Cooperation: Conceptual Guidelines for Communication and Interpretation

Cooperation is an essential behaviour for the good of social life – when people cooperate they share knowledge, ideas, beliefs, values, actions. With special focus on the conceptual reflexes of the term, our aim is to problematize cooperation, in complementarity, in two areas of knowledge pertaining to the philological field: pragmatics and narrative semiotics. From the perspective of pragmatics, we will investigate the standards and principles of cooperation in the act of communication with the view to accounting for the inferential mechanism that bridges the gap between what is said and what is meant. Switching perspective and applying the framework of narrative semiotics, we will account for the strategies of interpretive cooperation that ensure the success of text interpretation. Putting the concept of cooperation back on the theoretical agenda is all the more relevant as the needs to understand and accept the differences between individuals, communities, and cultures become more and more stringent in the contemporary world if we are to safeguard such values as dialogue, tolerance or respect.