Search

This book argues for a view in which processes of dialogue and interaction are taken to be foundational to reasoning, logic, and meaning. This is both a continuation, and a substantial modification, of an inferentialist approach to logic. As such, the book not only provides a critical introduction to the inferentialist view, but it also provides an argument that this shift in perspective has deep and foundational consequences for how we understand the nature of logic and its relationship with meaning and reasoning. This has been upheld by several technical results, including, for example a novel approach to logical paradox and logical revision, and an account of the internal justification of logical rules. The book shows that inferentialism is greatly strengthened, such that it can answer the most stringent criticisms of the view. This leads to a view of logic that emphasizes the dynamics of reasoning, provides a novel account of the justification and normativity of logical rules, thus leading to a new, attractive approach to the foundations of logic. The book addresses readers interested in philosophy of language, philosophical and mathematical logic, theories of reasoning, and also those who actively engage in current debates involving, for example, logical revision, and the relationship between logic and reasoning, from advanced undergraduates, to professional philosophers, mathematicians, and linguists.

Taking linguistics students beyond the classical forms often taught in introductory courses, Language and Logics offers a comprehensive introduction to the wide variety of useful non-classical logics that are commonly used in research. Including a brief review of classical logic and its major assumptions, this textbook provides a guided tour of modal, many valued and substructural logics. The textbook starts from simple and intuitive concepts, clearly explaining the logics of language for linguistics students who have little previous knowledge of logic or mathematics. Issues are presented and discussed clearly before going on to introduce symbolic notation. While not avoiding technical detail, the book focuses throughout on helping students develop an intuitive understanding of the field, with particular attention to conceptual questions and to the tailoring of logical systems to thinking about different applications in linguistics and beyond. This is an ideal introductory volume for advanced undergraduates and beginning postgraduate students in linguistics, and for those specializing in semantics.

The volume analyses and develops David Makinson's efforts to make classical logic useful outside its most obvious application areas. The book contains chapters that analyse, appraise, or reshape Makinson's work and chapters that develop themes emerging from his contributions. These are grouped into major areas to which Makinsons has made highly influential contributions and the volume in its entirety is divided into four sections, each devoted to a particular area of logic: belief change, uncertain reasoning, normative systems and the resources of classical logic.Among the contributions included in the volume, one chapter focuses on the “inferential preferential method”, i.e. the combined use of classical logic and mechanisms of preference and choice and provides examples from Makinson's work in non-monotonic and defeasible reasoning and belief revision. One chapter offers a short autobiography by Makinson which details his discovery of modern logic, his travels across continents and reveals his intellectual encounters and inspirations. The chapter also contains an unusually explicit statement on his views on the (limited but important) role of logic in philosophy.

'Foundations of the Formal Sciences'(FotFS) is a series of interdisciplinary conferences in mathematics, philosophy, computer science and linguistics. The main goal is to reestablish the traditionally strong links between these areas of research that have been lost in the past decades. The second conference in the series had the subtitle'Applications of Mathematical Logic in Philosophy and Linguistics'and brought speakers from all parts of the Formal Sciences together to give a holistic view of how mathematical methods can improve our philosophical and technical understanding of language and scientific discourse, ranging from the theoretical level up to applications in language recognition software. Audience: This volume is of interest to all formal philosophers and theoretical linguists. In addition to that, logicians interested in the applications of their field and logic students in mathematics, computer science, philosophy and linguistics can use the volume to broaden their knowledge of applications of logic.

This series will include monographs and collections of studies devoted to the investigation and exploration of knowledge, information, and data­ processing systems of all kinds, no matter whether human, (other) ani­ mal, or machine. Its scope is intended to span the full range of interests from classical problems in the philosophy of mind and philosophical psy­ chology through issues in cognitive psychology and sociobiology (concerning the mental capabilities of other species) to ideas related to artificial intelli­ gence and computer science. While primary emphasis will be placed upon theoretical, conceptual, and epistemological aspects of these problems and domains, empirical, experimental, and methodological studies will also ap­ pear from time to time. The present volume provides a collection of studies that focus on some of the central problems within the domain of artificial intelligence. These difficulties fall into four principal areas: defeasible reasoning (including the frame problem as apart), ordinary language (and the representation prob­ lems that it generates), the revision of beliefs (and its rules of inference), and knowledge representation (and the logical problems that are encountered there). These papers make original contributions to each of these areas of inquiry and should be of special interest to those who understand the crucial role that is played by questions of logical form. They vividly illustrate the benefits that can emerge from collaborative efforts involving scholars from linguistics, philosophy, computer science, and AI. J. H. F.

This book is a cross-linguistic investigation of resumptive pronouns and related phenomena. Pronominal resumption is the realization of the base of a syntactic dependency as a bound pronoun. Resumption occurs in unbounded dependencies, such as relative clauses and questions, and in the variety of raising known as copy raising. Processing factors may also give rise to resumption, even in environments where it does not normally occur in a given language. Ash Asudeh proposes a new theory of resumption based on the use of a resource logic for semantic composition and the typologically robust observation that resumptive pronouns are ordinary pronouns in their morphological and lexical properties. The framework for semantic composition is Glue Semantics and the syntactic framework is Lexical-Functional Grammar. The author introduces these frameworks and the concept of resource logics accessibly and compares results and explanations with those offered by a number of contrasting theoretical frameworks. The theory achieves a novel unification of hitherto heterogeneous resumption phenomena. It unifies two kinds of resumptive pronouns that are found in unbounded dependencies - one kind behaves syntactically like a gap, whereas the other kind does not. It also unifies resumptive pronouns in unbounded dependencies with the obligatory pronouns in copy raising. The theory also provides the basis for a new understanding of processing-based resumption, both in production and in parsing and interpretation. This book makes a substantial contribution to the understanding of the syntax-semantics interface, the nature of unbounded dependencies, and linguistic variation. It is clearly written and includes examples from a wide range of languages, such as English, Hebrew, Irish, Swedish, and Vata. It will interest researchers in syntax and semantics and its results are also relevant to computational linguistics, psycholinguistics, and the logical analysis of language.

conceptual, realist) theories of predication. Chapter IV.4 centers on an important class of expressions used for predication in connection with quantities: mass expressions. This chapter reviews the most well-known approaches to mass terms and the ontological proposals related to them. In addition to quantification and predication, matters of reference have constituted the other overriding theme for semantic theories in both philosophical logic and the semantics of natural languages. Chapter IV.5 of how the semantics of proper names and descrip­ presents an overview tions have been dealt with in recent theories of reference. Chapter IV.6 is concerned with the context-dependence of reference, in particular, with the semantics of indexical expressions. The topic of Chapter IV.7 is related to predication as it surveys some of the central problems of ascribing propositional attitudes to agents. Chap­ ter IV.8 deals with the analysis of the main temporal aspects of natural language utterances. Together these two chapters give a good indication of the intricate complexities that arise once modalities of one or the other sort enter on the semantic stage. in philosophical Chapter IV.9 deals with another well-known topic logic: presupposition, an issue on the borderline of semantics and prag­ matics. The volume closes with an extensive study of the Liar paradox and its many implications for the study of language (as for example, self­ reference, truth concepts and truth definitions).

th This volume is dedicated to Dov Gabbay who celebrated his 50 birthday in October 1995. Dov is one of the most outstanding and most productive researchers we have ever met. He has exerted a profound influence in major fields of logic, linguistics and computer science. His contributions in the areas of logic, language and reasoning are so numerous that a comprehensive survey would already fill half of this book. Instead of summarizing his work we decided to let him speak for himself. Sitting in a car on the way to Amsterdam airport he gave an interview to Jelle Gerbrandy and Anne-Marie Mineur. This recorded conversation with him, which is included gives a deep insight into his motivations and into his view of the world, the Almighty and, of course, the role of logic. In addition, this volume contains a partially annotated bibliography of his main papers and books. The length of the bibliography and the broadness of the topics covered there speaks for itself.

Philosophy of language is the branch of philosophy that examines the nature of meaning, the relationship of language to reality, and the ways in which we use, learn, and understand language. The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Language provides a comprehensive and up-to-date survey of the field, charting its key ideas and movements, and addressing contemporary research and enduring questions in the philosophy of language. Unique to this Companion is clear coverage of research from the related disciplines of formal logic and linguistics, and discussion of the applications in metaphysics, epistemology, ethics and philosophy of mind. Organized thematically, the Companion is divided into seven sections: Core Topics; Foundations of Semantics; Parts of Speech; Methodology; Logic for Philosophers of Language; Philosophy of Language for the Rest of Philosophy; and Historical Perspectives.Comprised of 70 never-before-published essays from leading scholars--including Sally Haslanger, Jeffrey King, Sally McConnell-Ginet, Rae Langton, Kit Fine, John MacFarlane, Jeff Pelletier, Scott Soames, Jason Stanley, Stephen Stich and Zoltan Gendler Szabo--the Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Language promises to be the most comprehensive and authoritative resource for students and scholars alike.

This second volume in the series Logic, Epistemology, and the Unity of Science brings a pragmatic perspective to the discussion of the unity of science. Contemporary philosophy and cognitive science increasingly acknowledge the systematic interrelation of language, thought and action. The principal function of language is to enable speakers to communicate their intentions to others, to respond flexibly in a social context and to act cooperatively in the world. This book will contribute to our understanding of this dynamic process by clearly presenting and discussing the most important hypotheses, issues and theories in philosophical and logical study of language, thought and action. Among the fundamental issues discussed are the rationality and freedom of agents, theoretical and practical reasoning, individual and collective attitudes and actions, the nature of cooperation and communication, the construction and conditions of adequacy of scientific theories, propositional contents and their truth conditions, illocutionary force, time, aspect and presupposition in meaning, speech acts within dialogue, the dialogical approach to logic and the structure of dialogues and other language games, as well as formal methods needed in logic or artificial intelligence to account for choice, paradoxes, uncertainty and imprecision. This volume contains major contributions by leading logicians, analytic philosophers, linguists and computer scientists. It will be of interest to graduate students and researchers from philosophy, logic, linguistics, cognitive science and artificial intelligence. There is no comparable survey in the existing literature.

This volume presents a number of systems of logic which can be considered as alternatives to classical logic. The notion of what counts as an alternative is a somewhat problematic one. There are extreme views on the matter of what is the'correct'logical system and whether one logical system (e. g. classical logic) can represent (or contain) all the others. The choice of the systems presented in this volume was guided by the following criteria for including a logic as an alternative: (i) the departure from classical logic in accepting or rejecting certain theorems of classical logic following intuitions arising from significant application areas and/or from human reasoning; (ii) the alternative logic is well-established and well-understood mathematically and is widely applied in other disciplines such as mathematics, physics, computer science, philosophy, psychology, or linguistics. A number of other alternatives had to be omitted for the present volume (e. g. recent attempts to formulate so-called'non-monotonic'reason­ ing systems). Perhaps these can be included in future extensions of the Handbook of Philosophical Logic. Chapter 1 deals with partial logics, that is, systems where sentences do not always have to be either true or false, and where terms do not always have to denote. These systems are thus, in general, geared towards reasoning in partially specified models. Logics of this type have arisen mainly from philo­ sophical and linguistic considerations; various applications in theoretical computer science have also been envisaged.