Some Features of Communication Situations

Abstract

Lewis is right, I believe, in assigning a key role to truthfulness and trust in the description of interpersonal communication. But some of the argument in Chapter I was designed to show that the role he chooses for these notions is the wrong one; an account was there proposed, both of meaning and of what it is for an act to be established in a population as a bearer of meaning, which left open the possibility that the members of a population are not regularly truthful and trusting in their use of language and signalling systems. That there is a need for such an alternative account to Lewis’s stems from the fact that a great deal of communication goes on against a background of dishonesty and suspicion, and from what would seem to be the reasonable hypothesis that one and the same language or signalling system can be used in both an atmosphere of mutual trust and an atmosphere of mutual suspicion. Use of a language (or signalling system) involves the employment of a set of meaning-bearing devices; it is my contention that if truthfulness and trust are not made constitutive of language (or signalling system) use — if it is not required by the theory that the members of the language/signalling system-using population are regularly truthful and trusting — then a more flexible and realistic picture of what goes on in communication situations may be presented; and this picture may be more sensitive to the manifold ways in which meaning-bearing devices may be exploited.