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.