What is Game Theoretic Pragmatics?

Models and methods of rational choice theory naturally suggest themselves as excellent candidates for formal accounts of pragmatic inferences conceived in a Gricean fashion as the result of interpreting language use as rational human action. This paper spells out a particular way of using game theory in linguistic pragmatics and assesses weaknesses and strength of the suggested approach. The paper outlines the main research questions of game theoretic pragmatics and introduces (i) dynamic games of incomplete information, with emphasis on signaling games, as formal models of the context of utterance and (ii) perfect Bayesian equilibrium as a rationalistic solution concept for signaling games. 1 Linguistic Pragmatics & the Gricean Programme It is a near-platitude that under normal circumstances we reliably learn more from observing the honest utterance of a declarative sentence1 than we would learn from the direct observation of infallible evidence that the proposition expressed by that sentence was true. If John stands by the window and says