30/05 - Tony Marmo

Systems, Presuppositions and Implicatures: an exploratory, logical and philosophical investigation

In this work we shall, from the logical and philosophical standpoint, investigate two pragmatic phenomena known as presupposition and implicature, associating them to more general features of human rationality, such as economy and consistency, and to the current logical pluralism, including some controversies between the classical tradition and more recent alternative approaches. Grice has articulated an analysis of such phenomena based on principles governing conversation or interaction between cooperative and rational beings. We dissent from the gricean tradition, and propose that implicatures are processed by the ‘sieving of information’, rather than by the mere exploitation of maxims. By providing precise definitions to the concepts of presupposition and implicature, it is possible to build a logical framework, to be called presuppositional systems, which either extend other logical systems (such as the propositional calculus, for instance), the results of which we shall present hereinafter.

 

 

Keywords: Presupposition, Implicature, Scalar Implicatures, Inference, Logical Systems, Philosophical Logic, Algebraic Structures, Implication Theory, Non-Classical Logics, Rationality, Language, Semantics, Pragmatics.