Common Ground or Conceptual Reframing? A Study of the Common Elements in Conflicting Positions in French Interactions - Conflict and Multimodal Communication: Social Research and Machine Intelligence - page 136

that they make sense together. For Royal, Sarkozy must explain why everything
has gone wrong in France because he is mainly responsible. But this causal link
relating responsibility to accounting for is more profound than it may seem. It
does not merely emerge as a textual causal connection between two independent
propositions. This link pertains to the meaning that Royal gives to one single
expression: “the ethics of politics”. Indeed, Royal presents this expression as a
vehicle for a kind of responsibility , which is something which is followed by the
obligation to account for what you have done during its exercise. This kind of
responsibility is different from many others. For instance, it is different from the
one generally attached to fatherhood. When we say that we are responsible for
our children, we are usually saying something quite different, we are saying, for
instance, that a father must “take care” of his children. But how could we describe
this causal link?
In truth-conditional approaches, causality is analysed as a peripheral phe-
nomenon as regards propositions, and by peripheral I mean that the causal
connection is situated outside the core of the semantic content, the proposition itself.
I will argue, along the lines of Carel's Semantic Blocks Theory (Carel 1992 , 2005 ,
2011 ) that causality (in fact, something similar to what is usually called “causality”)
may appear at the deepest conceptual level. So the first way in which the common
ground approach appears to be unsatisfactory is that in order to understand Royal's
position, a causal link between responsibility and accounting for must be supposed
as internal to the meaning of the ethics of politics , while in the propositional
approach, on which the common ground notion is based, this link is external to
semantic content.
The second criticism of the notion of common ground specifically concerns
the description of the common element in the conflicting positions. As we have
seen, if we stick to pieces of information, we can conclude that what is shared in
both Royal's and Sarkozy's stances is the pair formed by (5) [The Right is partly
responsible for p] and (6) [The Right must account for p]. So that Sarkozy's strategy
would consist in adding these pieces of information:
(7) [The Left is partly responsible for p ]
(8) [The Left must account for p ]
Although it overlooks the causality issue, this description might allow an
explanation of the fact that in Sarkozy's reply, Royal's point of view appears
as an incomplete interpretation of the situation. Nevertheless, one of the crucial
properties of Sarkozy's strategy is that he shows his own position to be a particular
manifestation of the ethics of politics as Royal defines it (this is developed in
Sect. 8.4 ). This kind of strategy seems to imply non-informational contents. But
even if we imagine an informational description of Royal's ethics of politics ,theway
both positions are related does not seem something which it is possible to interpret
using the common ground approach. In the next section I present a framework that
avoids these problems, and come back to the analysis of this fragment in Sect. 8.4 .