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Eavesdropping: What is it good for?

Paper · 2020 · Jonathan Phillips and Matthew Mandelkern

Summary

The paper asks whether eavesdropping judgments can settle the debate between relativism, expressivism and contextualism about epistemic modals such as "might" and "probably". These are intuitions about whether a claim heard from another context is false, ought to be taken back, or conflicts with what the listener knows. The authors take the central experiment from each of three earlier empirical studies (Knobe & Yalcin 2014, Beddor & Egan 2018, Khoo & Phillips 2019). They rerun each one with extra conditions in which the modal sentence is replaced by a first-person belief report of the form "I think that p". In all three cases, participants judge the "think" versions in the same way as the modal ones. No one seriously treats belief reports as assessor-relative or lacking truth values, and the two patterns are too similar to justify separate explanations. The authors therefore argue that one general account is needed, and that it will not depend on the special semantics of modals. On this view, eavesdropping data cannot choose between the competing theories, although they weaken a key motivation for relativism and expressivism. The paper also outlines unified accounts based on conversational updates and the question under discussion (QUD).

Key points

  • The replication of Knobe & Yalcin 2014 (Experiment 4) recruited 242 participants via Amazon Mechanical Turk across four conditions. A non-modal claim ("Joe is in Boston") and a Modal claim ("might") reproduced the original. A new Attitude variant used "I think Joe is in Boston". Each participant answered either a falsity question or a retraction question.
  • The original study found that people resisted calling the modal claim false but agreed it should be retracted. In the new variant, participants were even more willing to reject the "think" claim as false than the "might" claim. The authors suggest this is because "think" and "probably" express a stronger update than "might".
  • Beddor & Egan's results, as extended here, show that eavesdropping judgments depend heavily on the conversation's QUD.
  • Two unified accounts are sketched: Khoo's update-proposal account and a speech-act modifier account (with Krifka 2014 cited for embedding). The update-proposal view predicts that third-person belief reports behave like first-person ones only when the reported person is treated as an epistemic authority.
  • The proposed accounts fit contextualist, expressivist and relativist semantics alike. The paper's main conclusion is negative: eavesdropping judgments do not discriminate between these views.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. Minimal-substitution control: swap the contested construction for one with uncontroversial semantics and check whether judgments change; if they do not, the effect is not specific to that construction.
  • I2. Gricean reading of judgment tasks: when asked about truth or consistency, people may instead evaluate the proposed update, which is the more helpful question given the QUD.
  • I3. Deference to authority: a reported belief of a trusted third party behaves like a first-person hedge, making p a live possibility.
  • I4. Graded hedge strength: "might" is weaker than "probably" or "think" in the update it proposes, and this shifts how readily people call a claim false.
  • I5. Separating falsity from retraction: people can agree that a claim should be withdrawn without calling it false.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (learn): when a repair rule or silver-data pattern seems tied to one construction, run a substituted control (e.g. "might" vs "I think") as a negative control before crediting the construction itself.
  • I2 (frames): model "I think p" and "might p" as hedged proposals to add p to the common ground, so that a reply like "No, he isn't" is linked to the embedded p rather than to the speaker's belief.
  • I3 (world): store reported beliefs together with their source, and promote p to a tentative world fact only when the source is treated as authoritative, so it can be withdrawn later if contradicted.
  • I4 (world): attach a strength level to hedged propositions, so that contradicting evidence counts as a stronger refutation of "think/probably" claims than of "might" claims.
  • I5 (answer): keep "was the statement false?" and "should the speaker take it back?" as distinct question types in fable and QA readers, with different evidence conditions.

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

 Institutions

🎓New York UniversityNew York · United States136 works · 86,390 citations🎓University of OxfordOxford · United Kingdom52 works · 154,829 citations🎓Dartmouth CollegeHanover · United States16 works · 42,313 citations

📚 Shelves 5The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Computer Science · 9,086 worksArtificial Intelligence · 8,889 worksArts and Humanities · 9,296 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 9,206 worksPhilosophy · 211 works

Cite

Cite as Jonathan Phillips and Matthew Mandelkern. 2020. Eavesdropping: What is it good for?. Semantics and Pragmatics.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.3765/sp.13.19

@article{phillips2020eavesdropping,
  title = {{Eavesdropping: What is it good for?}},
  author = {Jonathan Phillips and Matthew Mandelkern},
  journal = {Semantics and Pragmatics},
  year = {2020},
  doi = {10.3765/sp.13.19},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.3765/sp.13.19}
}

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