LIMITS OF DISCOURSE: EXAMPLES FROM POLITICAL, ACADEMIC, AND HUMAN-AGENT INTERACTION

Abstract

This contribution looks at modern discourse from two perspectives. It tries to show that the term ‘discourse’ has been expanded over the last few decades to include more phenomena and more disciplines that use it as a basis for their analyses. But it also tries to show that discourse in the sense of effective interaction has met its limits. The fundamental question is: When is discourse real discourse, i.e. more than a series of unrelated utterances and when is it coherent interactive communication? This paper does not intend to provide a new overall theoretical-methodological model, it uses examples from political discourse to demonstrate that popular discourse is often unfortunately less interactive than seems necessary, examples from academic discourse to illustrate that community conventions are being standardised more and more, and from humanoid-human discourse to argue that it is still difficult to construct agents that are recognised as discourse partners by human beings. Theoretical approaches to discuss these limits of discourse include coherence andintentionality. They can be applied to show where lack of cohesion in discourse indicates lack of cohesion in society.