Page 59 - Handbooks of Applied Linguistics Communication Competence Language and Communication Problems Practical Solutions

A cognitive pragmatic perspective on communication and culture 37

This accident, which grieved all of us so deeply, has shown once again just how
seriously the aviation sector must take its responsibilities.
[…]
The Helios crash has been yet another reminder to the entire sector that there must
not be negligence in even the smallest details.
Our company has always operated with this mindset, constantly increasing and
strengthening its precautions and efforts regarding flight safety and will continue to
host its passengers with confidence.

The text from which this excerpt is taken makes evident the informative inten-
tion to express solidarity with another airline and the people affected by the ac-
cident, but many readers will reject this informative intention, because of what
they take to be compelling evidence for the conclusion that the writer has a
covert aim, a hidden agenda, as it were: to put down a rival company in order to
promote his own. What must have seemed a clever and legitimate marketing
move to the writer of the letter, is seen as a transparent, hypocritical and insen-
sitive marketing ploy in the cultural context of many people in the intended
readership.
These examples point to the importance of culture in context selection.
Therefore, an explanatory approach to inter-cultural communication should
provide an account of the way cultural knowledge is represented and used in
communication.

3. The epidemiological approach to culture

Like some other animals, humans represent mentally various aspects of the
world they live in. Unlike any other animals, humans have the ability to form
metarepresentations, i.e. belief-representations (beliefs hereafter) about the
mental representations of their physical and psychological environments. Their
ability to do this is evidenced by all things which are part of culture: a given
thing is a hammer, not in virtue of the representation we form of its shape, form
and other visible features, but because we make such representations the objects
of various beliefs (e.g. that the thing in question is used for a particular pur-
pose). To give another example, consider the mental representation of a particu-
lar thing (let’s call it A) as a small stone. It is easy to think of circumstances
which may lead one to make the mental representation: A is a small stone the
object of beliefs, such as: A is a small stone which can be used to keep the door
open, or A is a small stone which can be used to prevent paper from flying off the
desk when the window is open. When such beliefs about the representation of
A as a small stone become accepted by the members of a social group, A be-
comes an artefact: a doorstop or a paperweight. Of course, a typical artefact is a