The relevance of awareness

Abstract

Relevance is a crucial concept in linguistics, but also a notoriously vague notion. Recently, some formal decision-theoretic notions of relevance have been applied successfully to linguistics (van Rooij 2003; van Rooij 2004), but none of these captures the impact of modalized sentences, in particular possibility statements. We treat decision problems of possibly unaware agents (cf. Fagin and Halpern 1988; Modica and Rustichini 1994) and give an update procedure that captures becoming aware of further contingencies. We define the relevance of such updates, and hint at the pragmatic reasoning surrounding possibility statements in dialog.