Natural meaning, probabilistic meaning, and the interpretation of emotional signs

Underdeterminacy without ostension: A blind spot in the prevailing models of communication

“…1 I will illustrate this blind spot with examples of spontaneous emotional expressions, in particular laughter (see Section 3), but it may well include other cases (see Bonard, 2021, Chapter 3). A secondary aim of this article will be to sketch a possible explanation for such cases (see Section 5-cf., related suggestions that I made in Bonard, 2021Bonard, , 2022.…”

“…Laughter (as a type) is not factively related to mirth since one can feign mirthful laughter and so does not naturally mean mirth according to Grice's (1957) factive definition. However, one may hypothesize that laughter naturally means mirth under a probabilistic understanding of natural meaning (see Bonard, 2023, for an analysis of how natural meaning and probabilistic accounts of natural information can deal with emotional expressions). Because senders and receivers would both know that (implicitly), they would share the association, established before the communication takes place, between the stimuli making up laughter and the information that the laugher is mirthful.…”

“…Let us call them meaning NAT-FACTIVE and meaning NAT-PROB . Now, the participants in the conversation do not think that laughter as a type means NAT-FACTIVE the information transmitted in (2) or (3) because they know that such laughter types may be instantiated in situations where what is transmitted in (2) or ( 3) is not the case (Bonard, 2023). We cannot either explain the information transmission with the hypothesis that the participants believe that laughter means NAT-PROB the information transmitted because it is too idiosyncratic to be accounted for through probabilities, as we have seen above.…”

“…In light of these empirical investigations, it appears that the best that a code model for the sounds of laughter can do here is to offer a statistical association—a natural code—between only two pairs: First, the acoustic cues making up what I will call Duchenne laughter is statistically paired with positive affective states and, second, non‐Duchenne laughter is paired with a heterogenous set of affective states (see Table 1). In other words, if we use ‘naturally means’ in a probabilistic sense (Bonard, 2023; Stegmann, 2015), then, as far as we know, Duchenne laughter naturally means positive affective states, non‐Duchenne laughter naturally means a heterogenous set of affective states, and there are no other acoustic categories of laughter that would naturally mean types of affective states. Let me underline that the empirical literature thus seems to show that we cannot acoustically distinguish between, say, nervous laughter, sardonic laughter, embarrassed laughter, and so forth (in Section 4, I will discuss attempts at devising a more sophisticated code using non‐acoustic cues).…”

“…This distinction has proven extremely influential although it has been shown that some cases of communication fall in neither one of the two groups, something which Grice himself foresaw (1957, p. 379). Notably, the meaning of nonhuman animal communicative signs and that of spontaneous emotional expressions sometimes is neither natural nor non‐natural as Grice defined these terms (Armstrong, 2021; Bonard, 2023; Denkel, 1992; Wharton, 2003). It has been argued that these “neither natural nor non‐natural” cases are better dealt with thanks to a distinction that is based on, though independent of, Grice's: They would be accounted for by either the code model or the inferential model of communication.…”