Theor of free choice permission

Abstract

I argue that the conjunctive distribution of permissibility over ‘or’, which is a puzzling feature of free-choice permission is just one instance of a more general class of conjunctive occurrences of the word, and that these conjunctive uses are more directly explicable by the consideration that ‘or’ is a descendant of ‘oper’ than by reference to the disjunctive occurrences which logicalist prejudices may tempt us to regard as semantically more fundamental. I offer an account of how the disjunctive uses of ‘or’ may have come about through an intermediate discourse-adverbial use of ‘or’, drawing a parallel with ‘but’, which, etymologically, is disjunctive rather than conjunctive and whose conjunctive uses seem to represent just such a discourse-adverbial application.