Rubin, Hannah and Bruner, Justin and O'Connor, Cailin and Huttegger, Simon (2015) Communication Without the Cooperative Principle: A Signaling Experiment. UNSPECIFIED.

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Abstract

According to Grice's `Cooperative Principle', human communicators are involved in a cooperative endeavor. The speaker attempts to make herself understood and the listener, in turn, assumes that the speaker is trying to maximize the ease and effectiveness of communication. While pragmatists recognize that people do not always behave in such a way, the Cooperative Principle is generally assumed to hold. However, it is often the case that the interests of speakers and listeners diverge, at least to some degree.
Communication can arise in such situations when the cost of signaling is high enough that it aligns the interests of speaker and listener, but what happens when the cost of signaling is not sufficient to align the interests of those communicating? In these cases the theoretical prediction is that they will reach a partially informative system of communication. Using methods from experimental economics, we test whether theoretical predictions are borne out. We find that subjects do learn to communicate without the cooperative principle.

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Item Type:	Other
Creators:	Creators Email ORCID Rubin, Hannah hannahr@uci.edu Bruner, Justin justin.bruner@anu.edu.au O'Connor, Cailin cailino@uci.edu Huttegger, Simon shuttegg@uci.edu
Keywords:	Cooperative Principle, game theory, pragmatics, grice, experimental philosophy, philosophy of language, evolution of language, signaling, signaling game
Subjects:	Specific Sciences > Biology > Evolutionary Theory Specific Sciences > Economics General Issues > Experimentation
Depositing User:	Dr. Cailin O'Connor
Date Deposited:	10 Dec 2015 13:29
Last Modified:	10 Dec 2015 13:29
Item ID:	11664
Subjects:	Specific Sciences > Biology > Evolutionary Theory Specific Sciences > Economics General Issues > Experimentation
Date:	September 2015
URI:	https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/id/eprint/11664

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