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Natural Language and Logic of Agency

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Abstract

This light piece reflects on analogies between two often disjoint streams of research: the logical semantics and pragmatics of natural language and dynamic logics of general information-driven agency. The two areas show significant overlap in themes and tools, and yet, the focus seems subtly different in each, defying a simple comparison. We discuss some unusual questions that emerge when the two are put side by side, without any pretense at covering the whole literature or at reaching definitive conclusions.

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Notes

  1. There have been related major debates on where to place the focus in understanding natural language, witness the famous Chomsky–Piaget clash recorded in Piattelli-Palmarini (1980).

  2. Here and throughout this discussion piece, we will only give a few non-exhaustive references.

  3. Dag Westerståhl has emphasized that one can view the functional stance as descriptive, too, but then of linguistic practices—with the logical systems discussed later describing valid laws of such practices. This is right, though I do not think this undermines the intuitive contrast.

  4. However, an explicit discussion of the basic mechanics of natural language is found in Barwise and Perry (1983), as a prelude to their proposed paradigm shift to situation semantics.

  5. See Fagin et al. (1995), Shoham and Leyton-Brown (2008), Wooldridge (2001).

  6. One can often see both motivations living together even in basic textbooks on logic.

  7. This common terminology may be suboptimal, since we are really modeling the update for any totally reliable information: coming from communication, observation, or yet other sources.

  8. The same logical methodology applies. One identifies key events of ‘hard’ and ‘soft information’ that transform a ‘plausibility order’ of worlds inside the current epistemic range. The logic makes these events explicit, and has the complete laws governing the induced belief changes. Similar logics govern changes in agents’ syntactic inferential information, or their preferences.

  9. In this connection, while the mainstream of dynamic logics of agency is closer to standard semantics for natural language, having different levels of information might come closer to the richer structures used in Discourse Representation Theory (Kamp and Reyle 1993).

  10. This is reflected in the emergence of ‘protocols’ encoding procedural information (Hoshi 2009). Typical systems handling protocols are epistemic-temporal logics, or extensions thereof.

  11. For instance, a game is a typical temporal protocol for many interacting agents, whose step by step dynamics can be studied using dynamic–epistemic update methods (van Benthem 2014).

  12. It has been suggested that this emphasis is mainly a result of the philosopher’s preoccupation with written rather than spoken language, an emphasis that can be very misleading. See Wenzel (2010) on the unfortunate effects of making Chinese written characters our exclusive yardstick for understanding Chinese culture, rather than also the structure of spoken Chinese.

  13. Goodman and Lassiter (2013) analyze brain processing of language as a belief revision machine.

  14. For some initial work in this direction, see Baltag et al. (2012).

  15. E.g., truth decomposes recursively along major logical constructions, but does plausibility?

  16. One power may be this: even with a much richer picture of agency, the principles governing that picture are true or false, and hence truth-conditional semantics seems appropriate to reports on a wide range of informational and evaluative attitudes by linguistic agents.

  17. The emphasis on correctness in language may be a remnant of old attitudes in the foundations of mathematics, with its aim of proving correctness of mathematical reasoning once and for all.

  18. Indeed, special cases of correction have been studied in semantics and pragmatics, witness a phenomenon like accommodation in presuppositions (Stalnaker 1973; Schlenker 2008).

  19. Holliday and Icard (2013) switch seamlessly to logic of agency mode in discussing Yalcin (2007).

  20. Even innovative logicians looking at activity verbs like “see” have suppressed its dynamics, construing it as a static relation between an agent and a situation (Barwise and Perry 1983).

  21. With epistemic modals, we would need the action expressions that make us say that something “must” or “might” be the case, with candidates such as the verbs “conclude” or “suspect”.

  22. Some words in natural language might be ambiguous between a static and a dynamic reading, witness the ‘product–process ambiguity’ noted for many expressions in van Benthem (1996).

  23. One of the referees has pointed at work at the interface of linguistics and cognitive science that may be relevant to the issues raised here, including studies of evidentiality (Papafragou et al. 2007) and the acquisition of attitude verbs (Anand and Hacquard 2013).

  24. Lenzen (1980) studies variety of basic attitudes beyond knowledge and belief in epistemology.

  25. Game-theoretic semantics does provide more process structure (Hintikka and Sandu 1997). See van Benthem (2008) for a survey of several different games proposed for natural language.

  26. Similar points have been made in Halpern (2003), Bovens and Ferreira (2010) on the impossibility of solving standard puzzles like Sleeping Beauty in the philosophical literature about probability and decision. Without more process information, discussions remain fatally open-ended.

  27. A case in point is the semantics of questions in terms of decision problems in van Rooij (2003). Also relevant is the treatment of pragmatics in Jäger et al. (2005).

  28. Agent diversity in realistic communication drives complex phenomena beyond standard semantics. For a case study of the complexity arising even in the small test realm of logic puzzles, see Liu and Wang (2012) on logical scenarios where liars and truth-tellers meet and interact.

  29. Recall the point by Stalin in the early 1950s, reported in Klaus (1959), who argued that thinking of language as a class-dependent medium would make serious class struggle impossible, since all one could say would be that capitalists and proletarians are talking at cross-purposes.

  30. Interesting proposals for ‘the mother process of natural language’ are the view of language as abduction in Hobbs et al. (1993), the game theoretical analysis of conversation in Feinberg (2008), or the neuroscience-inspired probabilistic lambda calculus of Goodman and Lassiter (2013).

  31. Cai (2013) ties this to the original semiotic program of Peirce or De Saussure for language.

  32. One might also think that the ‘language’ of semantics is narrower than the broader ‘language’ of pragmatics, but this is a subtle debate I do not want to enter into here: cf. Stojanovich (2008).

  33. On our full agency view, however, translation will have to be a much richer notion still, involving different agents to communicate successfully across their grammar + reasoning practices. Moreover, given the variety of basic informational actions, we may also want a translation to mimic update steps on models for agents using the two languages. It is not hard to see that a logical translation of the usual sort will do this, for instance, for public announcement updates, but we leave the details of this sort of extended correlation of behavior to a future occasion.

  34. van Benthem (2013) discusses more detailed examples of the explicit–implicit contrast in epistemic logic and intuitionistic logic, dynamic logics of belief change and non-monotonic logics, or game logics and logic games—and draws general lines, including possibilities for borrowing, formal translation, and system merging between the two approaches. Holliday and Icard (2013) is an interesting case study relating the two approaches in the area of epistemic modals.

  35. One of the referees has pointed at areas of linguistics where similar dualities seem to play, including studies of presupposition (Beaver 1997), vagueness, and ‘procedural semantics’.

  36. Language even refuses to be drawn into controversies between formal and natural language. It has a creative ability to absorb formal language as needed, witness the smooth absorption of technical terminology and notations in special fields like mathematics, but also more generally.

  37. Ciardelli and Roelofsen (2013) discusses such merged systems in the area of questions.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute for Logic, Language and Computation ILLC, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Johan van Benthem

  2. Department of Philosophy, Stanford, CA, USA

    Johan van Benthem

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Correspondence to Johan van Benthem.

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I thank the editor and two referees for their helpful critical comments. I have also profited from feedback by colleagues at presentations of these thoughts in Beijing and Tilburg.

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van Benthem, J. Natural Language and Logic of Agency. J of Log Lang and Inf 23, 367–382 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10849-014-9188-x

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