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“[…] the scourge [of AIDS] cannot be overcome by the distribution of condoms: on the contrary, they increase it.”
The statement above by Pope Benedict XVI, at the beginning of his visit to Africa in March 2009, provoked a strong media reaction. It shall be at the centre of our project to apply a technical method for the analysis of dialogue semantics of spoken utterances, already proven in electronic speech signal processing, to communication between the pope and the press. In doing so, the meaning of an utterance beyond the utterance itself is to be found and affixed to subjective relations to reality, which we call “semantic anchors”. The application of such a method stands to reason in the case of cognitive machines whose 'subjective' realities are fully represented in memory contents; an application to the communication between pope and media appears at first glance less obvious, because it is initially not clear to what extent the media can at all be regarded as a “person” with independent cognitive structures. However, we will show in the following that formal methods can be used successfully even in this context, once the appropriate semantic anchors have been established. In doing so, we can also show that the subjective meanings of the pope's statement cited above are, due to the pope’s and press’s completely different discursive realities and the worlds of thought underlying the utterances, incompatible and thus cannot be squared with each other.