Nicholas Allott

Game Theory and Communication

This chapter looks at recent attempts to shed light on communication using game theory. It is divided into three parts. First, motivations for a game-theoretic approach to communication are briefly investigated. In the second part, one of the most fully developed game-theoretic accounts of communication is examined: Prashant Parikh’s post-Gricean utterance-by-utterance account (Parikh 1990, 1991, 2001). Doubts are raised about some of the aspects of Parikh’s treatment and suggestions are made for refinements of cost factors to improve predictive power. A more fundamental problem is that the model drops a Gricean constraint on inference in communication. I argue that this leaves it without an account of the content of implicatures. Some comparisons are made with relevance theory (Sperber and Wilson, 1986/95), a non-game-theoretic utterance-by-utterance account of communication, which retains a form of the Gricean constraint.

Lexical Pragmatic Adjustment and the Nature of Ad hoc Concepts

According to truth-conditional pragmatics, a word may contribute an ad hoc concept to the proposition expressed, that is, something that differs from the concept the word encodes (the lexicalized concept). In relevance-theoretic lexical pragmatics, ad hoc concepts are treated like a species of concepts proper. Concepts as well as ad hoc concepts are taken to be atomic. Lexical pragmatic adjustment is conceived as the formation of an ad hoc concept that is narrower or broader in extension (or both) than the lexicalized concept involved. We argue that difference in extension should not be taken as the crucial feature of lexical pragmatics, since ad hoc concepts can have the same extension as the lexicalized concept. In contrast, we propose a positive view of ad hoc concepts as clusters of information poised to be used in inference. (Surprisingly, ad hoc concepts turn out not to be concepts at all.) The cluster account drops the assumption that ad hoc concepts are atomic and can therefore provide a satisfactory explanation of lexical pragmatic adjustment.

The many errors of Vyvyan Evans’ The Language Myth

Abstract Vyvyan Evans’ The Language Myth argues that Chomsky’s program of Universal Grammar (UG) is “completely wrong,” and it has attracted much recent discussion, some of it laudatory. We set out what we take to be its many serious errors, including: (i) a misunderstanding of the empirical character of the evidence that Chomsky and other generativists have adduced for UG, in English as well as in many other languages, coupled with a mistaken claim that the theory is unfalsifiable; (ii) a confusion of superficial typological universals, or features present at the surface of all of the world’s languages, with UG features that are apparent only under analysis; and (iii) a failure to appreciate the significance of Fine Thoughts (the things one cannot say in natural languages, even though it would be clear what they would mean) as critical evidence of UG, and of the difficulties presented by them for the kinds of “language-as-use” and related empiricist theories that he favors. Indeed, Evans also (iv) fails to address the issues of competence and constraints that are raised by Fine Thoughts and that are a central concern of UG; and (v) conflates UG with a computational theory of mind, a Fodorean conception of modules and a Pinkerean interest in the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.

The illocutionary force of laws

Abstract This article provides a speech act analysis of ‘crime-enacting’ provisions in criminal statutes, focusing on the illocutionary force of these provisions. These provisions commonly set out not only particular crimes and their characteristics but also their associated penalties. Enactment of a statute brings into force new social facts, typically norms, through the official utterance of linguistic material. These norms are supposed to guide behaviour: they tell us what we must, may, or must not do. Our main claim is that the illocutionary force of such provisions is primarily ‘world-creating’, i.e. effective, or declarational, rather than directive (behaviour-guiding). We assume that directive illocutionary force is either direct or indirect, showing that provisions need not contain the linguistic items that make for direct directives and that according to standard tests no indirect directive is present. A potential counter-argument is that any utterance serving to direct behaviour is necessarily a directive. We show that this behaviour-directing property is shared by some clear non-directives.

Lexical Modulation without Concepts

We argue against the dominant view in the literature that concepts (understood as the standing meanings of general terms) are modulated in lexical modulation. We also argue against the alternative view that ‘grab bags’ of information that don’t determine extensions are the starting point for lexical modulation. In response to the problems with these views we outline a new model for lexical modulation that dispenses with the assumption that there is a standing meaning of a general term that is modified in the cases under consideration. In applying general terms we intend to conform with our linguistic ancestors and in doing so we take facts about the referents of these terms for granted. In cases of lexical modulation we become aware of facts we took for granted and we need to change the facts we take for granted in order to see ourselves as continuing in a practice. These changes result in utterances of the general term referring to different properties. In general, concepts are neither the starting point for lexical modulation nor the standing meanings of words.

Classical logic, conditionals and “nonmonotonic” reasoning

Reasoning with conditionals is often thought to be non-monotonic, but there is no incompatibility with classical logic, and no need to formalise inference itself as probabilistic. When the addition of a new premise leads to abandonment of a previously compelling conclusion reached by modus ponens, for example, this is generally because it is hard to think of a model in which the conditional and the new premise are true.