threats, promises and communicative action

Threats, Promises and Communicative Action

Joseph Heath

Jurgen Habermas’ attempt to distinguish between instrumental and communicative rationality is often hampered by his failure to respect certain very important distinctions in the instrumental model of action. Above all, he persistently treats contexts that call for strategic reasoning as if they involved parametric decision problems. Usually this stacks the deck in his favour, making his arguments against the generality of the instrumental model much easier than they should be. On the other hand, it sometimes works against him, by making the instrumental model appear considerably more flexible than it in fact is. In the case of his analysis of speech act theory, this excessively charitable attitude has led him to make one very important concession that he need not have made. He grants that simple imperatives can sometimes be overt strategic actions. But the type of example that leads him to make this concession - that of a bank robber issuing a threat - is intrinsically flawed, since there is no suck thing as a strategically rational tk rea t .

This issue has broader philosophical significance. At stake is the question of what type of action theory is required in order to provide an adequate pragmatics for a theory of meaning. It is widely believed that David Lewis’ work on convention showed how the instrumental model of action could be applied to perform this task.’ If Habermas’ overall analysis were correct, it would show that the use of an instrumental model of action, to relate agents’ intentions to their actual speech behaviour would render the content of most speech acts indeterminate. This would have the consequence of revealing a major limitation of the dominant rational choice paradigm.

I believe that Habermas’ conclusion is correct, but that the specific argument he presents does not work. In this paper, I outline the probiems with his argument, then present a short game-theoretic analysis that shows how the desired conclusion can be reached. In section I, I offer a brief presentation of the instrumental model, in order to explain the difference between parametric (decision-theoretic), and strategic (game-theoretic) reasoning. To illustrate the significance of this distinction, I present an example of an invalid argument that Habermas makes through confusion of the two. In section 11, I argue that Habermas makes a similar error when he grants that there can be overtly strategic uses of imperatives. I present a general game-theoretic model of threats, and show that instrumentally rational agents can only bluff. In section 111, I present an account of threats as norm-governed actions, takmg as my point of departure Thomas Schelling’s observation that threats have the same basic action-theoretic structure as promises. I conclude in section IV by arguing that

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226 Joseph Heath

much of the mileage Habermas’ critics have got from the problem of imperatives is ill-acquired. Defenders of the instrumental model themselves often apply it inconsistently, ignoring the fact that the bulk of game-theoretic analyses of communication tend to support Habermas’ contention that speech acts cannot be modelled instrumentally.

1

The basic instrumental model of action, along with the core conception of rationality expressed in the expected utility maximization theorem, belong to the realm of decision theory. Decision theory deals with the logic of decision in cases where the actor’s environment does not include any other rational actors. This allows the agent to calculate the effects of his action while treating the course of events in the environment as a given, or at least as independent of his own deliberations. Because the probability of various states of nature obtaining is itself not a part of the decision problem, the external world can be represented as a set of parameters that constrain the agent’s choice - hence the term parametric reasoning.

Decision theory relies upon a very parsimonious ontology.2 This consists of states, outcomes, actions and beliefs: a state is a description of the world, that may or may not obtain; an outcome is something that can happen, as it relates to the actor; an action is a function that maps an outcome onto each possible state; and an agent’s beliefs are a set of subjective probability distributions over states. The agent’s preferences can be given as a rank ordering on a set of lotteries that assign different probabilities to various outcomes. With a few additional assumptions a cardinal utility function for the agent can be derived from this preference r e l a t i ~ n . ~ Rationality consists simply in choosing the action that will give the highest-ranked lottery, given the agent’s beliefs about the prevailing state (when this is represented in a utility function, it shows up as maximizing expected utility).

When the agent interacts with other rational agents, the problem is not so simple, because agents will anticipate each others’ actions, anticipate each others’ anticipations, etc. and develop their plans accordingly. In order to deal with this complication, game theory retains the basic teIeologica1 model of action from decision theory, but expands the role of agents’ beliefs. When dealing with other rational agents, it is impossible to determine the probability of a particular state without taking into consideration how these agents will act. But for an agent to anticipate their actions (in order to form adequate beliefs about the state), he must determine the beliefs of the other players. This in turn will require determining their beliefs about his beliefs, their beliefs about his beliefs about their beliefs, and so on. For a long time, it was thought that this led automatically to an infinite regress. Since the state is no longer given parametrically, the agent must solve for two variables simultaneously. Not only

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Threats, Promises and Communicative Action 227

must she decide which action is optimal, she must also determine which state will obtain. The catch is that which state will obtain depends upon which actions are optimal, and which actions are optimal will depend on which state will obtain.

Game theory was developed when it was discovered that a strategic equilibrium provides a solution to this problem, because it terminates the regress of anticipations and allows a stable set of beliefs to emerge for all players. For each player, strategic reasoning operates by worlung through the cycles of anticipation in such a way as to turn other players’ actions (which have not yet been planned or performed) into events that will occur with specific probabilities. Once reduced in this way, each player’s problem can then be handled using the standard technique of decision-making under risk, A game-theoretic ’solution’ is therefore an equilibrium of beliefs, and game theory is a general mechanism for determining beliefs about the relative probabilities of various states.

Since beliefs come to play an important role only when the transition is made from decision theory to game theory, and since Habermas often treats strategic actors as if they were reasoning parametrically, he tends to overemphasize the naturalistic flavour of the decision-theoretic ontology and ignore the central role assigned to beliefs. Thus in a recent article he makes things far too easy for himself by claiming that actions in the instrumental model are limited by the foIlowing three conditions: the goal of the action must be determined ’a) independently of the means of intervention b) as a causally-achieved state c) in the objective ~ o r l d ’ . ~ This is an example of a statement that is true in decision theory, but false in game theory. While it is correct that an outcome must be a natural state of affairs, brought about by causal intervention, it is not true that every action must bring about an outcome, formally defined. In a standard sequential move game, only the last player’s action brings about an outcome, and so only this action is subject to the above constraints.

Habermas goes on to argue that a state of successful communication cannot be described under these three constraints, since ‘a) illocutionary goals cannot be defined independently of the linguistic means of reaching mutual understanding’, ’b) the speaker cannot intend the goal of reaching mutual understanding simply as something to be implemented causally’, ’c) and finally, the participants cannot perceive the ongoing process of communication in which they are involved, nor the result which it is supposed to have, under the description of innerworldly event^'.^ While all three of these claims may be true, the only thing we are entitled to infer from them is that communication cannot occur in the last move of a game. This does not stop the game theorist from attempting to model communication through actions taken within the game.

David Lewis’ game-theoretic model of linguistic conventions uses precisely such a mechanism. Lewis presents a signalling game in which player 1 alone observes an event, then performs one of a set of actions that will be viewed by player 2. Player 2 then chooses an action that results in an outcome, with payoffs for each player having the structure of a coordination problem. Through fairly


228 Joseph Heath

simple strategic reasoning within one or another of the game equilibria, it is possible for player 2 to infer which event has occurred by observing player 1’s action. Thus player 1’s action can be described as a signal that communicates the prevailing state of nature to player 2. Since player 1’s reasoning mirrors player 2’s, it can plausibly be said that player 1 sends the signal with the intention that player 2 form correct beliefs about which event has occurred. But player 2’s belief is not brought about causally by player 1’s action. Player 1, who knows the prevailing state, chooses an optimal action. Player 2, who does not observe the state, is able to form correct beliefs about it from the combination of observing player 1’s action and knowing that player 1 is optimizing. Thus player 2 can rationally infer the information content, i.e. the meaning, of player 1’s signal.6

The important point is simply that strategically rational agents can perform actions with the intention of prompting other players to change their beliefs. Because of this, Habermas’ argument does not show what it purports to. This is not to say that the conclusion is incorrect. Several limitations with Lewis’ model suggest that there are in fact very good reasons to believe that communication cannot be modelled game-theoretically. But this is an entirely different, and significantly more complicated a r g ~ m e n t . ~

I1

Habermas runs into greater difficulties in his attempt to distinguish between strategic and communicative uses of language, particularly in his analysis of simple, or genuine imperatives. The problem has something of a complicated history. Habermas presented his position initially in The Theory of Communicative Action, but then tried to back away from it once the difficulties it created were pointed out. His retraction, however, was partial and somewhat unpersuasive. In this section, I argue that the retraction should be total, since Habermas’ entire discussion of imperatives rests upon a substitution of parametric for strategic reasoning.

Habermas’ general position on speech acts is that successful communication requires participants to abandon their usual instrumental action orientation, and adopt what he calls a ’performative stance’. This stance is defined by a number of idealizing presuppositions, most importantly, that agents suspend their pursuit of strictly individual plans and adopt a joint interest in achieving mutual understanding. In Parsonian terms, they must adopt an attitude oriented toward mutual understanding [verstundigungsorientiert]. For an agent who has adopted this attitude, actions cannot be planned or judged according to the standard criteria of instrumental rationality. This creates an opening for the introduction of a different rational action type, which Habermas refers to as communicative rationality. In every speech act, the agent raises a set of validity claims, which serve as an implicit assurance that she could, if need be, defend the truth, rightness, or sincerity of the utterance through reasoned argument.

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The speech act can then be judged rational or irrational depending upon whether the speaker could in fact do so. In essence, Habermas takes the conception of rationality-as-justifiability that is usually applied to the evaluation of beliefs, and extends it to serve as a standard for evaluating a particular type of social action.

But Habermas gets into difficulties when he tries to show that communicative and instrumental rationality are mutually exclusive. He wants to claim that mutual understanding is the inherent telos of all speech, and that the idealizing presuppositions of the performative stance are present in all linguistically mediated interactions, But since it is the presence of validity claims that makes the action communicatively rational, in order to maintain the ’inherent telos’ claim he must maintain that all speech acts raise validity claims. He tries to do so by arguing that the meaning of an utterance, more specifically, the illocutionary component of a speech act, can be understood only via its associated validity claim.

Given this basic argumentative strategy, it was therefore very puzzling when, in The Theory of Communicafive Acfion, he defined simple imperatives as speech acts whose illocutionary component does not raise a validity claim, but merely a power claim. The intuition was that if I say to someone ’Stop smolung’, and we are in a non-smoking area, I am implicitly claiming validity for my imperative through reference to the normative context in which the action occurs, and could therefore supply the hearer with reasons to motivate compliance. On the other hand, if I say the same thing to a stranger in a park, the imperative can be understood only as an arbitrary imposition of my will, and so I can motivate the hearer only by threatening him with sanctions. This is the old view that simple imperatives should be analysed as disjunctions of the form: ‘Either you do X, or Y will happen’.8 Thus,

Simple imperatives are illocutionary acts with which the speaker openly declares his aim of influencing the decisions of his opposite number, and in so doing has to base the success of his power claim on supplementary sanctions. Thus with genuine imperatives - requests and demands that lack normative authorization - speakers can un- reservedly pursue illocutionary aims and nonetheless act with an orientation to success rather than to understanding. Not all illocutionary acts are constitutive for communicative action, but only those with which speakers connect criticizable validity claims.’

The problem with this position, which Habermas later recognized, is that it makes the association of validity claims with utterances optional. This not only undermines the claim that understanding the meaning of an utterance involves knowing the conditions under which it could be rationally redeemed, it grants that there can be completely strategic uses of language. This undermines the claim that mutual understanding is the ’inherent telos‘ of all communication.

After Erling Skjei pointed this out, Habermas agreed that it was a mistake to


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classify simple imperatives as strategic actions. lo He suggested that the solution 'is to argue that the sharp distinction between normatively authorized and simple imperatives cannot be sustained; that, rather there is a continuum between habitual power and power that has been transposed into normative authority. Then all imperatives to which we can ascribe illocutionary force can be analysed according to the paradigm of normatively authorized requests'.'' He later refined this view in the following way:

Only in the limit case of manifestly strategic action does the normative validity claim shrivel into a pure power claim, which is based upon a potential for sanctions that is contingent and no longer conventionally regulated or grammatically readable. The 'Hands Up!' of a bank robber, who at pistol point demands of the threatened bank clerk that he hand over the money, demonstrates in a drastic way that the conditions of normative validity have been replaced by sanction conditions. The dissolution of the normative background appears in a symptomatic way in the if-then structure of the threat, which in strategic action takes the place of the sincerity or earnestness of the speaker that is presupposed for communicative action. Strangely, imperatives or threats that are deployed purely strategically and robbed of their normative validity are not illocutionary acts, or acts aimed toward reaching understanding, at all. They remain parasitic insofar as their comprehensibility must be derived from the employment conditions for illocutionary acts that are covered by norms.l*

But simply assigning to purely strategic threats the status of a parasitic borderline case does not really dispose of the problem. And since Habermas does not supply any independent motivating grounds for this shuffle, it has a serious air of 'adhocness' about it. In my estimation, William Hohengarten has quite reasonably objected that:

This account is wholly ad hoc, designed for the express purpose of disarming a counterexample . . . There is no reason why genuine imperatives should be treated as a limit case of normatively authorized imperatives, any more than normatively authorized imperatives should be treated as a limit case of genuine imperatives. The second reduction is after all equally possible, and perhaps slightly more plausible: normatively authorized imperatives are 'limit cases' of genuine imperatives, in which the power claim has 'shriveled' into nothing and has been 'replaced' with normative backing. l3

But before concluding that Habermas' overall analysis of communicative and instrumental rationality is in trouble, it is worth examining more closely the idea of a strategic threat. I would like to suggest that, far from being a borderline case, there is in fact no such thing.

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Let us consider for a moment a possible world in which Habermas is wrong, i.e. where the only type of rational action is instrumentally rational action. In this world there are no in principle limits to our ability to model social interaction game-theoretically (even though there may be some problems with computa- tional tractability). Since we are bracketing the question of whether this possible world is also the actual world, we must begin by suspending our everyday intuitions about the structure of social interaction. If everything can be modelled game-theoretically, we should not assume the possibility of any familiar social phenomena until we have constructed a game that exhibits the relevant properties. In order to consider the problem of imperatives, it is therefore necessary to develop an adequate game-theoretic characterization of threats.

Consider first the extensive form game shown in figure 1. The game diagram is a finite rooted tree, with each non-terminal node representing a decision that a player must make. A 'move label' indicates which player it belongs to. In figure 1, the origin, or first move, belongs to player 1, the second to player 2. The branches stemming from these two decision nodes represent the players' possible actions, and are identified by a 'choice label'. In figure 1, player 1 has the options {U,D}, and player 2 {L,R}. The remaining terminal nodes are represented by the payoff vector associated with that outcome (player 1 first, player 2 second).

1

Figure 1

There are a variety of different solution concepts that offer a resolution to such a strategic problem. The most general - Nash equilibrium - is able to generate at least a minimal solution for any game." A Nash equilibrium is a strategy profile (a set of strategies, one for each player) in which each player's strategy is an optimal response to those of the others. In other words, no single player can gain by unilaterally deviating from equilibrium play. Figure 1 has two pure strategy Nash equilibria, ([U],[R]) and ([D],[L]). The logic of these two equilibria is as follows. Suppose U and R are the anticipated moves. If player 2 is playing R, then player 1 is best playing U, and if player 1 is playing U, player 2 has no reason to switch to L. Similarly with ([D],[L]). And so these outcomes are in a

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232 Josqh Heath

certain sense self-enforcing, since no player has an incentive to deviate from them.

But looking at the game a little more closely, it is easy to see that there is something unreasonable about the ([U], [R]) equilibrium. The only reason that player 2’s ‘choice’ of R over L does not lower her payoffs is that she does not get a chance to move when player 1 selects U. However, if she were actually called upon to move, she would choose L. So while it is true that player 1 cannot benefit by deviating from the equilibrium so long as player 2 is playing R, if he were to deviate, player 2 would certainly not play R, but would in fact switch to L. And player 1, knowing this, would want to play D in order to get the higher payoff of 3. This effectively unravels the equilibrium.

It appears then that the only reasonable equilibrium in this game is ([D],[L]). In order to deal with this type of problem, Reinhart Selten introduced the first ’refinement’ of Nash equilibrium, now referred to as subgame-perfect equilibrium. l5 Selten argued that a reasonable equilibrium strategy profile would have to be not only Nash in the large game, but the relevant subset of it would also have to be Nash in any proper subgame, even if this subgame was never reached in the course of play. The idea was that players’ strategies had to be optimizing both on and off the equilibrium path, otherwise some player might still benefit by a deviation that prompted other players to switch strategies. In figure 1, player 2’s decision node forms the origin of a subgame that is not reached in the ([U],[R]) Nash equilibrium. Since R is not a Nash equilibrium of this subgame, ([U],[R]) is not a subgame-perfect equilibrium of the larger game. Thus subgame perfection eliminates the ’unreasonable’ Nash equilibrium.

Under the ([U],[R]) Nash equilibrium, player 2 receives a payoff of 2, while under subgame-perfect ([D],[L]) she receives only 1. In the former case, if player 1 for some reason believed that player 2 would choose R, then he would select U. Since this would be to player 2’s advantage, any signal she could send that would have the effect of getting player 1 to believe this could reasonably be described as a threat, i.e. she would be threatening player 1 with the (0,O) payoff in order to force him to choose U. But the threat would always be a bluff, since both can figure out that player 2 would play L in the event that she was called upon to move. Thus the subgame-perfection refinement has the consequence of making it impossible for players to threaten each other.

Translating this into ordinary prose gives us a useful game-theoretic characterization of threats. When one player threatens another, he makes a claim of the sort ‘if you don’t do X, I will perform mutually damaging action Y’. Notice that it is not incidental that the action threatened is mutually damaging. If it were not suboptimal for the threatener, then there would be no point in threatening it. For instance, when the bank robber says to the teller ’Give me the money or I’ll shoot you’, it is assumed that the robber would prefer not to shoot him. If the robber wanted to shoot him, she would do it anyway (no matter what happened with the money), and so it would not be an effective threat.

This means that in order to threaten credibly, players have to be willing to engage in non-utility maximizing actions. But since this is precisely what



instrumentally rational agents are unwilling to do, there can be nothing but empty threats in strategic contexts. And since instrumentally rational agents would never actually carry out their threats if called upon to do so, and everyone knows that everyone knows this, no instrumentally rational agent would ever both trying to issue a threat. So even though it sounds somewhat odd, it is nevertheless the case that the term 'strategically rational threat' is an oxymoron."

I11

As Hobbes noted, 'he that can bind, can release; and therefore he that is bound to himself only, is not bound'. The reason strategic rationality excludes threats is that instrumentally rational agents are unable to commit themselves to actions. In order to threaten effectively, one must be able convincingly to bind one's will to the performance of a mutually damaging action in the event that the threat fails. This is what creates problems for the utility-rna~irni2er.l~

It is worth emphasizing that this inability to commit is not an incidental feature of the instrumental model. In order to represent an agent's preferences with a cardinal utility function, the agent must be willing to accept tradeoffs between any particular outcome and a randomization over others. If an agent were committed to an outcome, she would be unwilling to accept such tradeoffs. In such cases (referred to as lexicographic preferences) the agent has no utility function, which is to say that her actions cannot be modelled using a maximizing conception of practical rationality. Thus we are not dealing with simply a technical problem; there is a deep conceptual incompatibility between commitment and instrumental rationality.I8

Now since agents in the actual world frequently make commitments and rely on the commitments of others, it is often presumed that there is some normative context that allows them to do so. The role of commitment in threats is usually overlooked, but in the more obvious case of promises the role of a normative background is usually granted. And as one might suspect, instrumentally rational agents cannot make promises. Consider figure 2. This game has only one equilibrium ([U],[L]). Player 1 will choose U, since he expects player 2 to choose L. If player 2 could promise to choose R, then the ([D],[R]) outcome could be achieved, and both players would get 3. But since she cannot commit, they are stuck with the Pareto-inferior outcome of (2,2).

In both figures 1 and 2 ([U],[L]) is the sole equilibrium because player 2 is unable to commit herself to playing R. In figure 1, commitment to R would be called a threat, since playing R would be mutually damaging. In figure 2 it would be called a promise, since playing R would only hurt player 2. This illustrates a point made long ago by Thomas Schelling, which is that threats and promises have a very similar action-theoretic structure, and that both are by definition impossible among instrumentally rational agents." (This similarity is widely


234 Ioseph Heath

reflected in ordinary language, particularly when movie villains say: 'that's not a threat, it's a promise'.)

There are some clear instances in which threats are directly norm-governed actions. When the policeman says 'Stop or I'll shoot', the credibility of the threat stems from the fact that in applying the sanction the officer would be following a norm that licenses the use of force in certain situations.2" In their primary usage, threats provide a general mechanism for motivating norm-conformity in agents (particularly children) who inappropriately adopt an instrumental orientation in institutionally bound contexts. Thus the imperative contains an obvious reference to the normative background that licenses the sanction. The validity claim associated with this type of imperative can be rejected by a hearer, and it is often the case that people can be argued out of carrying out threats if it can be shown that they are not acting legitimately.

In situations where there is no norm to license the sanction, there is a good argument to be made for the claim that the threat is parasitic on the standard normed case. Consider the structure of an insincere promise, which I take to be uncontroversially parasitic on the case of sincere promises. Making a promise with the intention of breaking it only makes sense if you expect that the other person will expect you to keep it. This expectation is only reasonable if you assume that the other person either a) expects you to adopt a norm-conformative orientation, b) expects you to act irrationally, or c) expects you to adopt an instrumental orientation, but believes that the act of promising has changed your preferences so that you now want to comply. I maintain that all illegitimate threats can be analysed in terms of one of these cases. If the bank teller did not subscribe to a), b) or c), and if none of the conditions described in a), b), or c) in fact obtained, then the teller could successfully call the robber's bluff.

Illegitimate threats are therefore parasitic upon legitimate threats, in exactly the same way that insincere promises are parasitic upon sincere ones. In both cases, the action can succeed only if one agent makes an error in determining the other's action orientation. In a possible world where agents could adopt only instrumental action orientations, such an error would never occur. So in order to argue that actual agents do employ threats and break promises with 'strategic'

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intent, one must grant that the actual world is one in which agents can adopt non-instrumental action orientations. Any attempt to use the example of threats to defend the generality of the instrumental model is therefore logically incoherent. The case of simple imperatives, far from undermining Habermas’ position, tends rather to support it.

IV

So far I have dealt only with specific errors that arise from the confusion of parametric and strategic rationality. In conclusion I would like to explore a more general problem that this confusion creates for the discussion of Habermas’ proposal for a theory of communicative rationality.

Habermas makes the very general claim that speech acts cannot be planned and executed with strategc intent. In so doing, he shoulders a considerable burden of proof, viz. of showing that, in principle, communication cannot be modelled using a maximizing conception of practical rationality. Unfortunately, it is very easy to extrapolate from this argumentative strategy the suggestion that communication can be modelled instrumentally until proven otherwise. But this would make sense only on the assumption that there is already some coherent, well-developed instrumental model of communication that can step in and take up the slack in the event that Habermas’ demonstration fails. Unfortunately for Habermas’ critics, there is no such thing.

What tends to get overlooked is the fact that standard game theory models specifically exclude communication among players. The reason for this is simple - introducing primitive semantic resources into games has the consequence of undermining all of the traditional solution concepts. This means that purely strategic interactions involving communication often generate an infinite regress of anticipations, making it impossible for any agent to determine a maximizing strategy.” This is a huge problem in contemporary game theory, and one that has so far proven quite intractable. Because of this, anyone who wants to claim that speech acts can be instrumentally rational must also be prepared to shoulder a considerable burden of proof.

Now, if one had a tendency to treat strategic interaction problems as though they were merely parametric, it would be quite easy to overlook this difficulty. One of the attractive features of decision theory is that all decision problems have solutions. This means that for an agent who restricts herself to reasoning parametrically, the instrumental model is able to generate a recommendation for absolutely any context, and thus any action can be modelled instrumentally. Games, however, do not necessarily have solutions, since strategic agents must solve for two unknowns rather than just one. This means that for any interaction among rational agents, there is no a priori reason to believe that it should be possible to solve the problem through instrumental reasoning. In order to demonstrate the applicability of the instrumental model, one must actually provide an adequate game-theoretic solution concept.


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It is by ignoring this complication that many of Habermas’ critics have wound up with a dramatic misallocation of the burden of proof. If communication was only a decision problem, it would be logical to believe that an instrumental account of speech acts would be available automatically. But since communication that relies upon ‘non-natural’ meaning implies a strategic context, it is incumbenton the game theorist to come up with a model that exhibits therelevant properties. The difficulties that game theorists have encountered in their attempts to construct such a model have for the most part gone unappreciated, largely because of two widespread errors that underlie much of the debate surrounding Habermas’ analysis.

1. Intentionalism: It is widely thought that instrumentally rational action can have as its objective the production of beliefs. Thus speech acts could be modelled along the following lines: when I say ’It’s seven o’clock to you, I do so with the intention of getting you to believe that it is seven o’clock. I choose this particular utterance because it is the most efficient means of getting you to form this belief, and hence of realizing my desired outcome.22 Ernst Tugendhat makes this assumption when he argues that the strategic intentions of a speaker need not remain concealed, since ‘many such aims can perfectly well be acknowledged in the open, and there are some perlocutionary actions which do not even need to be acknowledged since they seem to be analytically connected with the illocutionary act, such as trying to induce a belief in the other person when I tell him something in the ind i~a t ive’ .~~

The problem with this assumption is that in principle beliefs cannot be outcomes, and instrumentally rational action is by definition directed toward outcomes. To see why this is not a minor point, recall that the strategically reasoning agent must select an optimal action and form correct beliefs about the relative probabilities of various states. These beliefs must include beliefs about the beliefs of all other players. Now suppose players act with the intention of producing not outcomes in the world, but beliefs in each other. Since the players must anticipate each others’ beliefs, but at the same time their actions have as their objective the production of beliefs, everyone would already have to know what everyone else wanted to say before anyone could decide what to say. Since the need for communication presupposes that not everyone knows in advance what everyone wants to say, a regress would always arise. Without an external, shared point of reference to stabilize the belief structure, strategic rationality simply fails to offer any solution to the interaction problem.

To say that beliefs cannot be outcomes is to say that actions aimed at producing beliefs cannot be modelled game-theoretically. And given the fundamental reflexivity of the game-theoretic model, to say that these actions cannot be modelled is equivalent to saying that they cannot be planned by agents who are reasoning instrumentally. Since agents cannot produce beliefs in other rational agents through instrumental action, insofar as they do act with the intention of producing beliefs, they cannot be reasoning or acting instrumentally.



2. Language games: As a fallback, it is often assumed that the non- communicative goals that agents pursue via communicative interaction can account for the instrumental efficacy of the speech act. Speech acts could then be modelled along the lines of when I say ’It’s seven o’clock‘ to you, I do so with the intention of getting you to wake up and get out of bed. I choose this particular utterance because it is the most efficient means of getting you to perform these actions, and hence of bringing about the outcome that I desire. Once again Tugendhat makes this assumption explicit when he argues that in interaction between buyers and sellers in a market ’the observance of assertoric validity claims - truth claims - requires no special “consent-orientation”, since it is in everyone’s own interest not to be mistaken’.24

The problem with this model of communication is that it works only if one assumes a symmetric coordination problem (as Lewis does). But since strategic interaction occurs in contexts of interdependent choice, agents may be able to pursue their interests only by ensuring that others are not able to pursue their own. Thinking of rationality only in parametric terms allows Tugendhat to imagine that agents will simply mind their own business and communicate truthfully. Unfortunately, among strategically rational agents everyone’s business is also everyone else’s business. So while it may be true that each individual does not want herself to be mistaken, she may well want everyone else to be mistaken. And if this is the case, then everyone will know that everyone knows this, and so no information can be transmitted credibly, which is to say that no communication can occur.25

The general problem is that agents facing a conflict of interest have no incentive to reveal anything to each other. This means that the only equilibria of conflict-of-interest signalling games are the infamous ’babbling equilibria’, in which all players randomize over possible messages, and all other players ignore them. Without introducing problematic semantic primitives into the game, this means that messages are not only unbelievable, but are also literally meaning- less. Vincent P. Crawford and Joel Sobel have established this as a completely general limitative result. In all so-called ’cheap-talk signalling games: ’perfect communication is not to be expected in general unless agents’ interests completely coincide, and that once interests diverge by a given “finite” amount, only no communication is consistent with rational behavior’.*‘ It is because of this credibility problem that most game theorists have given up on the possibility of modelling communication in non-cooperative games.27

These two errors are the source of my concern over the burden of proof. As far as the instrumental model of rationality is concerned, the fact that agents are able to communicate successfully is completely mysterious. To my mind, this means that any attempt to expand the notion of rational action to account for communication starts out with a certain prima facie plausibility. Unfortunately, misunderstanding of the instrumental model has led many critics to treat some of Habermas’ more reasonable proposals with undue scepticism. For instance, there has been an enormous amount of critical attention focused on his attempt


238 Ioseph Heath

to use the illocution/perlocution distinction as a way of distinguishing success- oriented [erfolgsorientiert] from understanding-oriented [verstundigungsorient~~t] action. Although the specifics of this proposal were no doubt contentious, the underlying distinction is fairly intuitive. Consider the following way of stating it.

A11 action is teleofogical, and thus has a goal. An action that has an outcome as its goal is a success-oriented action. An action that has another's belief as its goal (and does not rely upon 'natural' meaning) is an understanding-oriented action. Success-oriented actions can be planned and judged instrumentally, while understanding-oriented actions cannot. This leads naturally to the question, how are understanding-oriented actions planned? Recall that success-oriented actors can communicate when their interaction has the structure of a symmetric coordination problem. It is perhaps reasonable to suppose that in the absence of such a problem, agents are able to sustain communication by assuming one counterfactually, i. e. bracketing out the question of the specific outcomes that players may be pursuing by way of speech, and assuming a set of standardized intracommunicative objectives. They might charitably posit an outcome in which they are all assumed to have an interest - let us call this outcome 'mutual understanding'. Such a posit would not be a falsifiable hypothesis in the ordinary sense, since its adoption would be an enabling precondition for any form of communicative interaction.

It is worth noting that this type of construction is not without precedent in the literature. Donald Davidson's project for a 'unified theory of meaning and action' posits three primitive attitudes: belief, desire and meaning, that are to be determined simultaneously in the overall account of an agent's linguistic and non-linguistic behaviour.2x The observation of choice behaviour allows for the determination of belief and desire, while verbal interpretation provides belief and meaning. Through a process of tiitonnernenf, the interpreter is to arrive at a coherent system of ascribed attitudes. The implication, however, is that verbal interpretation assumes a perfect correlation between the agent's attitude of holding true and her acts of assent and dissent, i.e. that her beliefs are expressed sincerely. This is what allows the interpreter to determine meaning and belief without worrying about desire. But this means that the interpreter must in effect ascribe to the agent something like a desire to tell the truth, otherwise the interpretation problem would be completely unsolvable.

But since radical interpretation is designed to be an adequate characterization of everyday communicative interaction, Davidson's principle of charity includes the assumption that agents always operate with a mutually ascribed interest in open and honest communication. Note that since this assumption is counterfactual, agents are not forced to in fact adopt this interest. They can continue to pursue their private objectives, but they will only be able to do this if they pretend to maintain the interest in mutual understanding, since general recourse to an instrumental orientation would make the interaction degenerate into babble. 29 The counterfactual supposition thus excludes the possibility of overt strategic action (although this is less important when the strategic situation is in fact a coordination problem). Because of this, it is no stretch to say, with

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Habermas, that instrumental uses of language are parasitic on communicative ones3'

Although this reconstruction uses a somewhat foreign terminology, the basic position is recognizably Habermas'. The account is entirely speculative, particularly with regard to the content of the idealizing presuppositions. But even though no argument is given in support of the claims, it should be clear that there are no objections that can be made from the perspective of the rational choice theorist, i.e. this portion of Habermas' analysis is compatible with and complementary to the account of action and rationality offered by contemporary game theory.

Joseph Heath University of Toronto

NOTES Lewis (1969).

* Here I follow Savage (1954), except that he takes beliefs for granted. The clearest presentation of this derivation remains Luce and Raiffa (1957),

Habermas (1994), p. 47. ibid., p. 48.

pp. 12-39.

' Lewis (1969) presents the game informally, pp. 122-59. Formal models of the same game are available at various locations, including Fudenberg and Tirole (1991), pp. 32P31, and Banks and Sobel (1988).

See Heath (1995). Bonhert (1945). Habermas (1984), p. 305.

lo Skjei (1985), Habermas (1985). Habermas (1985), p. 112.

l2 Habermas (1992), p. 135. I 3 Hohengarten (1992), p. 349. Habermas has recently considered retracting the basic

concession on simple imperatives by distinguishing between 'strong' and 'weak' communicative action. In weak communicative action, the speaker would associate only truth and sincerity claims with the utterance, no rightness claim. Simple imperatives would then not be instrumentally rational, because the agent would still raise truth and sincerity claims, even though neither was explicitly thematized. The idea is that in saying 'Give me the money, or I'll shoot', the agent is tacitly claiming sincerity for her intention to carry out the threat, and is raising truth claims for a number of auxiliary presuppositions, e.g. that the gun is loaded. The problem with this analysis is that many non-linguistically conveyed threats raise exactly the same claims. For example, suppose that we are both driving up to an intersection, and it is unclear who will cross first. As we approach, I accelerate dramatically, intending to give you the option of yielding or having a collision. Here we could say that I raise a 'sincerity claim' for my intention to go first, along with a number of 'truth claims' for the auxiliary presuppositions, e.g. that you are capable of stopping in time. But it would be ridiculous to maintain that this action is not instrumental just because we are capable of getting into an argument about some of the


240 joseph Heath

beliefs that I have upon initiating it. In the background here is a very unhelpful blurring of the distinction between the ’meaning’ of an action and the ’meaning’ of an utterance.

l4 There is not always a pure strategy Nash equilibrium. But when players can select mixed strategies, i.e. lotteries that assign selected probabilities to their pure strategies, every game has at least one Nash equilibrium. For concise proof see Myerson (1991), pp. 13&40.

l5 Selten (1975). For reasons which need not concern us here, Selten’s actual purpose in this paper is to introduce trembling-hand perfect equilibrium, which restricts the set of equilibria to those that are Nash in a slightly ’perturbed’ game whose strategies are such that every node is reached with positive probability.

l6 This conclusion undermines an assumption that informs most of the discussion on this subject, including Skjei (1985), Hogengarten (1992), and Ape1 (1992).

l 7 That player 2 will not choose the suboptimal action is tautologous given the model, since the payoff of 1 compared to 0 is simply a numerical representation of the fact that L would be chosen over R. There is no gap between preference and choice.

I* This is why projects that attempt to introduce commitment, like David Gauthier’s (1986), have a tendency to undermine their own decision-theoretic foundations. For discussion, see Hollis and Sugden (1993).

Schelling (1960), ‘Threats’, pp. 12S30, ’Promises’, pp. 131-7. 19

2o It is worth keeping in mind that threats can be made in a disinterested fashion, in the same way that promises can be made out of self-interest. ” Specifically, Farrell (1993) shows that ’neologism-proof‘ equilibria, which are just

like Nash equilibria except that players’ actions and messages must be a best response to the actions and messages of the others, do not exist for many games.

22 I t should be noted that Habermas himself subscribes to this mistaken view, which is why he believes that an intentionalist semantics would permit an instrumental account of communication. See e.g. Habermas (1992), p. 65.

23 Tugendhat (1985), p. 183. 24 ibid, p. 183. 25 Another way of putting this is to note that agents in pure strategic interactions

cannot tell lies, for the same reason that they cannot break promises. Since agents would always lie and break promises when it was in their interest to do so, the institutions of truth-telling and promise-keeping could never arise. But without truth-telling, there can be no communication.

26 Crawford and Sobel (1982), p. 1450 (my emphasis). 27 Myerson (1989), p. 265. See also Myerson (1991), p. 242. Myerson responds by

switching from a non-cooperative to a cooperative model, by assuming that literal meanings are given exogenously. For an overview of these issues, see Heath (1995).

’* See Davidson (1990), lecture 111. ” Naturally, introducing a second rational action type complicates the instrumental

model. The interaction between one agent with a success-orientation and one agent with an understanding-orientation would have to be modelled decision-theoretically, with some exogenously determined probability-measure representing the chances that the understanding-oriented actor will maintain that orientation.

30 Parasitic here has a precise meaning: an action type is parasitic if it can succeed only in the event that one‘s interaction partner makes an error in the determination of one’s attitude or intent. Instrumental uses of language are parasitic in the following way: if ego adopts an instrumental orientation while alter maintains an understanding-orientation, ego is facing a solvable parametric decision problem. If alter detects ego’s orientation and also switches to an instrumental orientation, then their interaction becomes an



unsolvable strategic problem. Thus an instrumental use of language can be successful only if one-sided, and may remain one-sided only if undetected.

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Apel, K. 0. (1992), ’Illokutionare Bedeutung und normative Giiltigkeit. Die transz- endentalpragmatische Begrundung der uneingeschrankten kommunikativen Verstandigung’, in Proto Soziologie, vol. 2, pp. 1-15.

Banks, J. S. and Sobel, J. (1987), ‘Equilibrium Selection in Signalling Games’, in Econometrica, vol. 55, pp. 647-61.

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