Abstract for Alex Orenstein's talk

Systematically misleading Logical Forms
Alex Orenstein (CUNY Graduate Center)
September 22, 2005 (Thursday)
4:15 PM - ; Room 6417, the CUNY Graduate Center

I follow Davidson, Harmon and others in taking the position that proposing a logical form is a case of hypothesizing/theorizing about the best way to represent natural language reasoning in formal logic (predicate logic). Explanatory power (generality) and conservativism (capturing backgound data) are two of the criteria for deciding which hypothesis/theory to accept. In this paper I propose a different account than those presently offered in the literature for generalizations and for their canonical instances. It is a rival to current unified treatments of the standard quantifiers of formal logic, i.e., 'Every' and 'At least one', 'Every Queens College student' and of other plural quantifiers such as 'Few students at Queens College', 'Several linguistics majors' etc. I also argue for demonstrative noun phrases, e.g., 'This/that Queens College student' as serving in the instances for such generalizations. My evidence is that this approach is more conservative than the standard views (e.g. Restricted quantifiers: Bach, Neale, Cherchia and Binary Quantifiers: Evans, Wiggins, Davies). Conservatism requires mirroring best in predicate logic the regimented natural language sentence. Another part of my evidence is that the account offered has greater explanatory power explaining intuitively valid reasoning not captured on the rival accounts.