OK or not OK? Commitments in acknowledgments and corrections

Abstract

When saying something in a conversation, an agent publicly commits to some interpretation of what she said, which others might dispute. But how does making a commitment affects the commitments of others? We provide an answer to this question for the case of acknowledgments. Commitment semantics poses a dilemma for acknowledgments: either the semantics is strong, entailing that agent i’s committing to j entails other agents commit to i’s committing to j. This makes acknowledgments vacuous. Or further acknowledgments are required to produce commitments about others’ commitments, but then grounding seems never achievable in finite time. Building on Venant & Asher (2015) we provide a model of these strong and weak semantics where we show how the two are linked via a semantics for inductive, synchronous acknowledgments.