Cognitive Constraints on Communication

Communication is one of the most challenging human phenomena, and the same is true of its paradigmatic verbal realization as a dialogue. Not only is communication crucial for virtually all interpersonal relations; dialogue is often seen as offering us also a paradigm for important intra-individual processes. The best known example is undoubtedly the idea of concep tualizing thinking as an internal dialogue, "inward dialogue carried on by the mind within itself without spoken sound", as Plato called it in the Sophist. At first, the study of communication seems to be too vaguely defmed to have much promise. It is up to us, so to speak, to decide what to say and how to say it. However, on eloser scrutiny, the process of communication is seen to be subject to various subtle constraints. They are due inter alia to the nature of the parties of the communicative act, and most importantly, to the properties of the language or other method of representation presupposed in that particuIar act of communication. It is therefore not surprising that in the study of communication as a cognitive process the critical issues revolve around the nature of the representations and the nature of the computations that create, maintain and interpret these representations. The term "repre sentation" as used here indicates a particular way of specifying information about a given subject.

Autorentext

Jaakko Hintikka is the author or co-author of thirty volumes and of some 300 scholarly articles in mathematical and philosophical logic, epistemology, language theory, philosophy of science, history of ideas and history of philosophy, including Aristotle, Descartes, Leibniz, Kant, Peirce, The Bloomsbury Group, Husserl and Wittgenstein. He has also been active in international scholarly organizations, most recently as the First Vice-President of FISP, Vice-President of IIP and Co-Chair of the American Organizing Committee of the Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy. He has been Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal Synthese and the Managing Editor of Synthese Library since 1965.

Inhalt
Dialogue and Cognition.- Diplomatic Communication.- Insight and Self-Observation: Their Role in the Analysis of the Etiology of Illness.- Parental Communication Deviance and Schizophrenia: A Cognitive-Developmental Analysis.- Contributions of the Right Cerebral Hemisphere in Perceiving Paralinguistic Cues of Emotion.- Towards a Computational Theory of Semantic Memory.- Two Types of Discourse in Hölderlin's Madness.- Problems in Question Answering.- Looking for a Process Model of Dialogue: Speculations from the Perspective of Artificial Intelligence.- Jokes and the Logic of the Cognitive Unconscious.- A Logical Form Based on the Structural Descriptions of Events.- Linguistic and Situational Context in a Model of Task-Oriented Dialogue.- Some Ways of Representing Dialogues.- Towards a Logical Model of Dialogue.- Message Theory and the Semantics of Dialogue.- Rules, Utilities, and Strategies in Dialogical Games.- Focus and Dialogue Games: A Game-Theoretical Approach to the Interpretation of Intonational Focusing.- Intensional Man vs Extensional Man: A Difficult Dialogue.- Dynamic Model Selection in the Interpretation of Discourse.- Modelling the Dialogue by means of Formal Language Theory.- Precisiation of Meaning via Translation into PRUF.- Conversations between Programs.- Index of Names.