Free choice permission as resource-sensitive reasoning

Free choice permission is a long-standing puzzle in deontic logic and natural language semantics involving a so-called conjunctive use of or: from You may eat an apple or a pear, we can infer that You may eat an apple and that You may eat a pear—but not that You may eat an apple and a pear. Following Lokhorst 1997, I argue that because permission is a limited resource, a resource-sensitive logic such as Girard’s Linear Logic is better suited to modeling permission talk than, say, classical logic. A resource-sensitive approach enables the semantics to track not only that permission has been granted and what sort of permission it is (whether to eat apples or to eat pears), but also how much permission has been granted, i.e., whether there is enough permission to eat two pieces of fruit or only one. In addition, I suggest that or is ambiguous between a familiar disjunctive use (translating to Linear Logic’s additive disjunction, ⊕), and a use on which it forces a choice between equally viable but competing alternatives (Linear Logic’s additive conjunction, &). The account here is primarily semantic, with no special modes of composition or special pragmatic rules. The paper includes an introduction to the core ideas