Now that you mention it: awareness dynamics in discourse and decisions
Michael Franke, Tikitu de Jager · 2011
Please do not cite or quote without permission. All comments gratefully received. We model unawareness of possibilities in decision-making and (linguistic) pragmatic reasoning. A background model is filtered through a state of limited awareness to provide the epistemic state of an agent who is not attending to all possibilities. We extend the standard notion of awareness with assumptions (implicit beliefs about propositions the agent is un-aware of) and define a dynamic update for ‘becoming aware. ’ We give a propositional model and a decision-theoretic model, and suggest that de-cision problems should in general be seen as filtered models in this sense, describing only those features of the situation which the modeller consid-ers relevant and the agent is aware of. We show how pragmatic relevance reasoning can be described in this framework, extending a standard defi-nition to the case of awareness updates. An utterance can be relevant even if semantically uninformative, if it brings relevant alternatives to aware-ness. This gives an explanation for the use of possibility modals and ques-tions as hedged suggestions, bringing possibilities to awareness but only implicating their degree of desirability or probability. ∗The authors are listed in alphabetical order. 2Contents 1