Daniel Harris on “Designing Communicative Acts”

Unlike other animals, humans extensively customize both the messages that we communicate and the signals with which we communicate those messages for our intended addressees. I will argue that this capacity for communication goes some way toward explaining the power and flexibility of human communication, and that it is an important precondition for our use of the kinds of languages that we in fact use. I will give an account of how this capacity works. The key idea is that our communicative intentions are both the products of and inputs to flexible and domain-general practical reasoning, and so they occupy central positions in complex plans that connect our abstract goals to the motor instructions that guide our muscle movements.

Daniel Harris (The City University of New York)

To join the session on Zoom, use this link.

This event is part of the ArgLab Research Colloquium organised by Maria Grazia Rossi, Andrés Soria Ruiz and Nuno Venturinha at the Laboratory of Reasoning and Argumentation of the Nova Institute of Philosophy. For any inquiries, please contact Maria Grazia, Andrés, or Nuno.