Cover -- Contents -- Preface -- Acknowledgments -- I: THE SOCIAL SIDE OF MEANING -- 1- Platonic Heaven -- The Puzzle of Reference -- Use, Mention, and Truth -- The Language of Thought -- Concepts, Mentalese, and the Informational Universe -- Language and the World -- Platonic Heaven in a Box -- Inferences and Mentalese -- Further Reading -- 2- My Fall from Platonic Heaven -- Phrase Structure Grammar -- Grammar and Compositionality -- Thinking and Computing -- The Heaven in Your Head -- Brains in SUVs -- Symbols and Proofs -- Into the Chinese Room -- The Social Nature of Intention -- The Excesses of Youth -- Further Reading -- 3- Meaning and the Social Contract -- Choice and Meaning -- Internal Predicates and External Behavior -- Public Knowledge -- The Economics of Meaning -- Physical Computation and Social Computation -- The Sociolinguistics of Meaning -- Further Reading -- II: GAMES AND TRUTH -- 4- A Primer on Games -- The Cake Game -- Sequential Games and Backward Induction -- The Holmes-Moriarty Game -- ''Ideal Free'' Ducks and Mixed Strategy Nash Equilibria -- Mixed Strategy Nash Equilibria and Language Variation -- Coordination Games -- The Prisoner's Dilemma -- Cooperation: The Stag Hunt -- Case Marking Systems -- Further Reading -- 5- A Game Logic for Natural Language -- The Tale of Abe ́lard and Eloıs̈e -- Syntax -- Games and Models -- Atomic Sentences -- Negation -- Logical Connectives -- The Aristotelian Square of Opposition -- Prospects -- Ambiguity -- Monotonicity -- Compositionality -- Limitations -- Further Reading -- III: GAMES AND THE WORLD -- 6- Common Knowledge -- Coordinated Attack -- Definite Descriptions and the Mutual Knowledge Paradox -- Common Knowledge and Bounded Rationality -- Miscommunication -- Presuppositions and Accommodation -- Further Reading -- 7- Lexical Games -- Games for Finding Words.

Orderly Communication and Utility -- Playing the Odds -- Clues from the Context -- Back to Descriptions and Common Knowledge -- Equilibrium Selection and Implicature -- Down the Garden Path -- Further Reading -- 8- Two Examples: Pronouns and Politeness -- Discourse Pronouns -- Politeness, Power, and Implicature -- On Game-Theoretic Analysis -- Further Reading -- 9- The Social Ecology of Meaning -- Games and Prototypes -- Metrics, Central Tendencies, and Focal Points -- Semantic Landscapes and Meaning Niches -- Semantic Hierarchies and Defaults -- Homophones and Polysemy -- Into the Artificial World -- Further Reading -- Notes -- References -- Index.