Meaning, Context, and Control:Convergent trends and controversial issues in current Social‐scientific research on Human cognition and communication

Abstract

A survey of a wide range of social‐scientific disciplines reveals a definite convergence of theoretical interest in human cognition and communication as situated, concerned, and embedded in social commitment. Recent contributions within situation semantics and cognitive science explicitly reject some of the constraints inherent in their shared philosophical heritage and prepare novel ground for dialogues between fields as far apart as formal semantics and ‘dialogical’ text theory. Issues such as purely cognitive versus motivational aspects of human situatedness, and the relationship between models of individual information processing, on the one hand, and hermeneutic‐dialectic assumptions about social and collective features of meaning and mind, on the other, are thus made topics of cross‐disciplinary discussions. These are some of the many problems in need of further clarification if we want to explore the possibility of bridging and/or transcending the gulf between analytic‐rationalist and hermeneutic‐dialectic contributions to our insight into human cognition and communication.