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A Pragmatics-First Approach to Faces

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Abstract

This article aims to make a philosophical contribution to the understanding of the communicative dimensions and functions of faces and facial expressions (FEs). First, I will refer to the expressivist and socio-communicative theories of FEs, and to a proposal to unify them under a pragmatic approach based on the theory of speech acts. Subsequently, I will examine the characterization of faces and FEs as social and behavioral affordances, and I will identify their characteristics and communicative functions, especially in “conversational displays”, to justify why they are functionally special. I will then insert facial signals into the framework of a pragmatic perspective on human communication, both verbal and non-verbal, which is broader than speech act theory: a Pragmatics-First Approach to Human Communication. I will argue that it provides an adequate understanding of the pragmatic-interactive foundations of human communication, where Facereading is a central component. Finally, I will refer to the relationship between Facereading and the Second-person Perspective of social cognition.

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Notes

  1. Facial expression (FE) will be used not only for referring, strictu sensu, to dynamic facial features but also to their more stable features, except when it is required to establish distinctions between them. Since I am interested in the communicative functions of FEs, I refer interchangeably to them, in many cases, as facial signals or facial displays.

  2. I will not deal with animal communication, although the pragmatic approach that I advocate, mutatis mutandis, can be applied to it as well.

  3. Although our proposal applies to facial signals, it can be extended to other nonverbal signals, considering in each case their specific pragmatic functions.

  4. For Ekman, however, the expressive repertoire is not limited to basic emotions. He admits “blended emotions” and “compound faces”, and non-universal features, related to cultural patterns and rules, which although learned may not be used consciously (cf. Knapp et al. 2014), arguing that people inhibit, modify or attenuate EEs because of the influence of socio-cultural display rules (Ekman and Friesen 1969; Ekman 1997). Other rules that modulate emotional expression may be idiosyncratic, giving rise to different expressive-facial styles, as Ekman also recognizes. In any case, Ekman´s view is that EEs are involuntary in nature (although they occasionally can be suppressed), in contrast with other facial displays which can be voluntary: specifically communicative ones.

  5. Shariff and Tracy (2011) developed a similar idea: a psychological functionalist account of EEs that combines, in two stages, an early Darwinian adaptive hypothesis, with a later exapted communicative function: EEs could have originated as cues, i.e., providing information as a by-product of an alternative adaptive purpose, but afterward they became signals, i.e., features that evolved for specific communicative purposes. Thus, “the function of expression itself evolved” into communicative functions.

  6. A detailed synthesis of the interpretation of the results of the studies on cross-cultural attribution agreement and audience effects, and the support they offer to each of the two theories can be found in Glazer (2019).

  7. This section, in addition to presenting a very schematic summary of the issues addressed by the TAP, is deliberately selective regarding the issues that interest me.

  8. Scarantino (2018, 2019) does not take a position on analogs of proclamative speech acts (producing certain changes just by saying something), because they seem to pertain to a linguistically more restricted territory.

  9. Other philosophical attempts to reconcile the contributions of the two theories can be found in Green (2007) and Glazer (2019).

  10. As a reviewer pointed out, the strict parallelism between illocutionary acts and EEs is a (highly) controversial claim. I partially agree with him in the following sense: given its peculiar granularity and complexity, each EE (and each FE too) can regularly perform many communicative acts at once, but how many and which ones depend on the cases and contexts. So, not necessarily each EE performs the four types of speech acts analogs. Similarly, I do not believe that these communicative acts are limited to very specific occasions, when they are accompanied by verbal speech acts, or when they are intentionally made to communicate something, as the reviewer also points out. I will not argue these points in detail because they exceed my goals. In any case, I do not agree with TAP for more basic reasons explained below in this section and Sect. 5.

  11. For a similar objection, see Fischer and Sauter 2017. As a reviewer rightly remarked, TAP reflects a constraint based on an emphasis on the language model for understanding facial communication.

  12. Similar proposals can be found in Green (2007) to support a theory of expressions, and in Wharton (2009) to support “natural pragmatics” in a Gricean style. Both are not limited to EEs, as in the case of TAP. I cannot, however, analyze them here.

  13. Curiously, Griffiths and Scarantino (2009) argued for a non-classical conception of emotions as affordances and socially situated phenomena, “shifting theoretical focus from the intrapsychic to the interpersonal” (p. 448). So, the dynamics of social interactions could explain EEs by means of “reciprocal exchange of signals…(that) shaped by how the interactant responds to the initial message, by how the emoter responds to the interactant´s responds, and so on” (p. 447). However, Scarantino did not continue exploring this ecological and interactional approach in TAP, which, on the contrary, adopts an expresser/communicator-centered approach.

  14. Shargel and Prinz (2018) argue against the dispositionalist view of affordances adopted by Griffiths and Scarantino’s (2009) proposal on emotions and EEs. I agree with them in attributing this kind of affordance to a more interactive role. But I do so also with FEs in general.

  15. Philosophers, psychologists, and ethologists have more recently been paying increasing attention to cognitive-social functions of gaze direction for shared and joint attention.

  16. In this context, “race” is a social category, not a biological one.

  17. Bjornsdottir and Rule (2017) refer to the evidence of this influence of the perception of EEs on the perception of social categories (age, sex, race, personality, gender stereotypes, etc.). For them, “the communication of social group membership via facial expressions of emotions can thus be regarded as Speech Act Analogs along the lines of those described in Scarantino’s TAP” (p. 187). Scarantino (2017b) seems to accept this proposal, but he rather points out the correlation between emotions and social features, or the fact that “… ‘social information’ (is) nested with emotional expressions”. But these features should be conceptualized as different kinds of affordances: cues (or signs) but not signals. In any case, I do not believe it is possible to apply the linguistic framework of TAP to these social features.

  18. Ekman pointed out early on two features of FEs that have been unnoticed for a long time. The first one: less than one-third of a corpus of FEs in dialogue were EEs (see Ekman and Friesen 1975); and the second one: while EEs contribute to the semantics of conversational interactions (as facial emblems), facial signals instead are part of the structure of conversation, synchronizing with it (Ekman 1997) (see Bavelas and Chovil 2018 for a detailed interpretation).

  19. It should be noted that proponents of Pragmatics-First Approaches disagree with the relevant pragmatic requirements. The one I propose incorporates pragmatic elements of a new kind, present in the more fundamental communicative interactions.

  20. So, removing some restrictive assumptions about the Speech Act Theory mentioned above, TAP might be compatible with PFAF. In any case, PFAF has a wider explanatory scope because it conceives differently to TAP the communicative functions of facial signals.

  21. More generally, interactional studies are related to conversation analysis, that is, the study of the interactional organization of human communication, which is a field of empirical research developed within various disciplinary frameworks. Here I intend to extract general philosophical assumptions and implications to apply them to facial signals.

  22. Conative functions of facial signals should not be assimilated to analogs directive speech acts because they signal the addressee to perform an action relative to the progress of the conversation itself.

  23. Many vocalizations, whatever their status, linguistic o semi-linguistic, accomplish similar roles in the conversation, e.g., interjections such as eh? ah! Aja!, mm…, among others. Fridlund (1994) refers to communicative facial displays as “paralinguistic interjections”.

  24. I take this term from Rossano (2013) but to cover the conative and phatic functions mentioned, i.e., in a broader sense than him. I do not choose the simple label pragmatic marker because it is used for encompassing a wide range of non-regulatory pragmatic functions. Many different labels refer to this family of functions in the literature, although they are mostly about verbal signals.

  25. Levinson’s proposal is illustrated with the functions of all kinds of nonverbal signals, not especially facial signals.

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Acknowledgements

This paper is part of the special issue of Topoi “What’s so special about faces? Visages at the crossroad between philosophy, semiotics and cognition”, edited by Marco Viola and Massimo Leone, which results from a project that has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (Grant Agreement No 819649-FACETS). I would like to thank the reviewers for their detailed comments, criticisms, and suggestions because they allowed me to formulate my ideas more clearly, and justify in more detail some statements and suggestions relevant to my work.

Funding

Funding was provided by Secretaria de Ciencia y Tecnología - Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, and Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (CONICET).

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  1. Instituto de Humanidades (IDH), Universidad Nacional de Córdoba-CONICET, Pabellón Agustín Tosco, Ciudad Universitaria, 5000, Córdoba, Argentina

    Silvia Carolina Scotto

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Scotto, S.C. A Pragmatics-First Approach to Faces. Topoi 41, 641–657 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-022-09821-1

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