Mental states are the essence of pragmatics: questions, answers and the Multiple Perspectives Theory of communication
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Multiple Perspectives Theory (MPT) is a cognitive architecture that aims to provide a mechanistic account of the ways in which mental states are represented and used in communication. The theory posits a cognitive architecture with two representations: a representation of self and a representation of the other, as well as a cognitive process that compares these representations to identify epistemic (a)symmetries. We illustrate how this theory can explain some of the most basic linguistic constructions and commonplace conversational moves, namely standard questions used to request information. We present examples of wh- questions (e.g. When is the train coming? ), polar ( yes–no ) questions (e.g. Is the train coming? ) and rising declaratives (e.g. The train is coming? ) and argue that these conversational moves cannot be modelled by appealing to just one perspective. Instead, this requires considering the perspectives of both conversational partners, and computing their relative epistemic status. The fact that this ubiquitous, literal conversational move cannot be modelled without appealing to mental states provides strong evidence to the position that mental states are routinely used in communication. Thus, in this paper, we not only consider when mental states are used in communication—our answer is always–but also present an account of how they are used, specifically to model questions. This article is part of the theme issue ‘At the heart of human communication: new views on the complex relationship between pragmatics and Theory of Mind.’
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".