Two Cases of Deduction with Non-referring Descriptions

Jiří Raclavský
(Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic)

Formal reasoning with non-denoting terms, esp. non-referring descriptions such as "the King of France", is still an under-investigated area. The recent exception being a series of papers e.g. by Indrzejczak, Zawidzki and Kürbis. The present paper offers an alternative to their approach since instead of free logic and sequent calculus, it's framed in partial type theory with natural deduction in sequent style. Using a Montague- and Tichý-style formalization of natural language, the paper successfully handles deduction with intensional transitives whose complements are non-referring descriptions, and derives Strawsonian rules for existential presuppositions of sentences with such descriptions.

In Andrzej Indrzejczak and Michał Zawidzki: Proceedings Eleventh International Conference on Non-Classical Logics. Theory and Applications (NCL'24), Łódź, Poland, 5-8 September 2024, Electronic Proceedings in Theoretical Computer Science 415, pp. 48–65.
Published: 31st December 2024.

ArXived at: https://dx.doi.org/10.4204/EPTCS.415.8 bibtex PDF
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