I recently overheard an exchange that drew my attention to a previously unexplored aspect of verbal communication, which I will refer to as Exchange Structure. Though such structures can be graphically represented numerous ways, I didn’t spend time evaluating the options, and simply chose the first that came to mind. It’s all very straightforward, with each column corresponding to an Exchange Participant, and the circled numbers representing the chronological order of things. Here’s what I overheard, shown in its ES form, which led to the construct of an ES in the first place:

So we have a person who had made the innocent mistake of swapping the relationship between proof and % alcohol. They happened to have been reading from the bottle’s label, on which was printed the % alcohol, and from which they had incorrectly inferred the beverage’s proof. What interested me about all this was that, despite the other Exchange Participant accurately pointing their inquiry to the piece of information they had assumed was given (% alcohol), they could just as well have asked about the inferred information, the proof, thinking that it was this information from which the % alcohol was inferred. And what in god’s name would the Exchange Structure look like then, I wonder? Would not the EP being asked to confirm the proof similarly reply ‘yes’, albeit perhaps less confidently, owing to the fact that in this case the information whose accuracy they were being asked to confirm was based on their own inference rather than on an official-looking label?

Well, of course, I had to draw it out. As you would expect, this ES is rather longer than that from the first case, since the EPs have to hash out a seeming contradiction: whereas before, the Exchange Participant who was corrected by the other is led to concede that their inference was in error, now they’re staring directly at the bottle’s own label, which claims that the beverage therein contained boasts a fourfold increase in % alcohol compared to the % alcohol purported by the correcting Exchange Participant.

I was initially quite taken by this idea of an Exchange Structure, romanticizing that it could be used to quickly discern whether a misunderstanding had taken place. I had imagined that variables like the intonation associated with questions, and the number of arrow “branches” between EPs, could be used to uniquely render a conversation graphically in a way that would catalyze the deduction of information about it. I’ve since concluded that conversations are too unpredictable to ever dependably fit into anticipated, pre-fabricated forms. For example, questions are sometimes asked with the intonation of a statement.

Yes, I had already given up on the idea of an Exchange Structure by the time I started writing this post, yet I nonetheless propagated the fallacy of its merit, at least for a time. After all, who wants to read about something that is total bunk? I included this last paragraph in an attempt to illustrate that authors who are unwilling to let go of ideas that once held promise might be knowingly deceiving their readers. It is easier to believe your own lie after you’ve convinced others to believe it with you.