In this post, we’ll ignore Gricean implicature; our agents just take everything literally. Justification for ignoring it: first, the cluster-based model in this post is nowhere near the level of sophistication where lack of Gricean implicature is the biggest problem. Second, when it does come time to handle Gricean implicature, we do not expect that the high-level framework used here—i.e. Bayesian agents, isomorphism between latents—will have any fundamental trouble with it.
A naive reader may think that “ignoring Gricean implicature” means pretending that it doesn’t exist; to be more precise: pretending that the semantics and pragmatics of an utterance are equal.
(I will use ‘pragmatics’ to mean all implications a listener can draw from an utterance, including Gricean implicature, and ‘semantics’ to mean only the literal implications. For example, if I say “you left the door open” then (depending on context) I probably am implying that you should close it; this is pragmatics and gricean implicature, but is not a literal implication of what I said. This is also a near-synonym of a connotation/denotation distinction, where connotation≈pragmatics, denotation≈semantics.)
However, the way you frame the problem actually critically relies on a semantics/pragmatics distinction. You define “the magic box” to be what translates from the utterance to what you would condition on if you took the sentence literally: the difference between CarolSays(‘‘X") vs X.
IE, when Alice hears Carol say something, she conditions on the full sensory experience, and reaches the full range of pragmatic conclusions: PAlice(.|CarolSays(‘‘X")). But, for the purpose of sussing out semantics, what you want to do in the post is pretend that Alice takes Carol literally, and conditions only on the semantic content of what Carol says: PAlice(.|X).
Hence, the magic box is a function relating pragmatics to semantics; it takes the event which we would condition on to get the pragmatics (namely: the full sensory experience) and maps it to the semantics (the literal meaning of what was said).
I suppose I didn’t draw out the critical implication I’m trying to point to:
If you buy my argument that, far from ignoring semantics vs pragmatics, your way of framing the problem relies critically on the distinction...
...then you should be more curious about what is going on with the distinction, rather than writing it off as a less important detail to be figured out later.
I take pragmatics to be easy to understand (so long as we take it to include semantics, rather than be exclusive): the pragmatics of an utterance is just what a Bayesian listener would infer from it. (We can, if we like, also point to the pragmatic intent: what the speaker was trying to get the listener to infer.)
What seems hard is, how do we point out only the semantic content, when in conversation we always need to think about the full pragmatics?
Why do we even believe that utterances have literal content, rather than only a cloud of probabilistic implications? How could such a belief be grounded in linguistic behavior, aside from the brute fact that people talk about this distinction as if it is a thing? What singles out some inferences as semantic? What makes those inferences different from other pragmatic inferences?
It seems like it has something to do with always-valid inferences vs context-sensitive inferences, for one thing.
A naive reader may think that “ignoring Gricean implicature” means pretending that it doesn’t exist; to be more precise: pretending that the semantics and pragmatics of an utterance are equal.
(I will use ‘pragmatics’ to mean all implications a listener can draw from an utterance, including Gricean implicature, and ‘semantics’ to mean only the literal implications. For example, if I say “you left the door open” then (depending on context) I probably am implying that you should close it; this is pragmatics and gricean implicature, but is not a literal implication of what I said. This is also a near-synonym of a connotation/denotation distinction, where connotation≈pragmatics, denotation≈semantics.)
However, the way you frame the problem actually critically relies on a semantics/pragmatics distinction. You define “the magic box” to be what translates from the utterance to what you would condition on if you took the sentence literally: the difference between CarolSays(‘‘X") vs X.
IE, when Alice hears Carol say something, she conditions on the full sensory experience, and reaches the full range of pragmatic conclusions: PAlice(.|CarolSays(‘‘X")). But, for the purpose of sussing out semantics, what you want to do in the post is pretend that Alice takes Carol literally, and conditions only on the semantic content of what Carol says: PAlice(.|X).
Hence, the magic box is a function relating pragmatics to semantics; it takes the event which we would condition on to get the pragmatics (namely: the full sensory experience) and maps it to the semantics (the literal meaning of what was said).
I suppose I didn’t draw out the critical implication I’m trying to point to:
If you buy my argument that, far from ignoring semantics vs pragmatics, your way of framing the problem relies critically on the distinction...
...then you should be more curious about what is going on with the distinction, rather than writing it off as a less important detail to be figured out later.
I take pragmatics to be easy to understand (so long as we take it to include semantics, rather than be exclusive): the pragmatics of an utterance is just what a Bayesian listener would infer from it. (We can, if we like, also point to the pragmatic intent: what the speaker was trying to get the listener to infer.)
What seems hard is, how do we point out only the semantic content, when in conversation we always need to think about the full pragmatics?
Why do we even believe that utterances have literal content, rather than only a cloud of probabilistic implications? How could such a belief be grounded in linguistic behavior, aside from the brute fact that people talk about this distinction as if it is a thing? What singles out some inferences as semantic? What makes those inferences different from other pragmatic inferences?
It seems like it has something to do with always-valid inferences vs context-sensitive inferences, for one thing.