Miscommunication phenomena such as repair in dialogue are important indicators of the quality of communication. Automatic detection is therefore a key step toward tools that can characterize communication quality and thus help in applications from call center management to mental health monitoring. However, most existing computational linguistic approaches to these phenomena are unsuitable for general use in this way, and particularly for analyzing human–human dialogue: Although models of other-repair are common in human-computer dialogue systems, they tend to focus on (...) specific phenomena, missing the range of repair and repair initiation forms used by humans; and while self-repair models for speech recognition and understanding are advanced, they tend to focus on removal of “disfluent” material important for full understanding of the discourse contribution, and/or rely on domain-specific knowledge. We explain the requirements for more satisfactory models, including incrementality of processing and robustness to sparsity. We then describe models for self- and other-repair detection that meet these requirements and investigate how they perform on datasets from a range of dialogue genres and domains, with promising results. (shrink)

Successful language use requires accurate intention recognition. However, sometimes this can be undermined because communication occurs within an interpersonal context. In this research, I used a relatively large set of speech acts (n = 32) and explored how variability in their inherent face‐threat influences the extent to which they are successfully recognized by a recipient, as well as the confidence of senders and receivers in their communicative success. Participants in two experiments either created text messages (senders) designed to perform a (...) specific speech act (e.g., agree) or interpreted those text messages (receivers) in terms of the specific speech act being performed. The speech acts were scaled in terms of their degree of face threat. In both experiments, speech acts that were more threatening were less likely to be correctly recognized than those that were less threatening. Additionally, the messages of the more threatening speech acts were longer and lower in clout than the less threatening speech acts. Senders displayed greater confidence in communicative success than receivers, but judgments of communicative success (for both senders and receivers) were unrelated to actual communicative success. The implications of these results for our understanding of actual communicative episodes are discussed. (shrink)

McCabe & Healey argue that in patient‐psychiatrist interaction, the more the participants engage in repair, i.e., trying to fix potential misunderstandings, the better the outcomes of the interaction, as measured by treatment adherence and the quality of the Dr – patient relationship. This holds both for self‐repair, when psychiatrists fix their own utterances, as well as other‐repair, where patients try to fix the understanding displayed by the psychiatrist.

This paper studies a sender-receiver game in which both players want the receiver to choose the state-optimal action. Before observing the state, the sender observes a “contextual signal,” a payoff-irrelevant signal that correlates with states and is imperfectly shared with the receiver. Once the sender observes the state, the sender sends a message to the receiver, incurring a small messaging cost. It is shown that there is no miscommunication in any efficient equilibrium if the messaging cost is uniform or (...) contextual information is poorly shared between players. However, if the messaging costs are different between some messages, and contextual information can affect the probability ranking of states and is shared reasonably well, any efficient equilibrium that favors the sender exhibits miscommunication. Furthermore, the messages that cause miscommunication can be coarse or ambiguous, depending on how well players share contextual information. (shrink)

Language of the law, due to historical, sociological and cultural factors, is often characterized as linguistically obscure and difficult to understand. This is often at odds with the concept that clarity of a message conveyed during court proceedings is crucial to the understanding of the mechanics of the legal processes, as well as their outcome. The present analysis examines structural and lexical features used by men and women litigators in court. This investigation concentrates in particular on those linguistic features used (...) by lawyers that lead to gender-based miscommunication that may adversely influence the outcome of the proceedings. The linguistic features that were examined included the use of syntactically complex utterances and obsolete vocabulary. The data included transcripts of court proceedings and were collected at Milwaukee County Courthouse, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA. The analysis revealed that men lawyers use structurally complex language more frequently than women lawyers. The present investigation provides evidence that recognizing different gender specific discourse strategies may significantly improve the clarity of legal language. (shrink)

This thesis integrates the epistemology of testimony with work on the epistemology, psychology, and metaphysics of language. Epistemologists of testimony typically ask what conditions must be met for an agent to gain testimonial justification or knowledge that p given that p has been asserted, and this assertion has been understood. Questions regarding the audience's ability to grasp communicated contents are largely ignored. This is a mistake. Work in the philosophy of language suggests that the determination and recovery of communicated contents (...) is far from straightforward, and can go wrong in many ways. This thesis investigates the epistemology of testimony in light of this work, with a special focus on miscommunication. The introduction provides a brief overview of some relevant work on testimony, the philosophy of language, and psychology, and argues that there is good reason to investigate the three. One obvious problem in this area is that if testimonial knowledge requires knowledge of what is said then the risk of miscommunication will block testimonial knowledge. Chapter two argues that testimonial knowledge does not require knowledge of what is said. The remaining four chapters discuss problems which do to arise from miscommunication. Chapters three and four focus on the epistemic uncertainty of communication with context sensitive terms. Chapter three argues that many beliefs formed on the basis of context sensitive testimony are unsafe and insensitive. Chapter four argues that speakers often have plausible deniability about the contents of their assertions. Chapters five and six explore types of miscommunication which arise as a result of background mental states affecting our linguistic understanding. Chapter five explores the social/ethical consequences of this, arguing that certain groups are disproportionately subject to harmful misinterpretation. Chapter six argues that testimonial anti-reductionists make the wrong predictions about a range of cases of cognitive penetration. (shrink)

In post-Gricean pragmatics, communication is said to be successful when a hearer recovers a speaker’s intended message. On this assumption, proposals for ‘what is said’ – the semantic, propositional meaning of a speaker’s utterance – are typically centred around the content the speaker aimed to communicate. However, these proposals tend not to account for the fact that speakers can be deliberately vague, leaving no clear proposition to be recovered, or that a speaker can accept a hearer’s misconstrual even though the (...) speaker didn’t intend it. In such cases, identifying ‘what is said’ is more contentious, even though communication is arguably no less successful. Building on recent interactionist approaches to meaning, this chapter offers a proposal for ‘what is said’ that can account for cases of ‘imperfect’ communication in which the recovery of a speaker’s intention goes awry. This involves taking ‘what is said’ as the co-constructed meaning that the speaker and hearer jointly agree on, giving ‘grounded meanings’ – those mutually and manifestly accepted into the discourse by speaker and hearer – higher precedence in a theory of communication than simply the speaker’s intended meaning. In such cases, rather than speaker and hearer converging at the level of explicit utterance content, communication is expected to be successful as long as the hearer recovers a proposition which is compatible with the speaker’s higher-order discursive goal. The hearer’s uptake is then allowed to override the content of the speaker’s intended meaning in the process of negotiating ‘what is said’. (shrink)

Clapp et al. (2025) demonstrate how words and phrases do much more than communicate representations of, or “tell about,” the world. In this commentary, we elaborate upon Clapp et al.’s description...

Between Thought, Religion, and Contemporaneity: the hyperboles of being and the equivocal communication of the sacred (Entre o Pensamento, a Religião e a Contemporaneidade: as hipérboles do ser e a comunicação equívoca do sagrado).The contemporary philosophical thought regards itself as postmetaphysical, post-religious, postmodern, and post-philosophical. It advocates for metaphysics without metaphysics, ethics without ethics, and religion without religion. This paper aims at exploring the possibilities of thinking through the place and role of God, religion, and mystique in the philosophical discourse (...) of contemporaneity, having William Desmond’s thought as a reference. According to Desmond’s thought, there’s an intimate, idiotic, porosity in the call to truth. Thought is communication openness for its own originating source. This means that thought is situated at the knowledge threshold, and it may open up to a reverence attitude in the face of the mystery of being. Through metaphysical metaphors, intermediate names going beyond the univocal determination of metaphysical constructs from the past, Desmond aims at thinking through something which is present amidst finitude, indicating a foremost transcendence going beyond our experience: an upper transcendence essentially asymmetrical to our own transcendence. Such metaphors or hyperboles safeguard the enigma involved in the issue of God and the religious being. This enigma or mystery isn’t something negative, but openness for a fuller and overdetermined agapic origin. Keywords: Metaxology. Religion. Postmodern. Agape. Mystique. Resumo O pensamento filosófico contemporâneo se compreende como pós-metafisico, pós-religioso, pós-moderno e pós-filosófico. Ele advoga uma metafisica sem metafisica, uma ética sem ética e uma religião sem religião. O objetivo deste artigo é explorar as possibilidades de refletir sobre o lugar e o papel de Deus, da religião e da mística no discurso filosófico da contemporaneidade, tendo como referência o pensamento de William Desmond. Para o pensamento desmondiano, existe uma porosidade íntima, idiótica, no chamado à verdade. O pensamento é uma abertura comunicativa para a sua própria fonte originadora. Isso significa que o pensamento se encontra no limiar do saber, podendo abrir-se para uma posição de reverência diante do mistério do ser. Através de metáforas metafisicas, nomes intermediários para além da determinação unívoca das construções metafisicas do passado, Desmond busca refletir sobre algo presente em meio à finitude, que indica uma transcendência primeira que vai além da nossa experiência: uma transcendência superior essencialmente assimétrica à nossa própria transcendência. Tais metáforas ou hipérboles asseguram o enigma envolvido na questão de Deus e do ser religioso. Tal enigma ou mistério não é algo negativo, mas uma abertura para uma origem agápica mais plena e supradeterminada. Palavras-chave: Metaxologia. Religião. Pós-moderno. Ágape. Mística. (shrink)

Collaborative interaction pervades everyday practices: work meetings, innovation and product design, education and arts. Previous studies have pointed to the central role of acknowledgement and acceptance for the success of joint action, by creating affiliation and signaling understanding. We argue that various forms of explicit miscommunication are just as critical to challenge, negotiate and integrate individual contributions in collaborative creative activities. Through qualitative microanalysis of spontaneous coordination in collective creative LEGO constructions, we individuate three interactional styles: inclusive, characterized by (...) acknowledgment and praise; instructional, characterized by self-repair; and integrative, characterized by widespread self- and other-repair. We investigate how different interaction styles leave distinct traces in the resulting LEGO models. The inclusive interaction style results in concatenations of individual contributions with little coherence and core narrative. The instructional style produces coherent, but individually driven models. Finally, the integrative style generates more innovative models, synthesizing individual contributions in shared narratives or schemas. (shrink)

Autistic speakers commonly report feelings of being misunderstood. Where communication is concerned, such misunderstandings manifest when the communicative intentions of an autist—i.e., an autistic person—are misinterpreted by their interlocutor(s). While in some cases this can lead to seemingly benign kinds of miscommunication, such as when someone takes what was intended as a genuine assertion or question as a joke, the same basic phenomenon can also lead to illegitimate criticism of the autist—e.g., for being ‘rude’ or ‘weird’. I argue that (...) such misunderstandings, given their frequency, cause serious harm to members of the autistic community and propose that the frequency of autists being so misunderstood can be explained by a sort of intellectual arrogance often exhibited by allistic (non-autistic) interlocutors. Allistic speakers have a tendency to smuggle certain assumptions into the conversational backdrop because they take these assumptions to simply be matters of ‘common sense’. Yet—as far as I am aware—no principled, much less predictive, account has been provided to explain where such assumptions are actually coming from. My suggestion is that the dogmatic way that allistic speakers tend to rely on their ‘common sense’ assumptions in the interpretation of conversational exchanges opens them up to misunderstanding the intentions of others in potentially harmful ways. (shrink)

Pain is a global problem whose social, economic, and psychological costs are immeasurable. It is now seen as the most common reason why people seek medical (including psychiatric) care. But what is pain? This article shows that the discourse of pain tends to suffer from the same problems of ethnocentrism and obscurity as the discourse of emotions in general. Noting that in the case of pain, the costs of miscommunication are particularly high, this article offers a new paradigm for (...) communicating about pain. It shows how the use of natural semantic metalanguage (NSM) techniques developed in linguistic semantics can help in this area, as in other areas concerned with human subjectivity, and can lead to a greater understanding between psychologists, psychiatrists, medical practitioners, social workers, and ordinary suffering mortals. (shrink)

Schober et al. describe two studies on how survey interview respondents misunderstand interview questions. After answering a survey, participants are given standardized definitions of the questions they have just answered. Even apparently simple questions such as “Have you smoked more than 100 cigarettes?” are interpreted very differently by participants. Moreover, clarifying the meaning of the definitions with the interviewer does not always help resolve the miscommunication.

This chapter examines how ambiguous language complicates communication by producing multiple interpretations for each word and phrase. It demonstrates that speakers and writers actively manage these ambiguities through context and tone, as illustrated by the example of the phrase “Cats sit.” The chapter underscores that miscommunication arises when interlocutors use words with differing meanings, leading to confusion in casual conversations and formal settings such as legal contracts. It highlights that experts and rhetoricians deliberately manipulate ambiguity to bolster their arguments (...) while inadvertently causing everyday misunderstandings. Finally, the chapter emphasizes that communicators persistently clarify and negotiate meaning, maintaining a dynamic balance between linguistic creativity and precision. (shrink)

Due to an unfortunate miscommunication with the copy editor an important reference was omitted from this recently published article. The reference that should be included is.

There is a correlation between positions taken on some scientific questions and political leaning. One way to explain this correlation is the cultural cognition hypothesis (CCH): people's political leanings are causing them to process evidence to maintain fixed answers to the questions, rather than to seek the truth. Another way is the different background belief hypothesis (DBBH): people of different political leanings have different background beliefs which rationalize different positions on these scientific questions. In this article, I argue for two (...) things. I argue that two attempts by proponents of the CCH to discredit the DBBH fail. And I argue that this matters, because while the CCH makes epistemic paternalistic interventions seem called for (as some philosophers have argued compellingly), the DBBH does not. The DBBH makes it much easier to stay closer to an ideal of deliberative democracy. (shrink)

Polysemous concepts with multiple related meanings pervade natural languages, yet some philosophers argue that we should eliminate them to avoid miscommunication and pointless debates in scientific discourse. This paper defends the legitimacy of polysemous concepts in science against this eliminativist challenge. My approach analyses such concepts as patchworks with multiple scale-dependent, technique-involving, domain-specific and property-targeting uses (patches). I demonstrate the generality of my approach by applying it to "hardness" in materials science, "homology" in evolutionary biology, "gold" in chemistry and (...) "cortical column" in neuroscience. Such patchwork concepts are legitimate if the techniques used to apply them produce reliable results, the domains to which they are applied are homogenous, and the properties they refer to are significant to describe, classify or explain the behavior of entities in the extension of the concept. By following these normative constraints, researchers can avoid miscommunication and pointless debates without having to eliminate polysemous patchwork concepts in scientific discourse. (shrink)

In the era of information and communication, issues of misinformation and miscommunication are more pressing than ever. _Epistemic injustice - _one of the most important and ground-breaking subjects to have emerged in philosophy in recent years - refers to those forms of unfair treatment that relate to issues of knowledge, understanding, and participation in communicative practices. The Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Injustice is an outstanding reference source to the key topics, problems and debates in this exciting subject. The first (...) collection of its kind, it comprises over thirty chapters by a team of international contributors, divided into five parts: Core Concepts Liberatory Epistemologies and Axes of Oppression Schools of Thought and Subfields within Epistemology Socio-political, Ethical, and Psychological Dimensions of Knowing Case Studies of Epistemic Injustice. As well as fundamental topics such as testimonial and hermeneutic injustice and epistemic trust, the Handbook includes chapters on important issues such as social and virtue epistemology, objectivity and objectification, implicit bias, and gender and race. Also included are chapters on areas in applied ethics and philosophy, such as law, education, and healthcare. The Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Injustice is essential reading for students and researchers in ethics, epistemology, political philosophy, feminist theory, and philosophy of race. It will also be very useful for those in related fields, such as cultural studies, sociology, education and law. (shrink)

This paper develops a geometric framework for modeling concepts, motivation, and influence across cognitively heterogeneous agents. Each agent is represented by a personalized value space, a vector space encoding the internal dimensions through which the agent interprets and evaluates meaning. Evaluative concepts are formalized as structured vectors -- abstract beings -- whose transmission is mediated by linear interpretation maps. An abstract being survives communication only if it avoids the null spaces of these maps, yielding a structural criterion for intelligibility, (...) class='Hi'>miscommunication, and concept death. -/- Within this framework, I show how conceptual distortion, motivational drift, and the limits of mutual understanding arise from purely algebraic constraints. A central result -- the No-Null-Space Leadership Condition -- characterizes leadership as a property of representational reachability rather than persuasion or authority. More broadly, the model explains how abstract beings can propagate, mutate, or disappear as they traverse diverse cognitive geometries. -/- The account unifies insights from conceptual spaces, social epistemology, and AI value alignment by grounding meaning preservation in structural compatibility rather than shared information or rationality. I argue that this cognitive-geometric perspective clarifies the epistemic boundaries of influence in both human and artificial systems, and offers a general foundation for analyzing conceptual dynamics across heterogeneous agents. (shrink)

What words we use, and what meanings they have, is important. We shouldn't use slurs; we should use 'rape' to include spousal rape (for centuries we didn’t); we should have a word which picks out the sexual harassment suffered by people in the workplace and elsewhere (for centuries we didn’t). Sometimes we need to change the word-meaning pairs in circulation, either by getting rid of the pair completely (slurs), changing the meaning (as we did with 'rape'), or adding brand new (...) word-meaning pairs (as with 'sexual harassment'). A problem, though, is how to do this. One might worry that any attempt to change language in this way will lead to widespread miscommunication and confusion. I argue that this is indeed so, but that's a feature, not a bug of attempting to change word-meaning pairs. The miscommunications and confusion such changes cause can lead us, via a process I call transformative communicative disruption, to reflect on our language and its use, and this can be further, rather than hinder, our goal of improving language. (shrink)

Background: Moral distress occurs when constraints prevent healthcare providers from acting in accordance with their core moral values to provide good patient care. The experience of moral distress in nurses might be magnified during the current Covid-19 pandemic. Objective: To explore causes of moral distress in nurses caring for Covid-19 patients and identify strategies to enhance their moral resiliency. Research design: A qualitative study using a qualitative content analysis of focus group discussions and in-depth interviews. We purposively sampled 31 nurses (...) caring for Covid-19 patients in the acute care units within large academic medical systems in Maryland and New York City during April to June 2020. Ethical considerations: We obtained approval from the Institutional Review Board at the University of Maryland, Baltimore. Results: We identified themes and sub-themes representative of major causes of moral distress in nurses caring Covid-19 patients. These included (a) lack of knowledge and uncertainty regarding how to treat a new illness; (b) being overwhelmed by the depth and breadth of the Covid-19 illness; (c) fear of exposure to the virus leading to suboptimal care; (d) adopting a team model of nursing care that caused intra-professional tensions and miscommunications; (e) policies to reduce viral transmission (visitation policy and PPE policy) that prevented nurses to assume their caring role; (f) practicing within crisis standards of care; and (g) dealing with medical resource scarcity. Participants discussed their coping mechanisms and suggested future strategies. Discussion/Conclusion: Our study affirms new causes of moral distress related to the Covid-19 pandemic. Institutions need to develop a supportive ethical climate that can restore nurses’ moral resiliency. Such a climate should include non-hierarchical interdisciplinary spaces where all providers can meet together as moral peers to discuss their experiences. (shrink)

There is a pattern of miscommunication bedeviling the people working on consciousness that is reminiscent of the classic Abbott and Costello 'Who's on First?' routine. With the best of intentions, people are talking past each other, seeing major disagreements when there are only terminological or tactical preferences -- or even just matters of emphasis -- that divide the sides. Since some substantive differences also lurk in this confusion, it is well worth trying to sort out. Much of the problem (...) seems to have been caused by some misdirection in my apologia for heterophenomenology, advertised as an explicitly third-person approach to human consciousness, so I will try to make amends by first removing those misleading signposts and sending us back to the real issues. (shrink)

Explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) is an emerging, multidisciplinary field of research that seeks to develop methods and tools for making AI systems more explainable or interpretable. XAI researchers increasingly recognise explainability as a context-, audience- and purpose-sensitive phenomenon, rather than a single well-defined property that can be directly measured and optimised. However, since there is currently no overarching definition of explainability, this poses a risk of miscommunication between the many different researchers within this multidisciplinary space. This is the problem (...) we seek to address in this paper. We outline a framework, called Explanatory Pragmatism, which we argue has two attractive features. First, it allows us to conceptualise explainability in explicitly context-, audience- and purpose-relative terms, while retaining a unified underlying definition of explainability. Second, it makes visible any normative disagreements that may underpin conflicting claims about explainability regarding the purposes for which explanations are sought. Third, it allows us to distinguish several dimensions of AI explainability. We illustrate this framework by applying it to a case study involving a machine learning model for predicting whether patients suffering disorders of consciousness were likely to recover consciousness. (shrink)

Twentieth-century philosophy has often been pictured as divided into two camps, analytic and continental. This study challenges this depiction by examining encounters between some of the leading representatives of either side. Starting with Husserl and Frege's fin-de-siècle turn against psychologism, it turns to Carnap's 1931 attack on Heidegger's metaphysics (together with its background in the Cassirer-Heidegger dispute of 1929), moving on to Ayer's 1951 meeting with Bataille and Merleau-Ponty at a Parisian bar, followed by the 'dialogue of the deaf' between (...) Oxford linguistic philosophers and phenomenologists at the 1951 Royaumont colloquium, leading up to the Derrida-Searle controversy. Careful study shows that it is implausible to assume the existence of a century-old 'gulf' between two sides of philosophy. Vrahimis argues that miscommunication and ignorance over the exact content of the above encounters must to a large extent be held accountable for any perceived gap. (shrink)

Within current debates about the future impact of Artificial Intelligence on human society, roughly three different perspectives can be recognised: the technology-centric perspective, claiming that AI will soon outperform humankind in all areas, and that the primary threat for humankind is superintelligence; the human-centric perspective, claiming that humans will always remain superior to AI when it comes to social and societal aspects, and that the main threat of AI is that humankind’s social nature is overlooked in technological designs; and the (...) collective intelligence-centric perspective, claiming that true intelligence lies in the collective of intelligent agents, both human and artificial, and that the main threat for humankind is that technological designs create problems at the collective, systemic level that are hard to oversee and control. The current paper offers the following contributions: a clear description for each of the three perspectives, along with their history and background; an analysis and interpretation of current applications of AI in human society according to each of the three perspectives, thereby disentangling miscommunication in the debate concerning threats of AI; and a new integrated and comprehensive research design framework that addresses all aspects of the above three perspectives, and includes principles that support developers to reflect and anticipate upon potential effects of AI in society. (shrink)

This paper argues that mainstream assumptions involved in the production and application of Large Language Models (such as GPT) undermine the claim that such systems attribute the same interpretations to natural language expressions as do the humans from whom they have acquired these expressions. We look at several case studies from modern cognitive science, each of which suggests that human cognitive development looks radically unlike the developmental trajectories of a predictive optimisation system, and argue that these different learning styles lead (...) to different representational contents in the developed systems. These differences result in representational mismatches, which, in real-world contexts, contribute to significant miscommunication with serious social and political consequences. (shrink)

Ashley J. Bohrer argues that it is only by considering race, gender, sexuality, and ability within the structures of capitalism and imperialism that we can understand power relations. Bohrer explains how the purported incompatibilities between Marxism and intersectionality arise more from miscommunication than a fundamental conceptual antagonism.

In recent philosophy of science there has been much discussion of both pluralism, which embraces scientific terms with multiple meanings, and eliminativism, which rejects such terms. Some recent work focuses on the conditions that legitimize pluralism over eliminativism – the conditions under which such terms are acceptable. Often, this is understood as a matter of encouraging effective communication – the danger of these terms is thought to be equivocation, while the advantage is thought to be the fulfilment of ‘bridging roles’ (...) that facilitate communication between different scientists and specialisms. These theories are geared towards regulating communication between scientists qua scientists. However, this overlooks an important class of harmful equivocation that involves miscommunication between scientists and nonscientists, such as the public or policymakers. To make my case, I use the example of theory of mind, also known as ‘mindreading’ and ‘mentalizing’, and broadly defined as the capacity to attribute mental states to oneself and others. I begin by showing that ‘theory of mind’ has multiple meanings, before showing that this has resulted in harmful equivocations of a sort and in a way not accounted for by previous theories of pluralism and eliminativism. (shrink)

Despite its elusiveness as a concept, ‘artificial intelligence’ (AI) is becoming part of everyday life, and a range of empirical and methodological approaches to social studies of AI now span many disciplines. This article reviews the scope of ethnomethodological and conversation analytic (EM/CA) approaches that treat AI as a phenomenon emerging in and through the situated organization of social interaction. Although this approach has been very influential in the field of computational technology since the 1980s, AI has only recently emerged (...) as such a pervasive part of daily life to warrant a sustained empirical focus in EM/CA. Reviewing over 50 peer-reviewed publications, we find that the studies focus on various social and group activities such as task-oriented situations, semi-experimental setups, play, and everyday interactions. They also involve a range of participant categories including children, older participants, and people with disabilities. Most of the reviewed studies apply CA’s conceptual apparatus, its approach to data analysis, and core topics such as turn-taking and repair. We find that across this corpus, studies center on three key themes: openings and closing the interaction, miscommunication, and non-verbal aspects of interaction. In the discussion, we reflect on EM studies that differ from those in our corpus by focusing on praxeological respecifications of AI-related phenomena. Concurrently, we offer a critical reflection on the work of literature reviewing, and explore the tortuous relationship between EM and CA in the area of research on AI. (shrink)

Despite its elusiveness as a concept, ‘artificial intelligence’ (AI) is becoming part of everyday life, and a range of empirical and methodological approaches to social studies of AI now span many disciplines. This article reviews the scope of ethnomethodological and conversation analytic (EM/CA) approaches that treat AI as a phenomenon emerging in and through the situated organization of social interaction. Although this approach has been very influential in the field of computational technology since the 1980s, AI has only recently emerged (...) as such a pervasive part of daily life to warrant a sustained empirical focus in EM/CA. Reviewing over 50 peer-reviewed publications, we find that the studies focus on various social and group activities such as task-oriented situations, semi-experimental setups, play, and everyday interactions. They also involve a range of participant categories including children, older participants, and people with disabilities. Most of the reviewed studies apply CA’s conceptual apparatus, its approach to data analysis, and core topics such as turn-taking and repair. We find that across this corpus, studies center on three key themes: openings and closing the interaction, miscommunication, and non-verbal aspects of interaction. In the discussion, we reflect on EM studies that differ from those in our corpus by focusing on praxeological respecifications of AI-related phenomena. Concurrently, we offer a critical reflection on the work of literature reviewing, and explore the tortuous relationship between EM and CA in the area of research on AI. (shrink)

An innovative, ambitious, tradition-crossing study drawing on the work of Husserl, Heidegger, Horkheimer, Adorno, and Habermas to propose a new and transformative concept of truth. The idea of truth is a guiding theme for German continental philosophers from Husserl through Habermas. In this book, Lambert Zuidervaart examines debates surrounding the idea of truth in twentieth-century German continental philosophy. He argues that the Heideggerian and critical theory traditions have much in common—despite the miscommunication, opposition, and even outright hostility that have (...) prevailed between them—including significant roots in the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl. Zuidervaart sees the tensions between Heideggerian thought and critical theory as potentially generative sources for a new approach to the idea of truth. He argues further that the “critical retrieval” of insights from German continental philosophy can shed light on current debates in analytic truth theory. Zuidervaart structures his account around three issues: the distinction between propositional truth and truth that is more than propositional (which he calls existential truth); the relationship between propositional truth and the discursive justification of propositional truth claims, framed in analytic philosophy by debates between epistemic and nonepistemic conceptions of truth; and the relationship between propositional truth and the objectivity of knowledge, often presented in analytic philosophy as a conflict between realists and antirealists over the relation between “truth bearers” and “truth makers.” In an innovative and ambitious argument, drawing on the work of Husserl, Heidegger, Horkheimer, Adorno, and Habermas, Zuidervaart proposes a new and transformative conception of truth. (shrink)

Owing to technological advances, genomic medicine is moving from specific to broader genetic analyses and from specialised to mainstream services. Sahan et al 1 point to complex ethical cases encountered by clinical laboratory scientists in the context of genomic medicine’s expansion. The authors discuss debates on interpreting and reporting genetic results, offering extended genetic testing and differences in the perceived responsibility of clinical laboratory scientists in different settings. As demonstrated by the case examples in the article, while genomic medicine holds (...) the promise of providing clinical answers, its mainstreaming can introduce a new type of ‘odyssey’ for patients and/or relatives, such as when there are uncertain findings. The integration of genomics in healthcare at large can also impact communication decisions and perceptions of responsibility for clinical laboratory scientists. Clinical laboratory scientists might report less to non-specialists than to genetic/genomic specialists, as they feel responsible for minimising the potential of non-specialists misunderstanding, misinterpreting or miscommunicating the genetic findings to patients.1 In this way, the perceived responsibility affects patients and the type and amount of genetic information they receive. We agree with the authors that current limitations in knowledge and capabilities among non-specialist clinicians necessitate identifying effective ways to communicate outcomes and …. (shrink)

'Theory' is one of the most important words in the lexicon of contemporary sociology. Yet, their ubiquity notwithstanding, it is quite unclear what sociologists mean by the words 'theory,' 'theoretical,' and 'theorize.' I argue that confusions about the meaning of 'theory' have brought about undesirable consequences, including conceptual muddles and even downright miscommunication. In this paper I tackle two questions: what does 'theory' mean in the sociological language?; and what ought 'theory' to mean in the sociological language? I proceed (...) in five stages. First, I explain why one should ask a semantic question about 'theory.' Second, I lexicographically identify seven different senses of the word, which I distinguish by means of subscripts. Third, I show some difficulties that the current lack of semantic clarity has led sociology to. Fourth, I articulate the question, 'what ought "theory" to mean?,' which I dub the 'semantic predicament', and I consider what one can learn about it from the theory literature. Fifth, I recommend a 'semantic therapy' for sociology, and advance two arguments about SP: the principle of practical reason--SP is to a large extent a political issue, which should be addressed with the help of political mechanisms; and the principle of ontological and epistemological pluralism--the solution to SP should not be too ontologically and epistemologically demanding. (shrink)

Remembering that there’s a difference between intellectual and perceptual attention can help us avoid miscommunication due to meaning different things by the same terms, which has been a particular problem during the last hundred years or so of the study of attention. I demonstrate this through analyzing in depth one such miscommunication that occurred in a philosophical criticism of the influential psychological text, Inattentional Blindness. But after making the distinction between perceptual attention and intellectual attention, and after making (...) an effort to keep this distinction in mind, we are still faced with the problem of specifying what makes intellectual attention distinct from perceptual attention. In the second half of this article, I discuss the range of proposals about how to understand intellectual attention that are present in the literature, and the problems with them. I do this with the aim of stimulating further discussion about how best to conceptualize intellectual attention, although I do not settle that further question within this paper. (shrink)

Autumn Fiester suggests that trauma-informed ethics consultation (TIEC) should focus on surrogate decision makers (SDMs) in preference over patients when (a) the patient is comatose or neurologically devastated, and hence beyond the capacity for suffering or further trauma; (b) the patient is thus incapable of asserting preferences; and (c) the patient’s wishes are not known, for example, in the absence of an advance directive. Therefore, (d) in these instances the moral obligation to prevent trauma for SDMs overrides obligations to patients. (...) Perhaps Fiester might countenance other instances, but, as presented, Fiester’s TIEC placing others’ trauma above patients’ is thus construed fairly narrowly. This commentary first offers a few brief observations regarding each tenet of Fiester’s argument and then offers broader reflections on ethics consultation and on TIEC in particular. As discussed below, when the issue sparking the request for an ethics consultant (EC) is a bona fide question of values rather than, for example, clearing up miscommunication or identifying a need for further information, ECs aim primarily to gather information and then offer their recommendation(s). This mission, I suggest, stands on thinner ice than we may recognize. Moreover, I will argue that if ECs disclose that mission to patients and SDMs with full clarity and truth, genuine TIEC becomes virtually impossible. (shrink)

Syntactic semantics is a holistic, conceptual-role-semantic theory of how computers can think. But Fodor and Lepore have mounted a sustained attack on holistic semantic theories. However, their major problem with holism (that, if holism is true, then no two people can understand each other) can be fixed by means of negotiating meanings. Syntactic semantics and Fodor and Lepore’s objections to holism are outlined; the nature of communication, miscommunication, and negotiation is discussed; Bruner’s ideas about the negotiation of meaning are (...) explored; and some observations on a problem for knowledge representation in AI raised by Winston are presented. (shrink)

Without question, Professors Nancy Dubler and Carol Liebman provided a service of immeasurable value to clinical bioethics, by bringing mediation to the clinical setting. As clinical ethics consultants learned long ago, the great majority of consults stem not from genuine moral puzzlement, in which everyone is truly uncertain about what decision(s) may be best, but from conflict. Sometimes that conflict can be resolved by clearing up miscommunications or securing missing information. But sometimes conflict is real and entrenched. It is here (...) that mediation offers great worth, and in this tribute issue of the Journal of Clinical Ethics we acknowledge an enormous debt of gratitude to Dubler and Liebman for bringing this shining light into healthcare’s clinical setting. That said, by attempting to merge mediation with traditional ethics consultation, Dubler/liebman’s adapted version of mediation revises all three cornerstone tenets of ethics and process in mediation: neutrality, self-determination, and privacy. The result is often not bona fide mediation but a process quite different from it. (shrink)

Sietske A.L. van Till and Eline M. Bunnik (2024) have recently expressed a concern about science miscommunication regarding human brain organoids. They worry that the mereological fallacy is often being committed when the possibility of brain organoid psychological capacities such as consciousness and intelligence are considered, especially by bioethicists discussing the moral status of human brain organoids. Focusing specifically on one psychological capacity, namely consciousness, this article begins with a brief introduction to van Till and Bunnik’s concern about the (...) mereological fallacy as it relates to brain organoids. It is then shown that whether the mereological fallacy is being committed depends on commitments in philosophy of mind about how consciousness relates to the brain and its neural mechanisms. This is demonstrated by appealing to two different example views about the ontology of consciousness embraced by J.J.C. Smart’s type identity theory and a version of hylomorphism. The article ends with a discussion of how neurobiological theories of consciousness can be intertwined with ontological commitments about consciousness that have significant implications for HBOs. An awareness of this can yield a philosophically informed application of neurobiological theories to the topic of whether HBOs could be conscious. (shrink)

An ideography is a general-purpose code made of pictures that do not encode language, which can be used autonomously – not just as a mnemonic prop – to encode information on a broad range of topics. Why are viable ideographies so hard to find? I contend that self-sufficient graphic codes need to be narrowly specialized. Writing systems are only an apparent exception: At their core, they are notations of a spoken language. Even if they also encode nonlinguistic information, they are (...) useless to someone who lacks linguistic competence in the encoded language or a related one. The versatility of writing is thus vicarious: Writing borrows it from spoken language. Why is it so difficult to build a fully generalist graphic code? The most widespread answer points to a learnability problem. We possess specialized cognitive resources for learning spoken language, but lack them for graphic codes. I argue in favor of a different account: What is difficult about graphic codes is not so much learning or teaching them as getting every user to learn and teach the same code. This standardization problem does not affect spoken or signed languages as much. Those are based on cheap and transient signals, allowing for easy online repairing of miscommunication, and require face-to-face interactions where the advantages of common ground are maximized. Graphic codes lack these advantages, which makes them smaller in size and more specialized. (shrink)

New genomic techniques (NGTs) are powerful technologies with the potential to change how we relate to our food, food producers, and natural environment. Their use may affect the practices and values our societies are built on. Like many countries, the EU is currently revisiting its GMO legislation to accommodate the emergence of NGTs. We argue that assessing such technologies according to whether they are ‘safe enough’ will not create the public trust necessary for societal acceptance. To avoid past mistakes of (...) under- or miscommunication about possible impacts, we need open, transparent, and inclusive societal debate on the nature of the science of gene (editing) technologies, on how to use them, and whether they contribute to sustainable solutions to societal and environmental challenges. To be trustworthy, GMO regulation must demonstrate the authorities’ ability to manage the scientific, socio-economic, environmental, and ethical complexities and uncertainties associated with NGTs. Regulators and authorities should give equal attention to the reflexive and the emotional aspects of trust and make room for honest public and stakeholder inclusion processes. The European Group of Ethics in Science and Technology’s recent report on the Ethics of Genome Editing (2021) is important in calling attention to a series of fundamental issues that ought to be included in debates on the regulation and use of NGTs to ensure public trust in these technologies and in regulating authorities. With the great power of NGTs comes great responsibility, and the way forward must be grounded in responsible research, innovation, and regulation. (shrink)

Artificial intelligence systems increasingly function as epistemic infrastructure, mediating how individuals and institutions access, evaluate, and act upon knowledge. This paper develops a comprehensive typology of epistemic risks posed by contemporary AI systems, organized around seven core categories: hallucination, error amplification, spurious coherence, authority drift, opaque provenance, filter bubbles, and miscommunicated uncertainty. I argue that addressing these risks requires recognizing three epistemic duties for AI system designers: provenance duty, uncertainty disclosure duty, and contestability duty. The paper presents concrete technical and (...) governance mechanisms for implementing these duties, including retrieval-augmented generation, calibration interfaces, metadata standards, feedback loops, and epistemic audits. Case studies in medical advice, legal research, and news recommendation demonstrate how these mechanisms can safeguard epistemic integrity while preserving AI's beneficial capabilities. (shrink)

Background Medical errors represent a significant threat to patient safety, often stemming from miscommunication and negligence. Nurses play a critical role in preventing such errors; however, they frequently underreport or conceal them. Simulation-based applications provide a controlled and safe environment where nurses can experience and reflect on medical errors, thereby enhancing their awareness and contributing to improved patient safety practices. Aim The study aims to investigate nurses’ experiences with medical errors using a simulation and to provide an in-depth understanding (...) of their behaviors. Research design Descriptive phenomenological qualitative research. Participants and research context: The study was conducted with 10 nurses at a university hospital between March and April 2023. Simulation scenarios were developed in line with the INACSL standards. Data were collected using a descriptive form and semi-structured interviews and analyzed using descriptive phenomenological analysis. Ethical considerations This study was approved by the Karadeniz Technical University Health Sciences Scientific Research Ethics Committee (approval no.2022/60) on 06.05.2024. Informed consent was obtained from the participants. Results During the simulation practices, nurses exhibited two distinct behaviors concerning medical errors: concealment ( n = 4) and disclosure ( n = 6). The analysis identified two themes and 12 subthemes based on the nurses’ experiences. Conclusion The study concluded that nurses exhibited a range of behaviors and emotions in response to medical errors, with these responses influenced by various underlying factors. The findings of this study are anticipated to inform strategies for managing medical errors encountered by nurses. Future research should focus on integrating and evaluating simulation-based approaches to medical error management within nursing education. (shrink)

I object to eliminativism about innateness and André Ariew’s identification of innateness with canalization, and I propose a new treatment of innateness. I first argue that the concept of innateness is serving a valuable function in a diverse set of research contexts, and in these contexts, claims about innateness are best understood as claims about the insensitivity of the appearance of a trait to certain variations in the environment. I then argue that innateness claims, like claims about canalization, should be (...) explicitly relativized to the specific range of environmental variations of interest to the scientist. My account characterizes an important way in which scientists are employing the concept and offers a way for scientists to carry on using the concept in their research while minimizing confusion and miscommunication. There is a fruitful research program, I claim, in which scientists employ the concept of innateness to help distinguish environmental factors of interest that have a causal influence on the appearance of a trait from those that do not. (shrink)