Katrin Schulz

Exhaustive Interpretation of Complex Sentences

In terms of Groenendijk and Stokhof’s (1984) formalization of exhaustive interpretation, many conversational implicatures can be accounted for. In this paper we justify and generalize this approach. Our justification proceeds by relating their account via Halpern and Moses’ (1984) non-monotonic theory of ‘only knowing’ to the Gricean maxims of Quality and the first sub-maxim of Quantity. The approach of Groenendijk and Stokhof (1984) is generalized such that it can also account for implicatures that are triggered in subclauses not entailed by the whole complex sentence.

A Pragmatic Solution for the Paradox of Free Choice Permission

In this paper, a pragmatic approach to the phenomenon of free choice permission is proposed. Free choice permission is explained as due to taking the speaker (i) to obey certain Gricean maxims of conversation and (ii) to be competent on the deontic options, i.e. to know the valid obligations and permissions. The approach differs from other pragmatic approaches to free choice permission in giving a formally precise description of the class of inferences that can be derived based on these two assumptions. This formalization builds on work of Halpern and Moses (1984) on the concept of ‘only knowing’, generalized by Hoek et al., (1999, 2000), and Zimmermann’s (2000) approach to competence.

If you'd wiggled A, then B would've changed Causality and counterfactual conditionals

This paper deals with the truth conditions of conditional sentences. It focuses on a particular class of problematic examples for semantic theories for these sentences. I will argue that the examples show the need to refer to dynamic, in particular causal laws in an approach to their truth conditions. More particularly, I will claim that we need a causal notion of consequence. The proposal subsequently made uses a representation of causal dependencies as proposed in Pearl (2000) to formalize a causal notion of consequence. This notion inserted in premise semantics for counterfactuals in the style of Veltman (1976) and Kratzer (1979) will provide a new interpretation rule for conditionals. I will illustrate how this approach overcomes problems of previous proposals and end with some remarks on remaining questions.

Logic, language and meaning: 17th Amsterdam Colloquium, Amsterdam, the Netherlands, December 16-18, 2009: Revised selected papers

This book contains the revised papers presented at the 8th Amsterdam Colloquium 2011, held in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, in December 2011. The 46 thoroughly refereed and revised contributions out of 137 submissions presented together with 2 invited talks are organized in five sections. The first section contains the invited contributions. The second, third and fourth sections incorporate submitted contributions to the three thematic workshops that were hosted by the Colloquium and addressed the following topics: inquisitiveness; formal semantics and pragmatics of sign languages, formal semantic evidence. The final section presents the submitted contributions to the general program.

Minimal models vs. logic programming: the case of counterfactual conditionals

This article aims to propagate Logic Programming as a formal tool to deal with non-monotonic reasoning. In philosophy and linguistics non-monotonic reasoning is modelled using Minimal Models as standard, i.e., by imposing an order (or selection function) on the class of all models and then by defining entailment as only caring about the minimal models of the premises with respect to the order. In this article we investigate the question whether instead of minimal models we should use logic programming to model non-monotonic reasoning. Logic programming is an attractive alternative to a minimal models approach in that it makes concrete predictions in an efficient and transparent way. We study this question by focusing on one particular phenomenon that gives rise to non-monotonic inferences: conditional sentences.

A Question of Priority

Properties as set of individuals, or of features? Worlds, or propositions? Time-points, or events? Preference, or choice? Natural kinds, or similarity? In modern analytic philosophy it is standard to take (i) individuals as basic, and properties as defined in terms of them; (ii) worlds as basic, and propositions as defined in terms of them; (iii) time-points as basic, and intervals as constructions out of them; (iv) preference as basic, and optimal choice as defined in terms of them; and (v) natural kinds as basic, and similarities as defined in terms of them. In this chapter we show that in all cases the other direction is possible as well. Most of the constructions used are well-known. But by putting them collectively on the table we hope to show that the constructions have something in common, and that it is not always clear which perspective is ontologically less committing.

Logic, Language and Meaning

This book contains the revised papers presented at the Amsterdam Colloquium 2009, held in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, in December 2009. The 41 refereed and revised contributions presented together with the revised abstracts of 5 invited talks are organized in five sections: the first section contains extended abstracts of the talks given by the invited speakers; the second, third and fourth sections contain invited and submitted contributions to the three thematic workshops hosted by the colloquium: the Workshop on Implicature and Grammar, the Workshop on Natural Logic, and the Workshop on Vagueness; the final section consists of submissions to the general program. The topics covered range from descriptive (syntactic and semantic analyses of all kinds of expressions) to theoretical (logical and computational properties of semantic theories, philosophical foundations, evolution and learning of language).

Conditionals, Causality and Conditional Probability

The appropriateness, or acceptability, of a conditional does not just ‘go with’ the corresponding conditional probability. A condition of dependence is required as well (cf. Douven in Synthese 164:19–44, 2008, The epistemology of indicative conditionals. Formal and empirical approaches. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2016; Skovgaard-Olsen et al. in Cognition 150:26–36, 2016). In this paper a particular notion of dependence is proposed. It is shown that under both a forward causal and a backward evidential (or diagnostic) reading of the conditional, this appropriateness condition reduces to conditional probability under some natural circumstances. Because this is in particular the case for the so-called diagnostic reading of the conditional, this analysis might help to explain some of Douven and Verbrugge’s (Cognition 117:302–318, 2010) empirical observations.

Topic, focus, and exhaustive interpretation

In this paper, we propose that a sentence like John \(_T\) ate broccoli \(_F\) should pragmatically be interpreted as follows: (a) Focus should be interpreted exhaustively; John ate only broccoli; (b) Topic must be interpreted exhaustively: Only John ate (only) broccoli; and (c) The speaker takes it to be possible (or even knows, if he is competent) that at least one alternative of the form x ate y not entailed by the sentence is true. It will be shown that in terms of this analysis we can also account for all the scope-inversion data of Buring (Linguist Philos 20: 175–194, 1997), without giving rise to some of the problems of the latter analysis.

Non-Monotonic Reasoning in Interpretation (Update of Chapter 17)

In the update contribution, K. Schulz and R. van Rooij concentrate on the recent progress made in formal pragmatics by using nonmonotonic logic. It is shown how minimal models can be used to describe and explain inferences of language use, in particular Gricean conversational implicatures. It is also shown how nonmonotonic logic can be used at the semantic-pragmatic interface to account for the ‘preferred’ interpretation’ of a sentence.