I see that the debate went on and on and my contribution (or rather, Jan's contribution) may be a bit late to make sense. However, this is what he has just written to me today in response to JKpate's answer to his message (a page above this one):
As far as I understand jkpate's point on context selection, I think a number of doubts are raised by findings about relevance.
1. Relevance crucially has to do with changes to one's beliefs (surprises, new information, funniness etc.) rather than with merely conforming to probabilistic frames of what is typically expected.
2. If the model is still meant to be a code model, all speakers and hearers would have to use the same frames of the world around them to construct the relevant contexts (as with a codebook). But relevance is always relevance to an individual, and the "sophisticated understanding" (Sperber) required in adult communication takes differences and changes in individual perspectives into account. I suspect that this is one thing which makes humans different from animals.
3. "Sophisticated understanding" is not just based in processes in individual brains, but in social processes happening between people. So a simulation of what goes on in an individual would not be enough to solve the puzzle.
I don't know if this makes any sense? Personally, I tend to think that the task is ultimately not tractatable in an information-theoretic framework or even in a cognitive-science one, but that we need a relevance theory integrated with a social theory (I argued some of this in a Journal of Pragmatics article in 2010).
I think that I am getting lost in the information theory framework, so I would just need to understand (as simply as you may express it --think of me as a moron and try to put some sense into my thick skull as clearly as you can) the point you seem to be making.
For you, I take it, linguistic meaning is exactly the same as the speaker's meaning.
So, for instance,
If I say,
e.1. Here is a school for boys and girls of wealthy parents
There is no ambiguity in the syntactico-semantic meaning of the sentence, and, therefore, there's no need to indulge in non coded inferencing processes to get MY meaning, which, in this case is, say, that the school allows all kind of boys and only those girls whose parents are rich.
Or, suppose I say:
e.2. The beach is full
The "fullness" I am thinking about is not full of sand, nor full of pets, nor full of people, but rather, full of empty coke bottles which disgusts me. Are you saying that to get to this thought of mine, you have enough with your linguistic decoding?
Suppose, now, I tell you
e.3. Don't you dare!
Do you maintain that the coded meaning of the sentence is enough to make my wish clear, namely, that you don't dare smoke in the hospital, or that you abstain from cheating in an exam? Or thousand of other thoughts that may be UNDER-covered by the use of that linguistic expression at different moments? One does not need to indulge in inferencing processes? Is that what you mean?
But these operations (solving ambiguities, determining scope, and fixing references) are not the only problems to solve with a code model. Take a simple straightforward coded linguistic expression, like, say, I have been to X, and tell me please how you do account for the altogether different consequences you may extract in the following two examples:
e.4.a. I have been to the bar
e.4.b. I have been to the Republic of Congo
How come that in the first interpretation of e.4.a., one assumes that the past is considered quite near the present, and does not normally imply that you have done so one or a few times in your life, but quite normally; whereas the reverse is true when interpreting e.4.b?
Now, if you answer me with little formulae, I will be stuck as a non-winged duck in the desert, and will not be able to respond, unless Jan comes to my help again --which will perhaps stretch his patience a bit too much.
You see, I thought it was obvious that semantics (coded organisation of linguistic material) cannot cover the whole range of human mental representations one wants at one moment or other make manifest through a communicative process.
It seems, I was wrong. It is far from obvious to intelligent and dedicated scientists like you seem to be.
I am astonished!
[Afterthought: if this fact is far from obvious, although we indulge in communication processes trillions of times in our life and we can watch what happens DIRECTLY, can we imagine what a debate on other less familiar ideas (i.e., evolution, the existence of god, art, heliocentric systems ... and whatnot) will be? An enormous fuss!]
