Communication and content

Communication and content presents a comprehensive and foundational account of meaning based on new versions  of situation theory and game theory. The literal and implied meanings of an utterance are derived from first principles assuming little more than the partial rationality of interacting agents. New analyses of a number of diverse  phenomena – a wide notion of ambiguity and content encompassing phonetics, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and  beyond, vagueness, convention and conventional meaning, indeterminacy, universality, the role of truth in  communication, semantic change, translation, Frege’s puzzle of informative identities – are developed. Definitions of  communication,  speaker meaning, and reference are given. Frege’s context and compositional principles are  generalized and reconciled in a fixed-point principle, and a detailed critique of Grice, several aspects of Lewis, and   some aspects of the Romantic conception of meaning are offered. Connections with other branches of linguistics, especially psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, historical linguistics, and natural language processing, are explored.

The book will be of interest to scholars in philosophy, linguistics, artificial intelligence, and cognitive science. It should also interest readers in related fields like literary and art criticism and the social sciences.