ABSTRACT
T he decisive nature of action, together with the pervasiveness of polarity inhuman language, makes it very difficult to communicate in a disinterestedand fully objective way about what action to take when faced with risk and uncertainty. The fact that there is no middle ground when it comes to taking an action – you either do something or you don’t – makes it remarkably difficult not to frame a message about what decision to make. I present a conversational action planning (CAP) model, which shows how decision goal-structure guides particular formulations of logical expressions that convey “pragmatic signals” about what should be done. A number of studies are presented that support the predictions of this model about how people formulate instructions and advice. In this view, framing is an essentially conversational phenomenon whereby the speaker has to choose between two possible descriptions of a given event or possible state of affairs. The choice of description thus communicates information about the speaker’s own attitudes to the course of action under discussion, which can be recovered by the hearer.
