Within five minutes of Professor Eisenberg mentioning Meaningful Games in class, I had placed it in my Amazon shopping cart. I am not certain I had ever been more excited about a book. I am positive that a book for class had never excited me as much as the idea of this one did. You see, Robin Clark’s book proposes to “explore language with game theory”, an idea that immediately intrigued me as a reasonable, if not immediately apparent, approach to a topic that we tend to treat with a highly analytic eye despite its undeniably human nature.
I will say right now that I see no good reason to look at language as something that’s biologically evolved or that can be universally described. We spent time in class looking at animal communication that we described as being somehow sub-linguistic. We noted that many species, especially more evolutionarily advanced ones such as primates, seemed to have developed distinct cries for denoting various circumstances in the environment -- leopards, snakes, etc. The tendency to vocalize and share information with the surrounding world, then, would seem to be evolved. I do not believe that language (the fusion of semantics and syntax) itself is, though.
Language seems, to me, to be more like a tool. The basic components of this tool -- those surprisingly varied vocal notifications that animals of many advanced species use -- are available to less evolved creatures. They use them in their simple way, just like otters cracking open sea urchins with rocks and chimpanzees fishing for termites with sticks. But humans are more advanced. We perceive more of the world and recognize relationships in the world more acutely. Just like we combine simpler physical resources into more elaborate contraptions, why wouldn’t we devise ways of combining vocal emissions to more effectively and efficiently relate truths about our surroundings -- in both the immediate and abstract senses. Would anybody say that (specific) tool use is evolved?
Would anybody claim that Japanese macaques have somehow become genetically predisposed towards washing their sweet potatoes? That seems downright silly. Why, then, would I have a genetic determination to recognize noun phrases and formulate clauses? Some people may point to the similar structures of languages across the globe as a suggestion that we are built to process languages in a specific way. I would say that even these similarities can be explained by the tool metaphor.
First of all, tool use is taught generationally. Successive generations, being taught how to make and use the tools of their forebears, do not have to waste their lives re-inventing the basics. Instead, they can move on to expand on existing technologies or invent new technologies -- including linguistic “technologies” -- previously unimagined. Over time, some tools survive and others are replaced. Some tools are simply better than others, and people with superior technologies of the moment tend to spread farther and subjugate those with weaker tools. In this way, the technological ecosystem evolves concurrently with our culture.
Linguistically, we expand and evolve our tools by inventing new ways of describing new experiences and more effective ways of describing old ones. Today we see this primarily through the invention of words, but that’s the microevolution of a language. It’s quick and dirty and gets the job done at the moment. Is it unreasonable to think of the addition, removal, and adaptation of grammatical structures as the macroevolution of a language? A more flexible syntactic structure is going to allow for more efficient communication, and thus ease education and cultural advancement in other areas. Just as multiple civilizations concurrently developed nautical and agrarian technologies that eventually converged to similar solutions, it’s reasonable to believe that grammatical structures across independently developed languages would also converge to similar standards.
Why would these structures be similar? Because they need to be processed in the brain. We live in a physical world, and the features of this world, including our biology, can be modeled mathematically. As such, there are logical structures, perhaps nested hierarchies like those often used to describe modern languages, that may simply coordinate better with the design of our brains. Just like we wouldn’t build a scythe that takes three arms to wield, we wouldn’t keep around a language for long if it did not make concessions to the way we focus our attention and process information. Over time, it’s very possible that we could select for traits that allow individuals to use an especially important tool more efficiently. Certainly, I operate in a mental space that is almost entirely linguistic, but I still see no reason to think that language itself is built into us any more than a tendency to build and drive automobiles.
I apologize for this protracted rant, but it’s necessary to explain my excitement over the prospect of Meaningful Games. If language is, as I see it, a socially constructed tool and not some sort of Platonic Form that has always existed, then it makes little sense to analyze language as something independent of communication. Communication fundamentally occurs between rational agents, and rational agents tend to be aware of one another’s rationality. When I hear the words “exploring language with game theory”, I presuppose an account based on this principle. I think of explanation that would account for the semantic richness of and the syntactic flexibility of languages from a perspective of the ways we use language; a perspective that respects the fundamentally social nature of the topic.
Clark’s preface to Meaningful Games suited to wet my appetite quickly. He touches on some of these very same issues I mention, especially the communicative purpose of language. He recognizes that language is defined by its use and that its use is defined by social circumstance. He talks about Tarski and Grice and logical models and meaning; he talks about truth making and algebras and grammars and what these things mean in a context of multiple rational agents. He talks about social context and developing techniques to describe language by its use -- to evaluate it, essentially, as a tool. He said all of the right words to get me excited about what he had to say.
Clark then begins his book proper by discussing the concept of “mentalese”, the sort of universal, Platonic “language” of thought. Mentalese, as Clark describes it, is basically a set of constructs that describe the interactions of objects and agents in the world as we perceive it. These constructs are expressed in a sort of predicate form, relating state transitions on individual objects and causal relationships between these transitions. For example, Clark gets hung up on the notion of what it might mean for A to “kill” B. He denotes a predicate kill(A,B), which suggests that A caused B to die.
We can imagine a complicated series of such predicates and the potential to conjoin and disjoin them and forming propositions of them in first order logic to express even more complicated relationships. These predicates can then be compared to the world we know and we retain those predicate pairings we know to be true. We can even conceive of what a world would be like if other predicates held true, as well.
The problem that Clark has with Mentalese is fairly simple: as Clark describes it, Mentalese effectively embraces the computational metaphor. Mentalese is an analytic thought form, only serving to hold a representation of the universe that is dependant on a detached, sensory experience that may or may not accurately resemble the world as it truly exists. Verbal language, under the assumption of mentalese, is simply a way of translating our own mentalese into an intermediate language that another person can then place back into their own version of mentalese. But this has two problems.
First, of all, we obviously do not operate simply on first order logic. We regularly use constructs like “most” or “many” or “often” that are vague and difficult, if not impossible, to construct into first order logic forms. But first order logic is the most complicated logical system for which we have correct and complete proof systems for. We cannot just be computers, then, because we cannot simply compute much of what we store and communicate. More troublesome for Clark is the simple fact that a world where we only work in mentalese is a solipsistic one, where individual understandings of reality are isolated, answering only to some higher standard. In the real world, though, it appears as though meaning is derived socially.
Clark lays these objections out in such a convoluted form that I am not sure either of us understands where his problem with Mentalese actually lies. He walks through the uncanny valleys of the Turing Test and the Chinese Room en route to an objection that is social rather than computational. And he never quite seems to resolve the two issues. Clark spends a chapter examining the social nature of meaning before taking time to describe game theory and the way we evaluate the design of games and strategies. By the time he actually starts to talk about linguistic games, suddenly people are computers once more, though he may not realize it.
Part of the problem is that the first linguistic “game” that Clark constructs is not really a game at all. It involves the verification or falsification of statements, the very thing Clark suggests Mentalese is designed to do. (In)Appropriately enough, Clark spends an extended amount of time discussing how we might translate statements into propositions in first order logic and how players might take turns stripping down the logical operators to check the truth of the statement against some publicly shared model of the world.
After nearly 60 pages, Clark acknowledges that this is a trivial game and not particularly useful. What he does not acknowledge is that his “game” fails to be a game. There is no actual strategy to be played, no matter what Clark might suggest. A proposition in first order logic is either true or false with respect to a model. The “winner” is determined not by player behavior but by the model over which they are playing. In the middle of all of this, Clark establishes more troublesome trends that will persist throughout the rest of his games. For one thing, his players are not communicating with each other. They are projecting information into and extracting information from a void. More important, none of Clark’s players behave in any less computational a manner than those in his verification game.
These problems become most clearly apparent when Clark starts talking about common knowledge. This chapter begins with an example of generals trying to coordinate an attack on a superior force. Not wanting to risk attacking alone, they send messengers back and forth between camps ad infinitum, believing that they cannot be certain that a confirmation was received until they receive a confirmation in turn.
Clark extrapolates this problem to individuals trying to discuss going to see a dance troupe when one performance has been cancelled and replaced with another. The problem, in this case, revolves around the definite description “the dance troupe” as opposed to specifying which troupe by a unique name. In our fantasy land, both players know about the cancellation, but neither knows what the other knows. They want to avoid confusion, but they also want to save effort of using the full name for the troupe that is actually performing. Clark suggests that this requires that they model each other’s mental states. That is, A needs to know about what B thinks A knows. Which means A needs to know about what B thinks A thinks B knows, and so on and so forth.
For asynchronous (or mono-directional) communication, this is a reasonable (if absurd) problem. We need to be aware of what our audience may not know and make concessions to ensure clarity. Direct communication between individuals, however, is inherently synchronized. When conversing, we may attempt to model one another’s knowledge, but we know that we can count on our partner’s awareness of their own knowledge to ease the burden. Individually, we can recognize when uncertainty enters the picture and make explicit reference to it. We can request clarification when we encounter confusion. Such active error correction may require more effort than simply knowing what referents are in play during a discussion, but it certainly requires less effort than infinite recursion.
This is what I mean when I say that Clark, despite his earlier complaints, continues to treat people like computers. We are communal creatures who operate on heuristics. We share information, including information about our own knowledge. Moreover, we generally do not build exact models or find exact solutions to problems as our first course of action. Rather, precision is a last resort once our estimations prove insufficient. Why would Clark even waste space talking about an effort to build a perfect representation of the cognitive world of others? This is not something we even attempt in indirect communication, as heuristics of charity encourage greater clarity than may be necessary. No model is perfect. The only perfect map of a territory is the territory itself. Anything else, by necessity, involves abstractions meant to communicate only the most significant details at the appropriate scale.
It is at this point that I started to get frustrated with Clark’s writing and began wondering if and when we would get to the meat of things. Was there ever a point where we would look at “games” that were concerned with something more elaborate than ambiguity? So I read. And I read. And I read some more. Eventually, on page 197, when Clark was still discussing types of copresence and their usefulness in resolving ambiguity in pronouns and definite phrases, he provided these two sentences:
(19) Because it was broken, I returned the plate I had just bought to the store
(20)Because the plate I had just bought was broken, I returned it to the store
Clark’s response to the variation in this sentence is as follows:
“The pairing of (19) and (20) immediately suggests another level of strategic decision making, one more allied to the general problem of stylistics and rhetoric. I leave this as an open problem for the reader.”
Suddenly everything that led to this point made sense. Clark is not concerned with communication strategies in the same way I am. When I think about use of language between agents, my concern, first and foremost, is with the rhetoric that Clark ignores. I am intrigued by strategies we use in our diction and our phrasing to affect the way our words are perceived by others. I am curious about implicature and subtler ways we make our ideas more or less palatable to listeners, and the ways in which we listen for these cues in an effort to reduce their impact.
Clark, on the other hand, is solely concerned with notions of clarity and economy. He looks at meaning in explicit ways, ignoring implicature in favor of understanding how sentence structure and “public information” (the very existence of which, Clark questions) can alleviate ambiguity. He invents quantifications of linguistic economy in an effort to explain our use of ambiguous phrases. He then justifies these efforts by making games to describe how we spare ourselves effort in our speaking and the risks that we take in doing so. Even in this regard, on a playing field of Clark’s own creation, I am not entirely certain how his “games” hold up.
Let’s look at an example involving pronoun use. We start out with two players, the speaker and the listener. We then have a statement. Clark uses the example “An undercover cop was observing a suspect. He stayed in the shadows.” In order to eliminate lexical cues, we could generically use “X ____ed Y. He ____ed.” In any case, Clark looks at this game as one of information states. The speaker begins in one information state, in which “he” refers to either X or Y, depending on the situation. His goal is for the listener to reach the same state. The speaker then has four options. He can use a proper name in place of “he”, or he can use “he” to refer to whichever of X or Y he intends for the listener to identify with the pronoun.
If the speaker chooses a proper name, then the listener has an easy choice: she can recognize the subject of the second sentence as the one directly referenced. Communication succeeds, both parties benefit. If the speaker chooses to use a pronoun, the listener gets to choose which of X and Y she believes the speaker to be referring to. A failure to choose the proper antecedent leads to confusion and both parties lose. Choosing the correct antecedent results in a benefit to both parties.
Obviously, to make this a game worth playing, the benefit for successful communication using a pronoun needs to surpass the benefit gained from using a proper name. As mentioned earlier, Clark is concerned with a concept of “economy” in language use. Since it takes more effort to generate a proper name (or a more descriptive phrase) than it does a simple pronoun, it is beneficial to the speaker to use the pronoun. Supposedly, it is also easier for the listener to process the shorter phrase. With this in mind, he devises a game that effectively looks like this, with the speaker’s options listed along the top and the listener’s options listed along the side:
Proper reference to X
|
“He” referring to X
|
“He” referring to Y
|
Proper reference to Y
| |
X
|
(1, 1)
|
(3.5, 3.5)
|
(-2, -2)
|
(-2, -2)
|
Y
|
(-2, -2)
|
(-2, -2)
|
(2, 2)
|
(1.5, 1.5)
|
Where do these values come from? Imaginationland, of course! That’s not quite fair. Clark does have some rules that he follows to create the rankings. Successful communication, obviously, carries the highest benefit and unsuccessful communication the highest cost. Encoding an element as a pronoun provides a larger benefit as opposed to using a full name. More prominent elements (such as the subject of an immediately previous sentence) are “cheaper” to encode, increasing the benefit of that encoding. Not immediately relevant is the fact that pronouns are cheaper than descriptions.
Continuing to ignore the fact that the actual values are wholly arbitrary, this is why the highest reward comes from using “he” when the speaker wants to refer to X. Playing the game backwards, we see that this is the choice the speaker should make if, indeed, he wishes to refer to X in the second sentence. If the listener hears “he”, she will be inclined to assume that there is a 50% chance that the pronoun could be in reference to either X or Y. X’s prior prominence makes it the safer option. As such, if the speaker wants to refer to Y in the second sentence, he ought to make the reference explicit.
Does this final decision make sense? Mostly, again assuming that the context fails to provide further lexical cues. What doesn’t make sense is the reasoning that led to it. Specifically, why is the pronoun beneficial to the listener? She has to take the mental effort not only to process the auditory emission, but to attach it to some other concept. Depending on the situation, this could be a lot more work than processing an exact name. Pronoun use is not symmetrically beneficial. It is selfish on the part of the speaker.
Of course, this is not the only game that Clark plays. He looks at situations where individual words create ambiguity by carrying multiple definitions. He also looks very lightly at implicature through the lense of sarcasm and hinting/politeness. In these cases, he suggests that we can design games that use social context, familiarity, and/or focal points to create probabilistic strategies. Prior experience as well as physical and lexical context dictate our initial response to a word’s definition when there are multiple options. Familiarity determines our likelihood at properly interpreting sarcasm or recognizing a hint as such.
Of course, with every situation being unique, we can’t devise universal games for these sorts of problems any more than we can for pronoun use. But Clark thinks that the approach is still useful in the way that it grounds our use of language in a particular context. I do not. I do not believe that games are at all a necessary construct in recognizing how we generate meaning. I am not even sure this central question of meaning is a linguistic one. The bigger issue, though, is this: does anybody actually think this way when speaking?
Here we find the real problem with Clark’s attempt to leverage game theory on topics of meaning and ambiguity. Game theory requires that its participants are rational decision makers who are, at some level, aware of the game that they are playing. In an ordinary, conversational setting, such as those that Clark describes, I do not think that human beings can be described as rational actors. We tend towards preoccupation. If we are playing a game, it is one of minimal energy expenditure, and over thinking every lexical decision we make is certainly not a winning strategy in that situation.
In order for game theory to be applicable to a given situation, there needs to be a reason for maximization. In order for human beings to behave as rational actors, there needs to be meaningful cost or reward. There needs to be risk. Under these sorts of circumstances, we are more likely to take the time to explore our options and try to improve our expected result. Typically, conversation is not such a situation. We are free to identify and correct misunderstandings. Any serious consequences are not immediate and irrevocable, and any direct consequences of poor communication are not overly costly.
If we are looking for a situation where people play games with language, designing (and responding to) rhetoric is exactly such a situation. When we engage in rhetoric, as a writer or an orator, we work with an agenda. We manipulate language as a tool to promote that agenda, and our ability to use language and anticipate the response of our audience is what determines immediately our success or failure. As an audience, we try to identify linguistic ploys and focus on facts. The game is plain, but, as an example, I suggest my experiences serving jury duty.
In the summer of 2010, shortly before moving to Colorado, I was under going voir dire in the Hennepin County court system. Since I was preparing to leave the state and had a lot of preparation to do, I did not want to actually sit on a jury. Effectively, the attorneys and I were locked in a game. They asked questions. trying not to violate procedure or give away the case they were building but still seeking jurors who would be sympathetic to that case. I phrased my answers in such a way that, without lying or being contemptuous, I could suggest that I would not be easy to sway or take kindly to their efforts at persuasion.
Both of us had something to gain and/or lose. I might have to risk days of my life hearing a case I really didn’t have time to hear, and possibly a boring one at that. The attorneys were trying to find people who would be willing to consider the story they wanted to weave. We played the game with language, leveraging various grammatical forms and semantic particularities to implant opinions and ideas without violating the constraints of the situation. By acknowledging and responding to their rhetoric, I pushed the situation towards one that was favorable to myself -- and which I believe was favorable for the attorneys.
So, rhetoric is obviously a game, and likely a better game than the ones that Clark creates in Meaningful Games. As much as this helps explain my frustrations, the fact that I would have preferred this as a topic has no bearing on the quality of the book itself. Even discounting these desires, though, Clark’s approach and his games did not do much to think about the way I think about language or say anything novel about meaning. Maybe I would feel differently if I were a linguist, but Meaningful Games mostly just left me frustrated with Clark’s insistence on treating heuristic bits of human behavior with such an analytic eye.
By my estimation, Clark seriously inflates the value placed on economy of speech. The best reason to do so is simply that it lends credence to his arguments, but it also means he overcomplicates the entire issue. There is also the problem of incessant tangents -- about mentalese, garden path sentences, focal points, logical proofs, and anything else Clark thinks of as mildly relevant. While fascinating in subject, the added value is of little comfort when the stated purpose of the book comes to so little.
Had I entered with lower expectations, I may have enjoyed Meaningful Games. Clarks’ writing is, for the most part, accessible, and his examples tend to be light and entertaining. It takes a joy in itself and manages to cover large swathes of ground, even if much of it is tangential. I would actually consider recommending Meaningful Games to people with no prior knowledge of any of the topics contained within it, but certainly not to a person looking for a serious read on topics of game theory, language, or meaning.
Work Cited:
Clark, Robin. Meaningful Games: Exploring Language with Game Theory. Camebridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 2012
