Common Ground

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Common ground and grounding is an assumption that is subject to some discourse models in linguistics and communication theory and that was essentially shaped by Herbert H. Clark and Edward F. Schaefer (1989). The common ground also plays an important role in the philosophy of language , especially based on the model of Robert Stalnaker . It is the assumption of an abstract common "knowledge space" that exists between communication partners.

Basic assumptions

  • Understanding: Communication between two or more people can have different goals. Regardless of individual goals, people who are having a conversation always want to communicate something to each other. This means that communication is a joint action . In order for a communication to be successful and for communication to work, the communication partners must assure each other that they have understood each other correctly. In communication, the communication partners try to achieve a common knowledge base.
  • Cooperation: If one assumes that the participants in a discourse strive for a common goal, namely understanding, then one can assume that the discourse participants cooperate.
  • Collective act: If the goal of a discourse is understanding and if this happens through cooperation between the participants, then the discourse itself can be described as a collective act.
  • Grounding: Two people cooperate in order to communicate. This means that both pursue the goal that they are firstly understood correctly by the other and secondly that they themselves understand correctly what the other wants to convey. The participants in the discourse therefore work together on understanding and thereby develop new knowledge together. A speech is therefore successful when it comes to grounding: Grounding denotes the point in the discourse at which the participants in the discourse believe they have understood each other correctly and the new shared knowledge is "saved".

theory

Assumptions / presuppositions

The basic idea behind Clark's and Schaefer's discourse model Contributing to Discourse is Common Ground. At any point in time in a discourse, every participant in the discourse makes assumptions (so-called presuppositions ) about the knowledge that the other participants in the discourse and himself have about the discourse topic . Common ground describes the common knowledge - i.e. the common knowledge base of all participants in the discourse - and is assumed by the speaker as background information. Each participant in the discourse makes his own assumptions about the knowledge he assumes as common, whereby his assumptions also include the assumption that the others make the same assumptions about the common ground. Put simply, this means that everyone in the conversation is constantly making assumptions about the background knowledge of everyone involved.

Update

As the discourse progresses, previously made assumptions can either be confirmed or destroyed, which means that the common ground is updated . The common ground is growing steadily, since even destroyed assumptions are now part of the common knowledge.

Confirm assumptions

In order to be able to confirm assumptions, the participants in the discourse must inform each other that they have correctly understood an utterance and that there are no misunderstandings. This can be done via various pronounced forms of acceptance (acceptance) of the statement made, which is manifested in references for understanding the current statement.
For example, by giving an appropriate answer to a question, you signal to the person you are speaking to that you have correctly understood the question in terms of form and content. If there are no problems in understanding, the new common knowledge is added to the common ground (grounding).

Destroy assumptions

If it turns out that there are communication problems because different assumptions have been made about the common ground, these misunderstandings are cleared up and the new knowledge, including the knowledge about the misunderstanding, is stored in the common ground.

Examples

  • A: Can you give me the solution for the task?
    B: Yes, you can copy them from me.

A makes some assumptions about the common ground, e.g. B. that B knows which task A is talking about, that B knows the solution for the task and also that B is ready to pass the solution on to A, etc.
B again confirms that he formally recognized the question as a question because his utterance is in the form of an answer. He also confirms the assumption that he knows the solution, and also that he is ready to pass the solution to the problem on to A. All assumptions that have now been confirmed are added to the common ground of A and B.

  • A: Even my father knows Johnny Depp.

Among other things, this statement contains the assumptions that A assumes that everyone knows who Johnny Depp is, but also that A did not believe that his father knew who Johnny Depp is.
The pre-existing assumption that A's father didn't know who Johnny Depp was was at some point shattered and the knowledge that both A and his father knew who Johnny Depp was added to the Common Ground.

application

The idea of ​​grounding is used in many discourse models in different areas, e.g. B. in communication science , cognitive science , linguistics and computer science . Even if the theory itself is often subject to criticism, its basic idea is often adopted or at least included and expanded if necessary.

criticism

The idea of ​​the common ground as a kind of mental representation is a common misconception. When common ground is viewed in this way, it cannot be empirically examined or measured with a measure. Since it would be a mental abstraction that is not accessible or visible to anyone else, the applicability of this theory for research is often questioned. Common ground is therefore often understood differently in research: In this context, the term serves as a physical metaphor that simplifies talking about possible speakers. For example, it is easier to talk about the person who is currently in the position for gentlemen than about the person who can currently be referred by "he". The orphaned person is not visually in one place for gentlemen, nor is they mentally in that place. “To put or see something on the ground in front of us” would just be a metaphorical way to make talking about references easier. That doesn't mean that everyone has to know what the other knows (endless loops in the hall of mirrors), and that doesn't mean that everyone has to build a mental representation of this metaphorical floor in order to understand the language. In response to the criticism that arose from a misunderstanding of the metaphor, some more recent models attempt to take into account the perspective of the individual communication partners who, due to the double contingency, cannot really know what the other is currently aware of.

Another point of criticism comes from the ranks of linguistics and the cognitive sciences: They accuse Clark that a cognitive process that constantly has to “calculate” the common ground of a participant in a discourse cannot be performed by the brain, since it is a recursive process ever higher order act. Specifically, it is criticized that there is no point at which a chain of thought such as “A suspects that B knows that X; and A also suspects that B thinks A thinks B knows X; etc. “comes to a stop without finite limit values ​​being established. Instead, the criticism objects that the cognitive process inevitably gets out of hand, similar to the possible moves in a game of chess. In later works, Clark acknowledged this point of criticism, but defended his theory with the position that the discourse participants' knowledge of Common Ground itself was sufficient to make a successful conversation. Accordingly, he himself distances himself from the idea that the assumptions made are actually represented mentally (in the sense of a theoretically infinite chain of thought “A knows that B knows that A knows, B knows ...”). At the same time, however, he continues to adhere to the idea that the common ground forms an idea of ​​the knowledge base that the participants in the discourse unconsciously assume as given.

See also

Wikiversity: Course: CSCL / Common Ground  - Course Materials

Individual evidence

  1. ^ R. Stalnaker: Common Ground. In: Linguistics and Philosophy. 2002. 25, pp. 701-721.
  2. ^ HH Clark, EF Schaefer: Contributing to Discourse. In: Cognitive Science. 1989, Vol. 13, pp. 259-294. PDF. ( Memento from January 20, 2016 in the Internet Archive ).
  3. ^ HH Clark, SE Brennan: Grounding in Communication. 1991. In: LB Resnick, JM Levine, SD Teasley (Eds.): Perspectives on Socially Shared Cognition. Pp. 127-149. PDF. ( Memento of September 8, 2015 in the Internet Archive ).
  4. ^ S. Greenspan, D. Goldberg, D. Weimer, A. Basso: Interpersonal Trust and Common Ground in Electronically Mediated Communication. In: W. Kellogg, S. Whittaker (Eds.): Proceedings of the 2000 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work. 2000, pp. 251-260.
  5. ↑ N. Nova, M. Sangin, P. Dillenbourg: Reconsidering Clark's Theory in CSCW. 2008. PDF.
  6. ^ AH Jucker, SW Smith: Explicit and implicit ways of enhancing common ground in conversation. 1996. In: Pragmatics. Vol. 6, pp. 1-18. PDF.
  7. ^ A. Roque, DR Traum: Degrees of Grounding Based on Evidence of Understanding. 2008. In: Proceedings of the 9th SIGdial Workshop on Discourse and Dialogue. Pp. 54-63. PDF. ( Memento of the original from December 3, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / sigdial.org
  8. ^ T. Peak, E. Horvitz: Conversation as Action Under Uncertainty. 2000. In: Proceedings of the 16th Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence. Pp. 455-464. PDF.
  9. ^ DR Traum, EA Hinkelmann: Conversation Acts in Task-Oriented Spoken Dialogue. 1992. In: Computational Intelligence. Vol. 8, pp. 575-599. PDF.
  10. ^ T. Koschmann, CD LeBaron: Reconsidering Common Ground: Examining Clark's Contribution Theory in the OR. 2003. In: Proceedings of the 8th conference on European Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work. Pp. 81-98. PDF.
  11. ↑ Fabian Bross: German modal particles and the common ground. 2012. In: Helikon. A Multidisciplinary Online Journal. 2. 182-209. PDF.
  12. ↑ D. Sperber, D. Wilson: Relevance: Communication and cognition. Blackwell, Oxford 1986, p. 18.
  13. ^ HH Clark: Using Language. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1996, pp. 95-97.