Strategic Conversations Under Imperfect Information: Epistemic Message Exchange Games

Abstract

This paper refines the game theoretic analysis of conversations in Asher et al. (J Philos Logic 46:355–404, 2017) by adding epistemic concepts to make explicit the intuitive idea that conversationalists typically conceive of conversational strategies in a situation of imperfect information. This ‘epistemic’ turn has important ramifications for linguistic analysis, and we illustrate our approach with a detailed treatment of linguistic examples.