Luck and the value of communication

Abstract

Those in the Gricean tradition take it that successful human communication features an audience who not only arrives at the intended content of the signal, but also recognizes the speaker's intention that they do so. Some in this tradition have also argued that there are yet further conditions on communicative success, which rule out the possibility of communicating by luck. Supposing that both intention-recognition and some sort of anti-luck condition are correctly included in an analysis of human communication, this article asks what the value of events satisfying these conditions is. I present a puzzle concerning the value of intention-recognition which is analogous to the Meno Problem in epistemology, but ultimately argue that this puzzle is solveable: the signaling-relevant value of intention recognition can be vindicated. However, I argue that the version of this puzzle that concerns the further proposed luck-proofing conditions on communication can not be answered. I argue therefore that communication, as analyzed by many, is no more valuable qua signal than a proper subset of its conditions. Human communication is then not a uniquely valuable signaling event.

The politics of past and future: synthetic media, showing, and telling

“…This is the one part of my presentation of showing which I take to be a bit non-standard; often, showing is characterized as involving the mere absence of the causal intention, rather than by the affirmative presence of an intention to the contrary. I think however that my addition here still captures most if not all of the cases of showing that theorists have been interested in discussing, and that it sharpens the showing/ telling distinction in a way that is helpful for our subsequent discussion.5Hyska [2023b] addresses a related puzzle about the value of intention recognition to communication generally.…”