Title: ‘Logic and Inference in the Sender-Receiver Model’

Abstract: Logic, inference, language – somehow these are all connected. But how? One of David Lewis’s goals in his book Convention (1969) was to answer this question. There, he presented what is now known as the sender-receiver model of communication, and he revealed how conventionally meaningful communication might come about. Many who held a conventionalist theory of meaning, however, also supported a conventionalist theory of logic. In this talk, I’ll investigate the nature of logic and inference from the point of view of the new model. The first part of the talk will introduce the model and some of its details. The second part will be a survey of work on logic that’s been done with the model so far. The third part of the talk will look at a new signaling game that involves agents following rules of a non-classical logic. I’ll finish with a discussion of the implications of this way of looking at logic and related issues and ideas for future lines of research.