Philosophy Colloquium - Daniel Harris / Cognitive Pluralism about Common Ground
Philosophy Colloquium - Daniel Harris / Cognitive Pluralism about Common Ground
Friday November 22, the Philosophy Colloquium welcomes Daniel Harris from Hunter College, who will present some of his work on language and the cognitive foundations of communication. His talk, abstracted below, is "Cognitive pluralism about Common Ground."
Common ground is the information that the members of a group take themselves to share for the purposes of their interactions with each other. Linguists, philosophers of language, and psychologists have found lots of reasons to think that it does important work in language use and human communication. What I will be interested in is the following psychological question: what has to be going on in the group members’ minds in order for some information to be common ground for them, and by what process do they enter into that state? In this talk, I will defend a pluralistic answer to these questions, according to which there are a number of interestingly different ways to treat information as shared, and range of routes that we take to those states. My position is an example of cognitive pluralism, which is the view that minds typically have many different ways to solve their most important problems, each solution having its own costs and benefits that make it useful in different scenarios.