On The Origins of Vagueness in Natural Language

From Santa Fe Institute

Jens Kipper, University of Rochester Bert Lipman has famously argued that vague languages cannot be game-theoretically optimal. This creates a puzzle: if vagueness is of no use to language users, then why is it so prevalent in natural language? In this talk, we use signaling games (inspired by David Lewis' "Convention") to address this puzzle. In extant work involving signaling games, vagueness is modeled as a mixed (i.e., non-deterministic) signaling strategy. We argue that this modeling cri...