Communication in the Face of Mismatch

Abstract Communication seems to happen in the face of people’s (extremely) varying perspectives or understandings of subject matter. As many have noted, the presence of this communicative mismatch—what we may call ‘the mismatch problem’—puts a lot of pressure on a naïve model of communication. According to this model, communicative success is a matter of content match or sharing. Here I focus on the kind of non-naïve response that a theory of ‘triangulation’ makes available. I shall discuss several features of triangulation theory and critically examine a recent articulation based on the notion of ‘aboutness’ (Sandgren [2019, 2021, 2023]). This articulation proposes content-free triangulation conditions in our explanations of communicative success. By contrast, I will suggest that we can use triangulation theory to address the mismatch problem without neglecting content by appealing to a meta-representational notion of content similarity. This notion, I argue, allows us to capture the necessary coordination between subjects, as well as the differences in their understandings.