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Address: http://www.soc.uu.se/publications/fulltext/diss2003-5.pdf
Reich, Wendelin, 2003. Dialogue and Shared Knowledge: How Verbal Interaction Renders Mental States Socially Observable. 176pp. Uppsala. ISBN 91-506-1682-X
This dissertation presents a new theoretical solution to the sociological question of the extent to which and by what means individuals "observe" or infer mental states of other individuals, thereby sharing knowledge with them. This is the problem of observability. The answer offered here follows from situating the problem in social interaction. Most fundamentally, the social situation of dialogue permits a speaker to use observable events (in particular, utterances) to compel a hearer to generate specific and expectable assumptions about some of the speaker's intentions and beliefs (among other mental states).
In order to show precisely why and how dialogue possesses this plausible but ultimately unverifiable capacity, the dissertation proceeds deductively. In a first step, dialogue is defined by way of three social constraints on interlocutors' cognitions. Dialogue is a situation where interlocutors (1) are compelled to overhear what the respective other is saying (and they mutually anticipate that they will hear it), (2) apply socially shared semantic rules to decode utterances into private cognitive representations (and they mutually anticipate that they do so), and (3) act as if they expect that any utterance they make will be met with a reply of acceptance rather than a reply of rejection (and they mutually anticipate that they act in this way).
In a second step, it is demonstrated that the bilateral operation of these constraints allows the hearer of an utterance to make a systematic guess at the intentions and beliefs that led its speaker to produce it. Furthermore, this bilateral operation allows the speaker to anticipate the hearer's guess-work and, therefore, to plan beforehand what assumptions about his mental states he wants the hearer to make.
Drawing on the works of H. Paul Grice, the dissertation shows that the hearer's search for ascribable mental states is organized around the central task of imputing an underlying informative intention. This intention does not (necessarily) correspond to the specific intention the speaker "really had" when he made his utterance, but it corresponds to the intention the speaker could anticipate the hearer would ascribe him. By means of this expectable imputation, the hearer arrives at an adequate explanation of what social goal the speaker meant to achieve by means of his utterance. The hearer can ascribe additional mental states, such as beliefs, emotions or expectations in order to rationalize this intention, but only to the extent that they are actually relevant to doing so.
In many dialogues, the hearer can respond to the original utterance with a second turn, the original speaker can then make a third turn, and so forth. The treatise concludes by analyzing the specific conditions under which a minimum sequence of three turns leads to mutually ratified shared knowledge. Whereas the status of merely shared knowledge is fundamentally precarious, mutually ratified shared knowledge is mutually recognized to be mutually known and can usually be treated as a "fact". In sum, sequences of at least three utterances constitute a societal solution to the problem of observability.
Keywords: cognitive sociology, microsociology, social theory, social interaction, dialogue, shared knowledge, observability, inference, constraint, expectability, Grice
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