Where do these crisp ontologies come from, if (under the signalling theory of meaning) symbols only have probabilistic meanings?
There are two things here which are at least potentially distinct: The meaning of symbols in thinking, and their meaning in communication. I’d expect these mechanisms to have a fair bit on common, but specifically the problem of alignment of the speakers which is adressed here would not seem to apply to the former. So I dont think we need to wonder here where those crisp ontologies came from.
This is the type of thinking that can’t tell the difference between “a implies b” and “a, and also b”—because people almost always endorse both “a” and “b” when they say “a implies b”.
One way to eliminate this particular problem is to focus on whether the speaker agrees with a sentence if asked, rather than spontaneaus assertions. This fails when the speaker is systematically wrong about something, or when Cartesian boundaries are broken, but other than that it seems to take out a lot of the “association” problems.
None of this is literally said, but a cloud of conversational implicature surrounds the literal text. The signalling analysis can’t distinguish this cloud from the literal meaning.
Even what we would consider literal speech can depend on implicature. Consider: “Why don’t we have bacon?” “The cat stole it”. Which cat “the cat” is requires Gricean reasoning, and the phrase isn’t compositional, either.
I think one criterion of adequacy for explanations of level 1 is to explain why it is sometimes rational to interpret people literally. Why would you throw away all that associated information? Your proposal in that post is quite abstract, could you outline how it would adress this?
Interrestingly I did think of norms when you drew up the problem, but in a different way, related to enforcement. We hold each other responsible for our assertions, and this means we need an idea of when a sentence is properly said. Now such norms can’t require speakers to be faithful to all the propabilistic associations of a sentence. That would leave us with too few sentences to describe all situations, and if the norms are to be reponsive to changing expectations, it could never reach equilibrium. So we have to pick some subset of the associations to enforce, and that would then be the “literal meaning”. We can see why it would be useful for this to incorporate some compositionality: assertions are much more useful when you can combine multiple, possibly from different sources, into one chain of reasoning.
Interrestingly I did think of norms when you drew up the problem, but in a different way, related to enforcement. We hold each other responsible for our assertions, and this means we need an idea of when a sentence is properly said. Now such norms can’t require speakers to be faithful to all the propabilistic associations of a sentence. That would leave us with too few sentences to describe all situations, and if the norms are to be reponsive to changing expectations, it could never reach equilibrium. So we have to pick some subset of the associations to enforce, and that would then be the “literal meaning”. We can see why it would be useful for this to incorporate some compositionality: assertions are much more useful when you can combine multiple, possibly from different sources, into one chain of reasoning.
There are two things here which are at least potentially distinct: The meaning of symbols in thinking, and their meaning in communication. I’d expect these mechanisms to have a fair bit on common, but specifically the problem of alignment of the speakers which is adressed here would not seem to apply to the former. So I dont think we need to wonder here where those crisp ontologies came from.
One way to eliminate this particular problem is to focus on whether the speaker agrees with a sentence if asked, rather than spontaneaus assertions. This fails when the speaker is systematically wrong about something, or when Cartesian boundaries are broken, but other than that it seems to take out a lot of the “association” problems.
Even what we would consider literal speech can depend on implicature. Consider: “Why don’t we have bacon?” “The cat stole it”. Which cat “the cat” is requires Gricean reasoning, and the phrase isn’t compositional, either.
I think one criterion of adequacy for explanations of level 1 is to explain why it is sometimes rational to interpret people literally. Why would you throw away all that associated information? Your proposal in that post is quite abstract, could you outline how it would adress this?
Interrestingly I did think of norms when you drew up the problem, but in a different way, related to enforcement. We hold each other responsible for our assertions, and this means we need an idea of when a sentence is properly said. Now such norms can’t require speakers to be faithful to all the propabilistic associations of a sentence. That would leave us with too few sentences to describe all situations, and if the norms are to be reponsive to changing expectations, it could never reach equilibrium. So we have to pick some subset of the associations to enforce, and that would then be the “literal meaning”. We can see why it would be useful for this to incorporate some compositionality: assertions are much more useful when you can combine multiple, possibly from different sources, into one chain of reasoning.
Good points! I’ll have to think on this.
I’ve thought about applying normativity to language learning some more, its written up here.