Logic and Control: How They Determine the Behaviour of Presuppositions
Marcus Kracht · The MIT Press eBooks · 1994
Presupposition is one of the most important phenomena of non-classical logic as concerns the applications in philosophy, linguistics and computer science. The literature on presuppositions in linguistics and analytic philosophy is rather rich (see [8] and the references therein), and there have been numerous attempts in philosophical logic to solve problems arising in in connection with presuppositions such as the projection problem. In this essay I will introduce a system of logics with control structure and elucidate the relation between context-change potential, presupposition projection and three-valued logic. For a definition of what presuppositions are consider these three sentences. (1) Hilary is not a bachelor. (2) The present king of France is not bald. (3) limn→ ∞ an � 4 Each of these sentences is negative and yet there is something that we can infer from them as well as from their positive counterparts; namely the following. (1 † ) Hilary is male.