Reflections on cooperativity and intention in communication

Abstract

Human communication is often depicted as a collaborative activity characterized by a high level of cooperativeness, as both sender and receiver assume supposedly interdependent roles in a process that essentially involves inferring the sender’s communicative intention through the signals emitted within a given communicative context. However, the alleged existence of unintentional forms of communication contradicts this interpretation. Building upon the overall framework of Herbert H. Clark’s joint activity theory (1996) and assuming that the overarching function of communication is to facilitate the coordination of cooperative activities, the role of communicative intention is reassessed within the general framework of collective behaviors with the aim of analyzing its function in action coordination and communication dynamics to verify whether it is an inherent part of this dynamic. In conclusion, it is suggested that the constraint imposed by the opportunities for cooperation offered by the situational context allows the apprehension of the situation to serve as the primary basis of communication. This implies that the signals from the sender would merely constitute a part of this context, the contribution of which to the final determination of the coordination solution between the agents would vary. As a consequence, in terms of purely informational functionality, there appears to be no qualitative difference between intentional communication and unintentional information transfers. This perspective shifts emphasis to the receiver, redefines the cooperative nature of communication, strengthens parallels of communication with other coordination devices, and offers a coherent account of so-called “unintentional communication”.