On understandings of intention: A response to Wedgwood

Abstract

In a recent paper, Wedgwood (2011)

The ironist’s intentions

“…Bara 2011;Haugh 2008Haugh , 2012Haugh , 2013Haugh and Jaszczolt 2012;Jaszczolt 2009;Kecskés 2012): a priori -post facto (temporal order), proximal -distal (orientation), iintentions -we-intentions (speaker-interlocutor interplay), as well as primary -secondary intentions (communicative priority). The centrality of these distinctions in a model of analysis of pragmatic meaning (and pragmatic phenomena like irony, in particular) depends on the theoretical goals of said model, which may range from philosophical approaches to intentions and intentionality (Anscombe 1957) to socio-cognitive (Kecskés 2010) and interactional (Arundale 2008) approaches to communication and utterance processing.…”

“…Rather than ascribing ambivalence or uncertainty to the speaker, it is plausible to assume that the speaker maintains both an ironic intent and the intent to tease her audience by entertaining the possibility of (eventually) embracing the expressed wish. The fact that an utterance can be left open to interpretation by the audience is indicative of the dynamic nature of discourse, whereby meanings can be negotiated and reinterpreted (Jaszczolt 1996: 716;Haugh 2012). In order to formulate the main arguments of this analysis, I will first discuss the ironist's hierarchy of intentions in view of the bundle of implicated propositions that correspond to an ironic utterance (section 2), continuing with the interplay between communicative priority and manifestness of intentions (section 3), while also considering the cases of audience-dependent mixed degrees of manifestness (section 3.2) as well as covert intentions and the case of deception through irony (section 3.3).…”

Communicative Intention in Code Review Questions

“…For the communication to be effective, all persons involved in the conversation must agree on the intention of the message [12]. Indeed, overt communication can be seen as an error-prevention strategy [13] and misinterpretations can arise from misunderstanding of the communicative intention [14]. In this study, we focus on the communicative intentions conveyed by developers during code review.…”

The pragmatics of insinuation

“…This, in my hypothesis, is the case with insinuations. 6 6 The problem of recognizing and attributing speakers' intentions has been cast in different terms by Haugh (2012Haugh ( , 2013. Starting from the assumption that intention "can be understood not only as a theoretical or cognitive notion, but also as a deontological notion where the focus is on what the speaker is committed to, or taken to be committed to, in interaction" (Haugh 2013: 42), Haugh suggests an alternative treatment of speaker meaning that shifts the attention to moral or ethical concerns, such as rights, obligations, responsibilities, permissibility, and so on.…”