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<Paper uid="W93-0238">
  <Title>J ! Information and Deliberation in Discourse</Title>
  <Section position="1" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="abstr">
    <SectionTitle>
1 Introduction
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    <Paragraph position="0"> Tile most common assumption about intention in discourse is that the primary intention of discourse is to eomlnunicate and receive information. This is a founding assumption of every formal model of discourse meaning that I am aware of. The standard account of meaning is that utterances are functions from contexts to contexts whose primary purpose is to describe the world, and whose meaning derives from the fact that they delimit the set of worlds that the conversants believe possible. One of the ramifications of this assumption is that utterances with no new information are infelicitous or have no meaning\[i, 2, 14, 5\]. However, consider example 1, asserted by a passenger in a vehicle in response to tile driver's comment that the heavy traffic was unexpected: (I) There's somet, hing on fire up there. I can't see what's on fire, but SOMETHING IS. (LW 6/12/92) In the first clause of 1, tile speaker asserts a proposition P, namely that something is on fire. In the second clause, the speaker presupposes P, and finally in the third clause the speaker affirms P. I will argue that examples like this show that a theory of discourse meaning must account for DELIBERATION-based intentions. The DELIBERATION-based view emphasizes that agents produce utterances to support other agents' deliberations about what they want to believe or what they want to do. Agents don't take it for granl.ed that their assertions will be accepted by other agents. I will call clauses like the third one above</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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