Journal of Philosophical Logic 

About: Journal of Philosophical Logic is an academic journal published by Springer Science+Business Media. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Modal logic & Normal modal logic. It has an ISSN identifier of 0022-3611. Over the lifetime, 1410 publications have been published receiving 34418 citations.

Scorekeeping in a Language Game

Abstract: EXAMPLE 1: PRESUPPOSITION’ At any stage in a well-run conversation, a certain amount is presupposed. The parties to the conversation take it for granted; or at least they purport to, whether sincerely or just “for the sake of the argument”. Presuppositions can be created or destroyed in the course of a conversation. This change is rule-governed, at least up to a point. The presuppositions at time r’ depend, in a way about which at least some general principles can be laid down, on the presuppositions at an earlier time r and on the course of the conversation (and nearby events) between r and r’. Some things that might be said require suitable presuppositions. They are acceptable if the required presuppositions are present; not otherwise. ‘me king of France is bald” requires the presupposition that France has one king, and one only; “Even George Lakoff could win” requires the presupposition that George is not a leading candidate; and so on. We need not ask just what sort of unacceptability results when a required presupposition is lacking. Some say falsehood, some say lack of truth value, some just say that it’s the kind of unacceptability that results when a required presupposition is 1acking;and some say it might vary from case to case. Be that as it may, it’s not as easy as you might think to say something that will be unacceptable for lack of required presuppositions. Say something that requires a missing presupposition, and straightway that presupposition springs into existence, making what you said acceptable after all. (Or at least, that is what happens if your conversational partners tacitly acquiesce - if no one says “But France has three kings! ” or ‘Vhadda ya mean, ‘even George’? “) That is why it is peculiar to say, out of the blue, “All Fred’s children are asleep, and Fred has children.” The first part requires and thereby creates a presupposition that Fred has children; so the second part adds nothing to what is already presupposed when it is said; so the second part has no conversational point. It would not have been peculiar to say instead “Fred has children, and all Fred’s children are asleep.”

Hedges: A Study In Meaning Criteria And The Logic Of Fuzzy Concepts

Abstract: Logicians have, by and large, engaged in the convenient fiction that sentences of natural languages (at least declarative sentences) are either true or false or, at worst, lack a truth value, or have a third value often interpreted as ‘nonsense’. And most contemporary linguists who have thought seriously about semantics, especially formal semantics, have largely shared this fiction, primarily for lack of a sensible alternative. Yet students of language, especially psychologists and linguistic philosophers, have long been attuned to the fact that natural language concepts have vague boundaries and fuzzy edges and that, consequently, natural language sentences will very often be neither true, nor false, nor nonsensical, but rather true to a certain extent and false to a certain extent, true in certain respects and false in other respects.

The logic of paradox

Abstract: The purpose of the present paper is to suggest a new way of handling the logical paradoxes. Instead of trying to dissolve them, or explain what has gone wrong, we should accept them and learn to come to live with them. This is argued in Sections I and II. For obvious reasons this will require the abandonment, or at least modification, of 'classical' logic. A way to do this is suggested in Section III. Sections IV and V discuss some implications of this approach to paradoxes.

Modal languages and bounded fragments of predicate logic

Abstract: Definition des fragments modaux de la logique des predicats a partir de formules du premier ordre qui sont des traductions des proprietes poly-modales elementaires. Distinguant les fragments variables et finis des fragments lies a un quantificateur, l'A. developpe une version semantique des fragments gardes en remplacant les liens syntaxiques par des restrictions sur les types d'attribution dans les modeles generalises. Se referant a l'algebre cylindrique, l'A. indique les nouvelles directions que peuvent prendre les theoremes de Tarski dans un environnement mathematique: celle des contraintes structurelles speciales, des extensions infinies, de la logique modale etendue et d'une semantique dynamique