Interpersonal Communication & Pragmatics

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Abstractions about how speakers position themselves and manage meaning in interaction — pragmatic speech patterns (guiltive, persuasive definition, epithet), interpretive and evaluative stances (principle of charity, thick concept, truthiness), and communicative styles or competencies such as assertiveness, rhetorical stance and universal pragmatics.

12 abstractions in this family — domain-specific abstractions that sit near one another in structural-signature space (k-means over structural-signature embeddings). Each is shown with its short description.

• Assertiveness — A learnable communication mode that expresses one's needs, rights, limits or views directly and confidently while recognizing the corresponding rights and agency of others, distinct from both passivity and aggression.
• Burrows–Abadi–Needham Logic — A formal authentication-belief calculus derives what protocol principals may believe from idealized messages, explicit trust and freshness premises, and named inference postulates.
• Coordinated management of meaning — Analyze communication as a recursive process in which participants use constitutive and regulative rules across nested contexts to coordinate actions and jointly make the social worlds their interaction sustains.
• Epithet — Attach or substitute a recurrent descriptive expression for a named bearer so the expression identifies, characterizes, praises, stigmatizes, classifies, or metrically marks that bearer in discourse.
• Guiltive — A pragmatic speech-act pattern in which an apparently generous or indifferent utterance transparently conveys the opposite attitude in order to induce guilt in the addressee.
• Hand-waving — A pejorative description of argument that substitutes vague plausibility, rhetoric or omitted steps for the evidence or derivation required to support a conclusion.
• Persuasive definition — A stipulative redefinition presented as ordinary or true usage that embeds an evaluative stance and shifts the audience’s attitudes or argumentative commitments.
• Principle of Charity — Constrain interpretation toward readings that make a speaker broadly coherent, rational, and substantially right, while preserving evidence and genuine disagreement.
• Rhetorical stance — Coordinate a communicator's projected persona, treatment of a subject, relation to an audience, purpose, tone, and available appeals so a message adopts a deliberate position fitted to its rhetorical situation.
• Thick concept — Combine substantial descriptive content with an evaluative valence in one concept, so competent application both characterizes a case and ordinarily commends or condemns it.
• Truthiness — Acceptance or assertion of a claim because it feels intuitively true or identity-congruent despite inadequate evidence, logic or factual verification.
• Universal pragmatics — Habermas's reconstruction of the general validity claims and communicative competencies presupposed when speakers seek mutual understanding through language.