Mistakes About Conventions and Meanings
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Mistakes About Conventions and Meanings Cosmo Grant1
© Springer Nature B.V. 2019
Abstract The Standard View is that, other things equal, speakers’ judgments about the meanings of sentences of their language are correct. After all, we make the meanings, so how wrong can we be about them? The Standard View underlies the Elicitation Method, a typical method in semantic fieldwork, according to which we should work out the truth-conditions of a sentence by eliciting speakers’ judgments about its truth-value in different situations. I put pressure on the Standard View and therefore on the Elicitation Method: for quite straightforward reasons, speakers can be radically mistaken about meanings. Lewis (Convention: A Philosophical Study, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1969) gave a theory of convention in a gametheoretic framework. He showed how conventions could arise from repeated coordination games, and, as a special case, how meanings could arise from repeated signaling games. I put pressure on the Standard View by building on Lewis’s framework. I construct coordination games in which the players can be wrong about their conventions, and signaling games in which the players can be wrong about their messages’ meanings. The key idea is straightforward: knowing your own strategy and payoff needn’t determine what the others do, so leaves room for false beliefs about the convention and meanings. The examples are simple, explicit, new in kind, and based on an independently plausible meta-semantic story. Keywords Convention · Meaning · Signaling games · Elicitation method
1 Overview The Standard View is that, other things equal, speakers’ judgments about the meanings of sentences of their language are correct.1 After all, we make the meanings, so how wrong can we be about them? I put pressure on the Standard View: for quite straightforward reasons, speakers can be radically mistaken about meanings. Lewis (1969) gave a theory of convention in a game-theoretic framework. He showed how conventions could arise in repeated coordination games. He also introduced a special kind of coordination game, a signaling game, and showed how, as a special case of his theory, conventional meanings could arise in repeated signaling games. I put pressure on the Standard View by building on Lewis’s framework. I construct coordination games in which the players can be wrong about their own conventions. The key idea is simple: knowing your own strategy and payoff * Cosmo Grant [email protected] 1
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needn’t determine what the others do, so leaves room for false beliefs about the convention. Guided by the coordination games, I consider the special case of signaling games, and construct signaling games in which the players can be wrong about their messages’ meanings. We make the meanings, but we can still be wrong about them. Perhaps we already know that speakers can be wrong about meanings, because of Twin Earth cases, or semantic de
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