Philosophy Of Language Directness And Indirectness In Communication **TUTOR MUST HAVE BACKGROUND KNOWLEDGE IN CONVERSATIONAL STYLES STUDIES; communications

Philosophy Of Language Directness And Indirectness In Communication **TUTOR MUST HAVE BACKGROUND KNOWLEDGE IN CONVERSATIONAL STYLES STUDIES; communications or philosophy of language**

Conversational styles differ in how indirect they are, but some use of indirect strategies in conversation is probably inevitable. Introduce indirectness in speech with some examples, and offer some motivations for employing indirectness. Now go on and describe (and justify) some rules of thumb for using indirectness; what are its do’s and don’t’s?

5-8 Pages double spaced.

Use in line citations mla style if youre not sure how refer to this link:https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/research_and_citation/m…

ATTACHED READINGS: Stalnaker talks a bit about indirectness and directness in the reading labeled stalnaker.

The main reading is by Pinker

Please do not hesitate to ask me questions Steven Pinker*†, Martin A. Nowak‡, and James J. Lee*
*Department of Psychology, and ‡Program for Evolutionary Dynamics, Departments of Mathematics and Organismic and Evolutionary
Biology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138
Edited by Jeremy Nathans, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, MD, and approved December 11, 2007 (received for review
July 31, 2007)
When people speak, they often insinuate their intent indirectly rather than stating it as a bald proposition. Examples include sexual
come-ons, veiled threats, polite requests, and concealed bribes. We propose a three-part theory of indirect speech, based on the idea
that human communication involves a mixture of cooperation and conflict. First, indirect requests allow for plausible deniability, in
which a cooperative listener can accept the request, but an uncooperative one cannot react adversarially to it. This intuition is supported by a game-theoretic model that predicts the costs and benefits to a speaker of direct and indirect requests. Second, language
has two functions: to convey information and to negotiate the type of relationship holding between speaker and hearer (in particular, dominance, communality, or reciprocity). The emotional costs of a mismatch in the assumed relationship type can create a need
for plausible deniability and, thereby, select for indirectness even when there are no tangible costs. Third, people perceive language
as a digital medium, which allows a sentence to generate common knowledge, to propagate a message with high fidelity, and to
serve as a reference point in coordination games. This feature makes an indirect request qualitatively different from a direct one
even when the speaker and listener can infer each other’s intentions with high confidence.
P
eople often don’t blurt out what
they mean in so many words but
veil their intentions in innuendo,
euphemism, or doublespeak. Here
are some familiar examples:
Y
Y
Y
Y
Y
Would you like to come up and see
my etchings? [a sexual come-on]
If you could pass the guacamole, that
would be awesome. [a polite request]
Nice store you got there. Would be a
real shame if something happened to
it. [a threat]
We’re counting on you to show leadership in our Campaign for the Future. [a solicitation for a donation]
Gee, officer, is there some way we
could take care of the ticket here? [a
bribe]
This phenomenon poses a theoretical puzzle. Indirect speech is inefficient, vulnerable to being misunderstood, and seemingly
unnecessary (because only a na??f could
fail to see past the literal meaning). Yet
politeness and other forms of indirectness
in speech appear to be universal or nearly
so (1). We all play this game and may be
offended at those who don’t, setting the
stage for the hypocrisy and taboo in social
life that are ubiquitously decried, yet ubiquitously obeyed.
Indirect speech also has considerable
practical importance. It figures in the design of computer language understanding
systems, which need to be programmed
not to take indirect requests, such as ‘‘Can
you tell me . . .’’ or ‘‘Do you know . . . ,’’
literally. It is also a major bone of contention in the framing and interpretation of
diplomatic agreements, and in the prosecution of bribery, extortion, and sexual
harassment.
For 50 years, indirect speech has been
intensively studied by linguists, philosophers, and psycholinguists, and the prowww.pnas.org?cgi?doi?10.1073?pnas.0707192105
cesses by which speakers veil their
requests and hearers recover them have
been well documented (1–3). However,
the reason people engage in these maneuvers in the first place (as opposed to saying what they mean clearly and succinctly)
is still largely unexplained. In this Perspective, we apply ideas from the analysis of
signaling in evolutionary biology and from
evolutionary game theory to illuminate
possible advantages of indirect speech (4).
Existing theories of indirect speech are
based on the premise that human conversation is an exercise in pure cooperation,
in which conversational partners work
together toward a common goal—the efficient exchange of information, in the influential theory of H. P. Grice (5), or the
maintenance of ‘‘face’’ (esteem and autonomy) in Penelope Brown and Stephen
Levinson’s Politeness Theory (1). Yet a
fundamental insight from evolutionary
biology is that most social relationships
involve combinations of cooperation and
conflict (6, 7). This insight applies to communication among organisms no less than
to physical actions, and indeed animal
signaling has been found to involve exploitative manipulation as well as the cooperative exchange of information (8). In
the human case, one has to think only of
threats (the proverbial ‘‘offer you can’t
refuse’’), dangerous secrets (hence the
need for witness protection programs),
contaminating leakage (such in blind refereeing, sealed bids, and clinical trials),
and incriminating questions (for which
one answer might be damaging, the other
a lie, and a refusal to answer a de facto
confession that those are the respondent’s
two options) (ref. 9; see also Gerd Gigerenzer’s Law of Indispensable Ignorance, www.edge.org/q2004/page2.html#
gigerenzer). The very existence of indirectness in language suggests that such
adversarial dynamics might be in play in
human communication. In cases of pure
cooperation, one expects maximally efficient conspiratorial whispers; in cases of
pure conflict, one expects a shouting
match (8). The complex, coded communique?s that characterize human language
bespeak a mixture of cooperation and
conflict. This conclusion is reinforced by
considering that most of the practical applications of indirect speech (diplomacy,
extortion, bribery, and sexual harassment)
take place in arenas of conflict.
Indirect speech takes many forms, including gestures of sympathy and deference (termed ‘‘positive politeness’’ and
‘‘negative politeness’’ in Politeness Theory). The phenomenon we address here is
sometimes called ‘‘off-record indirect
speech acts.’’ We propose a theory in
three parts, which apply to interactions
with successively more subtle cost–benefit
structures (4). The first part is the logic of
plausible deniability. In a simple case like
bribing a police officer, the appeal of a
veiled bribe is intuitively clear: If some
officers are corrupt and would accept the
bribe, but others are honest and might
arrest the driver for bribery, an indirect
bribe can be detected by the corrupt cop
while not being blatant enough for the
honest cop to prove it beyond a reasonable doubt. A simple game-theoretic
model can delineate the circumstances in
which indirect speech is an optimal solution to this problem.
Author contributions: S.P. and M.A.N. designed research;
J.J.L. performed research; J.J.L. analyzed data; and S.P.
wrote the paper.
The authors declare no conflict of interest.
This article is a PNAS Direct Submission.
†To
whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail:
pinker@wjh.harvard.edu.
© 2008 by The National Academy of Sciences of the USA
PNAS ? January 22, 2008 ? vol. 105 ? no. 3 ? 833– 838
PERSPECTIVE
The logic of indirect speech
The second part of theory extends the
game-theoretic logic to social situations in
which there are no fines or other tangible
costs and benefits, such as a diner without
a restaurant reservation who bribes a maitre d’ for a quick table, or a person who
tenders a sexual invitation to a friend after a dinner. Unlike the driver and the
officer, the speaker would incur no financial or judicial penalty were the hearer to
turn down a blatant proposition, so the
question here is why speakers still resort
to innuendo.
The third part addresses scenarios in
which people use indirect speech even
when the degree of uncertainty about the
other’s intentions is low—either because
variance among listeners’ values is low (so
speakers’ confidence in their values is
high), or because the listener is astute
enough to understand the intent of a
speaker’s innuendo with high confidence.
Why, in such cases, is a thinly veiled proposition still more acceptable than a naked
one? The answer must pertain to some
property of overt language itself, as opposed to the processes of social inference
that power the interpretation of innuendo.
Part 1: Plausible Deniability
Consider a speaker whose speech obeys
Grice’s maxims (5) of efficient communication and is thereby always succinct,
truthful, direct, and relevant. He is pulled
over for running a red light and is pondering whether to bribe the officer. His
choice is whether to remain silent or to
say, ‘‘If you let me go without a ticket, I’ll
pay you $50.’’
Unfortunately, he doesn’t know
whether the officer is corrupt and will
accept the bribe or is honest and will arrest him for attempting to bribe an officer.
The game-theoretic conundrum where
one actor does not know the values of the
other has been explored by Thomas
Schelling, who calls it the Identification
Problem (9). The payoffs are as follows:
Dishonest
officer
Honest
officer
Don’t
bribe
Traffic
ticket
Traffic
ticket
Bribe
Go free
Arrest for
bribery
If the driver doesn’t try to bribe the
officer (first row), either way he gets a
ticket; if he does offer the bribe (second
row), the stakes are much higher either
way: going free with just the cost of the
bribe if he is facing a dishonest cop, or an
arrest for bribery if he is facing an honest one.
Now consider a driver who knows how
to use an ‘‘implicature’’ to convey an ambiguous bribe (‘‘So maybe the best thing
would be to take care of it here’’). Suppose he knows that the officer can recognize it as an intended bribe, and that the
officer knows that he couldn’t make a
bribery charge stick in court because the
ambiguous wording would prevent a prosecutor from proving his guilt beyond a
reasonable doubt. The driver now has a
third option:
Dishonest
officer
Honest
officer
Don’t
bribe
Traffic
ticket
Traffic
ticket
Bribe
Go free
Arrest for
bribery
Implicate
bribe
Go free
Traffic
ticket
The payoffs in this third row combine the very large advantage of bribing a dishonest cop with the relatively
small penalty of failing to bribe an
honest one. In these circumstances,
indirect speech is the rational option.
Note how this analysis is inconsistent
with the traditional idea that indirect
speech is an implementation of pure
cooperation: The driver here is using
indirect speech not to help the honest
officer attain his goal (viz., to enforce
the law) but rather to confound that
goal.
The intuition that indirect speech can
be an optimal strategy can be confirmed
in a simple model of a Rational Briber.
The expected cost of a bribe y can be calculated from (i) the proportion of officers
that are honest, q; (ii) the cost of the
bribe, c0; (iii) the cost of the ticket, c1
(which must be greater than the cost of
the bribe, or it would never pay to bribe);
(iv) the cost of an arrest for bribery, c2
(which must be greater than the cost of
the ticket; otherwise, it would always pay
to bribe); and, the crucial psychological
variable, (v) the probability p that an officer will treat a statement with a given degree of directness d as an attempted bribe.
Directness is a semantic variable that corresponds to the degree of vagueness of
the proposition (the number of readings)
and the proportion of those readings that
are consistent with its being a bribe rather
than an innocent remark. An if–then proposition (‘‘If you let me go, I will give you
$50’’) is most direct; a leading question
(‘‘Is there some way to take care of it
here?’’) is less direct; and a generic remark (‘‘I’ve learned my lesson; you don’t
have to worry about me doing this again’’)
is least direct. (In practice, p can be estimated empirically by asking people their
degree of confidence that a given sentence was intended as a bribe.) Finally,
the target of the indirect speech must de-
834 ? www.pnas.org?cgi?doi?10.1073?pnas.0707192105
cide how to react to the proposition; this
tendency can be captured by a decision
function, L, which monotonically relates
the directness of the proposition to the
probability that the officer will treat it as
an attempted bribe and act accordingly.
Putting these together, the expected cost
to a driver facing a corrupt cop is yc ?
c0 p ? c1(1 ? p); the cost when facing an
honest cop is yh ? c2 p ? c1(1 ? p); altogether, the driver’s expected cost is y ?
qyh ? (1 ? q)yc.
Now, if the corrupt and honest cops
share a single linear decision function
L and hence have the same p for any
proposition, the optimal level of directness will simply be determined by the
fraction of honest officers. If q ? (c1
? c0)/(c2 ? c0), then the optimum
strategy for the driver is not to make
any bribing attempt at all: d ? 0. If the
fraction of honest officers is less than
this critical value, then the optimum
strategy for the driver is to make the
most direct and unambiguous bribing
attempt, d ? 1. In this model, so far,
indirect speech is never an optimum
strategy. The reason is that the cost
functions are linear in d (Fig. 1).
For an indirect bribe to be advantageous to the driver, his overall cost
function must be nonlinear. This situation could come about if the honest
and corrupt officers employ nonlinear
decision functions Lh and Lc relating
the probability they will act (p) to the
directness of the bribe (d), and if the
two decision functions are distinct.
That is, even if honest and dishonest
officers interpret indirect speech the
same way, and thus have identical assessments as whether an invitation to
‘‘settle it here’’ is an attempted bribe,
the honest cop may be more hesitant
to arrest the driver than the dishonest
cop is to accept the implicit bribe, because of the burden of proof in a prosecution. In general, the expected cost
for the driver is as follows:
y ? q?c2Lh?d? ? c1?1 ? Lh?d??? ? ?1 ? q?
? ?c0Lc?d? ? c1?1 ? Lc?d???
In the simple case in which Lh and Lc
are step functions, the scenario may be
displayed as in Fig. 2.
The expected cost for the driver is as
follows:
y ? c1 if d ? d c
y ? qc1 ? ?1 ? q?c0 if d c ? d ? d h
y ? qc2 ? ?1 ? q?c0 if d h ? d
The intermediate region, dc ? d ? dh, has
the lowest expected cost for the driver
and, therefore, represents the optimum
Pinker et al.
cost
arrest
honest
ticket
corrupt
subtle
bribe
explicit
directness of proposition
Fig. 1. The expected cost to a driver of tendering
bribes to honest and corrupt police officers with
linear decision functions.
level of directness. This result confirms
that there are plausible circumstances in
which indirect speech is an optimal strategy and is a formal implementation of the
everyday concept of plausible deniability.
The result does not depend on the officers’ decision rules Lh and Lc being stepfunctions. They could also be sigmoid
functions such as logistic or normal-ogive.
As long as corrupt officers have lower
threshold parameters than honest officers
in their sigmoid function, that is, Lh(d) ?
Lc(d) over some appreciable interval, it is
easy to show that a wide range of parameter values yields a minimum of y with
respect to d between the boundaries of
silence at one end and bald directness at
the other. The results also hold when
there are distributions of the threshold
parameters in the two populations of police officers. Yet another plausible extension to real life is the use of a sequence of
statements escalating in directness (2),
thereby probing the reaction of the officer
(‘‘What a beautiful morning. I’m very
sorry for speeding. I know I’ll have to pay
for my mistake. I admire officers doing
their duty. Can I make a contribution to
the policeman’s benevolent association? Is
there some way we could avoid the paperwork and settle it here?’’).
How plausible is the key assumption
that the decision functions of honest and
dishonest officers differ? The answer depends on the determinants of their cost
functions. Take the honest officer: why
wouldn’t he arrest anyone who offered a
veiled bribe, exactly as a dishonest officer
would accept all such bribes? The reason
is that even if all dishonest drivers offer
remarks that can be interpreted (correctly) as implicated bribes, some honest
drivers make those remarks too, as innocent observations (this is inherent to the
definition of indirectness), so any arrest
might be unsuccessful. An unsuccessful
arrest might be costly to the officer, exposing him to a charge of false arrest and
the police department to punitive damages. The cost to the honest officer of
Pinker et al.
arresting the driver will thus depend on
the proportion of dishonest and honest
drivers who utter a remark with that level
of directness, and on the professional
rewards for successful arrests and the penalties for false ones. Conversely, for a dishonest cop, the cost depends on the
amount of the bribe, the chances of his
being arrested in a sting operation, and
the penalty for being convicted of accepting a bribe. It is unlikely that the two decision functions would have the same
shape.
Part 2: Relationship Negotiation
The second puzzle of indirect speech is
why people use it in nonlegal situations,
where there are no financial or legal payoffs and penalties. Consider bribery in
everyday life, such as bribing a maitre d’
at a popular restaurant to be seated immediately despite having no reservation.
A restaurant critic, given the assignment
to write about such an experience for
Gourmet magazine (10), reported that the
prospect of being turned down filled him
with anxiety and that he resorted to indirect speech to tender the bribe, such as ‘‘I
hope you can fit us in’’ or ‘‘I was wondering if you might have a cancellation.’’ The
second part of the theory thus seeks to
explain why speech would be indirect in a
nonlegal context such as a restaurant
bribe or in a sexual overture among peers.
A key to this puzzle comes from Politeness Theory (1), which proposes that language serves two purposes: to convey a
proposition (e.g., a bribe, a command, an
offer) and to negotiate and maintain a
relationship. People achieve these dual
ends by using language at two levels. The
literal form of a sentence is consistent
with the safest relationship between
speaker and hearer. At the same time, by
implicating a meaning between the lines,
the speaker counts on the listener to infer
its real intent, which may initiate a different relationship. For example, in a polite
request, such as ‘‘If you could pass the
salt, that would be awesome,’’ the literal
content violates Grice’s maxims of
efficient conversation (5) because it is irrelevant and untruthful (i.e., an overstatement). The hearer implicitly reasons: ‘‘The
speaker is saying that an outcome of an
action by me is good. Therefore, he must
be requesting it.’’ The overall effect is that
the intended content—an imperative—
gets through, but without the presumption
of dominance that would ordinarily
accompany an imperative, with its tacit
assumption by the speaker that he can
expect the hearer’s compliance.
This reticence raises the question of
what kind of relationships, other than
dominance, people are mindful of when
choosing their words. Alan Fiske (11) has
advanced the strong claim that human
relationships in all cultures fall into only
three distinct types and that most of the
complexities of social life within and
across cultures may be explained in terms
of variation as to which relationship type
applies to a given dyad. (Fiske’s theory
also posits a fourth relationship type,
‘‘market pricing,’’ but holds that it is specific to industrial and postindu…
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