Arthur Merin
Neg-Raising, Elementary Social Acts, and the Austinian Theory
of Meaning
Arbeitspapiere des SFB 340, Bericht Nr. 78 (1996), 30pp.
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Abstract
A quirk of natural languages, noted by St. Anselm, Quine and
Hintikka, is `neg-raising' (NR): the apparent self-duality,
with respect to negation, of epistemic or deontic complement-taking
predicates including believe, seem, expect, should, intend,
want.(E.g. `I don't think that A' being near equivalent to `I think
that not-A', etc.) Larry Horn discovered that the items in question
are `mid-scalar' on scales of `strength'. This notion is shown to be
still in want of further explication. Flaws in Horn's standard
1978/1989 account of Neg-raising are demonstrated. A directly
act-denoting, kinematic semantics is proposed for the expression
paradigms involved. It hinges on a paradigm of Elementary Social
Acts---claim, concession, denial, and retraction---defined by
decision-theoretic parameters of contexts, their transformations,
groups under composition, and quotient groups. `External' and `
internal' occurences of not map to context- and
act-type-changing operations defined in terms of dominance
(a.k.a. warrant) and preference. Mid-scalars are explicated as
instances of a quotient act-type `suggestion', also representable as a
mixture, probabilistic or otherwise, of claim and concession. The
analysis predicts the effects of external negation on `weak' and
`strong' members of scales, as well as NR for mid-scalars. Rather than
rely on metaphoric appeal to operator paradigms in modal logic it
offers a formal rationale for the obvious analogy. It exemplifies
thereby how a semantics for speech acts, directly in terms of
operations on context (and thus arguably in the performative spirit of
J.L. Austin), will condition much-debated linguistic data, bypassing
the traditional route via truth-conditions. The modal
actually and its usage in Leibniz are briefly addressed along
the way.
Institut für Maschinelle Sprachverarbeitung
Formale Logik und Sprachphilosophie
University of Stuttgart
Azenbergstr. 12
70174 Stuttgart
Germany
arthur@ims.uni-stuttgart.de