3. Seeing what we don’t see

Chapter 3 addresses the interlocutor’s ex-ante beliefs: what they expect from the conversation before the talker talks – without conditioning on the nature of the statement. The chapter formulates the book’s first empirical questions, in a way that is held constant throughout the book: they ask whether the interlocutors’ beliefs differentiate enough with respect to the available information. The emphasis of the distinction between beliefs and information is borrowed from linguistics and the chapter argues that this distinction is well suitable for measurement with the methods of experimental economics and experimental psychology. The chapter also begins the book’s description of such measurements, including results, and continues the running examples.