Dear Robin,
I am afraid there is a misunderstanding about "building a context".
In my message, by "just build a context", I was referring to the
experimenter's (or EXPERIMENTAL) MANIPULATION that proved successful.
I was not referring to the HEARER'S ACTIVITY of context building for
which the word "just" would be most inappropriate.
GP
@¤@¤@¤@¤@¤@¤@¤@¤@¤@¤@¤
>Dear All,
>
>The puzzle, Frankie's comments on it, and the phrase 'just build a
>context..' in the procedure outlined by Guy Politzer for solving it,
>all seem to spotlight once again the theoretical vacuum in RT around
>the mechanism of relevant context retrieval or construction.
>
>Most of us would probably agree that attempts to model mental
>organisation of 'knowledge' like semantic networks, ontologies, and
>binary feature trees predict much slower retreval of relevant
>contexts than is observed, and I think both Matsui 1998 (critique of
>Sanford and Garrod 's 1981account of bridging references and Carston
>2002 refer to work confirming that such retrieval is much faster
>than all these frameworks predict*. RT seems to be wary of
>cognitive semantics and mental models theories which propose such
>models (eg prototype theory) because they also carry claims about
>reasoning processes incompatible with RT, only the relatively
>innocuous idea of schemas and scenarios organising and facilitating
>retrieval is accepted.
>
>What still seems vague is the relationship between constraint and
>facilitation. For instance, all three of Frankie's plausible
>hypotheses to explain our failure on the 'surgeon' puzzle,
>especially these extracts (my emphasis) highlight the constraining,
>suppressing role of schemas evoked by linguistic cues (with
>humbling implications for our pretensions at lucidity, suggesting
>that we can only ever see anything at a cost of great effort to
>escape them).
>
>'.....We are given no reason to doubt this guess until we come to
>the final statement, at which point our deduction system _isn't
>strong enough to shake off_ our previously-held assertion.'
>
>and '... use of the male gender _requires_ us to access concepts
>of maleness in our minds which consequently spill over into our mental image
>of the surgeon.'
>
>I suppose this might be consistent with a fast, modular Fodorian
>operation of relevance, like a filter.
>But this seems to be the opposite of the constructive process
>implied in Guy Politzer's 'way out of the impasse', viz. 'Just build
>a context...etc.' , unless this expression is just being used
>loosely.
>
>I hopr this makes some sense and that I am not just ignorant of this
>part of relevance theory. I don't think any of the above justifies
>suggests retreating from, for example, the adhoc concepts theory in
>favour of , for example, natural-kind or feature-based models of how
>concepts and thus utterance interpretations are constructed, but
>does anyone have thoughts, information, or references about what a
>RT theory of context retrieval/order of accessibility would look
>like?
>Thanks in advance,
>
>Robin Setton
>
>
>*I'd be grateful for a reminder of the reference, by the way.
>
>
>
>Prof. Robin Setton
>Professeur à l'Unité d'interprétation
>Ecole de traduction et d'interprétation (ETI)
>Université de Genève
>UNIMAIL
>40 Bd. du Pont d'Arve
>CH-1211 Genève 4
>Robin.Setton@eti.unige.ch
>Tel: (41-22) 705-8753
>Fax (Unité) 705-8759
-- °°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°° Guy Politzer C.N.R.S. - Saint-Denis °°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°
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