Scott Soames My topic is the concept of information needed in the study of language and mind. It is widely acknowledged that knowing the meaning of an ordinary declarative sentence, or the content of a representational mental state, involves knowing which things it represents as being which ways. Knowing this gives one knowledge of the truth conditions of the sentence or state, which are ways t...

In this document we discuss the applicability of speech act theory as a theoretical foundation for the design of information technology (IT). We pay special attention to the adaptation speech act theory has undergone when applied in the IT-field. One question we address concerns what happens when we import passive descriptive theories from other disciplines and use them as a basis in active des...

thought that I would leave research. Ever since I arrived in the United States as a Ph.D. student with the proverbial two bags in my hand and $50 in my pocket, my goal had been to become the best possible cancer researcher. I marched through my Ph.D. and postdoc, taking one weekend to get married followed by a honeymoon in the lab. Everything was on track as I landed a job as a tenure-track ass...

Our aim is to use the logic of public announcements and more generally dynamic epistemic logics as a logic of speech acts. To that end we start from a simple multimodal logic of beliefs and goals (without common belief), and add public announcements. We suppose that announcements do not modify goals. We then consider several variants of speech acts of assertive and directive force and provide a...

This paper introduces a model of human communication in which ‘accounting-for’ is the basis of meaning, and argues that interruptions should be handled in the same way as any other speech act. The model has at its core the idea that human languages are inherently intentional – we focus on our conversational partner’s goals – and that what is needed is mixed initiative at the level of intent. It...

This pallet derives the ha.sis of a theory, of communicat ion from a formal theov,.' of rat ional interaction. The major result is a <h, mon~t fa l len t hat. i lh ,c , t ionary acts need not I)e pr imit ive, and .ee, I uot he reco~'nized..\s a t,'st case. we derive Searle's condit ions on reqt,est in~ from pri ,ciples of ralionality coupled with a ~;ric~,an theory of iml~erativ,.s. The theory ...

A benchmarking procedure ranks real-valued acts by the probability that they outperform a benchmark β; that is, an act f is evaluated by means of the functional V (f) = P (f ≥ β). Expected utility is a special case of benchmarking procedure, where the acts and the benchmark are stochastically independent. This paper provides axiomatic characterizations of preference relations that are represent...

In this paper, we address several puzzles concerning speech acts, particularly indirect speech acts. We show how a formal semantic theory of discourse interpretation can be used to define speech acts and to avoid murky issues concerning the metaphysics of action. We provide a formally precise definition of indirect speech acts, including the subclass of so-called conventionalized indirect speec...