The Multiple Perspectives Theory of Mental States in Communication

Abstract

Inspired by early proposals in philosophy, dominant accounts of language posit a central role for mutual knowledge, either encoded directly in common ground, or approximated through other cognitive mechanisms. Using existing empirical evidence from language and memory, we challenge this tradition, arguing that mutual knowledge captures only a subset of the mental states needed to support communication. In a novel theoretical proposal, we argue for a cognitive architecture that includes separate, distinct representations of the self and other, and a cognitive process that compares these representations continuously during conversation, outputting both similarities and differences in perspective. Our theory accounts for existing data, interfaces with findings from other cognitive domains, and makes novel predictions about the role of perspective in language use. We term this new account the Multiple Perspectives Theory of mental states in communication.

Perspective conflict disrupts pragmatic inference in real-time language comprehension

“…This interpretation assumes both that (1) language users actively attend to relations between perspectives and pre-compute pragmatically relevant differences and (2) that pragmatic inferences are optional rather than obligatory. The first assumption is consistent with recent proposals about theory of mind and perspective taking, which emphasize attending to relations between perspectives rather than simply holding multiple perspectives in mind (Deschrijver & Palmer, 2020;Heller & Brown-Schmidt, 2023). But to our knowledge empirical and theoretical support is lacking for the second assumption, that addressees would spontaneously suspend pragmatic inferences in the face of perspective conflict.…”

What Does That Mean? Complementizers and Epistemic Authority

“…Functionally, this serves a communicative goal of signalling information privileged to the speaker (cf. Heller & Brown-Schmidt, 2023 ), in order to alert the addressee to expect to update their own (comparatively inferior) knowledge space.…”

“…However, we note here that the motivation for linguistically marking the speaker and addressee’s mutual knowledge space (i.e., “Common Ground”) might seem mysterious: why might language explicitly mark discourse that is shared? Contrarily, communication is said fundamentally driven by the need to exchange information that is not shared, as discussed by Heller and Brown-Schmidt ( 2023 ). In motivating their novel “Multiple Perspectives Theory” of mental states in communication, Heller and Brown-Schmidt ( 2023 : 35, emphasis theirs) remark that “what drives communication are the differences between conversational partners, and not mutual knowledge”.…”

“…Contrarily, communication is said fundamentally driven by the need to exchange information that is not shared, as discussed by Heller and Brown-Schmidt ( 2023 ). In motivating their novel “Multiple Perspectives Theory” of mental states in communication, Heller and Brown-Schmidt ( 2023 : 35, emphasis theirs) remark that “what drives communication are the differences between conversational partners, and not mutual knowledge”. Our proposal in which that marks epistemic authority follows from Heller and Brown-Schmidt’s ( 2023 ) “Multiple Perspectives Theory”: We consider complementizer that to mark a speaker’s private knowledge ( pace Staps & Rooryck)—thus, a perspective that (they believe) the addressee does not share.…”

“…In motivating their novel “Multiple Perspectives Theory” of mental states in communication, Heller and Brown-Schmidt ( 2023 : 35, emphasis theirs) remark that “what drives communication are the differences between conversational partners, and not mutual knowledge”. Our proposal in which that marks epistemic authority follows from Heller and Brown-Schmidt’s ( 2023 ) “Multiple Perspectives Theory”: We consider complementizer that to mark a speaker’s private knowledge ( pace Staps & Rooryck)—thus, a perspective that (they believe) the addressee does not share. However, this marking serves the functional purpose of alerting the addressee to the fact that their own knowledge is about to be updated.…”