Why does the quasi-prefix fail for communication?

Chalmers' quasi-interpretivism works for beliefs and desires because these can be characterized as sub-personal functional states: a system that has the right input-output profile can be said to quasi-believe p without any claim about phenomenal experience. The "quasi-" prefix weakens the commitment from "really believes" to "functions as if believing" — and the weakened version is still coherent because belief is the kind of state whose identity is given by its functional role.

Communication is not like this. Communication is constitutively intersubjective — its identity is given not by the functional role of individual states but by the mutual orientation of participants toward one another. To communicate is to raise a claim that the other can challenge, to seek understanding that the other can confirm or deny, to commit to a position that the other can hold you to. These are relational properties: they require two parties oriented toward each other, not one party functioning as-if.

Stripping the intersubjective orientation from communication does not produce a weakened version — quasi-communication — in the way that stripping phenomenal experience from belief produces quasi-belief. It eliminates communication and leaves something categorically different: text generation. Text generation produces well-formed strings. Communication produces mutual understanding. These are different operations. The output of text generation can be interpreted as communication by a human who supplies the missing orientation, but interpretation is a one-sided human act, not a joint communicative event.

This is the point where Chalmers' framework overreaches. His vocabulary is perfectly suited to sub-personal functional states and should be conceded for those. But extending it to communicative states requires that communication be reducible to functional role, and it is not. The conditions for communication are relational and normative, and no functional surrogate captures them.