Colloquium: Daniel Harris (CUNY)

TITLE: Why Communicative Intentions?

ABSTRACT: According to an influential tradition that originates with Grice, we often communicate by intentionally revealing our intentions to change our addressees’ states of mind. To perform a communicative act, on this view, is to act with a communicative intention. Why would we communicate in this way? This question is pressing because there are good reasons to think that forming, revealing, and recognizing communicative intentions are demanding cognitive feats, and competing models of human communication place lighter demands on communicators. My answer to this challenge involves thinking of communicative intentions as essential elements in larger plans, which allow us to customize what we say and how we say it for our addressees, and which allow us to organize conversations together with our interlocutors. I will argue that these forms of planning make human communication enormously more powerful and efficient, and are a precondition for a number of valuable design features of natural language, and these benefits are what justify the cognitive costs associated with communicative intentions. I will also discuss some of the corners we cut in these planning processes when the stakes are low or cognitive resources are scarce, and I will contrast the resulting picture with ideally Bayesian models of language use.