🚨 Out in Journal of Pragmatics A short thread 🧵 1/ As part of my research project to do pragmatics without appealing to "intentions", here I offer a non-Gricean account of ostensive stimuli (eye contact, exaggerated movements, etc.).

Ostensive marking as a distinctive feature of human communication

Human communication possesses far more expressive power than any other communicative system in nature. In pragmatic theory, this flexibility is attrib…

sciencedirect.com

🚨 Out in Journal of Pragmatics A short thread 🧵 1/ As part of my research project to do pragmatics without appealing to "intentions", here I offer a non-Gricean account of ostensive stimuli (eye contact, exaggerated movements, etc.).

Ostensive marking as a distinctive feature of human communication

Human communication possesses far more expressive power than any other communicative system in nature. In pragmatic theory, this flexibility is attrib…

sciencedirect.com

A short thread on what we claim 🧵 1/ Gricean theories treat communicative cognition as fundamentally a matter of attributing intentions. We argue this explains only a subset of human communication.

Nima Mussavifard@mussavifard.bsky.social · 2mo ago

🚨 Out in Mind & Language Inferential communication: The primacy of external representations With @gcsibra.bsky.social, we suggest a non-Gricean mechanism for interpreting communicative media that relies on mapping symbolic arrangements onto content; we then discuss its evolutionary implications.

A short thread on what we claim 🧵 1/ Gricean theories treat communicative cognition as fundamentally a matter of attributing intentions. We argue this explains only a subset of human communication.

Nima Mussavifard@mussavifard.bsky.social · 2mo ago

🚨 Out in Mind & Language Inferential communication: The primacy of external representations With @gcsibra.bsky.social, we suggest a non-Gricean mechanism for interpreting communicative media that relies on mapping symbolic arrangements onto content; we then discuss its evolutionary implications.

Representations of geometric shapes have syntactic structure w/ @maxencepajot.bsky.social and @standehaene.bsky.social is out & open-access in JEP:General doi.org/10.1037/xge0.... For an overview, see thread below!

Barbu Revencu@barbu-revencu.bsky.social · last yr.

Preprint alert (link below)! @maxencepajot.bsky.social, @standehaene.bsky.social, and I show that human adults, but not convolutional or transformer networks, encode geometric shapes in hierarchically structured representations. TL;DR: Geometric-shape representations have internal syntax! 1/8

🚨 Out in Mind & Language Inferential communication: The primacy of external representations With @gcsibra.bsky.social, we suggest a non-Gricean mechanism for interpreting communicative media that relies on mapping symbolic arrangements onto content; we then discuss its evolutionary implications.

Inferential communication: The primacy of external representations

We argue that intentionalist accounts of ostensive-inferential communication fail to adequately explain the role of external representations in human communication. We propose that the contents of a ...

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

New paper with @tadegquillien.bsky.social and Azzurra Ruggeri: "Children seek out observations that can reveal a partner's generosity". Out in @humbehevosoc.bsky.social EHB: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... 🧵

Children seek out observations that can reveal a partner’s generosity

Humans face the adaptive challenge of assessing how much other people value them. Evidence suggests that the human mind is well-equipped for this task…

sciencedirect.com