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 138

Fig. 8.1 Formal relationships between the concepts of a block

cry] share what can be intuitively called a “local world conception”, or a “micro-
ideology” concerning boys and crying. In fact, concepts pertain to coherent sets of
concepts called “conceptual blocks” (after Carel's “semantic blocks”). Figure 8.1
(Carel and Ducrot 1999 ) outlines the formal relationships between the concepts of
a block.
Let's stress that, in our framework, contrary to Fodor ( 1998 ) (amongst others),
a concept is not a mind state but a public productive structure. A concept is public
because it acquires its concreteness when it is put into circulation. This is not to deny
that the private level plays a role in the formation and the circulation of concepts, nor
that concepts influence the private level of individuals. But the private level appears
as external to the concept itself (Paveau makes a similar stance about what she calls
“ pre-discours ” (Paveau 2011 )).
A concept is productive in three ways: discursively, cognitively and praxeo-
logically. A concept is discursively productive because it can engender infinite
discourses (concept (11) can engender discourses where boyhood appears as
interpenetrated with the absence of crying); it is cognitively productive since it can
become one of the structures through which individuals and social groups perceive
(the way boys and crying are perceived, for instance); and it is praxiologically
productive because it can be applied by performing an action (a boy may apply
concept (11) by avoiding to cry).
So, in a way, many conflicting interactions can be seen as struggles in which
what is at stake is the productivity of concepts. In conflicting dialogues, as well as
in other kinds of interaction, to refute a concept is to try to cease the productivity of
this concept.
Finally, the analysis of conflict is crucially dependent on the way we conceive
interaction. When people interact, individual activity is subordinated to what the
participants suppose is going on in a shared space. This is maybe quite visible in a
multi-party interaction, like a business meeting in which speaking turns are strictly
regulated. One can imagine a very schematic interaction where the first speaker
states a position, then a second participant makes this position more precise, a third
one refutes the precision of the second participant but maintains the first stance, and
so on. All of this happens at a level that is not the individual mind, but a collective
space. Not everyone in the interaction has exactly the same idea of what is going