The CEU Department of Cognitive Science and the Social Mind Center cordially invites you
to its talk by
Diana
Mazzarella<https://www.unine.ch/islc/home/collaborateurs/professeurs/Diana%20Mazzarella.html>
(University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland)
Date: Wednesday, June 5, 2019 - 17:00-18:30
Location: CEU, Oktober 6. Street 7, room 101
The interface between pragmatics and epistemic vigilance
Speakers have two distinct goals: to be understood and to make the hearer think or act
according to what is to be understood. As a result, when receiving a piece of incoming
information, the hearer needs to interpret it (by inferring the speaker meaning based on
linguistic and contextual cues) and evaluate it (by assessing the reliability of its
source and the plausibility of its content). While the former task pertains to pragmatics,
the latter is carried out by epistemic vigilance mechanisms (Sperber et al., 2010). In
this talk, I will show that these two tasks are closely intertwined. I will make this case
by focusing on two distinct phenomena: speaker commitment and irony comprehension.
Previous research has shown that speaker commitment increases the likelihood that a
message is accepted as true (see, e.g., Vullioud et al., 2017). Committed speakers are
judged as reliable informants as their commitment puts their reputation at stake. I will
discuss the way in which the attribution of speaker commitment can be modulated by
pragmatic cues and provide empirical evidence that speakers are taken to be less committed
to what they implicate than to what they presuppose or assert.
Finally, I will focus on a specific pragmatic phenomenon, irony comprehension, and its
relation with epistemic vigilance. Current accounts of irony all converge on the
assumption that one of its defining features is the expression of a dissociative attitude
towards the proposition literally expressed (see, e.g., Clark & Gerrit, 1984;
Recanati, 2004; Wilson & Sperber, 2012). I will suggest that the recognition of this
implicit dissociative attitude requires the exercise of 'second-order' epistemic
vigilance and show how this proposal can shed light on the 'developmental puzzle'
of irony comprehension.
We are looking forward to see you at the talk!
Cognitive Science Events at CEU:
http://cognitivescience.ceu.hu/events
Social Mind Center Events at CEU:
http://socialmind.ceu.edu/events
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