Mutual Cognitive Environment Research Articles

Christopher Tindale: Exploring the Cultural Foundations of Rhetoric and Reason

The interview conducted with Christopher Tindale by Ruth Amossy in this special issue on “Challenging Rhetoric” proposes a survey of Tindale’s innovative work. Developing from Informal Logic to a theory of Rhetorical Argumentation, it eventually leads to an anthropological approach that challenges the Western rhetorical tradition. It assumes that ways of reasoning are culture-dependent and that arguments as reason-giving can take many forms beyond the ones described in the Western tradition. It thus tackles the question of cross-cultural communication in its argumentative dimension. In this framework it presents an “encounter rhetoric” exploring the encounter between people from very different cultures and looking at how a mutual cognitive environment is able, over time, to emerge and allow for argumentation.

Translating humorous videos on social media: Meaning-making in a shared culture

This paper focuses on the practices by amateur subtitlers who translate and disseminate foreign humorous videos on social media, with particular attention on the meaning-making process involving raw material selection, subtitling, reception and interaction within the online community. Drawing on relevance theory, this paper proposes that meaning-making in social media environment is achieved by both subtitlers and viewers who jointly construct a mutual cognitive environment containing shared cultural information. To verify this hypothesis, it selects 10 pieces of humorous videos and collects the viewer comments from weibo to analyze how subtitlers manage to convey the humorous meaning and how viewers respond to the subtitled content and negotiate meaning to build a shared culture. Overall, this paper contributes to the emerging research focus on the participatory consumption and reception of translated audiovisual texts in the digital era.

Communicating Sense: The Role of Inference in Joint Sensemaking in Equivocal Contexts

In this paper, we build a conceptual framework that elaborates the communicative mechanisms by which individuals in high reliability organizations (HROs) jointly make sense in order to coordinate in equivocal contexts. We build on past work in cognitive and discursive sensemaking, while also highlighting that past research tends to conflate cognition and discourse by presupposing cognitive effects of discourse. Instead, we submit that sensemaking research would benefit from a focus on how organizational actors make inferences and build shared understanding in context. We provide this analytical focus on inference by borrowing theoretical principles and assumptions from relevance theory, a theory in the neighboring field of pragmatic linguistics, and illustrating these principles with examples from seminal past cases of sensemaking under pressure. Our conceptual framework exposes the communicative processes of ostension and inference by which actors build a mutual cognitive environment. Crucially, our paper underscores the importance of investigating how failed inferences hinder coordinated action. We elaborate the contributions of our conceptual framework to sensemaking research, reexamining the concepts of equivocality, requisite variety, and double interacts from a communication standpoint.

Familiarity and Unfamiliarity Factor: A Variable in the Cognition of Proverbs

Proverbs are a very common linguistic tool that provides a mechanism for understanding the general in terms of the specific. Their usage reveals the state of mind and mutual cognitive environment of the discourse participants in a linguistic exchange. The interpretation of a proverb involves a mapping process leading the hearer to search for a correspondence between the literal statement and its meaning within a context (Gibbs 1994). My paper aims at studying how familiarity and unfamiliarity factor of a proverb acts as a variable in the cognition of proverbs. It will examine how familiar proverbs are understood in a non-literal fashion more quickly than unfamiliar proverbs. For example, ‘a rolling stone gathers no moss’ will use less processing effort than a comparatively less familiar proverb like ‘the used key is always bright’ andit will expose how ultimately greater cognitive benefits are achieved from its processing. Once the proverb is confirmed as a fixed conceptual frame, the literal and non-literal senses equally integrate into an emerging meaning structure. It will also observe how expressions of these underlying conceptual relationships in the form of verbal metaphors quickly become a part of the culture’s stock truismsand folk wisdom and how ‘conceptual integration’ and ‘frame shifting’ also depend on the familiarity and unfamiliarity of a proverb.

Collaborative meaning-making in delusional talk as a search for mutual manifestness

Delusional talk may pose predictable challenges to the hearer in identifying what the speaker intended to communicate, particularly if the speaker presumes the hearer to have access to assumptions based on delusional content. This paper explores delusional talk between participants with schizophrenia and an interlocutor, analysing how meaning is negotiated through achieving access to assumptions that are not initially manifest to the conversation partner. A Relevance Theory approach is taken to the analysis of the data revealing two strategies used by the interlocutor to negotiate meaning. The Relevance Theory notion of mutual manifestness emerges as a powerful explanatory factor. The pursuit of mutual manifestness and a mutual cognitive environment explains the interlocutor’s meaning negotiation attempts, allowing the communicators to ‘align’ and engage in conversation. The interlocutor is also exposed as seeking to exit the delusional talk by moving towards topics which are based on assumptions which are clearly mutually manifest.

A novel multimodal communication framework using robot partner for aging population

In developed country such as Japan, aging has become a serious issue, as there is a disproportionate increasing of elderly population who are no longer able to look after themselves. In order to tackle this issue, we introduce human-friendly robot partner to support the elderly people in their daily life. However, to realize this, it is essential for the robot partner to be able to have a natural communication with the human. This paper proposes a new communication framework between the human and robot partner based on relevance theory as the basis knowledge. The relevance theory is implemented to build mutual cognitive environment between the human and the robot partner, namely as the informationally structured space (ISS). Inside the ISS, robot partner employs both verbal as well as non-verbal communication to understand human. For the verbal communication, Rasmussen’s behavior model is implemented as the basis for the conversational system. While for the non-verbal communication, environmental and human state data along with gesture recognition are utilized. These data are used as the perceptual input to compute the robot partner’s emotion. Experimental results have shown the effectiveness of our proposed communication framework in establishing natural communication between the human and the robot partner.

Revisiting Classics: Relevance of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice

Although many readers and critics of the present era might consider Jane Austen's fictional writings to be outdated and clichéd, her work nevertheless retains an undying appeal. During the last decade of the twentieth century the English-speaking world has experienced an Austen renaissance as it has been treated to a number of film and television adaptations of her work. The reasons for viewers and readers enjoying and identifying with Austen's fiction are numerous. This paper contends that the 'mutual cognitive environment' which Jane Austen so skilfully and dexterously creates in her masterpiece Pride and Prejudice, accounts for its present day relevance and appeal. This claim will be elucidated and established through an analysis of the novel within the framework of the concept of a 'mutual cognitive environment' as explicated by Sperber and Wilson in their discussion of Relevance Theory (2002:249). The contention is prompted by the assumption that a comprehensive account of how this 'mutual cognitive environment' is created by Austen and the process of its interpretation by readers should generate accounts of how this text gives rise to particular effects. Further, the paper maintains that for the present-day reader of Pride and Prejudice this environment is created due to the interaction of contextual assumptions which include knowledge of hierarchical social status, predicament of women in a male-dominated society, and human traits.

Metaphors in Conversational Context: Toward a Connectivity Theory of Metaphor Interpretation

The model proposed in this article merges the cognitive and social elements of metaphor use and interpretation in the cognitive representation of mutual cognitive environment (Sperber & Wilson, 1986/1995) or common ground (Clark, 1996). The proposed principle of metaphor interpretation is based on the interaction of both vehicle and topic with the common ground. Because common ground is inherently problematic, it is rarely accurate to discuss "the meaning of" a metaphor, as if metaphors must have a single well-specified meaning. Each metaphor is interpreted in the particular communicative context in which it is encountered, and individual interpretations will not necessarily match unless the individuals' cognitive representations of the common ground are similar. The proposed model is consistent with several other theories of metaphor interpretation, but it explicitly acknowledges the need for interpretive processes to be context specific and neurologically embodied, and avoids the problem of circularity (Ritchie, 2003b).

Intersubjectivity and Temporal Reference in Television Commentary

In this article it is argued that television commentary gives rise to an electronically mediated intersubjectivity at the level of the speaker and hearer's spatio-temporal perspectives on the world. The linguistic structures which occur as a result of this mutual cognitive environment are discussed, with particular reference to the ostensive use of demonstrative expressions to indicate intersubjectively established elements. The article goes on to examine the linguistic patterns which arise in a situation where there are two temporally distinct but identical series of events involved, only one of which is shared.