One of the most interesting concepts in the philosophy of natural language is "the cooperative principle"[0] as described by Paul Grice. Basically, to understan

One of the most interesting concepts in the philosophy of natural language is "the cooperative principle"[0] as described by Paul Grice. Basically, to understand what other people are saying requires us to cooperate with them, that is in some ways to put ourselves in their stead and imagine _why_ they're saying what they are and the (shared) situation we find ourselves in, which of course involves not just a knowledge of syntax and lexicon, but also culture and other forms of background knowledge. This is obviously the best method of disambiguation: "can you pass the salt" is ambiguous from the point-of-view of lexical semantics, but a sentence is always said in a context - e.g. either at a dinner table, or by hikers on the edge of a salt flat - and here sentences are only very rarely ambiguous. Many schools of 20th century linguistics were obsessed with ambiguity in language, but if you start with an understanding of language as something that humans do - rather than a language being a set of sentences that can be generated by some grammar, N Chomsky 1958 - ambiguity is actually rather peripheral. The cooperative principle is also relevant to AI. We all know the Eliza effect, and, to me, nothing explains it better than Grice. We cannot help but cooperate with text, because that is how you make text work, so even when we know that it's just a robot reversing our sentences, or AI generated poetry (some of which actually reads remarkably well), we look for whatever meaning might be there, under the instinctive assumption that the author is trying to tell us something. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative_principle