Researching the unspoken

April 6, 2006 8:40 AM

Abstract/academic-filter: How do various disciplines quantify unspoken implications or mutual understandings? Lingustics, social sciences, anything!

So I'm trying to find a fresh perspective for my thesis topic, which relates to treaties. I'm trying to get at the understandings shared by everyone at the negotiating table, but that nevertheless don't make it into the treaty in a manifest way.

I'm curious how other disciplines have approached and isolated unspoken stuff of this variety. I'm still very much in the thinking/planning stage of my research, so I don't at all feel constrained by realistic aims at this point. I'm just trying to get an idea of intersubjective lit to browse through as I come up with my research design.

I'll be checking this all day, so if I'm not clear let me know.

posted by electric_counterpoint to Grab Bag (10 answers total)

I don't know how well this fits what you are thinking, but in my field there is an area of research into "psychological contracts." These are the psychological contracts that people generate during the employment process that can be entirely different than the physical contract. Violating the psychological contract can cause real problems. One of the leaders in this field is Denise Rousseau. Her website has a link to her vita which lists a book she has written on the topic as well as a number of papers.
posted by bove at 8:44 AM on April 6, 2006

Ooooh, neat question! In linguistics most of the questions you raise fall within the field of pragmatics. Pragmatics is said to be the study of the realm that bridges the literal meaning of a sentence, and everything else that the speaker "means" when he says it. This can include everything from shared cultural knowledge to things like sarcasm and metaphor.

You might want to start out at the Wikipedia metanode for pragmatics.

Here is some related vocabulary that might lead you interesting places:

Implicature

Presupposition

Paul Grice is a big-name philosopher in the field.

You'd probably also be interested in the philosophical discipline of universal pragmatics.

Discourse analysis.

Okay, actually, I give up now. I'm giving you a really mixed, shallow smattering of stuff. Honestly, this is a vastly rich linguistic and philosophic literature. Just putzing around on Wikipedia should open up dozens of avenues for you.
posted by miagaille at 9:20 AM on April 6, 2006

Response by poster: Bove- that's exactly the kind of thing I'm after! I'll definitely be checking out Dr. Rousseau's work.
posted by electric_counterpoint at 9:22 AM on April 6, 2006

I think that linguistics (theoretical linguistics at least) won't have exactly the kind of angle you are looking for -- it is not so interested in things like speaker choices (why certain things are left implicit, etc.) However, you might be interested in something like David Lewis' classic paper "scorekeeping in a language game" (citeseer link). this seems to be a (probably illegal) pdf of the article. This, along with Stalnaker's "Assertion" were very influential in a model of conversation known as "dynamic semantics", which uses the tools of intensional logic to model things like the "common ground" -- the set of propositions that participants in a conversation are mutually and publicly (but not necessarily explicitly) committed to. On dynamic semantics one thing to read might be Groenendijk, Stokhof, and Veltman, "Changing the Context" (pdf). Depending on how comfortable you are with logic and formal systems, there is much, much more. There is also a recent resurgence in game-theoretical modeling of discourse, but it is very technical. If you want tools for quantifying what you describe, though, from the linguistic perspective you probably couldn't do better than game theory combined with intensional logics!

One other (closely related) term in linguistics (and philosophy of language) you want to look for is "presupposition", especially "speaker presupposition". I'm sure there must be non-technical surveys of presupposition, but all that's coming to mind right now is David Beaver's survey article (ps file). If you pick up any semantics textbook (such as Chierchia and McConnell-Ginet, citeseer link) there should be a readable introduction to this. You also may be interested in "presupposition accommodation", the way speakers implicitly accommodate presuppositions in the utterances of others. (This idea was in fact first introduced by the Lewis article I mentioned above.)

Also, on a different note, you may want to look into the AI subfield sometimes known as "multi-agent systems". In particular, things like the "Belief, Desire, Intentions" (BDI) model which attempt to model the behavior of interacting rational agents that have (surprise) beliefs, desires, and intentions, which may be implicit. The idea is that agents should be able to reason about the BDIs of other agents based on observed behavior. The form of this that I've seen is basically a kind of intentional logic, though I'm not up on the details any more. I wish I could give links here but it's been a few years since I was involved in this field. One person I know about who was working on these models is Michael Woolridge, and he seems to have a book which you could probably get from the library. MAS people are also very into game theory.
posted by advil at 9:22 AM on April 6, 2006 [1 favorite]

I was just trying to define 'public meanings' for symbols for the last few days. Most of what I found was information on percieved value with regards to monetary versus personal values. To get 'mutual understandings' of what was valued, they did a sorting exercise with a population made up of one demographic, and then did a bunch of multi-dimensional statistics on it. (NB: I was taught statistics by an idiot sociopath, so following the statistics itself was beyond me.)

In the end they found out what sort of concepts linked to objects were more valued than others. So in order to define 'public meaning' for an object, they basically polled a bunch of people, using card-sorting, and came up with the statistically average agreed-upon belief.

This was Richins 1994 "Valuing Things:..." in the Journal of Consumer Research (on JSTOR) and Prentice 1987 "Psychological Correspondence of Possessions, Attitudes, and Values." in J of Personality and Social Psychology 53. (not on JSTOR)

The Prentice article expanded it to 'how people who value things differently react to different issues they were not familiar with.' I have no idea if this is what you're looking for, but it did seem somewhat related. (I'm doing my MA in historical archaeology/anthropology, so that's my background.)
posted by cobaltnine at 9:40 AM on April 6, 2006

Response by poster: Wow, I clearly have a lot to go through. I'm vaguely familiar with implicature from a formal logic class I'm taking, and I keep running into MAS papers when searching for similar stuff on JSTOR. Anyway, thanks and keep it coming!
posted by electric_counterpoint at 10:08 AM on April 6, 2006

In some versions of cognitive science you may want to check out frame semantics, or script semantics.

These have to do with making explicit the underlying shared background knowledge say needed to understand a sentence like "John opened the whisky and poured a shot".

E.g. "John opened the bottle that contains whiskey, and poured a shot glass quantity of whiskey from that bottle into a drinking container
posted by MonkeySaltedNuts at 10:16 AM on April 6, 2006

In my realm of qualitative social science research 'discourse analysis' has come to rather loosely name that range of methods appropriate to analysing both what is spoken and unspoken in human communication. As e_c points to - there is a lot of overlap here as researchers have done well to colonize whatever methods get the job done regardless of disciplinary boundaries. Good luck.
posted by anglophiliated at 10:24 AM on April 6, 2006

This instantly reminds me of Michael Polanyi, though I can't remember if/how he quantifies tacit knowing.
posted by unknowncommand at 11:43 AM on April 6, 2006

I'm trying to get at the understandings shared by everyone at the negotiating table, but that nevertheless don't make it into the treaty in a manifest way.


Historians of political thought have been dealing with precisely these questions for the past fifty years or so.

J. G. A. Pocock, for instance, has written extensively about the concept of 'languages' -- sets of shared discourses and assumptions that shape the way ideas can be expressed, but never at an explicitly conscious level.

Here's a quote from one of his methodological pieces:

The historian's reconstitution of the context that makes the text, as action and event, intellible ... becomes a matter of reconstituting the languages in which certain illocutions ... were carried out, and of discerning what the individual text, author, or performance did with the opportunities offered and constraints imposed by the languages available to it.

(Pocock, 'Texts as Events: Reflections on the History of Political Thought', in K. Sharpe and S. N. Zwicker (eds.) Politics of Discourse: The Literature and Writing of Seventeenth-Century England (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1987), 26.

Pocock's written a lot of methodological stuff; maybe the most sustained collection is his Politics, Language and Time (London, 1972).

Another political historian you could look at is Quentin Skinner. His Visions of Politics vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2002) has most of his most important methdological essays -- again, mostly focussed on early modern Europe, but the the ideas are transferrable to other contexts pretty easily.

If you have a lot of time on your hands, you could also check out H. G. Gadamer's Truth and Method, which discusses at length the importance of presuppositions and prejudices in the formation of ideas.
posted by Sonny Jim at 7:53 PM on April 7, 2006