Joint epistemic engineering: The neglected process in human communication

This contribution argues that a common language and its statistics do not explain how people overcome fundamental communicative obstacles. We introduce joint epistemic engineering, a neurosemiotic account of how asymmetric interlocutors can communicate effectively despite using ambiguous signals that are referentially contingent on the current communicative circumstances. The basic insight is that a communicative signal contains a multiplicity of functions and that interlocutors use those multi-layered signals to simultaneously coordinate a space of possible interpretations, declare a communicative intent, and to reduce uncertainty over the identity of a referent.