14 August, 3:30-5:30pm
Sir Rowland Wilson Building, Room 1.02

Josh Armstrong

The Scope of Scorekeeping

Wittgenstein famously remarked that words are deeds. Contemporary work in
semantics and pragmatics reflects this insight in modeling interpersonal
communication as a process of updating a structured body of facts,
preferences, and questions mutually presumed by the members of a group--in
David Lewis' (1979) terms, as a process of keeping track of the way
utterances serve systematically to change a conversational scoreboard or
discourse context. In this talk, I explore the scope of these scorekeeping
or context-change-potential models of communication to target phenomena
outside of the case of human language use. In particular, I consider the
extent to which these models illuminate core features of non-human animal
communication?especially the gestural and vocal communication systems of
non-human primates. I will present a number of case studies suggesting that
scorekeeping models are indeed needed to understand animal communication
properly. I close by considering the consequences of this fact for the
hyper-rationalistic construals of the underlying model that have come to
dominate work in formal semantics and pragmatics.

All welcome!