In this book, the author defends a unified externalists account of propositional attitudes and reference, and formalizes this view within possible world semantics. He establishes a link between philosophical analyses of intentionality and reference, and formal semantic theories of discourse representation and context change. The relation between belief change and the semantic analyses of conditional sentences and evidential (knowledge) and buletic (desire) propositional attitudes is discussed extensively.

Rooted in Gricean tradition, this book concentrates on game- and decision-theoretic (GDT) approaches to the foundations of pragmatics. An introduction to GDT, an overview of GDT pragmatics research to date, its relation to semantics and to Gricean pragmatics are followed by contributions offering a high-level survey of current GDT pragmatics and the field of its applications, demonstrating that this approach provides a sound basis for synchronic and diachronic explanations of language use.

Recent years witnessed an increased interest in formal pragmatics and especially the establishment of game theory as a new research methodology for the study of language use. Game and Decision Theory (GDT) are natural candidates if we look for a theoretical foundation of linguistic pragmatics. Over the last decade, a firm research community has emerged with a strong interdisciplinary character, where economists, philosophers, and social scientists meet with linguists. Within this field of research, three major currents can be distinguished: one is closely related to the Gricean paradigm and aims at a precise foundation of pragmatic reasoning, the second originates in the economic literature and is concerned with the role of game theory in the context of language use, and the third aims at language evolution seen either from a biological or from a cultural perspective. Edited in collaboration with FoLLI, the Association of Logic, Language and Information, this volume is based on a selection of papers of two international conferences, one organised at ESSLLI in 2007 on language, games, and evolution, and the other organised at the ZAS in Berlin on games and decisions in pragmatics in 2008. This volume is rounded off by additional invited papers and now contains eight articles of leading researchers in the field which together provide a state-of-the-art survey of current research on language evolution and game theoretic approaches to pragmatics.

In this book, the author defends a unified externalists account of propositional attitudes and reference, and formalizes this view within possible world semantics. He establishes a link between philosophical analyses of intentionality and reference and formal semantic theories of discourse representation and context change. Stalnakerian diagonalization plays an important role here. Anaphora are treated as referential expressions, while presupposition is seen as a propositional attitude. The relation between belief change and the semantic analyses of conditional sentences and evidential (knowledge) and buletic (desire) propositional attitudes is discussed extensively.

Rooted in Gricean tradition, this book concentrates on game- and decision-theoretic (GDT) approaches to the foundations of pragmatics. An Introduction to GDT, with an overview of GDT pragmatics research to date and its relation to semantics and to Gricean pragmatics is followed by contributions offering a high-level survey of current GDT pragmatics and the field of its applications, demonstrating that this approach provides a sound basis for synchronic and diachronic explanations of language use.