Justin D'Ambrosio (University of St. Andrews), "Manipulative Underspecification"

Forthcoming, The Philosophical Review

By Justin D’Ambrosio

It almost sounds trivial to say that language is a tool for communication. Why else would we use language other than to communicate with our interlocutors? What else could language be for? Of course, there are lots of differing views of what exactly it is to communicate. Some people think that to communicate is to share knowledge or information with our interlocutors. Others think that communication consists in changing the context by getting our audience to accept certain propositions, even if just provisionally. Still others think of communication as a tool for coordinating attention on certain features of the world. But no matter what we take communication to be, basically everyone thinks that one of language’s main functions—if not its primary function—is to help us communicate.

But the idea that language is mostly or exclusively a tool for communication is, at best, an idealization, and at worst, one of those stories that philosophers tell each other while sitting around the campfire—a story that is only distantly in touch with reality. Language is a powerful tool for influencing audiences and shaping the social world, and shaping the social world is often in tension with the goal of efficiently communicating, however that notion is understood. To put it slightly differently, language is often able to serve as a tool of influence only insofar as it does not function as a tool of communication. Consider an example.

Suppose that I’m a politician, you are a member of my constituency, and we meet at a town hall. Your goal is to come to know my policies and plans, and whether you vote for me will be determined by whether you think our positions are aligned. My only goal is to get you to vote for me. You ask me what steps I plan to take concerning gun control, but I have no knowledge of what your background views on the subject are, and you have no idea whether I intend to be forthright about my plans.

This is the kind of situation in which politicians love to use language that is practically meaningless—to use the kind of flabby, amorphous, noncommittal blather that gives them a bad name. Consider something I might say in the situation above: “I’m going to do everything in my power to keep guns out of the hands of dangerous people.” This is an example of underspecification: even in the context, there are many things that I might mean by “everything in my power,” and countless things I might mean by “dangerous.” I might mean “everything in my power consistent with the wording of the constitution” or “everything in my power, including proposing an amendment to the constitution,” or any number of other specifications.

If language is a tool for communication, why use language that is practically meaningless? Why use language that communicates so little? The answer is that in this context, as in many others, I’m trying realize what we can call a non-communicative goal: a goal that conflicts with the goal of communicating with you. In this case, I want you to think that our positions are aligned, and so vote for me. Of course, in some situations, the best way to get people to think you agree with them is to tell them exactly what they want to hear. But in this case, I don’t know what you want to hear, so I don’t even know enough to lie! So instead, I say something basically meaningless. But it turns out that saying something basically meaningless is a powerful strategy for manufacturing just the kind of perceived agreement I’m looking for.

I’m far from the first person to notice the power of “meaningless language.” Consider two passages from two of the most insightful critics of manipulative speech and propaganda. First, Chomsky, from Media Control: The Spectacular Achievements of Propaganda:

The point of public relations slogans like “Support our troops” is that they don't mean anything. … That's the whole point of good propaganda. … You want to create a slogan that nobody's going to be against, and everybody's going to be for. Nobody knows what it means, because it doesn't mean anything. Its crucial value is that it diverts your attention from a question that does mean something: Do you support our policy? That's the one you're not allowed to talk about. So you have people arguing about support for the troops? “Of course I don't not support them.” Then you've won. (Chomsky, 1991)

Next, Orwell, from the section of “Politics and the English Language” titled “Meaningless Words”:

The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice, have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another. In the case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. … Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different. … Other words used in variable meanings, in most cases more or less dishonestly, are: class, totalitarian, science, progressive, reactionary, bourgeois, equality. (Orwell, 1946)

By “meaningless language,” I take both Chomsky and Orwell to mean language that, in context, leaves open a wide range of candidate interpretations—they’re talking about utterances that leave their contents drastically underspecified. In my paper “Manipulative Underspecification,” I try to develop a view of how and why speakers deliberately underspecify, and how their underspecification affects conversation, that does justice to Chomsky and Orwell’s insights.

The basic idea is that, when a speaker underspecifies, they leave their audience uncertain about what they mean—they leave them guessing. In leaving the audience guessing about what they mean, the speaker is able to get the upper hand on the audience. Why? Well, first, if I force you to take a guess about what I mean, it allows for the possibility that you’ll read in an interpretation—hopefully, one toward which you’re positively disposed. If you accept what I say, so understood, this creates the illusion of agreement, which is exactly what I’m going for in the political situation above.

But even if you don’t read in a favorable interpretation, underspecifying has other advantages. As Chomsky points out, underspecifying makes my assertion hard to reject, and puts pressure on you to accept my assertion—after all, how can you deny that we need to keep guns out of the hands of dangerous people? But at the same time, underspecifying allows me room to maneuver in downstream conversation. Whether you accept or reject my assertion, I’m at liberty to retroactively claim to have asserted something else altogether—I can plausibly claim to have asserted any the other candidate meanings left open by the context—whatever is most conducive to my goals. This kind of dynamic is completely familiar from politics. Catching a savvy politician in a lie is like trying to nail Jell-O to the wall.

For the most part, the philosophy of language has operated with idealizations that make it impossible to capture this kind of interaction. For instance, one of the dominant frameworks for modelling communication in the philosophy of language—the common-ground framework—cannot accommodate communicative uncertainty at all. In the common-ground framework, assertions update interlocutors’ store of common information: the common ground. But in order for this to be possible, each interlocutor must be certain of the content of the assertion. Part of the goal of the paper is to develop a more general framework in which audiences reason under uncertainty about what a speaker has said when they underspecify, and also about whether the speaker is being cooperative in doing so—i.e., about whether the underspecification is a harmless feature of ordinary conversation, or whether it is deliberate and strategic.

The idea that in conversation, speakers and audiences are reasoning under uncertainty about one another’s goals, and in many cases, trying to deceive one another about their goals, is crucial to a broader project of mine on the nature of manipulative speech, of which manipulative underspecification is an instance. In another paper of mine that has just come out titled “A Theory of Manipulative Speech,” I argue that manipulative speakers are speakers who aim to influence audiences by appearing fully cooperative, while in fact speaking in ways that are less than fully cooperative. Manipulative speakers speak strategically, while posing as non-strategic and fully cooperative. They are, so to speak, false friends.

When an audience wrongly presumes that a speaker is being cooperative, they are susceptible to being influenced in a variety of ways that work against their interests. When an audience takes a speaker to be cooperative, they are more likely to: (a) believe lies when they do not know the facts, (b) interpret utterances in ways that are charitable when they do know the facts, (c) calculate and accept false or misleading implicatures, (d) interpret deliberately underspecified utterances as expressing something specific and plausible, (e) accept claims they do not fully understand, and (f) accommodate contentious presuppositions, to name just a few such actions.

In the more general paper on manipulative speech, I also argue that my view of manipulative speech can serve as the basis for a simple, attractive approach to propaganda. Propaganda, as I define it, is speech that either is, or can be causally traced back to, a manipulative contribution to public discourse. Manipulative speakers initiate propaganda, but that propaganda can be repeated unwittingly by other members of a linguistic community. As Chomsky shows us, manipulative underspecification can serve as a powerful form of propaganda. It is a tool that helps manipulative speakers shape the social world even without helping them communicate almost anything at all.