People use language to influence others' beliefs and actions. Yet models of communication have diverged along these lines, formalizing the speaker's objective in terms of either the listener's beliefs or actions. We argue that this divergence lies at the root of a longstanding controversy over the Gricean maxims of truthfulness and relevance. We first bridge the divide by introducing a speaker model which considers both the listener's beliefs (epistemic utility) and their actions (decision-theoretic utility). We show that formalizing truthfulness as an epistemic utility and relevance as a decision-theoretic utility reconciles the tension between them, readily explaining puzzles such as context-dependent standards of truthfulness. We then test a set of novel predictions generated by our model. We introduce a new signaling game which decouples utterances' truthfulness and relevance, then use it to conduct a pair of experiments. Our first experiment demonstrates that participants jointly maximize epistemic and decision-theoretic utility, rather than either alone. Our second experiment shows that when the two conflict, participants make a graded tradeoff rather than prioritizing one over the other. These results demonstrate that human communication cannot be reduced to influencing beliefs or actions alone. Taken together, our work provides a new foundation for grounding rational communication not only in what we believe, but in what those beliefs lead us to do. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

中文翻译：

---

调和真实性和相关性作为认知和决策理论的效用。


人们使用语言来影响他人的信念和行为。然而，沟通模式在这些方面已经出现了分歧，将说话者的目标形式化为听者的信念或行动。我们认为，这种分歧是关于格​​莱斯格言的真实性和相关性的长期争议的根源。我们首先通过引入一个说话者模型来弥合分歧，该模型考虑听众的信念（认知效用）和他们的行为（决策理论效用）。我们表明，将真实性形式化为一种认知效用，将相关性形式化为一种决策理论效用，可以调和它们之间的紧张关系，很容易解释诸如依赖于上下文的真实性标准之类的难题。然后我们测试我们的模型生成的一组新颖的预测。我们引入了一种新的信号游戏，它将话语的真实性和相关性解耦，然后用它来进行一对实验。我们的第一个实验表明，参与者共同最大化认知和决策理论的效用，而不是单独使用其中任何一个。我们的第二个实验表明，当两者发生冲突时，参与者会进行分级权衡，而不是优先考虑其中之一。这些结果表明，人类交流不能简化为仅影响信念或行为。总而言之，我们的工作为理性沟通奠定了新的基础，不仅使我们相信什么，而且使这些信念引导我们去做。 （PsycInfo 数据库记录 (c) 2024 APA，保留所有权利）。