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Wendelin Reich
Associate Professor in Social Psychology, Department of Sociology,
Uppsala University
Wendelin Reich studied at Georg-August-Universität Göttingen,
Rutgers University, Princeton University, and the European University
Institute (EUI) in Florence before receiving a Ph.D. from
Uppsala University in 2003. His main area of research is pragmatics
(the study of communicative interaction), which is a field that
draws equally on linguistics, philosophy, social psychology, and
artificial intelligence. Among Reich’s recent contributions are
“The Cooperative Nature of Communicative Acts” (Journal
of Pragmatics, forthcoming) and “Basic Communicative Acts
(BCAs) in Human-Robot Interaction” (AAAI Press/Proceedings,
forthcoming).
In the years following his dissertation, Reich developed an
alternative to speech act theory that coheres better with current
research on how the brain processes information, especially communicative
signals, and research on how interaction by means of
communicative acts may have evolved in genus Homo. The chief
problem with speech act theory, he argues, is its ignorance of context.
Cognitive neuroscience and evolutionary psychology both
predict that comprehension of communicative acts was evolutionarily
selected to exploit context in a computationally efficient
manner.
During his time at SCAS, Reich plans to develop formal models
of how context is integrated in the process of communicative
comprehension. His primary focus will be on “basic” communicative
acts in face-to-face settings (pointing gestures, yes/no signals,
etc.) which are linguistically trivial but capable of conveying complex
and context-sensitive meanings. |
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