From Signaling and Expression to Conversation and Fiction

Abstract

This essay ties together some main strands of the author’s research spanning the last quarter-century. Because of its broad scope and space limitations, he prescinds from detailed arguments and instead intuitively motivates the general points which are supported more fully in other publications to which he provides references. After an initial delineation of several distinct notions of meaning (Section 1), the author considers (Section 2) such a notion deriving from the evolutionary biology of communication that he terms ‘organic meaning’, and places it in the context of evolutionary game theory. That provides a framework for a special type of organic meaning found in the phenomenon of expression (3), of which the author here offers an updated characterization while highlighting its wide philosophical interest. Expression in turn generalizes to a paradigmatic form of human communication—conversation—and section 4 provides a taxonomy of conversation-types while arguing that attention to such types helps to sharpen predictions of what speakers say rather than conversationally implicate. We close (5) with a view of fictional discourse on which authors of fictional works are engaged in conversation with their readers, and can provide them with knowledge in spite of the fictional character of their conversation. Such knowledge includes knowledge of how an emotion feels and is thus a route to empathy.

Self-Expression in Speech Acts

“…Self-expression construed as sincere signalling of one's own introspectible mental states plays at least three roles in intentional communication. First, (i) in some cases what the communicating agent expresses is identical to 4 It is worth noting-following one of the reviewers-that in one of his recent papers Green (2019a) offers a revised definition of self-expression in which he drops the "of a sort to which A can have introspective access" requirement. However, a detailed discussion of this revision goes beyond the scope of the present paper.…”

“…However, a detailed discussion of this revision goes beyond the scope of the present paper. As Green notes, however, "[a]dvances in the evolutionary biology of facial expression might show (…) that blushing did evolve to signal embarrassment" (2007,27) and, by the same token, show that a blush on one's face is a signal; for references to recent works on blushing, see (Green 2019a).…”

Preface

“…For the past two decades, Mitchell S. Green (2003;2009;2019a) has been developing an original model of self-expression, the central idea of which is that expressing, understood as a behavior whereby we make our mental states public, is a species of signaling. In other words, in expressing ourselves we both show and signal our introspectable states.…”

“…Following this suggestion, Green develops a common-ground model of communication that accounts for acts of making an assertion as well as for acts of asking a question: to accept a question as a common ground component-i.e., to take it to be "a question worthy of investigation" (Green 2017a(Green , 1591-is "a matter of (…) structuring those worlds in a certain way" (Ibid.). Green (2017a;2019a;) also argues that the common-ground framework can be further elaborated to accommodate what he calls the teleological perspective on conversation. Adopting this perspective, he arrives at a taxonomy of conversation types that are defined by reference to their purposes and the distribution of roles or, in other words, 'illocutionary entitlements' among the conversing agents.…”

“…Maciej Witek in "Self-expression in speech acts" discusses Green's (2007) notion of self-expression and examines the role it plays in his model of illocutionary communication (Green 2009;2019a). He suggests that Green's three-part model of speaker-meaning can be extended by introducing the notion of proto-illocutionary speaker-meaning, which is necessary to account for cases of overtly showing general commitments that are not 'marked' as being specific to one or another illocutionary force.…”