Talking with tact: Polite language as a balance between kindness and informativity
نویسندگان
چکیده
Conveying information in a false or indirect manner in consideration of listeners’ wants (i.e. being polite) seemingly contradicts an important goal of a cooperative speaker: information transfer. We propose that a cooperative speaker considers both epistemic utility, or utility of providing the listener new and accurate information, and social utility, or utility of maintaining or boosting the listener’s self-image (being polite). We formalize this tradeoff within a probabilistic model of language understanding and test it with empirical data on people’s inferences about the relation between a speaker’s goals, utterances and the true states of the world.
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