Slides from this talk are available here.
Speaker: Maria Aloni (ILLC, University of Amsterdam)
Date and Time: Thursday, February 13th 2025, 16:30-18:00
Venue: ILLC Seminar Room F1.15, Science Park 107 and online.
Title: Nothing is logical.
Abstract. People reason in ways which often deviate from classical logic. An influential idea introduced by Grice is that these deviations are not logical mistakes but rather consequences of pragmatic enrichments: the fact that language users often interpret linguistic expressions as conveying more than what is literally said (Grice 1989). In the Gricean tradition, pragmatic enrichments (also known as implicatures) are derived as the product of rational interactions between cooperative language users. In this project we explore a different explanation for some of the non-classical inferences people draw in conversation: they are not the result of Gricean reasonings but rather a consequence of a tendency in human cognition to avoid empty representations (neglect-zero bias). In the talk I will first introduce a team-based modal logic which models the neglect-zero tendency and makes predictions on its impact on reasoning and interpretation; and then present the results of some experiments we conducted to test these predictions.