Can I say “bobobo” and mean “There's no such thing as cheap talk”?

Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization Vol. 57 (2005) 245–266

Can I say “bobobo” and mean “There’s no such thing as cheap talk”? David Sally ∗ Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth, 100 Tuck Hall, Hanover, NH 03755, USA Received 8 September 2001; received in revised form 21 January 2003; accepted 13 February 2004 Available online 26 February 2005

Abstract The theory of cheap talk, evaluated as a model of language use, is shown to mismatch the reality of communication in five respects: real talk is conflict dampening, is more than assertion, is dear, is not literal, and is beholden to its medium. The linguistic theory of pragmatics is employed to demonstrate formally that every utterance creates a coordination game whose resolution reveals evidence of similarity and of a shared mental model, so there is no neutral style of communication: an utterance must affect the relationship between the players. This alteration, in turn, will affect any game allowing for communication. © 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. JEL classification: C71; D01 Keywords: Bobobo; Language; Cheap talk; Coordination games; Communication; Meaning

- Can I say “bobobo” and mean “There’s no such thing as cheap talk”?1 - Surely, you cannot. “Bobobo” is just gibberish, a meaningless string of phonemes, and I do not know what it signifies. - Are you certain? Suppose I did say “bobobo” and you heard me to mean “There’s no such thing as cheap talk.” What, in turn, would be the meaning and significance of our shared understanding? ∗

Tel.: +1 607 257 5758. E-mail address: [email protected]. 1 Wittgenstein (1958) composed this famous thought: “Can I say ‘bububu’ and mean ‘If it doesn’t rain I shall go for a walk’?—It is only in a language that I can mean something by something” (p. 18n). 0167-2681/$ – see front matter © 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.jebo.2004.02.004

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Humans are adaptable producers of meaning. So it is that the chance appearance of a crow alighting on a sill or a rainbow arcing across the sky may be interpreted as an omen and may alter a person’s behavior; so it is that subjects in Garfinkel’s (1967) experiments who received random answers to “yes or no” questions constructed a monologic conversation to justify even contradictory replies;2 so it is that the amicable nonsense of Jabberwocky fills Alice’s head with “ideas—only I don’t exactly know what they are” (Carroll, 1871/1992, p. 24); so it is that words and gestures may momentously modify a social interaction (a meeting among the mimsy borogoves?). Although the achievement of meaning in a single mind may occur automatically, the coordination of meaning among intentional beings is not a trivial matter. However, at present, no economic model of communication reflects this nontriviality: theories of signaling and cheap talk assume that messages are unambiguous and that a decoding scheme is universally recognized. As linguists, adherents of these models would be welcomed by the semanticists, those who believe that meaning is generated by and within an utterance itself. Opposed to this view within the philosophical world are the pragmaticists, who state that the force of an utterance arises not only from its semantic content but also from the social situation. Leech (1983) captured the difference between semantics and pragmatics succinctly in his characterization of the basic questions asked by each about a given utterance, U: the former asks “what does U mean?;” the latter asks “what do you mean by U?” Semantically, “it’s hot in here” is the speaker’s assessment of the temperature in a place; pragmatically, the phrase may be a request to open a window, an ironic plea to close a window, a demand to move away from danger, and so on.3 Accordingly, the rhetorical approach of pragmatics is able to account for many of the instances when language is used in semantically inappropriate ways. The claim here is that the richness and power of language lie in its creative use (poetry, metaphor, whispering, humor, irony, promising) and that using language is fundamentally social and interpersonal and can only be analyzed as such. This paper has three major points: (1) “cheap talk” may be a good model of other signaling phenomena, but it inaccurately portrays language; (2) the pragmatic game of meaning is an “impure” coordination game, so any game in which players can talk really has at least two-stages—meaning coordination and then the original game; (3) in this two-stage setting, meaning coordination serves as a signal of the relationship between the players and consequently may affect their decisions in the original game. 2 Zeitlyn (1995) made the compelling case that these two first examples may be closely related. He described the Mambila spider divination in which a stick and a stone are placed near a spider’s hole, then covered with a few leaves and a pot. A yes–no question is posed and the pot is tapped. After a period of time, the pot is removed and the disturbance of the leaves produced by the spider is interpreted by the diviner. Because the divination process enjoys the same legitimacy as a conversation between humans, contradictions are as non-fatal to the former as to the latter: ‘the contradiction may be regarded as a rhetorical device used by the divination to make the diviner cast the net of his questions more widely” (p. 201). 3 The social settings in which the hearer directly understands these alternative meanings should occur easily to the reader. The basic point is that the development of these meanings depends on the coordination between the speaker and the hearer, a point made by Lewis (1969, p. 177): “I can’t say ‘It’s cold here’ and mean ‘It’s warm here’—at least, not without a little help from my friends.”

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The first section examines five specific weaknesses of cheap talk as a model of language: talk, it turns out, is conflict dampening, is more than assertion, is dear, is not literal, is beholden to its medium. For those readers who are unfamiliar with linguistics, this portion of the paper will also serve as an introduction to some essential concepts and data, especially those of Gricean pragmatics. The second section translates these principles of pragmatics formally into the proposition that any utterance establishes a coordination game. Solving or failing to solve this coordination game is shown in the third section to affect behavior in some linked games, for example, a prisoners’ dilemma preceded by discussion. The final section reviews, summarizes, and concludes.

1. Cheap talk is a flawed theory of talk 1.1. Formal results and refinements in cheap talk The sender–receiver model of Crawford and Sobel (1982) initiated the growth of a literature within game theory to which Farrell (1987) appended the phrase, “cheap talk.”4 This literature assumes that communication takes place through messages. The messages have two qualities: first, they are unambiguous so that if the sender selects message m1 , then the receiver recognizes m1 . There are never any problems with interpretation: in equilibrium, people say what they mean and mean what they say. Note that the sender is neither required to tell the truth (typically, about what type he is), nor excluded from being intentionally vague (his vagueness, nevertheless, is unambiguously understood). Second, neither the content of the message nor the actions of sending or receiving it alters the preferences or payoff functions of either participant. This quality reflects the “cheapness” of the talk: “A costless verbal agreement cannot be said to commit the players to anything” (W¨arneryd, 1990, p. 92). Therefore, the sender may alter only the informational environment of the receiver, although he may do so intentionally and deterministically. Cheap talk may be useful in a variety of games. Crawford and Sobel formally demonstrated that if the preferences of the sender and receiver are “similar enough,” then equilibria will exist in which the message of the sender will alter the prior beliefs of the receiver. This type of communication affects the outcomes of games that are coordinative rather than conflictual in nature. Accordingly, cheap talk improves the expected payoff of two firms producing complementary products who wish to enter a naturalmonopoly industry (Farrell, 1987), a committee may outperform a market leader in efficiently establishing an industry standard (Farrell and Saloner, 1988), bargainers may not exaggerate their initial claims so as to ensure that negotiations ensue (Farrell and Gibbons, 1989), and subjects in a single battle of the sexes experiment coordinate more successfully when they are allowed to send messages over their computers (Cooper et al., 1989, 1992).

4 The proverb, “talk is cheap,” was coined by a fictional con man, Sam Slick, in Haliburton’s (1843) comic novel: “Talk is cheap, it don’t cost nothin’ but breath.” Despite its aphoristic status, this phrase itself may represent Sam Slick’s finest scam: Sam sold succeeding generations a bill of goods since talk usually costs more than breath.

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Three papers have advanced theoretical refinements that reveal more clearly the linguistic underpinnings of cheap talk. Farrell (1993) and Matthews et al. (1991) introduced Nash equilibrium refinements, while Rabin (1990) developed a solution concept, all of which rest on the existence of a literal meaning for each of the messages. For example, Rabin assumes that the messages emanate from “a common language pre-dating the specific strategic situation” (p. 149), that “consists of (1) a meaningful vocabulary, and (2) a common understanding among agents that it is appropriate to interpret statements according to their literal meaning” (p. 145). His interpretation of “meaningfulness” is the postulated existence of an exclusive subset of messages associated with each subset of player types. Matthews et al. explicitly state a semantic view of the literal meaning of a message as being “determined by the meanings of its individual components (‘words’), and the application of a commonly known grammar to their combination” (p. 253). Because messages have only a literal meaning, the medium of the message is irrelevant: “It does not matter for our purposes exactly what language, speaking style, or low-cost mode of communication (e.g., verbal or written) is being employed” (Rabin, p. 150). Messages may be conveyed by semaphore, hieroglyphics, or voice, so long as both the decoding system and the hermeneutics of literalness are commonly understood. We can now ask the question relevant to the topic of this paper: “Is cheap talk, talk?” In other words, does it serve as a general linguistic model of “rational people who know how to communicate in the ordinary way?” (Farrell and Rabin, 1996, p. 117). The answer offered here is “No.”5 1.2. Communication and conflict If it holds to the cheap talk paradigm, communication should have no effect on a confrontational game such as the prisoners’ dilemma. Sally (1995) envisioned the augmented game as the problem of whether to put the prisoners in the same holding cell before they are interrogated and forced to choose confession or silence. Since players’ announced plans are followed only if they “constitute a Nash equilibrium” (Farrell, 1987, p. 35), and since the only equilibrium is to confess, the “cheap” promise to cooperate will be neither believed nor followed. Communication in this setting is without content: while it occurs, it carries no information, and after it occurs, it carries no influence. However, the empirical evidence from laboratory experiments involving social dilemmas is that discussion significantly increases the rate of cooperation (Sally, 1995). Promises are frequent in these settings, and subsequent choices reveal that people are both bound by their own promises and rely on the commitment of others (Orbell et al., 1988). Discussion also helped buyers and sellers resolve their discordance over valuation and price in Valley et al.’s (1998) Acquire a Company game.

5 A similar answer has been offered in the political science literature by Johnson (1993), Mackie (1998), and Schiemann (2000). The first showed that Habermas’ (1984) theory of communicative action is an explicit critique of game theory and strategic behavior and an implicit critique of cheap talk.

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1.3. Talk as solely assertion The type of messages conveyed by individuals within the world of cheap talk are propositional statements such as “I am type y.”6 Speech–act theorists, beginning with Austin (1962) and continuing with Searle (1969), asserted that language is used to perform a wide variety of acts and that assertion is but one among several categories of illocutionary acts. Searle (1976) discerned five categories of speech acts that would correspond to the following utterances in a cheap talk setting: 1. Assertives: the speaker commits to the truth of a proposition. “I affirm I am type y.” “I deny I am type x.” 2. Directives: the speaker tries to get the listener to act. “What type are you?” “I order you to tell me your type.” 3. Commissives: the speaker vouches for his own future action. “I swear to tell you my type.” “I promise to act like a type y.” 4. Expressives: the speaker expresses a feeling about a given proposition. “I would thank you for telling me your type.” “I apologize for not telling you.” 5. Declarations: the speaker’s saying makes it so. “I will become the type who would and could make this statement itself.” While this last category seems quite strange at first, social life contains a number of dramatic examples: “I pronounce you husband and wife;” “I nominate you as a candidate for office.” In the setting of a game, the speaker’s utterance can indirectly change either party’s type and serve as evidence for such a change. I am claiming, on the one hand, that only friends can make certain statements and that making certain statements makes you more intimate, and hence, cooperative, toward another. On the other hand, the wrong utterance at the wrong time will also alter the players’ types and heighten conflict, in part because it violates the expectation of coordination leading to cooperation. This typology of speech acts hints at the overriding limitation of cheap talk as a model of language: its obliviousness to the creative act of communicating and its correspondent neglect of the impact of language on the cognitive states of the participants. Cheap talk, then, is one important manifestation of the general obliviousness to rhetoric among economists and within economics, an unawareness sweepingly exposed by McCloskey (1985). 1.4. Language as costless It is clear that, at a minimum, language consumes time and hence, as this sentence grows longer and longer and longer (and longer), the opportunity cost of continuing to read it 6

Note that cheap talk also makes no distinction between this simple statement of fact and the more intricate and intimate assertion, “I am the same type you would be if you were in my shoes.”

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is increasing. Psycholinguists have discovered over the last two decades that cognitive resources, especially memory, are differentially used by various kinds of words, sentences and discourses (Carpenter et al., 1995; McKoon and Ratcliff, 1998). More cognitive resources are used by infrequent words, unusual syntaxes and ungrounded and unprepared phrases. Respectively, “extol” is more costly than “praise;” “At the party, Bob talked” is more expensive than “At the party, Bob talked to Rachel;” “The diver asked the doctor, ‘How badly did the nurse bite me?”’ is more dear than “The diver asked the doctor, ‘How badly did the nurse shark bite me?”’7 Moreover, the processing heuristics espoused by speakers and listeners reflect the scientific findings: we believe that the processing cost of an expression increases as the expression is rarer, longer, more complex, more laden and more obscure (Clark, 1996). 1.5. The primacy of literal meaning Recall that Farrell (1993), Matthews et al. (1991), and Rabin (1990) refined cheap talk by allowing each message to have a literal interpretation: suppose, then, that every word had but one literal meaning. Communication would still be difficult because there is no clear one-toone mapping onto some unique subset of the objects of the world. Bronowski (1978) asserted that no individual word is wholly “unambiguous:” even a simple word such as “table” does not divide the entire world into tables and non-tables (p. 107, quoted in Lieberman, 1984). Labov (1973) recounted the results of a series of experiments testing people’s abilities to categorize cylindrical, upwardly concave containers as “cups,” “bowls,” or “vases.” Subjects disagreed over a wide range of dimensions on the denotation of an object, and their names shifted if they were told to imagine the object holding food or flowers. This ambiguous mapping is also evident when I am questioned by my son about the categorization of certain objects: when is a creek, a “stream;” a pond, a “lake;” a shout, a “yell?” Moreover, the statement at the beginning of the previous paragraph is incorrect: many words are polysemous.8 The graphs in Fig. 1 display the number of distinct dictionary definitions for, on the left, 257 randomly selected words, and, on the right, the 100 words used most frequently in writing (Britton, 1978).9 This latter group comprises almost half of the total words found in the huge sample of Kucera and Francis (1967). The entire English lexicon, based on this representative sample, may have a majority of words that have just one literal meaning. Nevertheless, 44 percent of the lexicon is polysemous, and 9 percent of its entries have more than four definitions. Furthermore, of the words writers repeatedly employ, 62 percent have more than four meanings. Examples of highly polysemous words (greater than 15 definitions) are “to” [4], “have” [22], “will” [39], “time” [66], “for” [11], “back” [94], and “way” [99].10 The application of grammar 7 Interestingly, the “dear” in the last subclause may not have been more expensive despite its ambiguity, due to the brain’s parallel processing abilities and the primed and salient context of “cost.” 8 See Miller (1999) on the importance of polysemy (multiple meanings) and the ease with which native speakers resolve it. 9 Because this list contains the same verb in different tenses or, in one case, the plural of a frequent pronominal adjective, I collapse these into one observation, so the graph is based on a total of 89 words. 10 [x] represents the frequency rank of the word in the Kucera and Francis sample.

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Fig. 1. Number of dictionary definitions randomly chosen words most frequently used words.

and sentence structure may not be sufficient to distinguish among these literal meanings. Hence, a trip to a financial institution, or a fishing expedition, or a particular billiards shot may be indicated by the utterance, “Sue went to the bank.” Similarly, “this dish is hot” may describe the temperature of a plate or of the food on a plate, or the spiciness of the food.11 A parallel process can occur with the transmission of vocal communication. Homonyms may be ambiguous to the listener’s ear. A listener hears “we too a¨ r go’ing” and is uncertain whether the speaker is indicating that she has a single companion in some outing or that she believes that her group of some size will be joining the listener in going.12 Finally, certain words may be indefinite by nature or undetermined within the context of the immediate utterance. The largest subset of these are pronouns, such as “she,” “him,” or “that,” which are uncertain without knowledge of either previous utterances or of the setting of the speaker and listener. Anaphora occurs when one phrase replaces a prior phrase, and deixis, when it refers to an object physically present. The use of pronouns in anaphora and deixis is pervasive in language: 15 of the most frequently used words are pronouns (Britton). Another sub-group is indefinite quantifiers, such as “some” or “many,” whose meaning depends on the specific context. For example, respondents in one study quantified “few” in phrases of the form, “a few people standing in front of . . .:” if the blank was filled by “a hut,” the average estimate was 4.5; if filled by “the building,” 7.0 (Hormann, 1983, cited in Gibbs, 1994). A third sub-category is that of filler phrases, such as “what’s-hisface” or “thingamajig,” which are indefinite and are even explicit requests for help from the audience.

11 Furthermore, one can easily generate figurative meanings, including “recent gossip,” “a swift pass of the basketball,” and “an attractive individual.” 12 Goffman (1976) determines that the verbal request “do you have the time?”can take on so many different meanings that it can elicit relevant responses in 6 major categories with 12 subcategories. He lists 30 examples, such as “No, but I have the newsweek” and “I have the basil too,” but implicates the possibility of thousands.

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Not only do multiple literal meanings abound, but a given utterance may have other levels of meaning as well. First, at the basic level of what is said, words may have conventional meanings distinct from their literal translation. The outstanding example of this fact is the word “can” in a request such as “can you tell me the time?” The conventional meaning of “will you” substitutes for the literal “are you able.” Logical operators, such as “and,” often have a conventional sense quite distinct from their literal meanings: thus, the two sentences “I woke up and had a cup of coffee” and “I had a cup of coffee and woke up” convey two very distinct senses, based on the convention of attaching temporal ordering to “and” (Carston, 1988). Matthews et al. conflate conventional and literal in one of their examples of cheap talk, claiming that “my type is either a or b” literally means that each type is equally likely, although logically the statement makes no such assertion. Most significantly, as Grice so clearly illuminated, the force of an utterance may be implicated. The implied thoughts and meanings are known as implicatures. A seminal example offered by Grice (1975) is the following dialogue taking place beside a parked car:13 A: B:

I am out of gas. There is a station around the corner.

[U.1]

B’s response literally may describe a train depot, yet A understands instantly both that B is talking about a gas station, and moreover, that B believes that this garage is open and is the easiest place for A to purchase fuel. One type of speech act can implicate another, as in this example wherein an assertive speech act has the implied illocutionary force of a directive: You are standing on my foot.

[U.2]

We easily understand this literal, pedal assessment to be a request for us to move our offending foot. The cooperative maxims of conversation discovered by Grice and elaborated by others provide the logic by which we “translate” such a statement into the intended request. Note that such indirectness would not always be as easily comprehended, as in this instance: You have placed the piano upon my big toe.

[U.3]

The implied request for the audience to act quickly seems at odds with the choice of the utterer to employ an implicature instead of a scream of pain to communicate. In fact, there is an element of humor to this sentence, both as an ironic parallel to example U.2, and as an absurd use of language. Ultimately, such non-literal use of language, whether in the form of humor, irony, metaphor, implication, or poetry, must be included in any conception of language through which a theorist hopes to gain insight into human communication. 1.6. The irrelevance of the medium As mentioned above, models of cheap talk ignore the mode of transmission. Yet, in one of the very few articles by an economist on language, Marschak (1965) discussed the failure of an attempt to replace phones in jet fighters with assigned buttons or switches, each dedicated 13

These utterances have been Americanized from Grice’s original: A: I am out of petrol. B: There’s a garage round the corner. In English, garage may mean filling station or parking structure.

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to one of the few necessary messages: “without the relief of verbal, voiced exchange, tension might become intolerable” for the pilots (p. 135). A simple signaling system carrying the same informational content could not provide the coordination and interconnection required by the pilots. Furthermore, Sally (1995) presented strong evidence that the medium of communication does affect the rate of cooperation observed in social dilemma experiments. Face-to-face discussion had a much more positive impact on cooperation than did the exchange of written messages (a result replicated by Valley et al. for their game). Cheap talk fails linguistically for these five reasons: discussion can potentially be productive and consequential even in a direct conflict; talk is more than assertion; language is cognitively costly; not all phrases have a single literal meaning, and many (if not all) have figurative and illocutionary meanings as well; and media matter. 2. To talk is to coordinate A number of authors have applied notions of rationality to the use of language (Jacobs and Jackson, 1983; Kellerman, 1992; Sanders, 1987), arguing that some form of intentional choice was involved in the production of many utterances.14 Lewis (1975, p. 3) elegantly described the reasoned choice inherent in language: He who produces certain sounds or marks does so for a reason. He knows that someone else, upon hearing his sounds or seeing his marks, is apt to form a certain belief or act in a certain way. He wants, for some reason, to bring about that belief or action. Thus his beliefs and desires give him a reason to produce the sounds or marks, and he does. He who responds to the sounds or marks in a certain way also does so for a reason. He knows how the production of sounds or marks depends upon the producer’s state of mind. When he observes the sounds or marks, he is therefore in a position to infer something about the producer’s state of mind. He can probably also infer something about the conditions which caused that state of mind. It is critical to Lewis’ description that these marks or sounds result from mutual consideration by the producer and audience of each other’s state of mind. The ability to see and make inferences about the state of mind of the other, therefore, excludes a number of interesting linguistic phenomena: the rantings of the insane, the cries of the startled, the babblings of the infant, the murmurings of the sleeper, the musings of the solitary (see Goffman, 1981 on self-talk), and the utterances of the severely autistic (those who are mindblind, to use the term of Baron-Cohen, 1995). Even with these exclusions, we are left with plenty of words and speech to consider. The purpose of this section is to demonstrate that every utterance creates a coordination game along the lines of Schelling’s (1960) famous examples: the choose-the-same-color game, or “heads-or-tails.” In fact, we will show that when a speaker utters a phrase, it is as though he 14 One alternative viewpoint is that communication (especially, verbal dialogue) occurs too rapidly for the participants to be mindful of pursuing their intentional goals (Bavelas and Coates, 1992). However, Motley (1992) offered evidence from verbal slips of the tongue, such as “could you cut my meef” (beef and meat), which seemed to indicate that people often do make detailed lexical decisions. In addition, as a referee noted, even an unintentional choice might still be rational.

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or she is proposing that a Schelling game be played (e.g., “guess what number I’m thinking of” or “meet me in the city at three o’clock”). That is, an utterance is an invitation by the speaker to the listener to play the pragmatic game, “what do I mean?” To begin, assume that there are two fundamental sets for linguistic communication. The first set is that of speech acts: SA = {sa1 , sa2 , sa3 , . . . , saN }

(1)

This set includes all the actions that speech act theorists, beginning with Austin and Searle, have catalogued: asserting a proposition, p, is true; naming an object; questioning whether a proposition, q, is false; promising to take a future action; requesting that someone do something, and so on. I will take this set as elemental, and therefore, I will not concern myself with the great amount of philosophical work that has attempted to define partitions of the set into speech act categories (see Austin, 1962; Searle, 1969, 1976; Bach and Harnish, 1979; Habermas, 1984). It is the study of this set that distinguishes pragmatics from semantics, which is concerned with the truth conditions of propositions, not with the expression of propositions as one of a set of possible actions (Stalnaker, 1970). Of no less importance than speech acts to a language is the second set of elements, namely a set of comprehensible utterances. Such a set is produced from a collection of morphemes, the linguistic atoms of a given language, that combine to form the lexicon, the molecules, that, in turn, are conjugated according to the production function, the grammar. Together, the lexicon, which we will call L, and the grammar produce this set: ULG = {u∅ , u1 , u2 , u3 , . . . , uM }.

(2)

ULG includes sentences, phrases, single words, and u∅ , the null utterance, or silence. A given element of ULG , ui , may be decomposed into a sequence (ui1 ui2 ui3 . . .), in which uik ∈ L for all k. In other words, words. Fauconnier (1997) contends that “mappings between domains are at the heart of the unique human cognitive faculty of producing, transferring, and processing meaning” (p. 1). Accordingly, we will define meaning as a mapping between ULG and SA. The set of all speech acts to which a given utterance, ui , can be mapped is its “timeless meaning” (Grice, 1989, p. 119). The purpose here is to prove that the timeless meaning of each and every ui has at least two elements. If this can be proven, then from the audience’s perspective, an utterance would create a formal coordination game in which the multiple meaning mappings are the possible moves for both participants. This game would be distinct from the determinant meaning inherent in models of cheap talk.15 We begin by assuming that every language has a pool of conventional mappings of words to the set of objects and events in this world and possible worlds (). In literate

15 By no means is what follows a general model of language. I am only focusing on the stage of interpretation given a particular utterance. A more complete model would have to account for the speaker’s choice of the utterance and the dynamics of turn-taking in the conversation. From the utterer’s perspective, the complete question is “What do I say?—given what we said before, and given that we will play, ‘what do I mean?’.” Thanks to a referee for emphasizing this point.

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societies, these mappings are written down into a single volume, the dictionary; in nonliterate societies, these mappings are held solely in the memories of each individual speaker. Axiom 1. There exists mD : L → . As Lewis (1969) analyzed, this “dictionary” meaning arises from the conventional solution to the pure coordination game arising from assigning verbal signals to an action or object. It is a shared norm, for example, that horse drivers say “gee” when they want the team to turn right and “haw” to turn left. Literal meaning, mL , is a mapping such that for any ui ∈ ULG consisting of n words, n
mL (ui ) = “ mD (uik ) ∈ ”. The literal image of an utterance is the assertion that the k=1

intersection of all the events and objects referred to by the individual words is also part of the world. For example, consider the utterance: A brown dog is barking.

[U.4]

The literal translation of U.4 can be represented as: mL (“a brown dog is barking”) = “an object” ∩ “objects of a certain hue” ∩ “canine objects” ∩ “objects making a particular sharp yelp” ∈ .16 Although this is an admittedly rough way to characterize literal meaning, it seems to correspond fairly well to our intuitive sense of literalness. It is clear from our previous discussion of polysemy and deixis that for many ui ∈ ULG , mL (ui ) may have more than one element. Based on this definition of literal meaning, I will advance the following axiom: Axiom 2. For every sai ∈ SA, there exists uj ∈ ULG such that sai ∈ mL (uj ). This axiom states that every speech act may be literally expressed. Similarly, Katz (1981) (p. 226) proposed the “principle of effability” in which every thought is “expressible by some sentence in every natural language.” Given the unbounded length of utterances, this axiom may be non-controversial (although with regard to creative speech such as jokes, metaphor, etc., it may be dubious). It also fits with the perspective of cheap talk theorists on the ubiquity of literal meaning. While there may be a way to say everything literally, people do avail themselves of other ways to achieve speech acts, and a decision to employ a literal utterance instead of another phrase may have other significant meanings, especially with respect to the relationship of the speaker and listener. Literal meaning also does not pertain to all utterances, as the next proposition demonstrates. Proposition 1. There exist elements of ULG that are not mapped by mL into SA. 16

A more rigorous explanation would convert each of these words into specific speech acts. For example, m (mD (brown)) = “I assert the proposition that there exist brown objects in this world.” The logical conjunction of these individual speech acts would be the image of the literal mapping of the given utterance. For speech act types other than assertion, one would have to assign an operator to the conjunction of the individual words.

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Proof. Choose an element of ULG , ui , containing two words such that mD (uij ) ∩ mD (uik ) = / SA. A ∅ (this null intersection is representative of oxymorons). In this case, mL (ui ) = ∅ ∈ classic example of an utterance which is semantically well-formed but literally meaningless is Chomsky’s (1957) famous sentence: Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.

[U.5]

Certainly, U.5 is an element of ULG , yet because mD (“colorless”) ∩ mD (“green”) = and mD (“sleep”) ∩ mD (“furiously”) = , it is without literal meaning.
Chomsky’s sentence, however, does appear to have some sense or force. In a Jabberwockian fashion, the combination of these words creates some coherent image in the mind of the reader. One interpretation would be, “New, unelaborated thoughts are busy in the subconscious.”17 Hollander (1971) even wrote a short poem using the phrase: Curiously deep, the slumber of crimson thoughts: While breathless, in stodgy viridian, Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.

These explications are examples of a metaphorical or figurative mapping between utterances and speech acts. Let this mapping be mF . The human ability to make sense even out of “nonsense,” as Alice’s reaction to Jabberwocky exemplifies, leads to the following strong axiom: Axiom 3. For every ui ∈ ULG , {mL (ui ) ∪ mF (ui )} is a non-empty subset of SA. In other words, every utterance can be assigned at least one speech act through literalness or metaphor. This axiom states that a given grammatical structure may be randomly completed by the appropriate types of words and that some thought will be produced by every single set of substitutions. Let us run the experiment right now. We will call it the Refrigerator Poetry Experiment, after those magnetic lexicons that can be shuffled into random verses on metallic doors in idle kitchen moments. Suppose I were to stop writing for a while and take this grammatical blueprint—(NounPhrase = “the” + adjective + noun) + (VerbPhrase = verb + “the” + adjective + noun)—and randomly fill the slots with the proper elements from L.18 Do you anticipate that they will have some sense for you? Here are the sentences I just constructed using computer-generated random numbers and the dictionary on my desk: The nonagenarian confirmation foreclosed the replevisable19 spot test. The exact southwesterner flooded the irremeable20 Powhatan.21 The licit hybrid tea maimed the determined flick.

17

[U.6] [U.7] [U.8]

Sanders (1987) and Searle (1982) have also suggested metaphorical readings of Chomsky’s sentence. Walker Percy (1978) noted that this technique is employed by many a modern poet, one who “shuffles words together, words plucked from as diversified contexts as possible” and gets “some splendid effects. Words are potent agents and the sparks are bound to fly.” However, since the poet has no intention of meaning, communication falls apart: “There is no celebration or hope of celebration of a thing beheld in common” (pp. 76–7). 19 “Capable of being repossessed through a legal action; applied to wrongfully taken or detained goods.” 20 “Irreversible.” 21 “Father of Pocahontas.” 18

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Writing each sentence, I certainly feel as though I have a sense of their meanings and I readily imagine a scene surrounding them: U.6—basically legal mumbo-jumbo, with an old agreement leaving matters of privacy just the way they are; U.7—a desert-dwelling, pernickety suitor begs a resolute father; U.8—literally, the thorn of a rose pricks the gardener’s finger; figuratively, an upper-class woman parries and counters the forceful insult of a rival. In the end, our relatively successful word shuffling and substituting provides some support for axiom three’s broad claim. Wittgenstein (1958) (Section 16) pointed to another meaning mapping: [W]hen I say to someone: ‘Pronounce the word “the,”’ you will count the second ‘the’ as part of the sentence. Yet it has a role just like that of a colour-sample in language-game (8); that is, it is a sample of what the other is meant to say. It is most natural, and causes least confusion, to reckon the samples among the instruments of the language. This particular linguistic sample is itself a sample of the broader phenomenon of “exemplification,” an utterance or action used to represent an entire category. Label this mapping mE . At first, we might be struck by the triviality of mE , but the same cognitive process it represents may play an important role in the interpretation of metaphors, an essential linguistic phenomenon (Glucksberg, 1991; Glucksberg and McGlone, 1999).22 The following proposition demonstrates that the timeless meaning of every utterance consists of more than one element. The important implication is that every communicative interaction involves a recognizable coordination problem, namely, which speech act did the speaker intend the addressee to believe? Proposition 2. For every ui ∈ ULG , there exists mj , mk such that mj (ui ) ⊂ SA, mk (ui ) ⊂ SA, and mj (ui ) = mk (ui ). Proof. Consider the speech act of responding to the question, “What is an example of an utterance?” Formally, let sau be the assertion, ui ∈ ULG . It is obvious that any utterance may be mapped to this speech act by me . Therefore, because of Axiom 3 above, the proposition is proved for all ui ∈ ULG such that sau ∈ / {mL (ui ) ∪ mF (ui )}. We are left with a class of utterances such as “this is an utterance” or “ui ∈ ULG .” Call this class “self-referential” utterances. The speech act of asserting that an utterance is “self-referential” may be signified by sasr , and it is distinct from sau because different logical propositions are involved. Accordingly, it is true for every element of this class that sasr ∈ me (ui ) and sau ∈ me (ui ).
The coordination problems range from the trifling as presented in a long, technical sentence with a pre-dominant literal meaning, to the consequential in such cases as

22

In this theory of metaphors (e.g., lawyers are sharks), the vehicle word, sharks, exemplifies a category (e.g., ravenous, sharp-toothed beasts) in which the target word, lawyers, is included.

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D. Sally / J. of Economic Behavior & Org. 57 (2005) 245–266 He picked that up. Meanings:

[U.9] A particular man lifted some object. Ben did not litter. Michael caught the inference. Rachel did not receive the signal. (Et cetera)

One plus one equals two. Meanings: Adding the integer “one” to itself results in the integer “two.“ Exemplifying the quality of simplicity. Exemplifying the quality of lucidness.23 Exemplifying an “equation.” (Et cetera)

[U.10]

Slab!24 Meanings:

[U.11] Helper, bring me a certain stone. Builder, we sure had a long, hard day of work, didn’t we? Bartender, I am parched, bring me a certain brand of beer! Remember Wittgenstein’s elemental language?! (Et cetera)

Doowahdee!25 Meanings:

[U.12] That is a yucky thing! I want something else. I am making a joke. Remember how Tommy used to say this? (Et cetera)

Bebebe. Meanings:

[U.13] Look out, you are in danger of being stung. Choose life, Hamlet, choose life. The answers to the next three multiple choice questions. No, no, no, not “d.” (Et cetera)

u∅ (Silence). Meanings:

[U.14] I want you to say something. I don’t like you. I don’t know the answer. You won’t like the answer.26 (Et cetera)

Formally, we can go a step further and show that the strategy space for both players in the speaker’s meaning coordination game is the whole set of speech acts. The following

23 This was the point of an economist who stage-whispered “1 + 1 = 2” during a seminar, as a response to the assertion that there were no unambiguous sentences. Of course, as listed above, there are numerous possible meanings to this utterance, and in this particular case, the meaning was roughly, “Look, wiseguy, here’s something that has only one meaning,” thereby contradicting the intended assertion. 24 Wittgenstein’s (1958) elemental language, used by a builder and helper to work with a variety of stones. 25 The favorite phrase of my son, Thomas, when he was a beginning speaker. 26 The following dialogue occurred in a doctor’s office (Frankel, 1983, quoted by Drew, 1995):

Patient :

This chemotherapy (pause) it won’t have any lasting effects on havin’ kids will it? (2.2 s of silence)

Patient :

It will?

Doctor :

I’m afraid so.

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proposition states no meaning can be excluded based on first principles: each and every utterance’s timeless meaning is the entire set, SA.27 Proposition 3. There exists a situation and a mapping such that any utterance ui can mean saj for any saj in SA. Proof. Suppose that I have found a model of language that excludes at least one mapping, namely, that u8 cannot mean sat8 . Now, imagine the following dialogue: A: B: A: B: A: B: A:

MODEL. [Assertion and explication of the logical, analytical model.] u8 −→not sat8 ? [Question about implication of model.] Right! Imagine a situation x such that I really want to do sat8 . Ok. “u8 !” [Quoted assertion in situation x.] “sat8 .” [Quoted thought.]

If this dialogue does not strike you as a strong enough contradiction of the original supposition, it can be recast along the lines suggested by Wittgenstein’s previously cited phrase: I: Can I say ‘bububu’ and mean ‘If it doesn’t rain, do you want to go for a walk’? You: No! I: Bububu? You: Well, sure [agreeing to go for a walk if it doesn’t rain].


[U.15] [U.16]

3. A game with talk is a changed game The point of propositions two and three is that any game in which players can talk is, of necessity, a two-stage game in which a coordination game precedes the original game.28 That players usually solve the coordination game is not in doubt, as demonstrated by this sentence and those that have come before it. It is important to note, however, that a successful meeting within any coordination game establishes a kinship between the players: we are similar since we both chose Grand Central Station as the spot to meet in New York City. Conversely, a failure to coordinate (or significant inefficiency in matching) may make salient the differences between the players: I thought you were the kind of person who would choose “rose” out of all varieties of flowers, and you disappointed me. This sense of similarity is one of the key elements of sympathy (or fellow-feeling or role-taking), a factor that has been shown to alter behavior and decisions in a variety of games (Sally, 2000, 2001).

27 The Linguistics Department of the University of Chicago is rumored to have played this game at the annual department party. Each person would write down a speech act on one piece of paper and a phrase on another: the papers would be gathered and then paired at random. The task was to devise a situation in which the utterance would achieve the speech act. 28 This conclusion differs from that of Habermas who distinguished between non-teleological, communicative action and success-oriented strategic action. In doing so, Habermas failed to see the essential continuity within human behavior, in particular, the other-orientation of many strategic, game-related actions, and the distancing caused by many communications.

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How the players solve this coordination game is one of the mysteries of language.29 Lewis (1969) proposed that conventions were a partial solution: a sentence means what we all know it has come to mean. Conventions are most useful in finite, bounded games, such as “one if by land, two if by sea,” and by their nature rely on the existence and application of common knowledge, as usually defined in game theory (Geanakoplos, 1992). Another essential part of the solution was identified by Grice (1975) as the Cooperative Principle (CP): a standard followed by utterers that guides them to make their “conversational contributions such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange” (p. 307). There are four categories of maxims that support the CP: Quantity, Quality, Relation, and Manner. His suggested maxims may be laid out as follows: Quantity: Quality:

Relation: Manner:

1. Make your contribution as informative as is required. 2. Don’t make your contribution more informative than is required. Try to make your contribution one that is true. 1. Don’t say what you believe to be false. 2. Don’t say that for which you lack adequate evidence. Be relevant. Be perspicuous. 1. Avoid obscurity of expression. 2. Avoid ambiguity. 3. Be brief. 4. Be orderly.

Sperber and Wilson (1995) refined these maxims, with some success, into Relevance and Efficiency: “be relevant” and “be efficient.” Return for a moment to U.4. Note that this particular phrase literally expresses a proposition that is continuously true in our world: somewhere, at all times, a brown dog barks.30 Accordingly, this phrase might be more realistic in the following setting: two owners of a chocolate Labrador are reading in their living room; the dog stands by the front door eager for a walk; one person says to the other, “A brown dog is barking.” The speech act performed is not an assertion about the existence of such a dog because the listener can surely hear the barking, but rather an indirect request that the other stop reading and take the dog for a walk. Note that the listener derives this meaning based not on truthfulness or convention, but rather the maxims that the speaker is being cooperative (saying something I can understand) and relevant (saying something of significance to me).31 Consider, once again, the dialogue in U.1: A: B:

I am out of gas. There is a station around the corner.

[U.1]

29 See Schiemann who tries to reconcile rational choice theory and critical theory in the context of coordination games with multiple equilibria and in players’ use of salience to guide their choices. 30 The phrase is reminiscent of Stein’s (1957) line: “A dog which you have never had before has sighed” (cited in Perloff, 1996). 31 Of course, these rules may be intentionally violated in return by the listener, who responds, “Really? I don’t hear a thing,” thereby implicating that if the first speaker wants the dog walked, he should do it himself!

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A says “I” instead of “my car” and B says “station” instead of “gasoline service station,” in part, because it is efficient to use shorter phrases in place of more explicit ones. The idea of relevance means that this piece of dialogue can be shifted to another situation and still cohere: imagine A and B have been walking for many blocks without stopping or eating. By applying the metaphoric equivalences of body and machine, and food and fuel, A indicates that she is hungry, and B suggests that there may be an open restaurant nearby. The Cooperative Principle demands that individuals utilize as accurate a mental model of the other as possible.32 Mead (1934) writes, “Language as such is simply a process by means of which the individual who is engaged in co-operative activity can get the attitude of others involved in the same activity” (p. 335). This mutual understanding will quite naturally reduce the psychological distance between the speaker and listener and affect their behaviors. As Clark (1992) notes, “When two people use language, it is like shaking hands, playing a piano duet, or paddling a two-person canoe: It takes coordination, even collaboration, to achieve” (p. xvi). Again, mutual identification and psychological closeness have been shown to affect a wide range of games (Bohnet and Frey, 1999; Sally, 2000, 2001). In addition, the usual cooperative mode of language provides an expectation and background against which deliberate miscoordination is noticed and has a negative impact: when you paddle only when I do not, our canoe moves chaotically and slowly. All utterances, therefore, have implicatures concerning the relationship between the speaker and the listener that depend upon the intimacy of the participants’ mental models and their utilization of mutual identification. These implicatures are analogous to the following literal situation: when a speaker and hearer are together, both of these statements are truthful, yet have divergent implications for the relationship. We are here. I am here, you are there.

[U.17] [U.18]

What we say and how we say it often draws a circle around ourselves and conveys our interpersonal intentions; is the other within as in U.17, or without as in U.18? This basic principle of language, “there is no entirely neutral style” (Sperber and Wilson, 1995, p. 218), has been recognized by philosophers (Wittgenstein), anthropologists (Goody, 1995) and psychologists (Clark, 1992, 1996; Higgins, 1992). The reason that we often place weight on a speaker’s words (and that talk is not cheap) is, according to Goffman (1969), our “belief that the very design of his construction provides a window into his intent, a window to a room that is lit from within by emotional expression” (p. 128). A number of experimental results verify the presence of common knowledge and mutual identification. Testing a variety of pure coordination games, including Schelling’s original situations, Mehta et al. (1994) have shown that the awareness that a coordination game is happening raises the coordination rate significantly compared to what would be expected from the pairing of independent responses. For example, when we know that we are trying to choose the same flower, each of us is much more likely to pick “rose” than when we were simply, outside of a matching context, picking any flower that occurred to us. In other 32 Much of this process happens below the level of consciousness and with a certain automaticity. The “interactive alignment” of dialogue creates implicit common ground that substitutes for explicit mental modeling (Garrod and Pickering, 2004).

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words, the shared knowledge that we are trying to meet each other within a puzzle increases the likelihood that we will find each other. More importantly, we will utilize all elements of the common ground between us to guide coordination. Subjects in one coordination game experiment, selecting from displays of common household objects, made quite different choices if they were trying to match “conservative Uncle George” rather than “jet-setter Cousin Amy” (Clark et al., 1983). Involvement in a coordination game, therefore, necessarily commits both partners to the mental activation, consciously or unconsciously, of their common ground. Hence, both parties are primed to perceive similarity, and this predisposition will be reinforced by smooth and successful coordination. The achievement of successful coordination may temper the conflict in the embedded game. Camerer and Knez (1997) (Knez and Camerer, 2000) reported that they found a spillover effect among subjects playing a coordination game first and then a social dilemma: coordinators were more likely to be cooperators. Utilizing a similar protocol, Ahn et al. (2001) found that experimental participants who coordinated successfully on an earlier sequence of eight coordination problems were much more likely to cooperate in a linked prisoners’ dilemma. The magnitude of this effect is revealed by their reported logit model; assuming average levels for all other variables, the expected cooperation rate for a player whose counterpart failed to coordinate on all eight trials is 16 percent, whereas it is 65 percent for a series of successful matches. Similarly, group identity, often created in the laboratory by a manipulation as simple as grouping people who pick the same color poker chip or overestimate the number of dots on a page, has been shown to increase cooperation in mixed motive games (Orbell et al.). Blue poker chip pickers are, from the present perspective, “successful” coordinators whose collective sense rests on a single, salient datum of similarity. As mentioned earlier, the meta-analysis of Sally (1995) has shown that discussion in social dilemmas has robustly and significantly altered the cooperation rate. The successful coordination of mutual promises commits both utterers to cooperation. Rather than being cheap, these promises appear to act as clear “windows” into the “intent” in the conjoined game. The fact that there is no entirely neutral style means that language is intertwined with the relationship between the speaker and the listener. Between new acquaintances, language is one factor that may signal similarity and goodness to the counterpart and can potentially build a positive relationship. Meaning coordination builds rapport and primes the situation to be less competitive. There are numerous economic domains in which this is manifest: in the interview, successful linguistic coordination is a tangible basis for the interviewee’s sense that things went well or not; on the sales call, vocabulary and indirectness signify competency and affiliation; in negotiations, more concessions will occur when the audience is smaller, the setting is less formal, and the speaking is less literal (Drolet and Morris, 2000; Sally, 2000; Nadler, 2004). In a domain directly relevant to us, think of the academic seminar: to be credible and perceived positively, a speaker has to know how to pronounce “Amartya” to an audience of economists, “Zajonc” to psychologists, and “Derrida” to deconstructionists. Lastly, meaning may be determined by affiliation: the same phrase, “you are such a jerk,” is a tease to a friend, an anomaly to an acquaintance, and an insult to an enemy (Slugoski and Turnbull, 1988; Jorgensen, 1996) (for more examples of the linguistic effects of relationships, see Sally, 2002, 2003).

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However, the evidence that we share a vocabulary and a manner of speech may be dominated by other facts, such as our differing skin colors, accents, interests, or agendas. Just as a relationship will not affect players’ strategy choices in a zero-sum game (Sally, 2001), the closeness signaled by meaning coordination between enemies may be overwhelmed by other emotions and strategic considerations. It is possible to spit your words into the face of your enemy: just as other similarities are overlooked in order to maintain psychological distance, so too will the utilization of common ground in forming and interpreting an utterance be neglected. Moreover, adversaries will proactively structure the communication in order to negate any possible kinship effects. For example, third parties, such as translators or agents, may be used to transmit all utterances between the two sides. Discussions may occur only in group settings so that every speaker is constrained by a two audience problem that forces his utterances to implicate to his own side that “we are here” [U.17], and to the other side that “you are there” [U.18] (Fleming, 1994). Adversaries may employ the same blatant disregard of convention and common knowledge that was explored in Garfinkel’s experiments: an uncooperative witness says to a hostile questioner, “It depends on what the meaning of ‘is’ is.” The inability to solve the coordination problem represented by “is” indicates the level of conflict, distances the players, and shows that negative speech is not necessarily cheap either. “Sticks and stones can break my bones, but names can never hurt me;” however, names, curses, and slurs can potentially make any linked game more competitive. There is no doubt that Ali’s repeated flinging of insults in the weeks leading to the Thrilla’ in Manila made Frazier fight that much more ferociously (Hauser, 1991). This discussion of negative speech is not evidence against the fundamental cooperative effect of language. Before duelists can shoot at each other, they still have to agree on a time and place, weaponry, the number of paces, and so on. One reason the principals send “seconds” to make arrangements is to avoid being exposed to the positive effects of coordination. In combative discussion, a lie or an insult is worthless if it is not understood by its target. The act of coordinating on dueling rules or on utterance meaning provides a push toward cooperation and a context against which any negative speech has additional implicatures (“screw you and screw Grice’s Cooperative Principle also”). Moreover, in the long run, it is only the accretion of successful small coordinations, beginning necessarily with the meaning of words and phrases, that creates enough common ground to make a negotiated resolution of great conflict possible. The argument here has been that talk is not cheap, rather it is complicated, creative, implied, affective and effective, altering speaker and listener and any embedded game. Some refinements of cheap talk have concentrated on the existence of literal meanings within the message space. However, once you let in a drip or two of literal meaning, you cannot prevent all of language from flooding in: poetry, promising, metaphor, irony, insult, intimacy, and the rest. The search for games that are stable in the face of any utterance, literal or figurative, is a vain quest. How can one of these utterances not change any game? F you! I love you! Really?!. . .I am from Chicago, too! Promise me that you will.

u∅ , u∅ , u∅ , u∅  [the silent treatment].

[U.19] [U.20] [U.21] [U.22] [U.23]

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