Seminar session on Questions on Monday November 9th

Questions can be viewed as triggers for explicit events of ‘issue management’. We give a complete calculus in the dynamic-epistemic logic style for events of raising, refining, and resolving an issue, all in the presence of information flow through observation or communication.

Questions still exhibit an aura of mystery and challenge as it is commonly found with natural language phenomena that lie on the border between semantics and speech acts. Several treatments have been proposed within denotational semantics, nevertheless there is no strong consensus about what kind of a semantic object their meaning is. We want to propose Dynamic Epistemic Logic (DEL) as a powerful tool for a unified treatment of all question types. We will start with an epistemic interpretation of Dynamic Propositional Logic and show how to use it to formalize yes/no questions and answerhood. We will then extend it with public announcements and public questions in order to account for embedded questions. This approach can be generalized to the case of constituent questions in the line of Groenendijk & Stokhof and offers some additional benefits with respect to the interaction of questions and other phenomena, e.g. presuppositions.

The aim of our article is to explore questions in the process of communication in a group of agents. The most appropriate framework for this seems to be the one of dynamic epistemic logic. We start with a representation of questions in the framework of a standard epistemic logic. Then we explore the information exchange in the process of asking questions in the logic of public announcement.