CEFISES Seminar: Jan Heylen, “‘The president’ and ‘that woman’: Partial free logic and its rivals”

Livestream https://www.youtube.com/@CEFISES

Series: Work-in-Progress

Speaker: Jan Heylen (KU Leuven)

Title: “‘The president’ and ‘that woman’: Partial free logic and its rivals”

Abstract

Partialists hold that many utterances semantically determine partial, rather than full propositions. These partial, semantically determined propositions serve as inputs to pragmatic processes that result in full propositions. We here provide a treatment of the logical attributes of sets of partial propositions, and arguments that include partial propositions, where these logical attributes serve as inputs to pragmatic processes in an analogous way. We focus on one source of partiality: non-denoting terms like definite descriptions and complex demonstratives. Our formal semantics is based on two principles: no-input-no-output and input-classical-output, resulting in a principled and elegant system with denotation, satisfaction, and truth gaps. This partial free logic differs from negative, positive and neutral free logics and introduces the conceptual novelty of validity and consistency gaps. Sentences with non-denoting terms are never logical truths or falsities, but arguments with such sentences can be valid or invalid and sets of such sentences can be consistent. Our framework avoids the need for an error theory about ordinary discourse involving non-denoting terms, and the pragmatic processes of completion do not need to be conceptualised as processes whereby pragmatics overrules semantics.