A logic and semantics for imperatives
نویسنده
چکیده
Truth is undefined for imperative statements. However, if imperatives implicitly reference a fact, they can be rephrased as truth-valuable declaratives explicitly referencing that fact. But are there such facts? Kenny held that any imperative references a set of wishes held by its imperator. I extend his thesis by proposing that imperator wishes are facts implicitly referenced by imperatives and explicitly referencing them yields semantically isomorphic declaratives. I implement this thesis with modal operators for wants and cause with which declarative schemata are formed to automate translation of imperatives into semantically isomorphic declaratives called proxy-imperatives. The proxy-imperatives match imperative behavior and provide semantic validation of imperative arguments thereby integrating imperative reasoning into classic truth-valuable logic.
منابع مشابه
A Paraconsistent Logic for Contrary-to-Duty Imperatives
Contrart-to-duty imperatives are those which tell us what we ought to do if we violate some of our obligations. In this work, we give an inconsistencyfriendly framework for contrary-to-duty imperatives and introduce three semantics for it: static, dynamic and topological. The static semantics uses the standard modal paraconsistent approach whereas the dynamic semantics views violations as dynam...
متن کاملLogic and Semantics for Imperatives
In this paper I will develop a view about the semantics of imperatives, which I term Modal Noncognitivism, on which imperatives might be said to have truth conditions (dispositionally, anyway), but on which it does not make sense to see them as expressing propositions (hence does not make sense to ascribe to them truth or falsity). This view stands against “Cognitivist” accounts of the semantic...
متن کاملImperatives and Deontic Logic
Deontic logic has so far been almost exclusively interpreted by a possible worlds semantics and ideality or preference relations between the worlds. In distinguishing itself from attempts at a logic of norms or logic of imperatives, deontic logic has portrayed its formulas as ‘deontic propositions’, true or false statements about what is obligatory, permitted or forbidden according to some unsp...
متن کاملSets, Sentences, and Some Logics about Imperatives
Though deontic logic is regarded as the logic of normative reasoning, norms – as entities lacking truth values – are usually represented neither in its language nor its semantics. Limiting ourselves to unconditional imperatives, we propose a concept for their semantic representation and show that existing systems of monadic and dyadic deontic logic can be reconstructed accordingly.
متن کاملA Preference Semantics for Imperatives
There is a rich canon of work on the meaning of imperative sentences, e.g. Dance!, in philosophy and much recent research in linguistics has made its own exciting advances. However, I argue here that three kinds of observations about imperatives are problematic for approaches from both traditions. I contend that these shortcomings stem from an entirely standard assumption of these semantic theo...
متن کامل