Pooling the ground: understanding and coordination in collective sense making

Abstract

Common ground is most often understood as the sum of mutually known beliefs, knowledge, and suppositions among the participants in a conversation. It explains why participants do not mention things that should be obvious to both. In some accounts of communication, reaching a mutual understanding, i.e., broadening the common ground, is posed as the ultimate goal of linguistic interactions. Yet, congruent with the more pragmatic views of linguistic behavior, in which language is treated as social coordination, understanding each other is not the purpose (or not the sole purpose) of linguistic interactions. This purpose is seen as at least twofold (e.g., Fusaroli et al., 2014): to maintain the systemic character of a conversing dyad and to organize it into a functional synergy in the face of tasks posed for a dyadic system as a whole. It seems that the notion of common ground is not sufficient to address the latter character of interaction. In situated communication, in which meaning is created in a distributed way in the very process of interaction, both common (sameness) and privileged (diversity) information must be pooled task-dependently across participants. In this paper, we analyze the definitions of common and privileged ground and propose a conceptual extension that may facilitate a theoretical account of agents that coordinate via linguistic communication. To illustrate the usefulness of this augmented framework, we apply it to one of the recurrent issues in psycholinguistic research, namely the problem of perspective-taking in dialog, and draw conclusions for the broader problem of audience design.

An Alternative to Mapping a Word onto a Concept in Language Acquisition: Pragmatic Frames

“…This behavior evokes (4) cognitive dispositions. As a result, cognitive factors are embedded in the child’s social experience ( Nelson, 2007 , p. 45), and meaning is distributed among participants ( Shotter and Newson, 1982 ) and among the different time scales (e.g., Rkaczaszek-Leonardi et al, 2014 ) encompassing memories of established routines.…”

“…Whereas some researchers claim that this responsivity belongs to their innate disposition ( Csibra, 2010 ), others provide examples of how this disposition might be educated and emerge over time ( Nomikou et al, 2013 ; Rkaczaszek-Leonardi et al, 2013 ; Rohlfing and Nomikou, 2014 ). At this point, we wish to emphasize the difference between the concept of a “cue” and the interactive process of a “co-construction”: whereas a cue would trigger a desired behavior in merely one short moment, a co-construction takes time and requires many turns in a process of mutual adjustment ( Fogel, 1993 ; De Jaegher et al, 2010 ; Rkaczaszek-Leonardi et al, 2014 ). It is only as a consequence of this mutual adjustment – within which interactants have to exchange behaviors in order to agree on the joint goal (see Dynamic Coupling) – that a behavior eventually becomes a cue.…”

On the Relatedness and Nestedness of Constraints

“…Rules and instructions may be considered as environmental information provided via social systems and transmitted through language (e.g., coach instructions, training/competition rules). This type of environmental social information should be assimilated by the performer in order to become a task constraint [46–48]. In fact, this information cannot be defined without goal-directed organisms for which those rules and instructions are valid.…”

Interacting Timescales in Perspective-Taking

“… 5 Indeed a critical aspect of perspective-taking and interaction is the capacity to decouple and coordinate more complexly with another person. We cannot elaborate on this issue here, but some intriguing recent work on measuring and describing this tendency is worth considering (Fusaroli et al, 2012 ; Raczaszek-Leonardi et al, 2014 ). In this work, the dyad (or group) is seen as coordinating more than just perspective, but also aspects of overt behavioral and environmental constraints to adapt to and carry out structured tasks.…”