N. J. Enfield, "Language Vs. Reality: Why Language Is Good for Lawyers and Bad for Scientists" (MIT Press, 2022)
New Books in Science, Technology, and Society
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What's the Point of a Coordination Problem?
In the book, you talk about coordination problems as one of the first ideas that you give the readers in the book. You suggest look, instead of thinking about word meaning in terms of what a speaker has in mind when she utters a particular word, we should focus on a diatic analysis. We're looking at what's publicly shared information between a speaker and a hearer. Andth, the book has nice images to help us see it, but do your best without the visuals maybe to help us understand it. The key point there was that people can come to solutions where they can coordinate with each other without what the solution is going to be in advance.
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