Strategic Conversation

International audienceModels of conversation that rely on a strong notion of cooperation don’t apply to strategic conversation — that is, to conversation where the agents’ motives don’t align, such as courtroom cross examination and political debate. We provide a game-theoretic framework that provides an analysis of both cooperative and strategic conversation. Our analysis features a new notion of safety that applies to implicatures: an implicature is safe when it can be reliably treated as a matter of public record. We explore the safety of implicatures within cooperative and non cooperative settings. We then provide a symbolic model enabling us (i) to prove a correspondence result between a characterisation of conversation in terms of an alignment of players’ preferences and one where Gricean principles of cooperative conversation like Sincerity hold, and (ii) to show when an implicature is safe and when it is not

Cooperation with Multiple Audiences

Steven Pinker proposes a game-theoretic framework to help explain the use of veiled speech in contexts where the ultimate aims of the speaker and hearer may diverge—such as cases of bribing a police officer to get out of a ticket and paying a maître d’ to get a table. This is presented as a response to what Pinker sees as the failure in H. P. Grice’s influential theory of meaning to recognize that speakers and hearers are not always cooperating. In this paper I argue that Pinker mischaracterizes Grice’s views on cooperation, and use this to refi ne a positive picture of what sort of cooperation is demanded by Grice’s Cooperative Principle. This positive picture serves to insulate the Gricean framework from objectors—including Pinker—who overstate the obligations entailed by the adoption of the Cooperative Principle. I then argue that the cases Pinker presents are best treated by recognizing that in each instance the utterance is formulated with two intentions towards two different audiences and detail a resulting revision to Pinker’s game-theoretic framework that reflects this proposal. I conclude by demonstrating how this proposed game-theoretic framework of cooperation with multiple audiences can be used to model the costs and benefits of other types of discourse, including political speech

Rethinking being Gricean: New challenges for metapragmatics

Arguably, forty years on, post-Gricean pragmatics is still the most successful and methodologically most rigorous approach to utterance meaning. However, and perhaps as a corollary of its extensive development, it has become necessary to ask what ‘being Gricean’ means for its current advocates. In this paper I address this question with respect to the current Anglo-American, truth-conditional paradigm, asking specifically how much, and on what identifiable dimensions, one can depart from his program and still remain ‘Gricean’. The label has generated very different challenges on several dimensions. First, (i) the role of inferential meanings has been questioned in that communication has since often been envisaged as mostly direct and non-inferential. In a similar spirit, (ii) the layered, also sometimes called ‘pipeline’ or ‘imbricated’ picture of meaning has been questioned within situation and game-theoretic semantics, and recently in their offshoot Equilibrium Semantics. Next, (iii) the explanatory role of intentions has often been denied in an attempt to reinstate the idea of multiple semantic ambiguities in lieu of meaning underdetermination, with the aim of aiding computational, formalizable accounts of discourse meaning. This reopened the question as to (iv) what kind of content, and how much of it, is attributable to grammar, following up on earlier proposals of the grammatical origin of some pragmatic meanings that were standardly classified as implicatures. Along yet another dimension, (v) the focus on cooperative interaction and proposition-based theorizing have been replaced with a focus on non-cooperative, such as strategic, communication and dialogue as the associated object of analysis. Finally, Grice’s project was a project in philosophy of language and as such in philosophical pragmatics. Theoretical, introspection-based methods employed without recourse to experimental or other empirical inquires are nowadays shunned in many pragmatics circles. So, the question arises regarding (vi) the place of philosophical pragmatics on a map of current research into meaning in communication. In this context, a metapragmatic question arises as to what qualitative and associated quantitative criteria current pragmatic theory has to fulfil in order to count as Gricean pragmatics. In this paper I address this question by discussing the identified areas (i)-(vi). Further, in doing so, using these indicators, I attempt to address the question ‘Quo vadis, pragmatics?’ with respect to the post-Gricean tradition. My metatheoretic inquiry begins by critically discussing the dimensions on which the Gricean program has been challenged and proceeds to arguing that none of the challenges constitutes a real threat to it. I develop two strands of argumentation showing how the approaches either (a) can be incorporated as its extensions or (b) are in pursuit of different goals and as such are not in competition with it. Argument (a) applies to automatic meaning assignment, the rejection of the ‘pipeline’ picture of meaning, emphasis on conventions, strategic conversation and generalized cognition. Argument (b) applies to the revival of semantic ambiguity and the grammatical foundation of implicatures. It is therefore concluded that the Gricean program can be relaxed on the dimensions covered by (a) and co-exist with the approaches subscribing to (b)

Communicating with Cost-based Implicature: a Game-Theoretic Approach to Ambiguity

A game-theoretic approach to linguistic communication predicts that speakers can meaningfully use ambiguous forms in a discourse context in which only one of several available referents has a costly unambiguous form and in which rational interlocutors share knowledge of production costs. If a speaker produces a low-cost ambiguous form to avoid using the high-cost unambiguous form, a rational listener will infer that the high-cost entity was the intended entity, or else the speaker would not have risked ambiguity. We report data from two studies in which pairs of speakers show alignment of their use of ambiguous forms based on this kind of shared knowledge. These results extend the analysis of cost-based pragmatic inferencing beyond that previously associated only with fixed lexical hosts.

Corpus Analysis and Lexical Pragmatics: An Overview

Lexical pragmatics studies the processes by which lexically encoded meanings are modified in use; well-studied examples include lexical narrowing, approximation and metaphorical extension. Relevance theorists have been trying to develop a unitary account on which narrowing, approximation and metaphorical extension are all explained in the same way. While there have been several corpus-based studies of metaphor and a few of hyperbole or approximation, there has been no attempt so far to test the unitary account using corpus data. This paper reports the results of a corpus-based investigation of lexical-pragmatic processes, and discusses the theoretical issues and challenges it raises

Explaining quantity implicatures

We give derivations of two formal models of Gricean Quantity implicature and strong exhaustivity in bidirectional optimality theory and in a signalling games framework. We show that, under a unifying model based on signalling games, these interpretative strategies are game-theoretic equilibria when the speaker is known to be respectively minimally and maximally expert in the matter at hand. That is, in this framework the optimal strategy for communication depends on the degree of knowledge the speaker is known to have concerning the question she is answering. In addition, and most importantly, we give a game-theoretic characterisation of the interpretation rule Grice (formalising Quantity implicature), showing that under natural conditions this interpretation rule occurs in the unique equilibrium play of the signalling game

Communication and content

Communication and content presents a comprehensive and foundational account of meaning based on new versions of situation theory and game theory. The literal and implied meanings of an utterance are derived from first principles assuming little more than the partial rationality of interacting agents. New analyses of a number of diverse phenomena – a wide notion of ambiguity and content encompassing phonetics, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and beyond, vagueness, convention and conventional meaning, indeterminacy, universality, the role of truth in communication, semantic change, translation, Frege’s puzzle of informative identities – are developed. Communication, speaker meaning, and reference are defined. Frege’s context and compositional principles are generalized and reconciled in a fixed-point principle, and a detailed critique of Grice, several aspects of Lewis, and some aspects of the Romantic conception of meaning are offered. Connections with other branches of linguistics, especially psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, historical linguistics, and natural language processing, are explored. The book will be of interest to scholars in philosophy, linguistics, artificial intelligence, and cognitive science. It should also interest readers in related fields like literary and cultural theory and the social sciences

Communication and content

Communication and content presents a comprehensive and foundational account of meaning based on new versions of situation theory and game theory. The literal and implied meanings of an utterance are derived from first principles assuming little more than the partial rationality of interacting agents. New analyses of a number of diverse phenomena – a wide notion of ambiguity and content encompassing phonetics, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and beyond, vagueness, convention and conventional meaning, indeterminacy, universality, the role of truth in communication, semantic change, translation, Frege’s puzzle of informative identities – are developed. Communication, speaker meaning, and reference are defined. Frege’s context and compositional principles are generalized and reconciled in a fixed-point principle, and a detailed critique of Grice, several aspects of Lewis, and some aspects of the Romantic conception of meaning are offered