Department of Linguistics

Bilateralist Truth-Maker Semantics for ST, TS, LP, K3, ...

Ulf Hlobil, Concordia University, Montreal, Canada

Abstract:
The talk advocates a marriage of inferentialist bilateralism and truth-maker bilateralism. Inferentialist bilateralists like Restall and Ripley say that a collection of sentences, Y, follows from a collection of sentences, X, iff it is incoherent (or out-of-bounds) to assert all the sentences in X and, at the same time, deny all the sentences in Y. In Fine’s truth-maker theory, we have a partially ordered set of states that exactly verify and falsify sentences, and some of these states are impossible. We can think of making-true as the worldly analogue of asserting, of making-false as the worldly analogue of denying, and of impossibility as the worldly analogue of incoherence. This suggests that we may say that, in truth-maker theory, a collection of sentences, Y, follows (logically) from a collection of sentences, X, iff (in all models) any fusion of exact verifiers of the members of X and exact falsifiers of the member of Y is impossible. Under routine assumptions about truth-making, this yields classical logic. Relaxing one such assumption yields the non-transitive logic ST. Relaxing another assumption yields the non-reflexive logic TS. We can use known facts about the relation between ST, LP, and K3, to provide an interpretation of LP as the logic of falsifiers and K3 as the logic of verifiers. The resulting semantics for ST is more flexible than its usual three-valued semantics because it allows us, e.g., to reject monotonicity. We can also recover fine-grained logics, like Correia’s logic of factual equivalence.

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The Meaning Group will meet online on Friday, April 23, 1-2pm. Our own Teru Mizuno will be presenting his work on "Q-particles in embedded declaratives, mood, and clausal complementation"

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