Questions as information types

Synthese 195 (1):321-365 (2018)
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Abstract

This paper argues that questions have an important role to to play in logic, both semantically and proof-theoretically. Semantically, we show that by generalizing the classical notion of entailment to questions, we can capture not only the standard relation of logical consequence, which holds between pieces of information, but also the relation of logical dependency, which holds between information types. Proof-theoretically, we show that questions may be used in inferences as placeholders for arbitrary information of a given type; by manipulating such placeholders, we may construct formal proofs of dependencies. Finally, we show that such proofs have a specific kind of constructive content: they do not just witness the existence of a certain dependency, but actually encode a method for transforming information of the types described by the assumptions into information of the type described by the conclusion.

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Citations of this work

Modus Ponens and the Logic of Decision.Nate Charlow - 2023 - Journal of Philosophical Logic 52 (3):859-888.
Questions and Dependency in Intuitionistic Logic.Ivano Ciardelli, Rosalie Iemhoff & Fan Yang - 2020 - Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic 61 (1):75-115.
Substructural inquisitive logics.Vít Punčochář - 2019 - Review of Symbolic Logic 12 (2):296-330.

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