In Language and Equilibrium, Prashant Parikh offers a new account of meaning for natural language. He argues that equilibrium, or balance among multiple interacting forces, is a key attribute of language and meaning and shows how to derive the meaning of an utterance from first principles by modeling it as a system of interdependent games.His account results in a novel view of semantics and pragmatics and describes how both may be integrated with syntax. It considers many aspects of meaning--including literal (...) meaning and implicature--and advances a detailed theory of definite descriptions as an application of the framework.Language and Equilibrium is intended for a wide readership in the cognitive sciences, including philosophers, linguists, and artificial intelligence researchers as well as neuroscientists, psychologists, and economists interested in language and communication. (shrink)

The primary function of language is communication. We use the tools of situation theory and game theory to develop a definition and model of communication between rational agents using a shared situated language. ;A central thesis of this dissertation is that the key feature of situated communication that enables agents to derive content from meaning is a special type of logical inference called a strategic inference. ;The model we develop, called the Strategic Discourse Model, looks at a single strategic inference. (...) An essential element of a strategic inference is that the content depends on the sentence uttered and on the embedding circumstances. This includes the private and public information and beliefs of the agents, their goals and intentions, and crucially, the other sentences the speaker might have uttered but chose not to. A complete model of communication involves a system of simultaneous strategic inferences. ;When the strategic interaction between two agents is common knowledge between them, that is, when it is a game, the information transfer is a communication. The content communicated is given by the solution to the game. This analysis formalizes Grice's ideas on nonnatural meaning within a situation-theoretic framework. A consequence of our situated analysis is that agents do not need to have the complex and infinite set of nested intentions postulated by the Gricean approach. A simple intention to communicate is all that is required, the ambient game doing the rest of the work. ;This model has many applications. Problems like resolving ambiguity, determining reference, inferring implicatures and indirect speech acts fall within its scope. As one application, we outline a new theory of names and definite descriptions. This account builds upon Russell and Strawson, and Barwise and Perry. The basic idea is that names and descriptions can both be used in various ways circumscribed by an ontological and a communicative constraint. This offers a new solution to the puzzle of informative identity statements and clarifies the referential-attributive distinction. It suggests an approach to the concept of representation. ;An underlying theme is to synthesize situation theory and game theory. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

We develop an analysis of discourse anaphora—the relationship between a pronoun and an antecedent earlier in the discourse —using games of partial information. The analysis is extended to include information from a variety of different sources, including lexical semantics, contrastive stress, grammatical relations, and decision theoretic aspects of the context.

This paper extends Parikh's earlier work in semantics with games of partial information and attempts to derive and represent the full content of an utterance from first principles. It also discusses various ways in which this content may be indeterminate.