Assertion and Belief: Moore's Paradox in Language Models
Moore's paradox \citep{moore1942} concerns sentences such as ``It is raining, but I don't believe that it is,'' which may well be true yet cannot be sensibly asserted. The absurdity lies not in the content but in the act, since to assert is to vouch for one's own belief. This makes the paradox a test of whether language models take the speech act into account when computing meaning. We present the first test of Moore's paradox in LLMs, evaluating 12 models on a curated set of Moorean sentences in varied contexts. We find that models largely recognize the infelicity of Moorean sentences, and that the judgement is not tied to a memorized form and tracks the speech act. Using the Rational Sp...
| Authors | Anshun Asher Zheng, Weili Cao, Fangcong Yin et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 18 October 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 18 October 2026 |
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