<p>Anyone who has read Douglas Adams’ novel cycle, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the </p><p>Galaxy, will probably agree that it is saturated with irony, but few people would </p><p>manage to define how or why. Irony can be used as an indirect but clear communicative strategy, by which the true meaning of a text is eventually eradicated. There are many different types of irony, and all types can be used for miscommunication. In this essay I have tried to establish what Adams' text is telling the reader and I have found that it is not simply a science fiction story about the humorous travels of Arthur Dent. In fact, what the text is not telling </p><p>the reader is at least as interesting. Adams' text is a multi-layered ironic </p><p>miscommunication, telling the reader that there is no truth or meaning in existence.</p>

Anyone who has read Douglas Adams’ novel cycle, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, will probably agree that it is saturated with irony, but few people would manage to define how or why. Irony can be used as an indirect but clear communicative strategy, by which the true meaning of a text is eventually eradicated. There are many different types of irony, and all types can be used for miscommunication. In this essay I have tried to establish what Adams' text is telling the reader and I have found that it is not simply a science fiction story about the humorous travels of Arthur Dent. In fact, what the text is not telling the reader is at least as interesting. Adams' text is a multi-layered ironic miscommunication, telling the reader that there is no truth or meaning in existence.

Because of its ambiguous function and usage, silence is a major source of intercultural miscommunication, which frequently leads to negative judgments, and breeds stereotypes. Grounded in a cross-cultural and interactive framework, I conducted a five-month descriptive qualitative study, which explored silence perceptions among Chinese, Korean, Russian, Colombian and Iranian ESL speakers, and Canadian native-speakers of English (NS). Multiple perspectives were investigated using stimulated recall, in a context of intercultural mentoring sessions and interviews. Eight ESL 'silence producer' participants were asked to explain their silence use, and their interpretations were compared with the functions attributed to these silences by other participants, one from the same cultural background as the 'silence producer', and a NS. Participants' silence perceptions were described, and most negatively-interpreted silences were identified. Analysis revealed intra-cultural acrimony, that high language proficiency perceptions increase negative silence attributions, cross-cultural differences in attitudes towards fillers, and the systematic silencing of ESL speakers.

Because of its ambiguous function and usage, silence is a major source of intercultural miscommunication, which frequently leads to negative judgments, and breeds stereotypes. Grounded in a cross-cultural and interactive framework, I conducted a five-month descriptive qualitative study, which explored silence perceptions among Chinese, Korean, Russian, Colombian and Iranian ESL speakers, and Canadian native-speakers of English (NS). Multiple perspectives were investigated using stimulated recall, in a context of intercultural mentoring sessions and interviews. Eight ESL 'silence producer' participants were asked to explain their silence use, and their interpretations were compared with the functions attributed to these silences by other participants, one from the same cultural background as the 'silence producer', and a NS. Participants' silence perceptions were described, and most negatively-interpreted silences were identified. Analysis revealed intra-cultural acrimony, that high language proficiency perceptions increase negative silence attributions, cross-cultural differences in attitudes towards fillers, and the systematic silencing of ESL speakers.

Thesis (M.Phil.) - University of Glasgow, 2008. / M.Phil. thesis submitted to the Department of Philosophy, Faculty of Arts, University of Glasgow, 2008. Includes bibliographical references. Print version also available.

Thesis (M.A.)--Montana State University--Bozeman, 2005. / Typescript. Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Lisa Aldred. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 192-211).

This thesis integrates the epistemology of testimony with work on the epistemology, psychology, and metaphysics of language. Epistemologists of testimony typically ask what conditions must be met for an agent to gain testimonial justification or knowledge that p given that p has been asserted, and this assertion has been understood. Questions regarding the audience's ability to grasp communicated contents are largely ignored. This is a mistake. Work in the philosophy of language (and related areas) suggests that the determination and recovery of communicated contents is far from straightforward, and can go wrong in many ways. This thesis investigates the epistemology of testimony in light of this work, with a special focus on miscommunication. The introduction provides a brief overview of some relevant work on testimony, the philosophy of language, and psychology, and argues that there is good reason to investigate the three. One obvious problem in this area is that if testimonial knowledge requires knowledge of what is said then the risk of miscommunication will block testimonial knowledge. Chapter two argues that testimonial knowledge does not require knowledge of what is said. The remaining four chapters discuss problems which do to arise from miscommunication. Chapters three and four focus on the epistemic uncertainty of communication with context sensitive terms. Chapter three argues that many beliefs formed on the basis of context sensitive testimony are unsafe and insensitive. Chapter four argues that speakers often have plausible deniability about the contents of their assertions. Chapters five and six explore types of miscommunication which arise as a result of background mental states affecting our linguistic understanding. Chapter five explores the social/ethical consequences of this, arguing that certain groups are disproportionately subject to harmful misinterpretation. Chapter six argues that testimonial anti-reductionists make the wrong predictions about a range of cases of cognitive penetration.

This study looks into the field of intercultural miscommunication and misunderstandings on small multicultural Non Profit Organization (NPO) seen from the expats point of view. It is a study based on a qualitative method-design, including a micro-ethnographic study and qualitative interviews on a small NPO on Bali, Indonesia called Project Clean Uluwatu (PCU) that contain volunteers from all over the world. These misunderstandings and miscommunications that occurred on PCU was mostly between local people born on Bali and foreign people working on PCU, due to many reasons, starting with the rapid pace of globalization and that culture don’t evolve in the same speed. Plausible explanations for this, that are raised in this thesis, is that people make sense of events in different ways, especially if the individuals within a misunderstanding belong to both a high context culture and a low context culture and aby that communicate in different ways. This thesis also explain them through Karl Wieck’s sensemaking perspective by applying 7 properties that describes how individuals make sense out of miscommunication by perceiving the event in different ways due to individuals former knowledge, their intentions and own identity.

The collection of short stories explores relationships. Sometimes characters’ secret longings, fantasies, and frustrations drive them to make unusual choices or to fixate on inappropriate people and solutions to their problems. Some characters are sidelined by their inabilities to make their most important needs known to those closest to them. Miscommunication or failing to be understood is a common thread throughout.

This study examined how social anxiety, gender, and mode of presentation influenced miscommunication and perception of negativity in children’s interpretation of computer-mediated messages. The initial phase of the research involved developing and validating the stimuli for emotion recognition via presentation of various emotionally toned messages. Following preparation of the stimuli, the 98 participants (aged 8-12 years) in the main study were randomly assigned to one of three conditions: audio-visual, audio-only, and text message. The same emotionally toned messages were presented in each of these three conditions. Participants were instructed to select from a list of six emotions (happy, sad, disgusted, angry, surprised, scared) which emotion each message conveyed. Participants then rated how positively or negatively they perceived each sentence, using a 5-point Likert scale that ranged from very negative to very positive. Following the emotion recognition and Likert rating task, participants completed questionnaires that gathered information about social anxiety and attribution bias. Findings revealed that additional nonverbal and paralinguistic, as in the audio-visual or audio-only condition, allowed participants to more accurately identify the emotion being conveyed in the message, compared to the text message condition. This advantage was found for all emotions with the exception of happiness. For happy messages, participants were able to identify the intended emotion at above-chance levels regardless of mode of presentation. When making interpretations about angry messages, a significant three-way interaction was observed between sex, condition and social anxiety. Likert rating analyses revealed that condition, sex, and social anxiety played important roles in the interpretation of both ambiguous and unambiguous emotions, such as surprise and happiness.