Adjectival vagueness in a Bayesian model of interpretation

Abstract

We derive a probabilistic account of the vagueness and context-sensitivity of scalar adjectives from a Bayesian approach to communication and interpretation. We describe an iterated-reasoning architecture for pragmatic interpretation and illustrate it with a simple scalar implicature example. We then show how to enrich the apparatus to handle pragmatic reasoning about the values of free variables, explore its predictions about the interpretation of scalar adjectives, and show how this model implements Edgington's (Analysis 2:193-204,1992, Keefe and Smith (eds.) Vagueness: a reader, 1997) account of the sorites paradox, with variations. The Bayesian approach has a number of explanatory virtues: in particular, it does not require any special-purpose machinery for handling vagueness, and it is integrated with a promising new approach to pragmatics and other areas of cognitive science. Edgington (1992Edgington ( , 1997 proposes an attractive unified approach to the Sorites, Lottery, and Preface paradoxes. According to Edgington, these puzzles are all explained by a generalization of classical logic which has the formal structure of the probability calculus, with an accompanying generalized notion of valid reasoning. She gives a number of strong arguments to the effect that a degree-based theory of vagueness with the formal structure of probabilities is preferable to one with the structure of classical fuzzy logic. However, she explicitly disavows the idea that the degrees involved in B Daniel Lassiter

Pragmatic reasoning through semantic inference

“…As a result, the listener will not gain any information about the weather from the speaker's choice of utterance. This reasoning can be formalized by combining the question under discussion (QUD) extension to RSA proposed in (Kao et al 2014b,a, Lassiter & Goodman 2015 with the lexical uncertainty extension. Using much the same argument, it is possible to show that, if the QUD is common knowledge between the speaker and listener, then the speaker will never communicate information about dimensions which are collapsed (irrelevant) under the QUD.…”

Proceedings of the 54th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)

“…The proposed framework successfully explains existing psycholinguistic theories and predict experimental results at various linguistic levels, such as the perception of scalar implicatures (e.g. 'some' meaning 'not all' in pragmatic usage) and the production of referring expressions (Lassiter and Goodman, 2013;Kao et al, 2014;Lassiter and Goodman, 2015). Recent efforts also acquire and evaluate the models using corpus data (Orita et al, 2015;Monroe and Potts, 2015).…”

Vagueness and Aggregation in Multiple Sender Channels

“…For 3 The sorites paradox has traditionally been central to the study of vagueness. Several probabilistic accounts of sorites have been given in the literature, including Edgington (1997) and most recently Lassiter and Goodman (2015). These adopt two main interpretations of conditional rules; the material conditional interpretation (MC) and the probability conditional interpretation (PC) (Lassiter and Goodman 2015).…”

“…Several probabilistic accounts of sorites have been given in the literature, including Edgington (1997) and most recently Lassiter and Goodman (2015). These adopt two main interpretations of conditional rules; the material conditional interpretation (MC) and the probability conditional interpretation (PC) (Lassiter and Goodman 2015). For the probability threshold model outlined in this paper we can illustrate MC and PC as follows: Suppose we have a sequence of heights fx k g n k¼0 where x kþ1 ¼ x k þ h for some small value h [ 0.…”