Biased communication: The Cognitive Pragmatics of Fallacies
| Responsable du projet |
Didier Maillat
Louis De Saussure |
| Résumé |
This interinstitutional project aims at investigating persuasive,
and in particular manipulative, exploitation of otherwise efficient
cognitive pragmatic processes of understanding. This research is
anchored on the theoretical vantage point of pragmatics, which
predominantly depend on models of understanding relying on frugal
(rapid) but non-prudent (risky) processes of contextualisation and
inference, which are compatible with spontaneous and automatic
heuristics documented elsewhere in cognitive psychology; we draw
upon recent developments in this framework aiming at bridging the
explanatory gap between understanding and consenting through the
notions of epistemic vigilance (Sperber & al. 2010),
context-selection constraint (Maillat & Oswald 2009, 2011,
Maillat 2006, forthcoming, and previous work by Saussure (2005) and
others. The outcomes of the project, besides a better understanding
of human sensitivity to fallacious arguments, lie on a more
practical level in establishing better control procedures, that is,
a critical mind, in the greater public. In this project, we approach
the interpretative processes triggered by fallacious arguments and
their persuasive and manipulative efficiency, from the theoretical
vantage point of pragmatics which considers human communication as
a cognitively driven activity which tries to maximise the output of
the interpretative process and simultaneously minimise the amount of
resources summoned during this same process. In brief, the current
project looks at how, through fallacies, persuasive and
manipulative discourse exploits cognitive biases which hinder this
interpretative process and yield sub-optimal, or even irrational,
outcomes. In doing so the main goal of this project is to bring the
centuries old discussion of argumentative moves and fallacious moves
in particular (van Eemeren & Grootendorst 2004, Hamblin 1970,
Walton 1995, 1996, 2000, 2003, Woods & Walton 1982) into the
domain of linguistic – more precisely pragmatic – theory in order
to move away from a mostly descriptive approach to such discursive
phenomena to an explanatory approach that will use the pragmatic
theoretical framework in order to make predictions regarding the
comprehension processes at work when an addressee interprets
well-known fallacies, for instance the ad verecundiam, ad populum,
ad hominem, ad baculum, strawman, ad consequentiam, etc. In this
respect, this project fills an important part of the gap noted by
Cummings (2004) who emphasizes the lack of and need for a
theoretically grounded pragmatic account of argumentative moves. As
explained above, this project tackles the depth and scope of
pragmatic enrichment processes through contextual selection and
modulation (disambiguation, reference assignment, semantic
saturation of elliptic forms) in persuasive circumstances (Carston
2002, Sperber & Wilson 1995, Recanati 2007, 2010 and others).
The purpose of the first level of investigation is therefore to
further develop a model that can capture phenomena that pertain to
biased communication – namely, fallacious arguments – and which is
inscribed within the larger framework of pragmatics, thereby
pursuing and extending the initial theoretical steps taken by
Maillat & Oswald (2009, 2011) and providing an explanatory
account which is cognitively grounded. The data used to test the
various theoretical hypotheses is drawn from an evaluation of the
comprehension processes triggered in an addressee by a subset of
fallacious arguments. From a methodological point of view, the
testing of our hypothesis is done in two distinct and complementary
experimental strands (see Noveck & Sperber 2004, Pohl 2004,
Sauerland & Yatsushiro 2009). Thus, the first line of
investigation focuses on fallacies from the perspective of Context
Selection Constraint (CSC; see Maillat 2006, forthcoming and
Maillat & Oswald 2009, 2011, forthcoming) a pragmatic account
of biased communication that was specifically developed to capture
fallacious arguments. Specifically, the project experimentally test
the biases theoretically predicted to be prompted by four fallacies:
ad populum, ad verecundiam and ad baculum in interpretative
processes. In doing so these fallacies are systematically and
respectively related to the relevant cognitive counterparts the
mere exposure and validity effects, epistemic vigilance, and
somatic markers (see below for a discussion). Thus we use the
insights of cognitive psychology in order to test empirically the
validity of our predictions. Indeed, one of the original
contributions of this project rests in its interdisciplinary effort
to bring together the findings of scholars who investigated
fallacies with those put forward by people who – following the
ground breaking work of Tversky & Kahneman (1974, 1981),
explained some of the most puzzling aspects of human understanding,
judgment, and decision making (see Pohl (2004), or Gigerenzer (2008)
for recent surveys). Interestingly, the relevance-theoretic
framework in which the theory is couched stimulates and assumes the
parallel between general cognitive processes and pragmatic processes
as the latter are taken to exploit generally valid cognitive
principles (see Sperber and Wilson 1995), thereby supporting the
combined approach discussed above. The second line of investigation
concerns the so-called strawman fallacy where the speaker gets
attributed a commitment to a content she does not (intend to)
convey. The research question concerns the efficiency of this
fallacy in persuasion, an issue expanding far beyond the question
of persuasion, having to do with the overall mechanism of pragmatic
inference and of retractability (itself a criterion for implicitness
in classical Gricean-style pragmatics). In argumentation theories,
expressed contents are reputed public and scrutinisable, objective
facts, a standpoint we regard as a rough oversimplification relying
on an ill-informed theory of language understanding where the role
of inference is null or light. Furthermore, the classical
assumptions on this matter by Argumentation theories cannot provide
any explanation for its common success otherwise than just through
the notion of burden of proof switching. On the contrary, the tools
designed within cognitive pragmatics and general principles of
understanding in context, as they provide explanations for other
types of miscommunication, such as misunderstanding or quiproquo,
suggest a line of explanation whereby the strawman relies on the
higher relevance of the attributed content with regard to the
actually intended one. Empirical tests are proposed to evaluate the
model. |
| Mots-clés |
communication, argumentation theory, experimental methodology, pragmatics, cognitive biases, cognition, language, rhetoric, persuasion, manipulation |
| Type de projet | Recherche fondamentale |
| Domaine de recherche | Langues romanes |
| Source de financement | FNS (Encouragement de projets Div. I-III) |
| Etat | Terminé |
| Début de projet | 1-3-2014 |
| Fin du projet | 28-2-2017 |
| Budget alloué | 323'140 |
| Contact | Louis De Saussure |