Speech Acts and Rationality

Summary

Cohen and Levesque challenge the assumption, common in speech act theory and in AI dialogue systems, that illocutionary acts such as requests are primitive and must be explicitly identified before a system can respond. They build a formal theory of rational action and interaction. It is a modal logic with loosely possible-worlds semantics, combining beliefs, mutual beliefs, goals and the outcomes of actions. Following Moore, it joins a model of knowledge with a situation-calculus view of action. Communication enters through a Gricean move: uttering an imperative sentence makes true a particular complex attitude about the speaker's goals. From general principles of belief and goal adoption, the authors derive chains of inference and package them as lemmas. One such lemma, REQUEST, yields conditions that cover Searle's felicity conditions for requesting, with no primitive request act. The theory also separates genuine requests from insincere or non-serious imperatives. For language systems, this justifies inference shortcuts while keeping full reasoning available as a backup.

Key points

The logic has four primary modal operators: BEL, BMB (belief about mutual belief), GOAL and AFTER. Complex actions are built with sequence, nondeterministic choice, tests, and IF/UNTIL constructs taken from dynamic logic.
Illocutionary acts are recast as summaries, meaning lemmas that encapsulate inference chains under stated conditions. These summaries need not match illocutionary verbs and may differ across agents and languages.
The REQUEST lemma is derived from first principles and subsumes Searle's conditions. Under insincerity, no request can be derived, as with a non-literal "jump in the lake."
The framework also covers:
- nonspecific requests, where the speaker only wants some state p made true;
- multi-utterance acts and multi-act utterances;
- indirect requests, via axioms in the style of Perrault and Allen, for cases such as "Can you reach the salt."
For NLP systems, summaries can be indexed by utterance type so that the most comprehensive ones are tried first, with a fallback to general reasoning about action. Recognizing the illocutionary act thus becomes optional rather than required.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

Fields: Linguistics & languages

Topics: Speech act theory

Cited by

15 papers of our library cite it (of the 140673 whose bibliographies we read); 2 of them have a page here, 13 not yet.

Cite

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.3115/981210.981217

@inproceedings{cohen1985speech,
  title = {{Speech Acts and Rationality}},
  author = {Cohen, Philip R. and Levesque, Hector J.},
  booktitle = {23rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics},
  year = {1985},
  doi = {10.3115/981210.981217},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.3115/981210.981217}
}

References

6 references, 1 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

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