Say It With Flowers: When the Message Remains Veiled

What did German Chancellor Friedrich Merz mean when he referred to “problems in the cityscape” linked to migration? And what can listeners read into wording that remains deliberately vague?

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It can be for very good reasons that we do not communicate too directly: because we want to be polite, avoid offending someone or first cautiously find out how the other person views an issue.

Those questions sit at the center of a research project on indirect communication led by philosophers Katharina Felka of the University of Münster and Julia Zakkou of Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf. Funded by Austria’s FWF and Germany’s DFG, the project examines why people sometimes avoid stating their position directly and instead communicate it in veiled form.

Indirectness is not automatically negative, Felka explains, just as directness is not always positive. People may choose indirect language to be polite, avoid offending someone or cautiously discover how another person views an issue. The researchers argue that a common communicative mechanism can underlie these different uses.

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We assume that a general communicative mechanism underlies it, even though it can be used for very different purposes.

The project draws on the communication model of English language philosopher Paul Grice. Conversations generally rely on the assumption that people will be relevant, accurate and clear. Sometimes, however, listeners can preserve that assumption only by concluding that a speaker means more than the literal words suggest. If a friend answers “I am sick” when asked whether she is coming to the cinema, the implied meaning is that she will not come. Zakkou describes this as a classic case of indirect communication.

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We are particularly interested in cases in which indirect communication is used strategically to convey problematic content while at the same time preserving a certain degree of plausible deniability.

The researchers are also interested in strategic uses of indirectness. It can help communicate problematic content while maintaining a degree of plausible deniability. That includes cases in which potentially racist ideas are concealed behind formulations that remain open to interpretation, allowing speakers to avoid declaring their position outright.

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Exactly that is a paradigmatic case of indirect communication.