Obligations and Permissions

4 Utterances and statements that are concerned with obligations and per5 missions are known as deontic expressions. They can present something of 6 a challenge when it comes to formalising their meaning and behaviour. The 7 content of these expressions can appear to support entailment relations similar 8 to those of classical propositions, but such behaviour can sometimes lead to 9 counter-intuitive outcomes. Historically, much of the descriptive work in 10 this area has been philosophical in outlook, concentrating on questions of 11 morality and jurisprudence. Some additional contributions have come from 12 computer science, in part due to the need to specify normative behaviour. 13 There are a number of formal proposals that seek to account for obligations 14 and permissions, such as Standard Deontic Logic. In the literature, there has 15 also been discussion of various conundrums and dilemmas that need to be re16 solved, such as the Good Samaritan, the Knower, the Gentle Murderer, Contrary 17 to Duty Obligations, Ross’s Paradox, Jørgensen’s Dilemma, Sartre’s Dilemma, and 18 Plato’s Dilemma. Despite all this work, there still appears to be no definite 19 consensus about how these kinds of expressions should be analysed, or how 20 all the deontic dilemmas should be resolved. It is possible that obligations 21 themselves, as opposed to their satisfaction criteria, do not directly support a 22 conventional logical analysis. It is also possible that a linguistically informed 23 analysis of obligations and permissions may help to resolve some of the deontic 24 dilemmas, and clarify intuitions about how best to formulate a logic of deontic 25 expressions. 26 ∗Language & Linguistics Compass invited submission. Copyright c © 2011 The Author. 1