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- Barbara Abbott (2009). Part V. Back to Grice: Conditionals in English and Fopl. In Dingfang Shu & Ken Turner (eds.), Contrasting Meanings in Languages of the East and West. Peter Lang.In the 1960’s, both Montague (e.g. 1970, 222) and Grice (1975, 24) famously declared that natural languages were not so different from the formal languages of logic as people had thought. Montague sought to comprehend the grammars of both within a single theory, and Grice sought to explain away apparent divergences as due to the fact that the former, but not the latter, were used for conversation. But, if we confine our concept of logic to first order predicate logic (or FOPL) with identity (that is, omitting everything which is not required for the pursuit of mathematical truth), then there are of course many other aspects, in addition to its use in conversation, which distinguish natural language from logic. Conventional implicature, information structure (including presupposition), tense and time reference, and the expression of causation and inference are several of these, which combine as well with syntactic complexities which are unnecessary in first order predicate logic. In this paper I will argue that such distinguishing aspects should be more fully exploited to explain the differences between the material conditional of logic and the indicative conditional of one natural language (English).Reading list | Discuss | Edit | Categorize |My bibliography
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The two main psychological theories of the ordinary conditional were designed to account for inferences made from assumptions, but few premises in everyday life can be simply assumed true. Useful premises usually have a probability that is less than certainty. But what is the probability of the ordinary conditional and how is it determined? We argue that people use a two stage Ramsey test that we specify to make probability judgements about indicative conditionals in natural language, and we describe experiments that support this conclusion. Our account can explain why most people give the conditional probability as the probability of the conditional, but also why some give the conjunctive probability. We discuss how our psychological work is related to the analysis of ordinary indicative conditionals in philosophical logic.
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| | Other links: blackwell-synergy.com dx.doi.org | Scholar | At my library | More options ... Almost forty years ago Richard Montague proposed to analyse natural language with the same tools as formal languages. In particular, he gave formal semantic analyses of several interesting fragments of English in terms of typed logic. This led to the development of Montague grammar as a particular style of formal analysis of natural language.
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| | Other links: homepages.cwi.nl | Scholar | More options ... This book looks at the ways in which conditionals, an integral part of philosophy and logic, can be of practical use in computer programming. It analyzes the different types of conditionals, including their applications and potential problems. Other topics include defeasible logics, the Ramsey test, and a unified view of consequence relation and belief revision. Its implications will be of interest to researchers in logic, philosophy, and computer science, particularly artificial intelligence.
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| | Scholar | At my library | More options ... Since Horn (1972) the notion of conversational implicature proposed by Grice has been put to use to explain certain interpretive differences between expressions in natural language and their counterparts in formal logic. For example, the sentences in (1) seem to convey more than they would be expected to if the natural language disjunction or had the same meaning as the logical disjunction ∨, or if the quantificational determiner some was interpreted as the existential quantifier ∃.
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| | Scholar | More options ... INTENSIONAL LOGIC §1. Natural Language and Intensional Logic When we speak of a
theory of meaning for a natural language such as English, we have in mind an ...
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| | Scholar | At my library | More options ... The perfect fit of syntactic derivability and logical consequence in first-order logic is one of the most celebrated facts of modern logic. In the present flurry of attention given to the semantics of natural language, surprisingly little effort has been focused on the problem of logical inference in natural language and the possibility of its completeness. Even the traditional theory of the syllogism does not give a thorough analysis of the restricted syntax it uses.My objective is to show how a theory of inference may be formulated for a fragment of English that includes a good deal more than the classical syllogism. The syntax and semantics are made as formal and as explicit as is customary for artificial formal languages. The fragment chosen is not maximal but is restricted severely in order to provide a clear overview of the method without the cluttering details that seem to be an inevitable part of any grammar covering a substantial fragment of a natural language. (Some readers may feel the details given here are too onerous.).
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| | Other links: jstor.org | Scholar | At my library | More options ... CHAPTER 1. INTENSIONAL LOGIC §1. Natural Language and Intensional Logic When we
speak of a theory of meaning for a natural language such as English, ...
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| | Scholar | At my library | More options ... When philosophers and linguists theorize about the nature of conditionals, they tend to make a number of assumptions about the linguistic structure of these sentences. For example, they almost invariably assume that conditionals have “antecedents” and “consequents” and that these have the structure of independent clauses. With a few exceptions, they assume that conditionals are categorized according to whether they are in the “indicative” or the “subjunctive” “mood”. However, rarely do they formulate criteria for identifying these moods, or for distinguishing between indicative and subjunctive conditionals.Through an analysis of the coordinated verb tense structures of the clauses of English conditionals, I challenge these and other related assumptions and show that the one relatively well-developed attempt to provide criteria for distinguishing between indicative and subjunctive conditionals---that of Gibbard (1980)---fails in its task. I then offer an alternative account of the linguistic structure of conditional constructions. To represent their structure I use first-order predicate logic with added devices to indicate deictic and anaphoric reference.
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| | Scholar | At my library | More options ... The aim of this paper is to test Grice's theory of conversational implication [1], so-calledimplicature, by putting it into operation in the simplest possible formal language, that is, by constructing an adequate zero-order (sentential) logic. We are going to give a recursive formal description of Grice's maxims and show that the description cannot be made finite.
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| | Other links: jstor.org | Scholar | At my library | More options ... This collection introduces the reader to some of the most interesting current work on conditionals. Particular attention is paid to possible world semantics for conditionals, the role of conditional probability in helping us to understand conditionals, implicature and the material conditional, and subjunctive versus indicative conditionals. Contributors include V.H. Dudman, Dorothy Edgington, Nelson Goodman, H.P. Grice, David Lewis, and Robert Stalnaker.
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| | Scholar | At my library | More options ... Discussion of Barbara Abbott, Part V. back to Grice: Conditionals in English and fopl
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