Coursera Spring Sale
40% Off Coursera Plus Annual!
Grab it
Watch a 53-minute lecture from the Santa Fe Institute exploring the game-theoretical analysis of vagueness in natural language. Delve into Jens Kipper's research challenging Bert Lipman's assertion that vague languages cannot be game-theoretically optimal. Learn how signaling games, inspired by David Lewis' "Convention," are used to examine why vagueness persists in natural language despite theoretical arguments against its utility. Discover a new approach to modeling vagueness as regions of absent signaling rather than mixed signaling strategies, demonstrating how vague languages can achieve optimality. Explore innovative signaling game experiments showing how vagueness naturally emerges and remains stable when agents must learn signaling strategies from limited generational data in large state spaces. Understand the implications of these findings for our understanding of language evolution and the practical advantages of linguistic vagueness.
