This paper analyzes communication with a language that is vague in the sense that identical messages do not always result in identical interpretations. It is shown that strategic agents frequently add to this vagueness by being intentionally vague, i.e. they deliberately choose less precise messages than they have to among the ones available to them in equilibrium. Having to communicate with a vague language can be welfare enhancing because it mitigates conflict. In equilibria that satisfy a dynamic stability condition intentional (...) vagueness increases with the degree of conflict between sender and receiver. (shrink)

An important finding of the game theoretic research on signaling games is the insight that under many circumstances, a signal obtains credibility by incurring costs to the sender. Therefore it seems questionable whether or not cheap talk—signals that are not payoff relevant—can serve to transmit information among rational agents. This issue is non-trivial in strategic interactions where the preferences of the players are not aligned. Researchers like Crawford & Sobel, Rabin, and Farrell demonstrated, however, that even in the case of (...) partially divergent interests, cheap talk may be informative. They assume that signals have an exogenously given meaning that is common knowledge between the players, and they explore the conditions under which such a signal is credible. This discussion has obvious relevance to the program of Gricean pragmatics in linguistics. According to Grice’s "Cooperative Principle”, this research tradition only considers scenarios where the interests of the players are aligned. Nevertheless, the assumption of differential signaling costs introduces an element of non-aligned interests. The present paper proposes a framework that combines these two research strands. Using an inference protocol of iterated best response, it gives a recipe for how the interlocutors derive rationalizable strategies from exogeneously given "literal” meanings of signals. No special assumptions about the alignment of interests or signaling costs are made. After introducing the formal model, the paper sketches several applications of this model to problems in linguistic pragmatics, like scalar implicatures, the division of pragmatic labor, and the interpretation of measure terms. (shrink)

Signaling games provide basic insights into some fundamental questions concerning the explanation of meaning. They can be analyzed in terms of rational choice theory and in terms of evolutionary game theory. It is argued that an evolutionary approach provides better explanations for the emergence of simple communication systems. To substantiate these arguments, I will look at models similar to those of Skyrms (2000) and Komarova and Niyogi (2004) and study their dynamical properties. My results will lend partial support to the (...) thesis that evolution leads to communication. In general, states of partial communication may evolve with positive probability under standard evolutionary dynamics. However, unlike states of perfect communication, they are unstable relative to neutral drift. (shrink)

Language use and interpretation is heavily contingent on context. But human interlocutors need not always agree what the actual context is. In game theoretic approaches to language use and interpretation, interlocutors’ beliefs about the context are the players’ beliefs about the game that they are playing. Together this entails that we need to consider cases in which interlocutors have different subjective conceptualizations of the game they are in. This paper therefore extends iterated best response reasoning, as an established model for (...) pragmatic reasoning, to games with unawareness. This extension not only leads to more plausible context models for many communicative situations, but also to improved predictions for otherwise problematic cases and an extension of the scope of pragmatic phenomena that can be captured by game theoretic analysis. (shrink)

A utility-based approach to the understanding of vague predicates (VPs) is proposed. It is argued that assignment of truth values to propositions containing VPs entails unjustifiable assumptions of consensus; two models of VP semantics are criticized on this basis: (1) the super-truth theory of Kit Fine (1975), which requires an unlikely consensus on base points; (2) the fuzzy logic of Lotfi Zadeh (1975), on fuzzy truth values of sentences. Pragmatism is held to provide a key: successful behavior justifies a person's (...) knowledge of the content of a VP. Instead of attempting to determine a consensus underlying successful communication, the utility of individual communications is held to rest on sufficient approximation of meanings between people. 3 Figures, 17 References. Adapted from the source document. (shrink)