Pragmatic reasoning through semantic inference

Abstract

A number of recent proposals have used techniques from game theory and Bayesian cognitive science to formalize Gricean pragmatic reasoning (Frank & Goodman, 2012; Franke, 2009; Goodman & Stuhlmuller, 2013; J ¨ ager, 2012). We discuss two phenomena which pose a ¨ challenge to these accounts of pragmatics: M-implicatures (Horn, 1984) and embedded implicatures which violate Hurford’s constraint (Chierchia, Fox & Spector, 2012; Hurford, 1974). Previous models cannot derive these implicatures, because of basic limitations in their architecture. In order to explain these phenomena, we propose a realignment of the division between semantic content and pragmatic content. Under this proposal, the semantic content of an utterance is not fixed independent of pragmatic inference; rather, pragmatic inference partially determines an utterance’s semantic content. We show how semantic inference can be realized as an extension to the Rational Speech Acts framework (Goodman & Stuhlmuller, 2013). The ¨ addition of lexical uncertainty derives both M-implicatures and the relevant embedded implicatures, and preserves the derivations of more standard implicatures.