Toward a Gricean Retreat: Probing LLMs for Knowledge Boundaries and Referent Specificity

When asked about entities outside their knowledge boundary, LLMs routinely fabricate plausible-sounding details rather than backing off to safer, more general claims. We frame this failure through a Gricean lens: a cooperative speaker who is uncertain about a referent retreats up the specificity hierarchy, trading informativeness for truthfulness. We ask whether LLMs have the ingredients to perform this retreat. Using a T-REx-based benchmark that varies entity familiarity and referent specificit

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ethics.ai (13 August 2026), “Toward a Gricean Retreat: Probing LLMs for Knowledge Boundaries and Referent Specificity,” evidence record 19159, https://ethics.ai/record/19159 (originally published by arXiv).

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