Constraining context selection: On the pragmatic inevitability of manipulation

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Constraining context selection: On the pragmatic inevitability of manipulation Didier Maillat * University of Fribourg, Switzerland Received 11 May 2012; received in revised form 5 June 2013; accepted 22 July 2013

Abstract In this paper, I propose a new take on manipulation that focuses on the hearer’s cognitive processing of manipulative utterances, thereby avoiding some of the descriptive and explanatory limitations of other approaches to manipulation (see de Saussure and Schulz, 2005 for discussion). I will follow Sperber and Wilson (1995) and posit that interpretation is a context building process through which contextual assumptions are incrementally added to an interpretative context subset. The main argument in this paper presents an analytic model that captures the specificity of manipulative strategies as attempts to exploit the inherent limitations of these context selection processes. Specifically, manipulation will be shown to be best accounted for as a form of communication that tries to interfere with the order of accessibility of contextual assumptions to ensure that the hearer’s interpretation of a manipulative utterance only accesses a sub-optimal set of contextual assumption, crucially preventing her from accessing a dissonant, although optimal, set (see Maillat and Oswald, 2009). The pragmatics of such interpretative biases, it will be argued, is best accounted for within a relevance-theoretic framework, as the model posits that the cognitive mechanisms which govern interpretation are error-prone as a result of our ‘cognitive optimism’ (Sperber et al., 1995, 2010). © 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Keywords: Argumentation; Manipulation; Cognitive illusion; Relevance theory; Propaganda; Fallacy

1. Introduction As pragmatics studies the construction of meaning in use, its scope inevitably encompasses manipulative discourse and as a result the paths of manipulation and pragmatic analysis have crossed on several occasions.1 In fact, in most instances manipulation has been regarded as a form of deficient communication in some respect. Authors point out the ill-formed nature of manipulative utterances on various -- not necessarily compatible -- levels. The purpose of this paper is to propose a pragmatic model of manipulative discourse that couches in pragmatic theory the specificity of the interpretative processes that govern manipulation. In this respect, this paper attends to the analytic void noted by Cummings (2005) when she underlined the urgent need for a principled pragmatic theory of argumentation. Thus, by looking at some reputedly ill-formed arguments -- manipulative moves -- a first glimpse of what such a principled theory would consist of will be presented. In doing so, I will place the main focus of this study on the comprehension component of communication and will suggest that an appropriate definition of manipulation should focus on the hearer’s side of the communicative exchange.

* Correspondence to: Department of English, University of Fribourg, Europe 20, CH-1700 Fribourg, Switzerland. Tel.: +41 26 300 79 07; fax: +41 26 300 97 87. E-mail address: [email protected]. 1 I would like to thank two anonymous reviewers for their feedback and suggestions, as well as Steve Oswald for the stimulating discussions we invariably have on these questions. 0378-2166/$ -- see front matter © 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2013.07.009

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Manipulation will thus be viewed primarily as something that affects a hearer. In the course of establishing this model the analytic weight will also be shifted from an attempt to define manipulation negatively as communication minus some component to an attempt at defining manipulation as a predictable -- inevitable -- development of the normal pragmatic processes that govern everyday communication. It will be argued that Relevance Theory is better equipped to scrutinise the sort of mechanisms that ensure the success of manipulative discourse. In the last part of this paper, I will analyse a well-known manipulative move, the argument ad populum, to claim that while undoubtedly problematic, this type of argument is in effect perfectly valid from an interpretative and cognitive point of view. 2. Defining manipulation Manipulation is often presented as an ill-formed type of communication. Many of the existing attempts to characterise manipulation have tried to define manipulation as deficient in some respect (see Maillat and Oswald, 2009 for a more detailed discussion). The actual nature of this defect varies. Rigotti (2005) for instance looked into the truth-conditional limitations of manipulative arguments. Lies would prototypically illustrate such manipulative uses. However, such a definition is too limiting on at least two counts: first truth-conditional inconsistencies do not capture other forms of manipulative arguments, for instance the use of fear to strengthen one’s argument (as in the case of a threat I wouldn’t do that if I were you or that of an argument ad baculum). Second, even in cases where arguably truth-conditions are blatantly violated, as for example with an ad populum argument of the type (1) Everybody thinks that Romney will be the Republican candidate, it seems that the gist of the manipulative intention lies elsewhere then in its attempt at misrepresenting the truth (i.e. not everybody thinks that). In our example, the strength of the manipulative use seems to be retained if we limit the referential scope of the universal pronoun: (2) Everybody I spoke to about this thinks that Romney will be the Republican candidate. (2) is still a manipulative use that presents the number of speakers who express a thought as an argument in favour of that thought’s inherent validity, ignoring the fact that everybody, respectively everybody-I-spoke-to-about-this, could be wrong. Other accounts, such as van Dijk’s (2006) are derived from the tradition in critical discourse analysis, which focuses on power relations as they are negotiated and imposed through discourse. In this line of research, manipulative discourse is primarily conceived of as involving an effort on the speaker’s part to guarantee her own dominant social position by pretending that an argument is in the hearer’s interest, when it really serves the interests of the speaker (see also the discussion in de Saussure, 2005). Such a definition also appears to be too restrictive in that it excludes many communicative situations in which a speaker wishes to manipulate the hearer to think X for his own good.2 Closer to the pragmatic turf, scholars have tried to elucidate the specificity of manipulative discourse using typically pragmatic tools. Parret (1978) for instance evaluated the possibility of a speech-act-theoretic approach, where the illformedness of manipulative moves is discussed in terms of a violation of felicity conditions. However, whether you wish to couch manipulation in terms of a perlocutionary effect or of an illocutionary force, the very idea of a category of manipulative speech acts (alongside warnings, promises, etc.) is self-defeating as a it would be a type of speech act that would cease to function the very moment it is identified (see the discussion in Parret, 1978). Finally, in an attempt based on a similar set of assumptions to the one proposed in the following section, some scholars emphasised the discrepancy between the manipulative speaker’s communicative goal and the hearer’s retrieval of her intention (Attardo, 1997; Rigotti, 2005). Such an account is bound to encounter some difficulties however, as it seems to define manipulation as something that a speaker does when in fact it can be shown that manipulation can be achieved by a set of utterances independently of the speaker who produces them. For example, we can think of a situation where a set of manipulative arguments achieve the same manipulative effect on a hearer independently of who relayed them to the hearer, as in the case of racist fallacious arguments that rely on anecdotal evidence to justify racist laws which validate social inequalities based on racial ancestry. It might be argued that the initiator of such propagandist communication is genuinely fooling her audience about her hidden intention. Such an intention could be paraphrased in the case in point, as an attempt at creating a sense of bonding around a feeling of self-professed superiority and a form of animosity towards social minorities. But such a set of fallacious arguments can be repeated by speakers whose intentions would not match the hidden goal described here. In this context, it would be difficult to analyse the manipulative use of fallacious arguments in terms of a misreading of the speaker’s intention. Back in 1933, the Nazi leaders knew that if a false statement was repeated often enough it could become the ‘truth’ in the eyes of the German population. Obviously, they would never go as far as to admit it bluntly, but it is quite clear in their writings. Thus, in a speech delivered as early as January 1928, Goebbels, who masterminded nazi propaganda, was

2

In this article, following RT’s practice, the speaker is conventionally assumed to be a woman and the hearer to be a man.

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saying that what matters in propaganda is not so much that some creed is generally true but that it be held true by the people who will fight for their leader’s Weltanschauung.3 In fact, Hitler himself was even more transparent in his writings on the relative advantages of using lies in propaganda. He insisted that useful lies not only could but should be put to the service of the higher cause through propaganda. While discussing the failings of war propaganda in Germany during the First World War, Hitler is keen to highlight that Allies’ propaganda was far superior for its systematic repetition of untruths. Thus the British soldier was never allowed to feel that the information which he received at home was untrue. Unfortunately the opposite was the case with the Germans, who finally wound up by rejecting everything from home as pure swindle and humbug. [. . .] The worst of all was that our people did not understand the very first condition which has to be fulfilled in every kind of propaganda; namely, a systematically one-sided attitude towards every problem that has to be dealt with.[. . .] The aim of propaganda is not to try to pass judgment on conflicting rights, giving each its due, but exclusively to emphasize the right which we are asserting. Propaganda must not investigate the truth objectively and, in so far as it is favourable to the other side, present it according to the theoretical rules of justice; [. . .] (translated by Murphy, 1939: chapter VI) In this excerpt it is quite clear that truth is regarded as accessory in war propaganda and can even be detrimental to its ultimate purpose. This apology of lies is underlined again when he points out that the Allies’ use of lies is to be emulated. Further, the way in which they pilloried the German enemy as solely responsible for the war -- which was a brutal and absolute falsehood -- and the way in which they proclaimed his guilt was excellently calculated to reach the masses, realizing that these are always extremist in their feelings. And thus it was that this atrocious lie was positively believed. The effectiveness of this kind of propaganda is well illustrated by the fact that after four-and-a-half years, not only was the enemy still carrying on his propagandist work, but it was already undermining the stamina of our people at home. (ibid.) Finally, he insists on the importance of repetition to reach one’s propagandist aims. In one of the many allusions to the paramount importance given in nazi propaganda to the repetition of the official creed, he thus writes that ‘‘only constant repetition will finally succeed in imprinting an idea on the memory of the crowd’’ (ibid.). It seems clear that while such a manipulative strategy (see the discussion of the ad populum fallacy below) would reflect a hidden intention on the Nazi leaders’ part when they masterminded the propaganda around the blaze at the Reichstag,4 such a hidden intention would be absent from the mind of most of the speakers who contributed to the rapid spread of this manipulative piece of discourse.5 Arguably, though, it seems intuitively appropriate to claim that whoever had been exposed to that manipulative strategy and had bought into it, that that person had been manipulated (independently of the speaker’s intention). Such an example shows that manipulation can be passed on even if the original, manipulative intention disappears in the process. As should have become clear in this rapid survey, a recurrent problem with all of these accounts is that they focus on an analysis of manipulation from the speaker’s perspective as most of them define it in terms of some hidden -- and hence unobservable -- move or intention on her part. In the following I propose that a potentially richer analysis of manipulative uses of language can be arrived at by reversing the viewpoint on these phenomena and by focusing on the hearer’s interpretative processes. 3. The pragmatics of manipulation A pragmatic approach to manipulative uses of discourse can be presented as an alternative to the limitations noted above. More specifically, the present account purports to define manipulation as an effect on an addressee rather than as misleading use of language on the speaker’s part. With such a shift in the perspective, I will claim that manipulative uses become more accessible from an analytic point of view. They will also more readily lend themselves to observation, contrary to what a phenomenon, like speaker-based manipulation, which is said to be covert. Interestingly, such a shifted perspective in the pragmatic analysis leads to non trivial changes in the kind of definition put forward for manipulative discourse. Perhaps the most important of these changes is linked to the communicative nature of manipulation. On the hearer’s side, manipulative arguments are processed like any other regular utterance. In

3 ‘Es kommt, wenn ich etwas als richtig erkannt habe, nicht darauf an, dass es in aller Theoretisiererei richtig ist, sondern vielmehr darauf, dass ich Menschen finde, die mit mir für diese als richtig erkannte Weltanschauung zu kämpfen bereit sind.’ (Goebbels, 1938). 4 Communist activists were (erroneously) designated as the only culprits. 5 This survey is not intended as an exhaustive list. Other accounts have been put forward to account for manipulative uses of language, as discussed in Maillat and Oswald (2009). The interested reader should turn to this reference for a more detailed discussion, as well as to the volume edited by de Saussure and Schulz (2005).

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other words, the interpretative processes involved in the understanding of a manipulative utterance are exactly those described under ‘normal’ circumstances. In fact, as will be argued below, it is precisely the interpretative unmarkedness of manipulative utterances that ensures their success.6 This should not be taken to mean that the interpretation of manipulative discourse cannot be distinguished from non-manipulative cases. The idea defended in this paper is to define manipulation as an instance of sub-optimal output of the normal interpretation process, i.e. a case where a normal interpretative procedure goes astray. The difference between this form of erroneous interpretative process and accidental interpretative mistakes7 lies in the fact that this sub-optimal output is assumed to be the result of a prior constraint applied onto the mechanisms that govern interpretation. In order to describe this phenomenon, it needs to be considered within a pragmatic framework. There are several reasons why Relevance Theory (Blakemore, 2002; Carston, 2002; Sperber and Wilson, 1995; Wilson and Sperber, 2012) appears to be better suited at handling the sort of analysis that is required here. The first argument that speaks in favour of the relevance-theoretic framework touches on its treatment of context. As Sperber and Wilson (1995) indicate, one of the points of divergence with other pragmatic models rests in the way context is regarded as entering the interpretative process. They write that ‘‘It is not that first context is determined, and then relevance is assessed. [. . .] [I]t is relevance which is treated as given, and context which is treated as a variable’’ (1995:141--142). They explain further that context is the result of the interpretative process. Interestingly for an account of manipulative uses, by refocusing the interpretative process on context selection procedures, they also predict that interpretation depends on these selection procedures and that if there were strategies to control context selection procedures, the latter would amount to effectively controlling the hearer’s interpretation. In other words, in a relevance-theoretic framework, manipulation could be analysed as an attempt to control the hearer’s context selection process. This constitutes the analytic option explored in this paper. Thus, relevance is not the goal of the interpretative process but rather the guiding principles that governs context selection (1995:141--142): an optimally relevant interpretation minimises the cognitive efforts the hearer has to put into the construction of the context set and maximises the cognitive effects generated via this context set. Crucially, as Sperber and Wilson (1995) point out, the construction of the set of contextual assumptions is an incremental process, in which the hearer accesses elements of his cognitive environment following an order of accessibility. That is to say that not all pieces of information that are manifest to an individual at the time when he processes an utterance are equally accessible, some assumptions are more manifest than others (1995:39--40). As the quest for optimal relevance only selects a small portion of all the assumptions manifest to a hearer, it follows that given the very unlikely situation in which two addressees of the same utterance would have two identical cognitive environments in terms of the assumptions that are manifest to them, they might still differ with respect to the degree of manifestness (or accessibility) to which these assumptions are activated in their cognitive environment. As a result, the same utterance U could lead to a different interpretation for these two individuals simply because different assumptions will be selected first depending on their degree of manifestness. Sperber and Wilson (1995) seem to capture the effect of an ordering relation in the cognitive environment using various notions that seem to overlap at times. They write about degrees of manifestness, accessibility (1995:138), and also about the strength of an assumption (1995:75ff, 143, 151). The fine-grained implementation of this ordered structure is not of importance at this stage for the purpose of this discussion, however. What seems important to the understanding of manipulative uses is the fact that The organisation of the individual’s encyclopaedic memory, and the mental activity in which he is engaged, limit the class of potential contexts from which an actual context can be chosen at any given time. [. . .] [N]ot all chunks of encyclopaedic information are equally accessible at any given time (Sperber and Wilson, 1995:138). Since the optimisation procedure that obeys the principle of relevance is not exhaustive,8 differences in the ordering relation will lead to the selection of a different context set, and hence, to a different interpretation. Manipulation, it is argued, is a discursive use that results in an effective re-ordering of contextual assumptions that affects their accessibility in the cognitive environment of the hearer. In the above excerpt taken from Mein Kampf, Hitler explicitly describes this re-ordering when he underlines ‘‘the very first condition which has to be fulfilled in every kind of propaganda; namely, a systematically one-sided attitude towards every problem that has to be dealt with’’ (translated by Murphy, 1939: chapter VI). The second reason that speaks in favour of a relevance theoretic framework is linked to the clear specification in the model of a point at which pragmatic processes stop and yield an interpretation that is regarded as optimal. Crucially,

‘Interpretative unmarkedness’ refers to the fact that interpretation in cases of manipulative discourse does not depart from the norm. Such a precision is needed as we do not want to treat as a case of manipulation an erroneous interpretation of (i) Max has this thing with bats as meaning that Max likes baseball, when it is small flying mammals that Max cares about. 8 ‘‘A phenomenon may make manifest a very large number of assumptions. However, this is not to say that the individual will actually construct any, let alone all, of these assumptions’’ (Sperber and Wilson, 1995:151). 6 7

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Relevance Theory insists on the fact that relevance is calculated as an optimal ratio between cognitive efforts and effects, but the notion of optimality used in this definition is not regarded as absolute. It is relative to a given cognitive environment, as well as to a specific allocation of cognitive resources. Thus, the first principle of relevance is described as a tendency towards optimal relevance (see discussion in Sperber and Wilson, 1995:262). But the authors hasten to add that There may be many shortcomings, many cognitive sub-mechanisms that fail to deliver enough effect for the effort they require, many occasions when the system’s resources are poorly allocated. (Sperber and Wilson, 1995:262) In other words, the pragmatic system as presented in Relevance Theory can err at times. Not only can it err, but the theory makes a certain number of predictions as to the type of errors that might lead the system astray and yield a sub-optimal interpretation. The central claim of this paper argues that manipulative discourse exploits the inherent weaknesses of the interpretative process to ensure that a sub-optimal interpretation is indeed arrived at, i.e. to ensure that one of the predicted errors occurs. In this context, this approach looks at manipulative uses as a built-in -- and hence, inevitable -consequence of the way our pragmatic system operates. Specifically, the analysis proposed here suggests that a manipulator will achieve her goal by having a re-ordering action on the cognitive environment of the hearer so as to guarantee that a given utterance U will be interpreted within an appropriate subset of contextual assumptions, independently of the expected presence of contradictory assumptions in the cognitive environment of the hearer. As a result, from an interpretative perspective, the main component of a manipulative argument is a constraint applied on the selection process of contextual assumptions when interpreting a target utterance U. Manipulation is therefore re-analysed as an instance of Context Selection Constraint (henceforth, CSC). Manipulation as Context Selection Constraint -- definition: Manipulative communication is a twofold process by which a constraint that limits context selection is combined with a target utterance U in order to force the interpretation of the latter within a limited set of contextual assumptions and to effectively ensure that the interpretation is reached before a known, alternative (contradictory) subset of assumptions is accessed.9 In this type of analysis, a manipulative use can adopt two different kinds of constraining patterns. According to Sperber and Wilson (1995:140--141), the cognitive environment of a hearer is an ordered structure that obeys a partial inclusion relation. In this ordered structure, the ‘‘assumptions left over in the memory of the deductive device, i.e. the interpretation of the previous utterance, constitute an immediately given context’’. This initial level can be extended to a wider context set that includes ‘‘the encyclopaedic entries (or possibly smaller chunks of encyclopaedic information, taken from these entries) of concepts already present either in the context or in the assumption being processed’’. A third extension occurs when ‘‘information about the immediately observable environment’’ is added. Most importantly for this approach, [t]his formal relation has a psychological counterpart: order of inclusion corresponds to order of accessibility [. . .]; contexts which include only the initial context as a sub-part [. . .] are therefore the most accessible contexts; contexts which include the initial context and a one-step extension as sub-parts [. . .] are therefore the next most accessible contexts, and so on. (1995:142) Going back to manipulation, the approach suggested here posits that manipulative uses ensure that a context Cˈ which would be relevant to the interpretation of the target utterance U is not accessed, as it would yield a contradiction for U, and would ultimately lead to the elimination of U from the cognitive environment of the hearer (CEH). Instead, manipulation works on making a context C, in which U is strengthened and gives rise to contextual implications, much more accessible, thereby effectively blocking access to Cˈ, since ‘‘[t]he less accessible a context, the greater the effort involved in accessing it, and conversely’’ (1995:142). In other words, manipulation exploits the fact that relevance is more likely to be reached within highly accessible contexts. The reader will have noticed already that the difficulty with an analysis of manipulation that concentrates on the hearer and does away with the speaker’s covert strategy mentioned in previous accounts resides in its ability to contrast manipulation with normal interpretative phenomena; or, to set this difficulty within the framework of argumentation theory (van Eemeren and Grootendorst, 2004), to contrast manipulation with persuasion. In this account, persuasion is a discursive attempt at strengthening an utterance U by ensuring that U is consistent and, ideally, strengthened in all relevant subsets of CEH. :9 Cˈ , Cˈ  CEH and Cˈ≠C, such that U is relevant in Cˈ and U is inconsistent and eliminated in Cˈ

9 It is worth pointing out that this twofold process can take place over the course of two distinct utterances which may or may not be adjacent (as in the case of affirming the consequent (see example below); or both steps can occur within one utterance as in the case of the standard ad populum fallacy (Everybody says that U).

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That is to say that persuasion ensures that there is no contextual subset Cˈ in which U is both relevant and inconsistent with other contextual assumptions. When the hearer is persuaded of U, the corresponding contextual assumption is reinforced in all subsets of CEH in which U is relevant. Whereas manipulation is a discursive attempt at guaranteeing that any known relevant subset Cˈ of CEH, which would lead to the elimination of U, is not accessed or at least that it be less accessible than C.10 8Cˈ, Cˈ  CEH and Cˈ≠C, such that U is relevant in Cˈ and U is inconsistent and eliminated in Cˈ, accessibility (C) > accessibility (Cˈ) in CEH In other words, where persuasion excludes the existence of any contradicting contextual subset, manipulation, on the other hand, makes sure that such a contradicting contextual subset, which is known to exist, is not accessed during the interpretation of U. The two definitions given above provide us with an interesting perspective on the contrast between the purported hearer-based approach and earlier speaker-based accounts of manipulation. Thus, it should be clear from the above that the proposed model does not try to dispense with the idea that a manipulative intention is at the origin of a manipulative argument. However, the crucial step consists in re-analysing that intention in terms of the effect sought from the point of view of the hearer’s interpretative processes. In such a framework, although an initial intention is likely to have triggered a manipulative argument, it is not a necessary condition for the interpretative effect to take place as the definition makes clear. Such a definitional framework readily accounts for cases of manipulation by proxy as they were described above. An analogy could illustrate further the contrast between manipulation and persuasion. The actions of persuasion and manipulation could be described as two actions in which a speaker tries to get some information through customs. Persuasion would then correspond to a situation where the speaker tries to get some information into the CEH by getting a proper visa for it, while manipulation corresponds to an attempt at smuggling some information into CEH (‘‘getting past [the hearer’s] defences’’ according to Sperber et al., 2010). Based on this model, two types of strategies are expected to allow a manipulator to achieve the intended effect on the hearer. She can either choose to increase the accessibility of the context set C in which U is strengthened or weaken the accessibility of the context set Cˈ in which U is inconsistent and eliminated as shown in Fig. 1. [(Fig._1)TD$IG]

Fig. 1. Two types of Context Selection Constraint in manipulative discourse: weakening of Cˈ or strengthening of C in the order of accessibility.

Having laid out the theoretical background for a pragmatic analysis of manipulative discourse, a case study of a prototypical example of manipulative fallacy is proposed that draws on the explanatory potential of the model and highlights further points of convergence with the relevance theoretic framework. 4. Not so ill-formed manipulative arguments: the case of the ad populum fallacy Maillat and Oswald (2009, 2011) explore the interface between argumentation theory and cognitive psychology and argue that CSC allows the analyst to explain manipulative arguments and in particular their effects on the hearer with an improved resolution and transparency. There are many different ways to achieve either one of the two manipulative strategies identified in the previous section. All of them, however, will target the internal structure of the cognitive environment and in that sense they are expected to be cognitive strategies. This should not be surprising for a pragmatic theory like Relevance Theory which asserts its own cognitive validity and foundation. As was already pointed out in an earlier quotation, the ‘cognitive submechanisms’ that govern -- among other things -- interpretative processes are subject to shortcomings (Sperber and Wilson, 1995:262). A good illustration of cognitive shortcomings is found in cognitive psychology under the category of cognitive illusions (see Pohl, 2004 for a detailed overview). Allott and Rubio Fernandez (2002) also looked at the pragmatic implications of such cognitive shortcomings in relation with the so-called Moses illusion (see Erickson and Mattson, 1981; Reder and Kusbit, 1991). Pohl (2004:2--4) defines a cognitive illusion as a cognitive phenomenon that (i) deviates from some ‘correct’

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It is important to point out here that this contradictory subset Cˈ is not challenged by U, it is simply avoided.

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standard, (ii) deviates in a systematic fashion, (iii) escapes conscious control, and, as a result, (iv) is difficult to avoid. Unsurprisingly, many manipulative strategies exploit such cognitive illusions in order to mislead the cognitive system.11 According to van Eemeren and Houtlosser (2008:140), the ad populum fallacy can be defined as ‘‘the fallacy of regarding something acceptable because it is considered acceptable by a great many people’’. In other words, the repetition of U by several sources tends to strengthen U. One does not need to look very long for an example of such manipulative use as the history of propaganda and advertising is replete with instances of it. Burst advertising campaigns for example count on the overwhelming presence and repetition of their slogan to strengthen its impact on their target audience. Similarly, as was already pointed out in an earlier section, the Nazi regime made sure that the German population was repeatedly exposed to some central claims (e.g. about the alleged inferiority of some minority ethnic, religious and political groups) in order to strengthen their accessibility within CEH. From a CSC perspective, the analysis of the ad populum fallacy is relatively straightforward. The repetition of U guarantees a greater degree of accessibility as U gets strengthened in CEH with each occurrence and as it gets connected with an increasing number of context sets. In CSC terms, this corresponds to a strengthening-by-repetition constraint on C which ensures that inconsistent context sets (which would lead to the elimination of U are fewer and weaker) are not accessed. As it turns out, there exists ample evidence in the fields of cognitive psychology and psycholinguistics that supports the cognitive effect (on CEH) described above. Two directions explored by scholars to elucidate the cognitive mechanisms which underlie strengthening-by-repetition ought to be mentioned here. Both effects enter the category of cognitive illusions. First, cognitive psychology identified the mere-exposure effect which is defined as ‘‘increased liking for a stimulus that follows repeated, unreinforced exposure to that stimulus’’ (Bornstein and Craver-Lemley, 2004:231). While the notion of ‘liking’ does not correspond directly to that of accessibility in the proposed model, I want to argue that the observed increase in the positive connotation of a given contextual assumption coincides with an increased level of accessibility (see Zajonc, 1968 for a discussion of mere-exposure effect on a lexical level). A second, more important, cognitive effect, which has been linked to repeated exposure is to be linked to strengthening-by-repetition, namely the validity effect. Contrary to the mere-exposure effect, this latter type of cognitive illusion is firmly grounded within language. Hackett Renner (2004:201) describes its impact on a hearer’s assessment of a given piece of verbally transmitted information. [I]f information has been heard previously, people are likely to ascribe more truth or validity to it than if they are hearing it for the first time [. . .] regardless of whether the information was originally believed to be true or false. That is to say that the more an assumption is repeated the more valid it becomes in CEH. This means that through the simple repetition of U a CEH in which U was eliminated can be turned into a CEH that is consistent with U. This phenomenon, it is argued, constitutes the cognitive counterpart of the ad populum fallacy. It provides a cognitive explanation to the CSC strategy of strengthening-by-repetition. Interestingly, the experimental results obtained in psycholinguistics show that whereas the ad populum might be an ill-formed argument from a rational point of view, it constitutes a perfectly valid argument from a cognitive perspective, since the repetition of U indeed guarantees that U is strengthened in CEH. As a result if everybody says U, U effectively becomes more accessible in CEH. However a second explanation needs to be put forward if one is to account for the most common form of ad populum argument used in manipulative discourse. While this type of account would explain why and how propaganda or advertising use repeated exposure to U in order to increase U’s strength in CEH, it is much less clear why an ad populum fallacious argument which manipulates a hearer into accepting U by merely stating once that everybody says U would work at all. Nevertheless, an utterance like everybody says U so it’s got to be true instantiates one of the most common, everyday forms of manipulative fallacy belonging to the ad populum type. In order to understand what is happening in the latter case, it should first be pointed out that everybody says U so U is a summary of what would effectively happen on a cognitive level if U were to be repeated by everybody in the hearer’s environment. As we saw above, the repetition of U strengthens U in CEH. Thus, to the extent that the antecedent of such an argumentative utterance describes an actual state of affair (it is true that everybody says U), the consequent cognitively follows from the mere-exposure and validity effects (U will be vindicated in CEH). Therefore, everybody says U so U must be true can be regarded as a discursive shortcut for strengthening-by-repetition. Such an argumentative move relies on a cognitive effect whereby a contextual assumption is reinforced through the mere mention of the corresponding cognitive process. In that sense, the ad populum only mentions repetition without actually realising it, but the cognitive effect on CEH remains. Incidentally, it seems important to point out that ample evidence that such cognitive shortcuts can take place has been found within the field of cognitive psychology, as scholars addressed the contrast between use and mention of repetition.

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Maillat and Oswald (2009, 2011) identify other such manipulative illusions.

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The goal of such research is to establish if the simple fact of mentioning that a given stimulus has been repeated (mention condition) suffices to trigger the validity effect noted when the stimulus in question is actually repeated (use condition). The team of scholars who published their results as Bacon (1979:247) showed that the triggering factor for the validity effect is a recognition judgment for a given stimulus more than the actual repetition of the stimulus in question. They write that: ‘Unambiguously, then, differences in rated truth are more sensitive to recognition judgments than to actual repetition of the statements being rated’. Ozubko and Fugelsang (2011:273) showed further that the same effect can be generated by misleading subjects in their belief that they encountered a target stimulus before. Coming back to the ad populum, it could therefore be argued that it exploits the cognitive effect of repetition in mention. This was the effect sought by Colin Powell in the speech he delivered on 5 February 2003 to the UN Security Council. He justified then that military operations should be envisaged against Iraq, based on -- arguably -- numerous pieces of information: The material I will present to you comes from a variety of sources. Some are U.S. sources and some are those of other countries. Some [of] the sources are technical, such as intercepted telephone conversations and photos taken by satellites. Other sources are people who have risked their lives to let the world know what Saddam Hussein is really up to. I cannot tell you everything that we know, but what I can share with you, when combined with what all of us have learned over the years, is deeply troubling. In this preamble, Powell tries to convey the idea of a very large number of sources (‘a variety of sources. . . Some are. . . Some of the sources are. . . Other sources are. . .’) and pieces of evidence that assert U, namely that Iraq is an international threat. We know now that there were very few and poor sources, but the manipulative move is clearly that of an ad populum argument which implies that all of us know that everything we know confirms U (‘everything that we know. . . what all of us have learned over the years’) even though the evidence actually presented is rather scarce. With these observations, we reach the conclusion that while certain interpretative effects can be achieved by using language in an appropriate way (by repeating a target utterance for instance), there exists linguistic shortcuts to trigger those same effects by simply alluding to the conditions under which the effect is generated. Unsurprisingly, such shortcuts exert a very strong appeal on manipulators. The relevance-theoretic framework imparts the analyst with a powerful tool in connection with this last observation. Unlike many other pragmatic models, RT has looked at ways that languages have to control the inferential processes at work during interpretation. In her work on the pragmatics of discourse markers, Blakemore (2002:89) notes that languages have evolved ‘‘coded means for constraining the inferential tasks involved in utterance interpretation’’. These expressions are called ‘procedural expressions’. The claim put forward in this paper is therefore that an utterance such as everybody says U functions like a procedural expression in that it constrains the inferential system towards strengthening-by-repetition, thereby effectively manipulating the interpretation of U (strengthening U in CEH). In that sense, everybody says U opens a cognitive shortcut since ‘‘[procedural expressions] ensure the recovery of the intended cognitive effects for a minimum cost in processing’’ (Blakemore, 2002:130). 5. Conclusion and perspective In this model, manipulative effects are achieved by constraining the context selection process. In the case in point, the ad populum fallacies, the constraint can be imposed on CEH in two distinct ways. The manipulator can adopt a brute-force strategy and decide to coerce interpretation cognitively by increasing the degree of accessibility of C through repetition; or she can use a procedural expression (everybody says U) to constrain the inferential process and guide it through a cognitive shortcut. The existence and appeal of such cognitive shortcuts within the interpretative process is predicted by a pragmatic theory based on an optimisation procedure like Relevance Theory. In a relevance-theoretic framework, interpretation is efficiency-driven. From an evolutionary perspective such a system is expected to look for processing shortcuts. Manipulation takes advantage of this natural -- inevitable -- attraction towards cognitive shortcuts and exploits it. And in many cases it gets away with it because, as Sperber et al. (1995:90) underline: [. . .] people are nearly-incorrigible ‘‘cognitive optimists’’. They take for granted that their spontaneous cognitive processes are highly reliable, and that the output of these processes does not need re-checking. In a recent development of these ideas, Sperber et al. (2010) claim that the cognitive system evolved a separate mechanism, ‘epistemic vigilance’, in order to offset the cognitive drawbacks of this drive towards efficiency. The role of the epistemic vigilance filter is to ensure that the cognitive mechanisms governing interpretation are not misled or trapped too often. In that sense epistemic vigilance is predicted to be intimately related to manipulative uses of language, as they are expected to function in opposite directions. 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The literature on fallacious arguments (see van Eemeren and Grootendorst, 2004) provides ample evidence of this antagonistic relationship. Sperber et al. (2010) invoke two main orientations for epistemic vigilance: (i) vigilance towards the content, and (ii) vigilance towards the source of an utterance. As expected in such a system, some manipulative uses can be categorised as attempts to lure epistemic vigilance on the source. For example, an expression like experts say that U -- an instance of ad verecundiam fallacy -- can be analysed as a procedural expression which constrains the interpretation of U by weakening the accessibility of any subset Cˈ in which U is eliminated, as the source of U gets contextually strengthened. An ad personam fallacy works in the opposite direction. Interestingly, some fixed formulations function like procedural expressions to trigger the interpretative effects associated with the ad verecundiam and ad personam fallacies. Expressions such as experts/scientists/government officials say that U and idiots claim that U are conventional linguistic signs that point towards inferential shortcuts which strengthen, respectively weaken, the contextual assumptions associated with U. Likewise, we find procedural expressions which signal content-related validity to the epistemic vigilance device. Syllogistic arguments, for instance, are cognitively safe in the sense that they guarantee the soundness of the conclusion drawn. Unsurprisingly, however, manipulators know that an argument that resembles a syllogism stands very good chances of evading the epistemic vigilance filter. This cognitive trick is particularly effective because it relies on a inconspicuous pragmatic phenomenon first discussed in Geis and Zwicky (1971:565), namely conditional perfection (CP). CP is described as a form of pragmatic enrichment, an ‘‘invited inference’’, which is ‘‘a principle governing the effects that utterances have -- conditionals are understood to be perfected unless the hearer has reason to believe that the converse is false [. . .]’’. Perfecting, in this instance, is therefore a case of treating a conditional relation as a biconditional one. By way of illustration, the conditional in (2), as a consequence of CP, tends to pragmatically license the conclusion expressed (Lou must be here), even though the affirmation of the consequent in the second premise (I just saw Max) does not validate it from a logical point of view: (2) You know what they say: ‘If you see Lou somewhere, Max is there too.’ -And I just saw Max. . . So Lou must be here too. As Geis and Zwicky (1971) argue, CP is a pervasive phenomenon and although it is not conventional in Grice’s sense (1989), it functions like a generalised conversational implicature which requires special circumstances in order to be cancelled.12 For this very reason, manipulation appreciates fallacious arguments disguised as syllogisms, such as affirming the consequent, as they rely on a generalised conversational implicature -- Conditional Perfection -- which tends to be triggered by default (in Levinson’s (2000) sense). As a result, a manipulator can try to trick the addressee by counting on the fact that a default CP implicature tends to be applied to conditionals if the addressee fails to note that the converse relation does not hold. Thus, while the application of CP in (3) is unproblematic, its application in (4) is. (3) At the time of each North Korean nuclear test, we observe increased movement around that army base. And spies spotted intense activity on the base. [ A North Korean nuclear test is underway. (via CP) (4) At the time of each North Korean nuclear test, we observe rain in Hamburg. And it rained in Hamburg yesterday. ?? [ A North Korean nuclear test is underway. (common sense calls for a cancellation of CP) Interestingly for the manipulator, the propensity for the CP implicature to be drawn even in (4) provides her with a perfect tool to strengthen U -- in this case, the conclusion of the syllogism -- in the cognitive environment of the addressee. In this second type of manipulative discourse, the cognitive shortcut is triggered through the content of the manipulating utterance (as argued in Sperber et al., 2010); when the addressee recognises a conditional structure, there is a great risk that he will tend to apply the default CP. When he does, he will have been manipulated to reinforce the conclusion U in his CE. For this same reason, we expect many other manipulative moves and fallacies to exploit generalised conversational implicatures, as they constitute a form of default cognitive shortcut. In our example, the quasi-syllogistic structure exploits the inferential constraints triggered by genuine syllogistic procedural expressions of the form (if P then Q; P; so Q). While these examples can only hint at the analytic potential of the model, I hope to have established that this type of pragmatic approach to manipulative uses of language opens up a very rich and fresh perspective on debates which have occupied language scholars since Aristotle.

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As the quotation above makes clear, CP is to be cancelled if the hearer ‘‘has reason to believe that the converse is false’’ (ibid.).

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Discourse and manipulation. Discourse Soc. 17, 359--383. van Eemeren, F.H., Grootendorst, R., 2004. A Systematic Theory of Argumentation: The Pragma-Dialectical Approach. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. van Eemeren, F., Houtlosser, P., 2008. Rhetoric in a dialectical framework: fallacies as derailments of strategic manoeuvring. In: Weigand, E. (Ed.), Dialogue and Rhetoric. John Benjamins, Amsterdam, pp. 133--152. Wilson, D., Sperber, D., 2012. Meaning and Relevance. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, New York. Zajonc, R.B., 1968. Attitudinal effects of mere exposure. J. Pers. Soc. Psychol. 9, 1--27. Didier Maillat received his PhD from Oxford University. He has worked as Associate Professor of English Linguistics at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland, since 2006. His research focuses on pragmatic models at various interfaces. His early research was on the pragmatics of spatial reference frames using an experimental framework. More recently, his interest in empirical pragmatics has taken him within the realm of manipulative discourse. His most recent publications include two theoretical discussions of a pragmatic account of manipulation (2009, 2011; with Steve Oswald).

Please cite this article in press as: Maillat, D., Constraining context selection: On the pragmatic inevitability of manipulation, Journal of Pragmatics (2013), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2013.07.009