Progress, of sorts

It’s been a while since I last shared an update here. Life has a way of throwing curveballs, and the past several months have been particularly challenging for me. Towards the end of 2023 and well into 2024, I found myself needing to step away from my dissertation work. Personal matters demanded my attention, and as much as I tried to stay connected to my research, I realized I was running on empty. It was a tough period—waking up in tears without fully understanding why—but sometimes we need to pause, even when we’re passionate about our work. Now, as we approach the latter half of 2024, I’m gradually finding my way back. Picking up where I left off hasn’t been easy, but I’ve made some progress and wanted to share what’s been happening on my dissertation journey since my last post. Thank you for your patience, and for sticking with me through this time. Here’s where I am now.

2021

I embarked on this dissertation in September 2021. I had a plan. Two plans, in fact. I had my original problem statement which I had used to explain to my professor what I wanted to understand. And I had my research proposal, which had been officially approved. I had also an idea of how to solve the problem, and had laid down foundations for this in my research master thesis.

• The original problem as I explained it to my professor in 2018
• Thesis
• Research proposal
• Radboud version of research proposal

But it did not happen like that. My professor asked me not to stick to my plan too tightly ( “they always change anyway”), stop reading so much, do some thinking of my own, and suggested I’d read Janet Bavelas, a psychologist who spent her life working on interactive communication. I learned a a lot from that, and from the writings of her mentor Paul Watzlawick but eventually I felt I was losing the thread to my dissertation. I created a presentation for my professor, to illustrate the original problem, through the ‘eyes’ of my current insights, so we might re-establish direction. And so we did.

2022

During the remainder of 2022, I searched for the source of the notion of commitment: where did it come from and why did it appear?

• In speech act theory, Bart Geurts takes his initial idea of commitment from Robert Brandom.
• In cybernetics, the notion of commitment is foundational to second-order feedback loops, as developed by Stafford Beer in the Viable System model, a framework for understanding the structure and and dynamics of complex organisation.
• In IT proces design, the notion of commitment comes via Jan Dietz from Winograd & Flores. But neither Brandom nor Winograd & Flores nor Stafford Beer came up with these ideas themselves.
  It seems that, other than zeitgeist, the connecting figure may have been philosopher Hubert Dreyfus. He and his brother IT professor Stuart, together with philosopher John Searle and economist Ann Markussen were doctoral advisers to Fernando Flores when he came to Berkeley University after his three years in prison. Previously, Flores has been minister of Finance om Chili under Allende. In that position, he previously brought in Stafford Beer from the UK to work on a new system for the Chilean economy and hence was familiar with his way of thinking. I have spoken to both Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores ; and it turns out that a) Flores is the sole source of the term in Winograd & Flores’ books and b) Flores’ notion of commitment came from . Given that he debate between McDowell, Brandom and Dreyfus from mid-1990s to mid-2010s involved serious discussion on the notion of commitment, Brandom must have been familiar with Dreyfus’ views.

2023

I then asked myself where the notion of intention in speech acts came from?

Intention did not come from Austin

I found that intention in Austin’s writings intentions is not a prominent feature at all. That centrality of intention should be credited to John Searle, as he himself emphasized in interviews. I also discovered that speech act theory was perhaps no more than a happy discovery that Austin did whilst inventing himself a new academic career. He based his approach on the principles of war-time intelligence-gathering field work that he directed as an officer during the second world war. He sent out officers, and later his students, out on meticulous fact find missions and then discussed the results an academic meeting afterwards; a practice which he and Gilbert Ryle developed into the infamous Oxford Tutorial system.
I became very frustrated, then amused by how childish these great philosophers behave at times. And how differently they style themselves.

Language, reality and intention

All this made me wonder about the connection between using language and acting in the world. What was the rightful place of speaker intention and commitment generated with the audience? And what was the connection between them? This became my project for 2023. It occurred to me that intention and commitment are both notions that connect us to reality, intention by guiding our actions, and commitment by allowing us to give and ask each other for reasons, to call each other out. I needed to know how acts of language, or indeed any acts, are related to the objective world. It seemed to me that language, as an activity, has two kinds of functions:

• Representational: Language represents the world by describing states of affairs , e.g. “the sky is blue today”. This is true if the sky is blue today, on a coherence or correspondence view of truth.
• Performative: Language acts on the world, changing social realities by creating commitments and obligations (e.g., contracts, promises). This is correct if the felicity conditions of the speech act are met, such “I promise to pay you back”.
  Conditions can be attached to either function, built either on truth or intention or both. For instance: “I hereby pronounce you man and wife” is both representational (describes the new state of affairs) and performative (enacts the marriage, provided I have the authority to do so). This way of thinking suggests that if we specify all possible conditions for both the representational and performative function of language, we will specify the function of language itself, and that all that is left to do is to understand representation and performance interact and perhaps how context influences their application. But I worried. The notion of ‘truth’ in representation assumes an objective reality that can be accurately described, which is philosophically contentious. Similarly, ‘intention’ in performative acts presupposes a clear link between mental states and actions, which is also debatable.
  I wanted to build my dissertation on solid ground, so I tried to find out how I could find, or, if necessary, build a theory of language without being dependent on the notions of truth and intention, mainstream though these are.

Down the rabbit hole

I spent many hours building a mental picture of how and why philosophers constructed theories around truth and intentions and actions and how it all connect to either objective or subjective reality. My reasoning was that if I could understand better what these theories set out to achieve, I might understand better how to do without them. But I found myself going down a rabbit hole, for three reasons:

• I simply did not believe that whether reality is objective or not, has much bearing on how we, or any other organism in the universe, perceive that reality with our specific senses.
• I could not see any justification of postulating an invisible element like intention, and then presume it to be the cause of all action, without having any idea on how we share intentions
• Many philosophical theories attribute the ability to discern truth, or to have intentions, exclusively to humans. That seemed to me to be simply wrong. Yes, we human have a wonderful cognitive apparatus. But that that apparatus has not developed by itself, not are its cognitive components unique across creation.
  Of course, I will not deny that we humans seem to be preoccupied with truth. In every police series, there is a witness who will break down after being forced to contradict himself. But it does not follow language was made for the purpose of truth.

Relevance theory

I then tried to imagine how I might construct my own theory of language use. Were there any other notions that might help me? I looked at Relevance theory, by Sperber and Wilson (1986). This is a highly influential cognitive approach to communication that builds on Grice’s idea of implicatures but shifts the focus towards cognitive efficiency. The core principle is that human cognition is geared towards maximizing relevance, which is defined by the balance between cognitive effort and contextual effects. The theory posits that during communication, individuals aim to convey information that is worth the listener’s cognitive effort, making it optimally relevant to them. It is improvement on Grice’s implicatures because it allows for dynamic, context dependent interpretation of meaning rather than relying on fixed maxims, which in some cases leads to better interpretations of implicatures (“There is a lion in the garden”), indirect requests (“Can you pass the salad”) and ambiguities (“He fixed the date”). Relevance theory also addresses the issue of the need for limiting cognitive effort, as we cannot process all context quickly enough. Relevance theory has no need of objective truth or falsity. It also has no need for a common communicative goal between interlocutors, other than that of understanding and being understood (Sperber and Wilson, 1995, p. 276), but it does rely on intentions. The theory hinges on the communicator’s ability to make their intentions clear and the audience’s ability to infer these intentions. This inferential process is crucial for achieving effective communication and understanding, maximizing and optimizing relevance and includes relevance guided comprehension heuristic for efficient processing.
I had originally dismissed this theory, because my professor said that “people who know say this is not a good theory”, and I tend to believe him. On revisiting the theory, I could see that indeed there are several serious objections against it, one methodological and one from what I take to be the nature of linguistic communication. The methodological objection is simply that the term relevance is too broad, so that it comes to define even itself. No empirical predictions can be derived from it. This is a serious objection, that to some extent also applies to the theory that I am developing. I will come back to that in the next paragraph. The other objection strikes at the heart of the matter: do we communicate just to convey information? Sperber and Wilson do not explicitly claim this, but they do claim that cognition is aimed at improving’s knowledge of the world through information processing (Sperber and Wilson, 1995, 47). Basically they claim that the world contains lots of information about things that are important to you, such as survival, friends, and social success. As a cognitive agent, you seek to obtain that information. In communication, you try to get information relevant to your goals as efficiently as possible. But there seems to be something missing. If communication is a source of information, then the relevance theory should apply to all other forms of interaction. And how are the goals of cognition established, maintained, prioritized? Relevance Theory has no satisfactory answer to these questions.

The problem of course, is that no one else has a good theory either. As Chemero (2009) notes, “Every book written by a philosopher begins with an argument that the competing approaches are hopeless. Yet, for some reason, we persist. Somehow we’re only convinced by the philosophical arguments that everyone else’s approaches are hopeless” (p. 20).

Explanatory gap

At this stage, I began to formulate my own theory, or rather, a synthesis of theories to provide a general framework for my proposal on the interpretation of speech acts. Due to extensive methodological criticism of relevance theory, I started to question the methodological foundation needed for my dissertation. Despite extensive reading, I found no consensus on research methods in philosophical research, similar to searching for a needle in a haystack. This issue extends beyond philosophy to other disciplines since research paradigms are philosophically derived (see Caelli et al., 2003; Mkansi & Acheampong, 2012; Sefotho, 2015).
This lack of organization in such a critical academic discipline as philosophy made me uneasy. I invested considerable time verifying the scarcity of research on this topic. After consulting several philosophers, including former tutors, I found no assistance. It appeared that within the many theoretical niches in the philosophy of language, there were no comprehensive theories on the nature of language itself—a bus going nowhere, so to speak. In the adjacent field of philosophy of mind, grand theories about cognition in relation to language exist, but they are often broad and merely descriptive, failing to provide explanatory power – the bus is defective . The following illustration depicts the challenging situation faced by a philosopher of language attempting to make progress:

Obviously, an elderly and lone PhD student like myself cannot do much about this situation. It would require a combination of Kant and Taylor to sort things out. I have now decided that I will construct my dissertation properly, by identifying and following a research methodology, then identifying approaches and theories and placing them in a methodological context as far as I am able, ignoring the mess. As if I were writing a dissertation in an applied discipline. Obviously, that is not something that can be done “right” or on any kind of scale. Publishers have a very hard time just labelling philosophical publications into their correct discipline. But I can try to work systematically myself, remembering all the time that things will not fit neatly. So I revisited the setup of my dissertation, following Bloomberg, 2023. That means I still need to find a place for much of the work I have done in the past two years, i.e. make it part of the revised structure.

I have now decided that I will construct my dissertation properly, by identifying and following a research methodology, then identifying approaches and theories and placing them in a methodological context as far as I am able, ignoring the mess. As if I were writing a dissertation in an applied discipline. Obviously, that is not something that can be done “right” or on any kind of scale. Publishers have a very hard time just labelling philosophical publications into their correct discipline. But I can try to work systematically myself, remembering all the time that things will not fit neatly, but without attempting to disguise the mess, so to speak. So I revisited the setup of my dissertation, following Bloomberg, 2023. That means I stil need to find a place for much of the work I have done in the past two years, i.e. make it part of the revised structure.

2024

For about 6 months, I had to take a break. Too much going on elsewhere in my life. I was exhausted and disheartened and woke up every day crying without knowing exactly why. This started end of 2023 and continue up to the summer of 2024, when I picked things up again.

The links below refer to the site where my dissertation-in-progress is located: https://publish.obsidian.md/theartofmisunderstanding
Drop me an email for the password.

• I have now completed the second draft of the first, introductory chapter, which sets the scene for the rest. It is here. I have also completed most of the keyword explanations for that chapter.
• I am currently working on the field study (chapter 4). I was nearing the end with the setup, but I have run into a conceptual problem with social organisations. Basically, philosophy and the real world have grown too far apart. Will talk about this soon with the accounting-philosopher-professor, which will be fun.
• My chapter 2, literature study, is empty, but it is not: I have a wealth of material which I will not use for the most part, because I selected most of my approaches already in the introductory chapter. Otherwise this dissertation would have exploded (might still)
• My chapter 3 (framework) will contain all the models I created myself. Not just what my professor calls the Wertwyn pyramid (it was already in my master’s thesis, but it has grown), but also the badminton model of communication (inspired by my husband’s weekly game). An introduction to the ideas is here, part of chapter 1. Below is what the model looks like in real life: to-and-fro, expectation-to-action
  

Biography

• Bloomberg, L. D. (2023). Completing your qualitative dissertation: A road map from beginning to end (5th ed.). Sage.
• Caelli, K., Ray, L., & Mill, J. (2003). ‘Clear as Mud’: Toward Greater Clarity in Generic Qualitative Research. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 2(2), 1–13. https://doi.org/10/gcd42d
• Chemero, A. (2009). Radical Embodied Cognitive Science.
• Mkansi, M., & Acheampong, E. A. (2012). Research Philosophy Debates and Classifications: Students’ Dilemma. Electronic Journal of Business Research Methods, 10(2), pp132‑140-pp132‑140.
• Sefotho, M. M. (2015). A Researcher’s Dilemma: Philosophy in Crafting Dissertations and Theses. Journal of Social Sciences, 42(1–2), 23–36. https://doi.org/10/gjhx