Dear all,
The Universities of Neuchâtel and Fribourg, Switzerland, are pleased to
announce the upcoming conference:
*"Communication and Cognition 2011: Manipulation, Persuasion and
Deception in Language"*
(http://www.unine.ch/comcog2011)
The conference will be held at the University of Neuchâtel, from the
*26th to the 28th of January 2011*.
*Meeting description:*
The overall aim of this conference is to explore the various parameters
that affect the way we process communicated information; as a case in
point, this 2011 edition will focus on the issue of persuasive,
manipulative, biased and fallacious verbal communication, with the goal
of shedding light on different parameters that play a role in its
'success'. In this respect, we seek contributions which specifically
focus on those (formal, informal, cognitive, linguistic and contextual)
aspects of communication that orient the interpretation of language and
fulfill argumentative and persuasive ends, be it in interpersonal or
mass communication.
In the past, discursive manipulation and neighbouring phenomena such as
lies, deception, persuasion and uncooperative communication, to name a
few, have been investigated by a variety of researchers in numerous
fields in the humanities and the social sciences. Among those are
philosophy, persuasion research, linguistics (in particular pragmatics),
cognitive linguistics, communication science, (critical) discourse
analysis, argumentation theory, not to mention the classical tradition
of rhetoric. However, the link between persuasive or deceptive
communication and the cognitive underpinnings allowing for its success,
already explored by trends in persuasion research, still needs to be
fully drawn and understood, given that the available literature on the
topic leaves too often aside the communicative dimension of manipulation
and seldom aims for a psychologically plausible account of such
communication-dependent phenomena.
Recent developments in cognitive science call for new research questions
in the field of deceptive persuasion and manipulation through verbal
communication, in particular in what regards the cognitive grounds of
misguided and credulous interpretation - and more generally of
gullibility (see Maillat & Oswald 2009). Emotions, trust, confidence and
other attitudes have long been considered as keys for the effectiveness
of persuasive language; the connotative load of certain keywords and
more generally the role of the lexicon, as well as types of syntactic
structures and other linguistic devices such as presuppositions have
also been suspected to bear on the persuasive force of deceptive
communication.
However, little is known yet as to why and how these processes,
including fallacious argumentation as a whole, jeopardize evaluation.
Recent research in this growing field tends to confirm the hypothesis
that communicative phenomena linked to deception and persuasion exploit
cognitive biases and heuristics otherwise useful for the general economy
of human communication. A long established concern for these cognitive
biases and heuristics in information processing (see Wason 1966, 1968,
Kahneman & Tversky 1974), which can in turn yield cognitive illusions
and errors in information processing (see Pohl 2004), together with the
input of cognitive anthropology (e.g. Mercier & Sperber, forth. Sperber
et al. forth.) and developmental psychology (Mascaro & Sperber 2009,
Clément 2010, Harris et al. forth.) opens a new promising trend of
research on the persuasiveness of deceptive communication.
It is one of the purposes of this conference to stimulate
interdisciplinary inquiry on these themes. Accordingly, contributions
promoting an integration of different - yet complementary - trends into
interdisciplinary models of information processing are encouraged. The
organisers will particularly welcome papers located at the interface of
the disciplines concerned, whether grounded on empirical evidence or
presenting a theoretical model.
*Plenary speakers*:
The following renowned scholars have accepted our invitation to deliver
keynote addresses:
-Miriam Metzger, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA
-Dan Sperber, Institut Jean Nicod (EHESS-ENS-CNRS), Paris, France
-Frans van Eemeren, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands
-Pascal Engel, University of Geneva, Switzerland
-Marc Angenot, McGill University, Montreal, Canada
*Call for papers*:
Submissions are invited in the form of an abstract of maximum one page
(plus references) either in .pdf or .doc format, to be uploaded on the
conference's Easy Abstracts website. The platform is accessible since
July 10th 2010 at:
http://linguistlist.org/confcustom/comcog2011
The official language of the conference is English, but propositions in
French are also accepted.
The deadline for submission is September 12th 2010. Acceptance or
rejection will be notified by October 30th 2010.
The targeted fields of research include, but are not limited to:
-Linguistics in a broad sense (including pragmatics and discourse analysis)
-Philosophy (in particular philosophy of mind, philosophy of language,
argumentation theory, rhetoric)
-Psychology (in particular cognitive psychology and neuroscience)
-Communication sciences in a broader sense (including media studies)
-Social sciences (in particular social psychology and anthropology)
More information can be found on the conference's website:
http://www.unine.ch/comcog2011
With my best wishes,
Steve Oswald
-- Steve Oswald Assistant Institut des Sciences du Langage et de la Communication Université de Neuchâtel Espace Louis Agassiz 1 CH-2000 Neuchâtel /Suisse Bureau 3.O.18 Tel: 032 / 718.18.35 web: http://www.steveoswald.tkReceived on Sat Aug 28 10:07:07 2010
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