Communicative intent, ostensive feedback and the resolution of interpretative indeterminacy: The psychology of (dis)agreement.

Humans are highly skilled at establishing mental state alignment through communication during collaborative interactions. Yet there is still much debate about how they do this effectively. Recently, scholars have argued that the capacity to understand others’ communicative intent facilitates mental state alignment by constraining the meaning of communicative expressions to a domain of mutual relevance. Although this constraint is likely an important facilitator of human communication, it is unlikely to completely resolve the interpretative indeterminacy inherent to humans’ open-ended communication systems (i.e., inferring the intended meaning of arbitrary signals amid quasi-infinite interpretive possibilities). Here, I argue that understanding communicative intent facilitates mental state alignment in a crucial, previously underappreciated way. Understanding the cooperative intention underlying ostension solves the problem of ‘ambiguous affective reference’ inherent to emotional expressions in response to communicative acts. Specifically, it constrains the interpretation of these expressions to be about the communicative act’s content (i.e., ostensive feedback). Consequently, ostensive negative feedback facilitates the negotiation of mental states during perceived mental misalignment (disagreement) until both individuals use positive ostensive feedback (affirmation) to indicate that they deem their mental states sufficiently aligned for the purposes of their interaction (agreement). I argue that this capacity facilitates much of humans’ sociality.