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 142

Fig. 8.5 A region of the conceptual space of the interaction as determined by Sarkozy's
intervention
ethics of politics as the frame of his own concept, and on the other hand, setting his
own position as the frame for Royal's demand. This strategy gives the impression
that Royal's demand is a partial view of the situation, while Sarkozy's position
appears to be more general in scope (as far as history is concerned), as well as not
escaping from the laws of the ethics of politics (Fig. 8.5 ).
The fact that the reframing of Royal's position performed by Sarkozy takes
place within the frame that Royal herself has set, leads us to class this as a case
of internal reframing. The new frame is internal with respect to the previous frame
of the reframed concept, i.e. the frame in which Royal includes her position. In the
following sections we examine two cases of external reframing.
But, before going through the next analysis, let us briefly point out how the
description we have just made can shed light on our initial claim of the insufficiency
of the notion of common ground to grasp the common element in conflicting
interactions.
The first reason for the unsatisfactory result of the “common ground” view is
that—given the informational perspective to which it pertains—it prevents us from
describing some concepts which seem to be relevantly described as connective
entities, like “the ethics of politics”, which we have identified as the frame of both
positions. The ethics of politics cannot be defined as the conjunction of two states
of affairs [X is responsible for p] and [X must account for what happens to p].
The ethics of politics, as Royal defines it, conceptually connects responsibility to
accounting for.
The second reason is that by focusing on the pieces of information that the
speakers accept as true rather than on the relationships between semantic entities
that result from discursive activity, the common ground notion lacks descriptive
adequacy regarding the strategies used in conflicting discursive interactions, even
when these strategies concern entities that appear to be common to both conflicting
positions. We cannot describe the strategy of reframing the opponent's position,
which involves “ keeping it but giving it a different interpretation” , by describing
what is believed to be true by both participants. The result of applying the notion of
common ground would be a list of what is accepted as true by both participants, but
not how the replier's position affects the opponent's one.