pragmatics: communicating preferences & politeness
How can we achieve direct, efficient communication?
Communicating about preferences is often problematic, because language does not provide us with reliable ways of communicating fine degrees of preference.
Imagine for instance: the sound of your neighbour's TV is annoying. This is a small annoyance that you'd rather not have to deal with, and you're not sure if they are watching it anyway... and even if they are, maybe they are indifferent about watching TV or doing something else. But maybe they do want to watch it, so you would like find out whether this is the case. You could say:
"would you mind turning down the TV"?
Just the fact that you bothered to mention it is evidence to them that it is a big enough deal... because there is a convention whereby you don't complain about small annoyances: you're only supposed to complain if it's a big enough deal. Even if you explain to them that it's actually a small annoyance, they may not believe you, because a standard politeness strategy is to downplay how big a deal something is.
This is likely the consequence of an important principle of politeness (which took me a while to grasp): don't force people to make difficult choices. i.e. make it clear to them that they have the option of declining without fearing the consequences. When you don't give people that option, you risk having them frame the situation as being one of your interests against their interests, and this could damage your relationship.
The problem here is that the linguistic community eventually adapts to the polite language: "would you mind doing X?" eventually acquires the meaning that "please do X" originally had. To be polite now, you need to make the sentence even longer: "would you mind doing X, if it's not too much trouble?". This is linguistic inflation, and the real losers are clarity and efficiency of communication.
Suppose you run a business, and you'd like an employee to work during the weekend, but NOT if this means they are going to hate you, i.e. you only want them to work if they don't mind it too much. How do you find out how much they mind? How do you know that they feel the freedom to say no?
Why don't we use numbers to communicate how much we want something?
Why don't we use dollars to communicate how much we want something? One answer is that this creates perverse incentives: if you customarily pay off your neighbour to turn down his TV, he now has the incentive to turn it on exactly when it's likely to annoy you.
Communicating about preferences is often problematic, because language does not provide us with reliable ways of communicating fine degrees of preference.
Imagine for instance: the sound of your neighbour's TV is annoying. This is a small annoyance that you'd rather not have to deal with, and you're not sure if they are watching it anyway... and even if they are, maybe they are indifferent about watching TV or doing something else. But maybe they do want to watch it, so you would like find out whether this is the case. You could say:
"would you mind turning down the TV"?
Just the fact that you bothered to mention it is evidence to them that it is a big enough deal... because there is a convention whereby you don't complain about small annoyances: you're only supposed to complain if it's a big enough deal. Even if you explain to them that it's actually a small annoyance, they may not believe you, because a standard politeness strategy is to downplay how big a deal something is.
This is likely the consequence of an important principle of politeness (which took me a while to grasp): don't force people to make difficult choices. i.e. make it clear to them that they have the option of declining without fearing the consequences. When you don't give people that option, you risk having them frame the situation as being one of your interests against their interests, and this could damage your relationship.
The problem here is that the linguistic community eventually adapts to the polite language: "would you mind doing X?" eventually acquires the meaning that "please do X" originally had. To be polite now, you need to make the sentence even longer: "would you mind doing X, if it's not too much trouble?". This is linguistic inflation, and the real losers are clarity and efficiency of communication.
Suppose you run a business, and you'd like an employee to work during the weekend, but NOT if this means they are going to hate you, i.e. you only want them to work if they don't mind it too much. How do you find out how much they mind? How do you know that they feel the freedom to say no?
Why don't we use numbers to communicate how much we want something?
Why don't we use dollars to communicate how much we want something? One answer is that this creates perverse incentives: if you customarily pay off your neighbour to turn down his TV, he now has the incentive to turn it on exactly when it's likely to annoy you.