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A Causal Theory of Speech Acts

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Logic, Rationality, and Interaction (LORI 2017)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 10455))

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Abstract

In speech acts, a speaker utters sentences that might affect the belief state of a hearer. To formulate causal effects in assertive speech acts, we introduce a logical theory that encodes causal relations between speech acts, belief states of agents, and truth values of sentences. We distinguish trustful and untrustful speech acts depending on the truth value of an utterance, and distinguish truthful and untruthful speech acts depending on the belief state of a speaker. Different types of speech acts cause different effects on the belief state of a hearer, which are represented by the set of models of a causal theory. Causal theories of speech acts are also translated into logic programs, which enables one to represent and reason about speech acts in answer set programming.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    \( Utter _t(x,\sigma )\) is represented by the proposition \(utter\!\_x\_\sigma _t\) where \(utter\!\_x\_\sigma \) is an action name. We write \(utter\!\_x\_\sigma _t\) by \( Utter _t(x,\sigma )\) for notational convenience.

  2. 2.

    U means Utter, B means Bel, and H means Hold.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer and Communication Sciences, Wakayama University, 930 Sakaedani, Wakayama, 640-8510, Japan

    Chiaki Sakama

Authors
  1. Chiaki Sakama
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Correspondence to Chiaki Sakama .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Institute for Logic, Language and Computation, University of Amsterdam , Amsterdam, Noord-Holland, The Netherlands

    Alexandru Baltag

  2. Department of Philosophy, The University of Auckland, Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand

    Jeremy Seligman

  3. Graduate School of Letters, Hokkaido University , Sapporo, Japan

    Tomoyuki Yamada

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Sakama, C. (2017). A Causal Theory of Speech Acts. In: Baltag, A., Seligman, J., Yamada, T. (eds) Logic, Rationality, and Interaction. LORI 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10455. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-55665-8_48

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-55665-8_48

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-662-55664-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-662-55665-8

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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