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A response to
Joshua Dever ’s
“Living the Life Aquatic”
and some open questions about accommodation,
from a generation perspective
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Presupposition and the problem with other minds
Kees van DeemterComputing Science Department
King’s CollegeUniversity of Aberdeen
Scotland, UK
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We tell our students:
– Formal semantics/pragmatics has taken a “dynamic turn”
– Meanings of sentences used to be viewed as a (static) proposition, but
– they are better viewed dynamically, thus embracing the notion of change
Motivating phenomena include anaphora and presupposition
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Dever asks excellent questions:
1. What exactly does it mean for a theory to be static/dynamic?
2. Where does dynamism leave the proposition (which we know and love)?
3. Does presupposition (accommodation) force us to be dynamic?
– His question is not whether a dynamic theory is more elegant, economical, etc.
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Dever’s answers (very globally)
• Interesting static reconstructions of dynamic proposals
• Cautious discussions of drawbacks that these static reconstructions might have
• As far as I can see: nothing that forces us to go dynamic
Let’s briefly revisit questions (1)-(3) above.
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1. What does it mean for a theory to be static/dynamic?
STATIC (Dever): ()= [[]] for every sentence and state
• STATIC is very specific. Imagine a theory saying ()= [[]] (forgetting everything that went on before ). – This would be static but not STATIC.– INTERSECTIVE might be a better word
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STATIC or static?
• Later on, Dever will effectively widen the concept of staticism, exploring some of STATIC’s close relatives.
• In some cases, one wonders whether a purely STATIC approach would have been possible. (E.g. below, point 3; the problem of gimcracks; and the treatment of accommodation)
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2. Where does dynamism leave the proposition?
• Propositions won’t go away: they are what remains when is given:
[[]] is not a proposition but () is
• E.g., in Groenendijk & Stokhof’s DPL all of these survive:– proposition– truth– entailment
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I agree with Dever:
Dynamism is not suspect: it’s the natural way to formalise action. Compare Hoare’s logic for programming, with rules like
(p cond){S}q (p ¬cond)→q p{if cond then S}q
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3. Does presupposition accommodation force us to be dynamic?
a. “Can presupposition projection be modelled statically?”
Saul does not regret that p
presupposes
p
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Dever’s response to (a)
• projection can be handled statically if the meaning of the sentence distinguishes between assertion () and presupposition () : [[]] = [[]] [[]]
[[ ]] = [[]] [[]]
• Dever views this as noncompositional
• But is this analysis not compositional in every important sense?
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b. The problem of gimcracks
• Saving staticism by elaborating on it
• Example: pronominal anaphora
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Dever: an attempt to treat anaphora statically:
– Lifting sets to sets of sets . Example:‘John came in’ intersects the context with the set of those sets of Reference Markers that have John as an element
Dever: this adds a nontruthconditional component to the semantics. • Not clear how bad this is• But how to link the two components?
(More work seems to be needed)
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Can this approach be made STATIC?
• This is not purely STATIC, because it involves 2 intersection operations, not 1.
• Perhaps the same effect can be achieved using one intersection operation, e.g. modelling a state as a sets of pairs of the
form w, set of RMs• Plenty of room for further work
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Conclusion (Part I)
• It is not obvious how to define staticism/dynamism
• A lot depends on “how compositional” we want our semantic theories to be
• It’s not clear whether truth-conditional and “binding” can be treated in one STATIC operation (i.e. based on just one intersection)
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Questions to Dever:
• Q1: On balance, does presupposition (accommodation) mandate dynamism?
• Q2: What would happen if the same questions were asked about dynamic analyses of imperatives such asx:=0 (ok, that’s easy)
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Questions to Dever:
• Q1: On balance, does presupposition (accommodation) mandate dynamism?
• Q2: What would happen if the same questions were asked about dynamic analyses of imperatives such asx:=0 (ok, that’s easy)x:=x+1Eat an apple a day
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How crucial is accommodation to Dever’ story?
• I’ve mentioned anaphora and presupposition• But how about accommodation? Consider
an utterance . Two options:
1. Don’t accommodate. (Dever)– test whether holds in – if not then CRASH,
else interpret according to STATIC
Dever’s verdict: this is only a mild deviation from STATIC
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2. Second option: Accommodate.
a. If is consistent with thenperform STATIC, computing [[]] [[]]
b. Otherwise perform belief revision, throwing away enough of , until ’ is consistent with , then compute ’ [[]] [[]]. My verdict: This does look seriously non-static.
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If accommodation involves belief revision then maybe this is a knock-down argument for dynamics. (But if so, then note that the assertion can also be inconsistent with , which would also trigger belief revision.)
Question to Dever:• Q3: Is accommodation more of a challenge to
staticism than presupposition? Does belief revision play a role in your answer?
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Reconciliation between staticism and dynamism raises questions:
• Should we stop worrying about the distinction?
• Problems about accommodation that existing theories do not help us with:– When is it ok for a speaker to rely on
accom? – Why is accom not marked explicitly?
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A (much too naive!) generation perspective
• Suppose Speaker believes A. S wants A’ A to be known by Hearer– What parts of A’ should be asserted?
– Which presupposed?
• Heim 1992: “assumptions to be accommodated are supposed to be uncontroversial and unsurprising”1. Too restrictive: why exclude belief revision
(see above)?
2. Too liberal:
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• S= ‘It was John who borrowed my bicycle’ p= borrowed my bicycle. Can I say S if ...
– I believe you believe p? No– I believe you do not know whether p? No– I don’t know whether you know whether p? No
• Some thoughts, focussing on generation of referring expressions
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1. Knowing something in principle
• The dychotomy between knowing and not knowing hides some important issues
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Example: reference
Suppose we’re having a conversation.
Suppose I see a football while you don’t.
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Example: reference
I see a football while you don’t.
Can I say Please give me the football? No
Can I say Please give me the football behind you ?Yes
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• Ivandre Paraboni et al. (e.g., INLG-2002, INLG-2006): empirical/algorithmic investigation into the effects of adding “redundant” information on– acceptability of a referring expression– effort involved in finding the referent
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Lack of Orientation (LO)
Univ. of Aberdeen
Meston building Taylor building
North Wing South Wing North West South
library libraryauditorium
“the West Wing”
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Dead End (DE)
Univ. of Aberdeen
Meston building Taylor building
North Wing ? South Wing North West South
library libraryauditorium
“the library in the North
Wing”
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• Paraboni et al. experimentally explore how much “redundant” information is optimal
• Corollary: Sometimes it’s less egocentricto let the hearer accommodate more!
( pace Evans 2005, cf. Lyn Frazier’s paper )
• Presuppositions are expressed for a purpose (e.g., allowing hearer to find the referent)
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2. Egocentricity
• Children can reason about other minds from at least age 6
• Yet even adults often do not use this ability (experiments by Keysar et al.)
• The simplest experiment:– hearer sees three candles of different sizes– speaker does not see the largest one– hearer knows this– speaker says “Pick up the large candle”
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This candle not seen by speaker
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This candle not seen by speaker
“Pick up the large candle”
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Egocentricity
• Results (Keysar, Barr, Balin and Brauner 2000)
– hearers often grab the largest of the three, even though they know the speaker cannot see it
– hearers’ interpretation of these utterances is delayed
• Similar in other experiments (Keysar, Lin, and Barr 2003)
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Egocentricity
• Accommodation may result from speaker’s egocentricity
• Need to understand when and why speakers are egocentric. – e.g., addressing a varied audience?
• Formal models of shared information (as used in NLG) need to become more sophisticated
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3. Handling uncertainty
• Jean Carletta (1992) “Risk-taking and recovery in task-oriented dialogue”
• MAPTASK experiment: Dialogues between two people looking at a map with landmarks (e.g., ‘the swamp’, ‘the cactus’)– Route giver: map with route– Route follower: map without route
• Task: giver lets follower draw the route• One version of experiment lets them have
different sets of landmarks!
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Carletta’s observations
• Speakers use different “gambling” strategies
• One strategy: High risk posture: – assume that partner has same information– specify referents minimally– rely on follow-up dialogue
• mismatches trigger negotiations, e.g. replanning (cf. J.Moore 1990).
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Conclusions (Part II)
• The main gaps in our understanding of presupposition and accommodation now involve generation
• Issues:– The concept of knowledge (Paraboni et al.)– Egocentricity (Keysar et al.)– Handling uncertainty and “gambling”
(Carletta, based on Maptask)
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Back to Josh Dever
• Ice-age semantics
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Back to Josh Dever
• Ice-age semantics
• permafrost semantics
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Back to Josh Dever
• Ice-age semantics
• permafrost semantics
• aquatic semantics
What next?
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Back to Josh Dever
• Ice-age semantics
• permafrost semantics
• aquatic semantics
What next? Global warming might cause ...
• steamy semantics
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Over to others ...
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additional slides
• (to be kept in reserve)
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dynamics in adjectives
• Dever observes that few people are scared of dynamism as a theory of adjectives:
[[large N]] [[large]] [[N]]
• A static account: [[large]] is initially determined by some “general-purpose” comparison set. Later material (such an N) changes this general-purpose interpretation.
• Empirical support: Sedivy et al. 1999’s attempt to reconcile English word order with incremental interpretation
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Treating RMs declaratively
[ 2. Making the existence of a reference marker explicit, restricting to states in which there exists a peg for an individual called John.
Dever: This fails to account for the fact that claims of this kind have to be true.
E.g.: You cannot respond to ‘John is tall’ saying ‘No’ , meaning ‘There is no peg for a person named John.’ ]
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Illustrating Heim’s qualification
• My cousin is talking to me about a camera once owned by her brother (whom I believe to be alive and well): “I inherited this camera from Jaap”
• ‘inherit’ can be taken literally or figuratively• In both senses, it presupposes that Jaap
once owned the camera, but ...• ... the literal interpretation could not have
been intended!