The Rational Speech Act Framework

Degen, Judith

doi:10.1146/annurev-linguistics-031220-010811

Cited by 26 publications

(17 citation statements)

References 94 publications

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“…Adults make qualitatively similar pragmatic errors of misinterpretation under certain linguistic conditions (Hansen et al 2017, Dudley & Mascarenhas in preparation) although at quantitatively different rates. The quantitative difference in error rates that is found between adults, older children and younger children is compatible with a picture where language interpretation involves probabilistic inference, with the weights for priors shifting across development as the child gains knowledge about both the world and communicative partners (Frank & Goodman 2012, Goodman & Frank 2016, Bohn et al 2021, Degen 2023. Such findings also suggest that linguistic stimuli could influence the responses of adults when we experimentally probe their knowledge attributions using linguistic stimuli, as a growing body of research does.…”

Section: Language-based Methods and Pragmatic Confoundssupporting

confidence: 61%

Knowledge, the concept know, and the word know: considerations from polysemy and pragmatics

Dudley,

Vogel

2023

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A recent focus on philosophical methodology has reinvigorated ordinary language philosophy with the contention that philosophical inquiry is better served by attending to the ordinary use of language. Taking cues from findings in the social sciences that deploy methods utilizing language, various ordinary language philosophers embrace a guiding mandate: that ordinary language usage is more reflective of our linguistic and conceptual competencies than standard philosophical methods. We analyze two hypotheses that are implicit in the research from which ordinary language approaches take their cues. This pair of optimistic assumptions (a) bind word meanings to properties of their corresponding concepts and (b) regard language as a direct reflection of our underlying cognitive processes and competencies. Polysemy and pragmatics complicate each assumption. Because the ordinary language philosopher's methodological mandate compels us to consider how individuals process the utterances they encounter in deciphering the communicative intentions of speakers, failing to attend to the import of polysemy and pragmatics in philosophical and empirical methods has the potential to frustrate the aims of their insightful mandate. The significance of those two complications is worked out with the case study of knowledge.

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Section: Language-based Methods and Pragmatic Confoundssupporting

confidence: 61%

Knowledge, the concept know, and the word know: considerations from polysemy and pragmatics

Dudley,

Vogel

2023

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“…A related approach, the Rational Speech Act (RSA) framework (seeDegen, 2023 for a review) also assumes that listeners reason about the communicative intent of the interlocutor. However, the RSA framework assumes that the literal meaning of a given sentence based on the veridical input is the starting point of the reasoning process.…”

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confidence: 99%

How do linguistic illusions arise? Rational inference and good-enough processing as competing latent processes within individuals

Paape¹

2023

Preprint

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Non-literal interpretations of implausible sentences such as "The mother gave the candle the daughter" have been taken as evidence for a rational error-correction mechanism that reconstructs the intended utterance from the ill-formed input ("... gave the daughter the candle"). However, the good-enough processing framework offers an alternative explanation: readers sometimes miss problematic aspects of sentences because they are only processing them superficially, which leads to acceptability illusions. As a synthesis of these accounts, I propose that rational inferences about errors on the one hand and good-enough processing on the other are competing latent processes that simultaneously occur within the same comprehender. In support of this view, I present data from a two-dimensional grammaticality/ interpretability judgment task with different types of subtly ill-formed sentences. Both rational inference and good-enough processing predict positive interpretability judgments for such sentences, but only good-enough processing also predicts positive grammaticality judgments. By fitting a lognormal race model jointly to judgments and response latencies, I show that rational inference and good-enough processing actively trade off with each other during reading. Furthermore, individual differences measures reveal that participant traits such as linguistic pedantry, interpretational charity, and analytic/intuitive cognitive styles contribute to variability in the processing patterns.

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“…Accordingly, "affected" means that a candidate was either a whether-cause or a how-cause (or both), "enabled" means that it was a whether-cause, and "caused" means that it was both a whether-cause and a how-cause. By combining this new semantics of causal expressions with a model of pragmatic inference (26,31), the CSM accurately captured which causal expressions participants selected as the best description of what happened, and what inferences they made about what happened based on a given causal expression (10).…”

Section: What Happens When There Are Multiple Candidate Causes?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Counterfactual simulation in causal cognition

Gerstenberg

2024

Preprint

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How do people make causal judgments and assign responsibility? In this paper, I argue that counterfactual simulations are key. To simulate counterfactuals, we need three ingredients: a generative mental model of the world, the ability to perform interventions on that model, and the capacity to simulate the consequences of these interventions. The counterfactual simulation model (CSM) uses these ingredients to capture people's intuitive understanding of the physical and social world. In the physical domain, the CSM predicts people's causal judgments about dynamic collision events, complex situations that involve multiple causes, omissions as causes, and causes that sustain physical stability. In the social domain, the CSM predicts responsibility judgments in helping and hindering scenarios.

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The Rational Speech Act Framework

Cited by 26 publications

References 94 publications

Knowledge, the concept know, and the word know: considerations from polysemy and pragmatics

Knowledge, the concept know, and the word know: considerations from polysemy and pragmatics

How do linguistic illusions arise? Rational inference and good-enough processing as competing latent processes within individuals

Counterfactual simulation in causal cognition

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