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Two pictures of communication: from content identity to coordination

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Abstract

In this paper, I discuss two influential pictures of communication and the relation between them. One picture holds that successful communication requires identity of content: The speaker has a belief that she expresses with her utterance, and the hearer acquires a belief with the same content by understanding the utterance. The second picture was proposed by Lewis in his classic work Convention and then refined in “Languages and Language.” It sees communication as coordination among speakers—a technical notion that Lewis draws from game theory. Samuel Cumming has recently provided an elegant and insightful synthesis of the two pictures, arguing that Lewisian coordination among speakers is in fact a form of content identity. In this paper, my negative goal is to argue against Cumming’s attempt to construe coordination as content identity, showing that it yields incorrect predictions about certain cases of successful communication. My positive goal is to show how we can avoid Cumming’s problematic interpretation of coordination and still do justice to the relevant data within a coordination-based framework.

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Notes

  1. The term “coordination” figures prominently in several recent works in philosophy of language and mind—to mention just one example, see Fine (2007) and the extensive literature that draws on his proposal. I will follow Lewis and use “coordination” in a different sense, to be introduced in the next section. I’m not suggesting that there is no interesting connection with other senses of “coordination,” but that’s a topic I shall set aside here.

  2. For an overview of the literature, see Planer and Godfrey-Smith (2020).

  3. See Lewis (1969, p. 179, 1975, p. 685).

  4. See Nash (1951). Lewis says his proposal originates in game theory—especially the theory of coordination games developed by Schelling (1960)—but doesn’t ultimately depend on it (Lewis, 1969, p. 3).

  5. For a recent and influential proposal along these lines, see Skyrms (1996, 2010). Skyrms’s contributions will play an important role in what follows.

  6. As Weber notes (ibid., fn. 7), this only applies to those cases where the hearer accepts the utterance as true instead of rejecting it as false or suspending belief. Furthermore, the principle only applies to declarative utterances, without considering other moods (imperative, interrogative, etc.). Like Weber, I’ll assume throughout that the relevant utterance is declarative and the hearer accepts it as true; of course, a full account of communication would have to cover a broader range of cases.

  7. See Locke (1689, book III, ch. 2, §4), Frege (1892, 1918). This interpretation raises difficult exegetical and philosophical questions—see for instance Frege’s famous discussion of first-person belief and communication in Frege (1918). So while the interpretation in question is fairly common, I do not take a stance on its historical accuracy here.

  8. See Stalnaker (1981, pp. 146–149, 1999, pp. 20–21). Content Identity is also endorsed by a number of other authors in the recent literature—see for instance Egan (2007), Schroeter (2012), and Kindermann (2019).

  9. The amnesiac mentioned by Stalnaker is Rudolf Lingens, from Perry (1977).

  10. On Lewis’s view, see Lewis (1979), Stalnaker (1981), Ninan (2010), Weber (2013); on the computational theory of mind, see Fodor (1998), Aydede (1998), Schneider (2011).

  11. See Ninan (2016) for a related argument.

  12. An early and influential discussion of this point can be found in Perry (1977). In what follows, I use Perry’s original example.

  13. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for helpful discussion of this point.

  14. Cumming (2013a, p. 396) acknowledges that identity of content is a “high bar” and tries to dispel the worry by surveying existing evidence on the evolution of signaling, linguistic processing, and psycholinguistics. His discussion is interesting in its own right, but it doesn’t address the challenge I present here.

  15. I have also discussed this case in Valente and Onofri (2022). Fine (2007, pp. 105–121) discusses a similar case involving proper names; Cumming (2013a, pp. 386–387) criticizes Fine’s account of the case. Related arguments can be found in Loar (1988), Crimmins (1992), Heck (2002), and Onofri (2016).

  16. Of course, I assume that the usual background conditions are met: H is a competent English speaker, a rational subject, and so on.

  17. See Cappelen and Dever (2013) for a recent critical discussion of this position.

  18. Cumming would accept this. He explicitly acknowledges that the same content can be transmitted across time, through both memory and communication, and he also explains how diachronic content preservation is possible within his theory (Cumming, 2013a, pp. 392–393):

    [...] there is no doubt that information is shared between the past and the present. An example of this [...] is the persistent symbol. A stable state in the brain or a computer—a state of symbolic memory—transmits information forward in time.

    This is what happens with S’s first-person belief that he is a talented pianist.

  19. Cumming observes that a Lewisian signaling system requires a one-to-one correspondence between speaker and hearer states; i.e. it requires alignment Cumming (2013b, pp. 8, 12). (Skyrms, 1996, p. 99) interprets Lewis’s notion of a signaling system in the same way. But this doesn’t show that successful communication requires alignment. What it does show—if my argument in this section is correct—is that successful communication can occur outside a Lewisian signaling system.

  20. Following previous discussions of the mathematical theory of information, Dretske (1981, p. 10) calls this quantity the surprisal value of an event—in this case, a signal.

  21. When first developing these notions, Skyrms makes clear that the relevant probabilities are objective probabilities (Skyrms, 2010, pp. 44–45). He then notes that if the sender and the receiver have the required cognitive capacities, they will have degrees of belief, i.e. subjective probabilities. In these cases, the signal also carries another kind of informational content, which is defined in terms of subjective probabilities. This is distinct from informational content as defined in terms of objective probabilities, since these might not be in line with the subjective probabilities assigned by the communicators. The notion of informational content deployed in what follows may be interpreted in terms of objective probabilities, although I don’t think anything hangs on this. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for urging me to clarify the issue.

  22. This is a convenient simplification. As Skyrms (2010, pp. 42–43) explains, truth-conditional content is a special case of informational content. The distinction will not matter for our discussion, so I will continue to identify informational content with truth-conditions in what follows.

  23. The idea plays an important role in Millikan’s brand of teleosemantics: See Millikan (1984), Millikan (2017).

  24. I borrow the example from Pagin (2008), with modifications.

  25. See for instance Bezuidenhout (1997, p. 217).

  26. This is in line with Skyrms (1996) and Skyrms (2010), but not with Lewis (1969, pp. 200–202). For reasons of space, I won’t be able to discuss this aspect of Lewis’s view here.

    The condition is not trivially satisfied. The utterance and the belief can differ in informational content, since their respective contents are determined independently. The utterance is a linguistic signal that carries information about a certain state of the world; the belief is also an information-carrying signal, but it may well carry information about a different state than the utterance. It goes well beyond the scope of the present work to provide a theory of reference determination for linguistic and mental representations; for present purposes, it is enough to note that the belief formed by the hearer will also be deployed in a number of other contexts (other communicative exchanges, non-linguistic cognitive tasks, and so on). So there is no reason to think that the belief somehow obtains its informational content from the utterance. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for asking me to clarify this.

  27. Here I agree with Cumming (2013a, pp. 387–389).

  28. See Skyrms (2010, pp. 38–39).

  29. This may seem strange. In the examples I have just examined, forking and pooling block the transmission of information entirely, which is certainly incompatible with successful communication. In a more realistic setting, however, the number of states, signals, and responses will be much larger, so the consequences of forking and pooling won’t be as dramatic. For instance, an ordinary human receiver has a large stock of responses to choose from, so there would be a lot of information in a signal that narrowed the possible responses down to two.

    Speaking more generally, note that information transmission comes in degrees: The amount of information transmitted can be optimal or null, but there is a range of possible values between these two extremes. I have argued that communication can succeed in some cases of sub-optimal transmission, while Cumming’s requirement of perfect transmission doesn’t admit such nuances.

  30. This kind of case is common in the literature on indexicals: See Ninan (2010, pp. 560–561), Loar (1976, p. 357).

  31. In both Good Forking and Bad Forking, communication proceeds smoothly in the exchange taking place at the concert, so it’s unnecessary to represent that exchange here.

  32. The point is related to the discussion of luck in post-Gettier epistemology (Gettier, 1963). See Onofri (2019) for further discussion.

  33. This part of the discussion is obviously indebted to Stalnaker’s work—see e.g. Stalnaker (1978). Note that if H was unsure about the relevant identity facts, rather than having a false belief about them, our explanation would still revolve around the same possibilities—Possibility 1 and Possibility 2. That’s because, on this construal of the case, H’s doxastic state would be compatible with those two possibilities.

  34. See Kaplan (1989a, b).

  35. See Stalnaker (1978), Kripke (1980).

  36. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer, who pressed these two worries and provided further feedback on this point. I’m also grateful to the same reviewer for mentioning an example from Donnellan (1970) (see fn. 38), and for two of the examples I’ll discuss in what follows.

  37. The considerations to follow are based on classic anti-descriptivist arguments—see especially Perry (1979), Kripke (1980), Kaplan (1989a).

  38. Donnellan (1970) makes similar observations about two versions of his case involving the philosopher J.L. Aston-Martin.

    What about our initial example: “He is a talented pianist?” It depends on the details of the case. Suppose S makes the utterance on the basis of prior knowledge about the musical skills of the man from the concert, so that she would take her utterance back if she found out that the man at the rally was a different person. In this case, S’s utterance in Possibility 2 might well fail to refer to a specific individual. But suppose instead that S makes the utterance at the rally on the basis of an impressive musical performance that the man has just delivered. In this case, the identity with the man from the concert is not essential to S’s goals, and S would not withdraw the utterance if she realized that these were distinct men. Her utterance in Possibility 2 would then have determinate reference, and we could explain the case in the way I’ve proposed.

  39. See Aydede (1998), Schneider (2011), Cumming (2013a).

  40. See Jackson (1998), Chalmers (2002), Chalmers (2011).

  41. See Perry (1977, 1979), Salmon (1986), Braun (1998).

  42. Some contributions in the second part of García-Carpintero and Torre (2016) go in this direction; see also Chalmers (2011), Heck (2002), Millikan (2017), Pagin (2020).

  43. Thanks to audiences in Guadalajara, Mexico City, Nantes, Paris, and Valencia for their feedback. Thanks to Carolyn Benson, Santiago Echeverri, and three anonymous reviewers for their very helpful comments. Special thanks to Matheus Valente, who provided valuable suggestions and discussed these issues with me on several occasions. This research was partly funded by the Secretaría de Educación Pública (Apoyo a la incorporación de nuevos PTC, project number UASLP-PTC-646, Mexico).

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Funding

Part of this research was funded by: Secretaría de Educación Pública (Mexico), Apoyo a la Incorporación de NPTC, project UASLP-PTC-646.

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  1. Facultad de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades, Universidad Autónoma de San Luis Potosí, Avenida Industrias 101-A, Fracc. Talleres, C. P. 78399, San Luis Potosí, SLP, Mexico

    Andrea Onofri

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Onofri, A. Two pictures of communication: from content identity to coordination. Synthese 200, 268 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-022-03757-0

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