How to avoid overcommitment: Communication as thought sharing (with consequences)

Abstract

We have to be grateful to Bart Geurts (BG henceforth) for his intriguing study on the effects of running through an interesting option in the theory of linguistic communication: Casting the concept of commitment as the principal character in order to explore the amount of “explanatory mileage” (BG p. 2) a commitment-based account provides. And I am grateful for being offered the opportunity to spell out the reasons for remaining skeptical about the trend BG’s paper is a characteristic example of. The concept of commitment has become fashionable recently not only in linguistics and philosophy of language, but also in business and politics: Google Books Ngram Viewer shows an almost fifty percent increase of the use of the English term in German books from 1998 to 2008. But what is its proper place in a theory of linguistic communication that covers the very notion of speech act as well as common ground management, linguistic conventions and conversational implicatures? BG’s thesis is clear: Social commitments belong “in the driver’s seat” of such a theory, whereas “mental states retain a very respectable position in the back seat” (p. 28). He continues: “and it could hardly be otherwise”, and this is certainly correct because he means the indispensability of mental states, and not the leading role of commitments. Regarding the latter such a claim would be much less uncontroversial. I will argue that it could and should well be otherwise and that mental states don’t belong in the back seat. While I wholeheartedly agree with BG’s postulate that “a theory of communication should bring together the social and mentalist perspectives in a way that is significantly more enlightening than the mere acknowledgement that these two perspectives exist,” I disagree on the way his proposal specifies this integration of perspectives, namely by what I would like to call overcommitting to commitments. Instead I