Date: Wed, 13 Feb 2002 00:11:47 -0800 (PST)
From: coulson@Cogsci.ucsd.edu
To: Francis F Steen <steen@commstds.ucla.edu>
Subject: howdy

Hi Francis,

Good to hear from you! Sorry to hear you haven't been feeling well. I can definitely sympathize since I just got over a similar thing. As you can probably guess from my lack of responsiveness lately, winter quarter has been pretty full. I teach class every morning, and seem to spend most of the afternoons supervising students in the lab or solving technical problems. But rest assured that I think about your messages even when I don't respond to them. ;-)

Anyway, now that we're over the hump (5th wk) life seems to be getting much better. The new kids in lab know how to do things and are starting to generate all sorts of new info! Plus my floor hockey team is undefeated [woohoo!].

Anyway, I’ve been thinking a little bit about resistance to rhetoric -- and managed to read your original piece on the web. I think that reverse engineering and simulation of the audience reacting to various messages is a big part of consciously crafted rhetoric (i.e. propaganda), but I’m not so sure it plays such an important role in resistance.

I think resistance primarily arises out of two fundamental aspects of communication: (i) the crucial role of background (world) knowledge in the construction of meaning; and (ii) the partitioning of speech acts into mental spaces. (i) is quite simple really, and is based on the idea that language comprehension proceeds as listeners use linguistic information associated with particular uses of language to construct various sorts of mental models that subserve their activity. A crucial part of the meaning construction process involves the activation of relevant contextual and background knowledge from semantic and episodic memory. Because linguistic information always underdetermines situated meaning, listeners provide crucial components of meaning from their own conceptual repertoire. (in fact, there are probably some more interesting cases of discourse in which speakers and listeners co-construct negotiated meanings. But for the immediate present, I will observe the custom and simply ignore this admittedly central aspect of language use.) Because listeners are providing most of the material from their own conceptual arsenal, they are quite likely to construct meanings consistent with their extant belief systems.

[As an aside, I should note that this model of language use differs from the standard (folk) model of language as a code for thoughts in which speakers encode thoughts into sentences and listeners decode sentence to recapitulate the original thought. Rather, the speaker makes an utterance intended to prompt the listener to construct various mental models. Linguistic information (explicit and implicit knowledge of word meanings and grammar) provides the speaker with some minimal expectations about the character of the listener's model/s, but in no way ensures that the meaning constructed by the listener will be identical or even similar to the model/s that subserve the speaker's communicative intent.]

Anyway, I think the cognitive linguist's philosophy inherent in (i) is probably compatible with your suspicion that people attempt to minimize conflict w/their own belief systems, and similar musings. In fact, these principles probably underwrite the resistance mechanism in (ii): partitioning discourse into mental spaces. The whole point of mental spaces is to find a way to represent the disparate properties of an object or event in different contexts and interpretive frameworks (or to represent the shared properties of analogous objects that each exist in different domains). One prototypical mental space is the belief space. To represent "John believes everything his psychic friend tells him," one would set up two mental spaces, one for the contents of John's beliefs (explicitly marked as a belief space) and one to represent reality -- which may or may not be structured the same as the belief space. Thus a fundamental component of language comprehension involves marking the epistemic status of various sorts of information. At this point I should note that while some mental space construction is signalled by grammatical cues (including all sorts of things from explicit space builders such as "John believes" to things like verb mood such as choice of indicative vs. Subjunctive to markers of negation such as "I am not a liar,"), much of it is not. Speakers simply decide to partition.

Presumably in cases of rhetorical resistance, the entire contents of an unreliable source's rhetoric will be embedded in a dumbwit-thinks space that listeners may represent in much the same way as they represent erroneous beliefs and negated propositions.

Note that this sort of a representation is amenable to the sort of reverse engineering you talk about via the addition of some meta-level spaces (which there is at least some independent evidence for the idea that speakers construct these sorts of things w/ a non-trivial frequency, i.e. not all the time, but often enough to make the suggestion plausible). However, this elaborate mental simulation isn't necessary for resistance. Presumably it's an empirical issue how effective this sort of mental simulation he-said-a-to- make-me-think-x is for creating resistance, as well as the precise details of the way it works.

Thoughts?

-s