Institute of Information Theory and Automation

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Bibliography

Journal Article

In defence of Higher-Level Plural Logic: drawing conclusions from natural language

Grimau Berta

: Synthese vol.198, 6 (2021), p. 5253-5280

: GA18-00113S, GA ČR, AH/L503915/1, Arts and Humanities Research Council

: Plural Logic, Higher-Level Plural Logic, Ontological commitment, Natural language

: 10.1007/s11229-019-02399-z

: http://library.utia.cas.cz/separaty/2019/MTR/grimau-0520340.pdf

: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11229-019-02399-z

(eng): Plural Logic is an extension of First-Order Logic which has, as well as singular terms and quantifiers, their plural counterparts. Analogously, Higher-Level Plural Logic is an extension of Plural Logic which has, as well as plural terms and quantifiers, higher-level plural ones. Roughly speaking, higher-level plurals stand to plurals like plurals stand to singulars, they are pluralised plurals. Allegedly, Higher-Level Plural Logic enjoys the expressive power of a simple type theory while committing us to nothing more than the austere ontology of First-Order Logic. Were this true, Higher-Level Plural Logic would be a useful tool, with various applications in philosophy and linguistics. However, while the notions of plural reference and quantification enjoy widespread acceptance today, their higher-level counterparts have been received with a lot of scepticism. In this paper, I argue for the legitimacy of Higher-Level Plural Logic by providing evidence to the effect that natural languages contain higher-level plural expressions and showing that it is likely that they do so in an indispensable manner. Since the arguments I put forward are of the same sort advocates of Plural Logic have employed to defend their position, I conclude that the commonly held view that Plural Logic is legitimate, but not so its higher-level plural extensions is untenable.

: BA

: 10102

2019-01-07 08:39