Pragmatic Back-and-Forth Reasoning

Abstract

Language use is often likened to a game that speakers and hearers play. This comparison is helpful for explaining pragmatic inferences and goal-oriented language use. Game theory offers rich tools for representing formal language games and ways of reasoning about them. Game theoretic approaches to pragmatics have been pioneered by Prashant Parikh as in (1991, 1992, 2001) but have since been accompanied by several different alternatives with a growing range of applications (see Benz, Jäger, and van Rooij, 2006; Franke, 2013a; Jäger, 2008, for overview) When it comes to tackling pragmatic reasoning along the lines envisaged by Grice (1975) models that spell out pragmatic back-and-forth reasoning are particularly relevant. Pragmatic back-and-forth reasoning is reasoning by speakers and hearers about what each other believes, does, believes his interlocutor does and so on. For instance, the general intuitive reasoning scheme behind a scalar inference is pragmatic back-and-forth reasoning of this kind: “I should not interpret ‘some’ to mean ‘all’ (although that would not be ruled out by semantic meaning), because, if the speaker had wanted me to do so, he would have said ‘all’.”