The surprise exam paradox, rationality, and pragmatics: a simple game-theoretic analysis

José Luis Ferreira and Jesus Zamora Bonilla

Journal of Economic Methodology, 2008, vol. 15, issue 3, 285-299

Abstract: The surprise exam paradox has attracted the attention of prominent logicians, mathematicians and philosophers for decades. Although the paradox itself has been resolved at least since Quine (1953), some aspects of it are still being discussed. In this paper we propose, following Sober (1998), to translate the paradox into the language of game theory to clarify these aspects. Our main conclusions are that a much simpler game-theoretic analysis of the paradox is possible, which solves most of the puzzles related to it, and that this way of analysing the paradox can also throw light on our comprehension of the pragmatics of linguistic communication.

Keywords: surprise exam; game theory; language; pragmatics; conversation maxims (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13501780802321459 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:jecmet:v:15:y:2008:i:3:p:285-299

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/RJEC20

DOI: 10.1080/13501780802321459

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Economic Methodology is currently edited by John Davis and D Wade Hands

More articles in Journal of Economic Methodology from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().