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E-book Inquisitive Logic : Consequence and Inference in the Realm of Questions

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Penilaian

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In logic, we study properties of sentences, such as truth, falsity, necessity, and contin-gency, relations between sentences, such as entailment and consistency, and practicesinvolving sentences, such as argumentation. However, bysentences, we normallyonly mean sentences of a certain particular kind: declarative sentences—statements,and their counterparts in formal languages.There are principled reasons for this restriction, which is worth examining. Ifwe approach logic from the semantic side, the focus is ontruth: the meaning oflogical operators is captured in terms of how the truth conditions of a compound arederived from the truth conditions of its components, and the central notion of logicalentailment is construed in terms of truth preservation: an entailment is valid if thetruth of the premises guarantees the truth of the conclusion under every interpretationof the non-logical symbols. If we approach logic from the syntactic side, the focus isoninference: on the basic rules that govern inference with certain logical constants,on the ways these rules can be used to build proofs, and on the information encodedby these proofs.In this book, we are concerned with interrogative sentences—questions, and theircounterparts in formal languages. Questions play a crucial role in language in manyways (see Ciardelli et al. [1] for an overview), and accordingly, they are a majortopic in linguistics. By contrast, in spite of some amount of work, in logic they haveremained somewhat marginal. In view of the central concerns of logic as outlinedabove, this should not surprise us. Take, for instance, the question what the capitalof Spain is. It is intuitively unclear what it would mean to ask whether this questionistrueorfalse. Arguably, questions are not the sort of sentences which are capableof being true or false—in technical jargon, they are nottruth-apt. And given thatthe semantic notion of logical entailment is construed in terms of truth, entailmentclaims are not applicable to questions either. Things do not look more promisingif we start from the syntactic side. It is intuitively unclear what it would mean tosuppose or to conclude a question—say, what the capital of Spain is—as part of an inference, and what it would mean for an inference involving such moves to count asvalid. So, there are serious reasons why questions have played only a marginal role inlogic: it would seem that those notions which are the central concern of logic—truth,entailment, valid inference—are simply not applicable to questions.The aim of this book is to show that in spite of these considerations, the scopeof logic can in fact be extended to questions in a way which is conceptually natural,formally well-behaved, and theoretically fruitful. We will see that, if we switch fromthe standard truth-conditional perspective on semantics to an informational perspec-tive, it is possible to give a unified semantic analysis of statements and questions.Building on this foundation, calledinquisitive semantics, it is possible to designconservative extensions of classical propositional, predicate, and modal logic thatencompass questions alongside statements.

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Ketersediaan

Informasi Detail

Judul Seri

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No. Panggil

160 CIA i

Penerbit

Switzerland : Springer Nature., 2022

Deskripsi Fisik

284 hlm

Bahasa

English

ISBN/ISSN

9783031097065

Klasifikasi

160

Tipe Isi

text

Tipe Media

computer

Tipe Pembawa

online resource

Edisi

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Subjek

Logic

Info Detail Spesifik

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Pernyataan Tanggungjawab

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Versi lain/terkait

Lampiran Berkas

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