A one-day seminar with Marco Mazzone and Maciej Witek
When
Friday, 17 April 2026, 09.30 — 13.00
Where
Institute of Philosophy and Cognitive Science, University of Szczecin, ul. Krakowska 71-79, Szczecin; room: 091
Goals
This seminar brings together two complementary perspectives that invite us to rethink the traditional Gricean model of communication. Recent work on cooperation and conflict in interaction, together with new analyses of insinuation, suggests that communication cannot be fully explained in terms of overt intentions and cooperative principles alone, and calls for incorporating elements of the Austinian approach. By examining layers of cooperation and forms of insinuation, the seminar sheds light on the subtle, often non-overt mechanisms that shape human communication in everyday and institutional contexts.
Programme
- 09.30 — 11.00, Marco Mazzone, Grice’s Cooperative Principle in the Face of a Multilayered Model of Communication
- 11.30 — 13.00, Maciej Witek, What insinuation reveals about the nature of communication
Abstracts
Marco Mazzone, University of Catania, Italy
Grice’s Cooperative Principle in the Face of a Multilayered Model of Communication
I intend to explore how Grice’s Cooperative Principle can be reinterpreted within a multilayered model of communication that integrates perspectives from animal communication, Michael Tomasello’s model of communication and morality, and even Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s ethics. While Grice located cooperation primarily in the speaker’s and hearer’s rational intentions to communicate meaningfully, recent (and earlier) interdisciplinary perspectives suggest that cooperation extends beyond cognitive alignment to include shared normative expectations and institutional frameworks. The talk outlines three layers of communication—minimally intentional, intersubjective, and symbolic—as progressively richer forms of coordination. It argues that Grice’s insight into communicative rationality needs to be complemented by J. L. Austin’s and John Searle’s accounts of speech acts and social conventions in order to explain how intentions become socially binding. The understanding of Grice’s model has much to gain from distinguishing different notions of (communicative) intention and cooperation, corresponding to the three layers proposed here.
Maciej Witek, University of Szczecin, Poland
What insinuation reveals about the nature of communication
This talk addresses the puzzle of insinuation—how a speaker can successfully communicate a potentially problematic content while remaining off record and maintaining deniability. As the analysis in shows, successful insinuation combines two seemingly incompatible features: it is communicative in that it guides the addressee toward a specific interpretation, yet it resists attribution of a single, clearly recognizable communicative intention. This tension poses a challenge for standard Gricean models, which treat communication as grounded in overt intentions designed to be recognized as such.
I propose two complementary solutions to this puzzle. The first develops the notion of Gricean insinuation as a partially overt act. On this view, insinuators aim to induce a response and to have this aim recognized, but they avoid making their intention fully overt. This structure, captured by the idea of a partially covert act, gives rise to what I call the “Fake One-Way Mirror Effect”: the addressee recognizes what is being conveyed, yet cannot straightforwardly attribute full communicative commitment to the speaker. The conveyed content is best understood in terms of partially covert implicatures, which differ from standard conversational implicatures in that they are not fully speaker-meant.
The second solution introduces Austinian insinuation as a non-overt communicative practice. Here, the indirectness of insinuation is not analysed in terms of conversational implicatures but in terms of expressive perlocutionary implicatures. These are conveyed by situating speech acts within contexts that afford specific inferences and responses. On this account, insinuation operates through a socially structured procedure with identifiable felicity conditions and characteristic perlocutionary, epistemic, and social effects.
Taken together, these two models suggest that communication is not exhausted by overt meaning and standard implicature, but includes a spectrum of indirect, non-overt practices that shape discourse in subtle yet consequential ways.