Inquisitive Modal Logic

Descripción del proyecto

Un nuevo marco para la lógica modal basado en la semántica inquisitiva

La lógica modal se utiliza en campos tan diversos como la filosofía, la informática, la inteligencia artificial, la lingüística y la economía. Formaliza el razonamiento sobre conceptos como posibilidad, obligación, permiso, conocimiento, acción y resultado. Tradicionalmente, la lógica modal se basa en la semántica condicional de verdad. Este fundamento conlleva dos limitaciones: en primer lugar, no se puede analizar una variedad de nociones modales importantes cuyos argumentos no son proposiciones, sino preguntas que carecen de condiciones de verdad; en segundo lugar, es inadecuado para el análisis de las modalidades en el lenguaje natural, como atestigua el viejo problema de las inferencias de libre elección. El proyecto InqML, financiado por el Consejo Europeo de Investigación, superará estas limitaciones desarrollando un novedoso marco para la lógica modal basado en un nuevo fundamento: la semántica inquisitiva. El planteamiento promete nuevas aplicaciones para la lógica modal y nuevos conocimientos lingüísticos.

Objetivo

"Modal logic is at the heart of an incredibly fruitful interdisciplinary enterprise: it is used to formalize reasoning about key notions like knowledge and belief, obligation and permission, action and outcome, and finds important applications in computer science, AI, economics, and linguistics. In its current form, modal logic builds on truth-conditional semantics, which analyzes meaning in terms of truth conditions. This is the source of two limitations. First, there are important modal notions whose argument is not a proposition, but a question. Since questions do not have truth conditions, these notions cannot be analyzed in existing modal logics. Second, much recent work indicates that natural language modals are sensitive not only to the truth conditions of their argument, but also to the different ""alternatives"" it presents, thus making distinctions that are invisible to truth-conditional semantics. The aim of this project is to develop a new framework for modal logic that overcomes these limitations; to achieve this, we will replace truth-conditional semantics with a novel foundation: inquisitive semantics. Since inquisitive semantics allows us to analyze not only statements but also questions, it becomes pos- sible to define modal operators that take questions as arguments. This brings a whole spectrum of new modal notions within the reach of logical analysis; examples include the notion of supervenience, several notions of dependence and independence, agential control and influence, and attitudes like wondering and indifference. Moreover, since inquisitive semantics allows us to associate a modal argument with a set of alternatives, we may now define a new class of modalities that are alternative-sensitive. This allows us to systematize a number of proposals made in the literature and to aim for a general theory of the alternative-sensitivity of natural language modals."