Cognition at the heart of human interaction
By Stephen C. Levinson. 2006
137 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Sometimes it is thought that there are serious differences between theories of discourse that turn on the role of cognition in the theory. This is largely a misconception: for example, with its emphasis on participants’ own understandings, its principles of recipient design and projection, Conversation Analysis is hardly anti-cognitive. If there are genuine disagreements they rather concern a preference for ‘lean’ versus ‘rich’ metalanguages and different methodologies. The possession of a multi-levelled model, separating out what the individual brings to interaction from the emergent properties of interaction, would make it easier to resolve some of these issues. Meanwhile, these squabbles on the margins distract us from a much more central and more interesting issue: is there a very special cognition-for-interaction, which underlies and underpins all language and discourse? Prime facie evidence suggests that there is, and different approaches can contribute to our understanding of it.
Subfields: Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Language and Linguistics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a62461637c5dae526e638b80c5ea213ad90be4bf
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In Experimental and Cognitive Psychology
In Language and Linguistics
Citations in the corpus
- Pragmatic markers: the missing link between language and Theory of Mind (2020, background): “…on whether human language could have evolved without Theory of Mind, even though language acquisition starts years before children are able to pass standard false-belief tasks (Sperber 2000;Malle 2002;Levinson2006;Tomasello 2008;Scott-Phillips 2014; Woensdregt et al. 2020; Moore, under review).”
- Intention in pragmatics (2008, background): “Levinson (2006a, 2006b), for instance, has recently reasserted the centrality of (Gricean) intentions in postulating an ‘‘interaction engine’’ that he argues underpins human interaction.”
- Speaker meaning and accountability in interaction (2013, unknown): “…on speaker meaning in pragmatics to assume that the recognition and attribution of speaker intentions underlies communication, thereby grounding speaker meaning (and intentions) in a presumed cognitive reality (e.g. Bara, 2010, 2011; Carston, 2002; Levinson, 2006; Sperber and Wilson, 1995).”