stage when participants provide a ‘yes’ answer. We interpret the data as follows: Participants derive the scalar inference both in face-threatening and in face-boosting contexts (as suggested by comparable RT’s at the ‘comprehension stage’ across conditions), but they are more likely to reject the enrichment in face-threatening contexts (thus the higher percentage of ‘yes’ answers). Furthermore, longer RTs at the epistemic assessment stage for ‘yes’ answers are explained by assuming that rejection of the speaker’s meaning takes longer than its acceptance.
Stephen Neale (Graduate Center, City University New York)
April 4 MON — 10.30-12.30
Sala "Enzo Paci" — Direzione del Dipartimento (Via Festa del Perdono 7, Milano)
Natural and Nonnatural Interpretation
Luca Guzzardi
March 21 MON — 10.30-12.30
Sala "Enzo Paci" — Direzione del Dipartimento (Via Festa del Perdono 7, Milano)
Sharing discoveries. The discovery of Uranus (1781-1782) as a new pattern of discovery?
Abstract:
In exploring the structure of scientific knowledge, historians and philosophers of science for a long time have emphasized the cases of scientific discoveries made by independent researchers, or by teams acting as quasi-individuals. Special attention has been devoted to important questions pertaining the priority and independence of a discovery made by several scientists independent of each other within a short period of time, the competition and rivalry among researchers, scientists’ resistance to novelty, and several micro-sociological aspects involved in the process of discovery itself. It is not difficult to find appropriate historical cases (and possibly case studies) for each of these issues throughout the spectrum of sciences : according to Kuhn (1977a), the discovery of the principle of energy conservation by H. Helmholtz, J.R. Mayer, and J.P. Joule provides a model for simultaneous discoveries made by independent researchers. A notorious case of competition among rival teams in modern science is the HIV-dispute between Gallo and Montagnier and their équipes and national communities (see e.g. Shilts, 1987). Finally, the rejection of Ignác F. Semmelweis’ ideas about the antiseptic procedures by the Viennese medical community can serve as an instance of what I named scientists’ resistance to novelty (see e.g. Lesky, 1964). In each of these examples we are obviously faced with different historical, epistemological, and social conditions, which should be (and have been) carefully analyzed, taking into account the peculiarities of each single case. Nevertheless, considering them together, they point out the important role generally ascribed to the competitive dimension in the process of scientific discovery.
By contrast, recent history of science has pointed out epistemic ‘fluidity’ of concept definitions as one of the most important features of the scientific research as an activity of innovation, and this obviously affects even the scientific discovery and its authorship. In this vein, this paper raises the problem of the authorship of Uranus discovery by studying the micro-context in which the ‘planet’ was ‘first’ observed in 1781-82, i.e. the people who made and worked on the observations and the networks linking them. (And in the final section I suggest that the collaborative dimension emerging from this reconstruction might be epistemologically relevant, since it seems to reveal something about the structure of the astronomical knowledge). So, this paper outlines a type of scientific discovery that seems rather different from the examples provided above: one in which priority questions are not particularly relevant, collaboration is more important than competition, researchers are not mutually independent of each other, and resistance to new findings is so marginal that practically plays no role. For this intriguing case, I propose the term of shared discovery.