Language and Strategic Inference

Language and Strategic Inference is Prashant Parikh's 1987 doctoral dissertation submitted to Stanford University. It combines two powerful mathematical frameworks-situation theory and game theory-and applies them to problems in philosophical semantics of interest to philosophers, linguists, computer scientists, and cognitive scientists. It contains in embryonic form many of the ideas that appear in the author's later work, and that have in part led to a new field of research and to a growing number of researchers interested in applying these frameworks to problems of communication and meaning.