This Monday 23 of November at 14:00 hrs we will have our next seminar’s sessions. This time, Kurt Ranalter, from the Universita’ degli Studi di Verona, will talk about Towards a dynamic account for an expressive conception of norms (abstract below). After the talk, further discussions about the topic and other dynamic business can take place with some drinks!
The meeting will take place in room C0.110 at Science Park 904.
Abstract
We report on work in progress concerning possible interpretations of deontic expressions such as “everyone must pay taxes”. If we look at them from a speech act theory perspective, such expressions may stand for assertions or prescriptions, depending on the specific context of their utterance or, alternatively, on whether the modal verb “must” is regarded as a force indicating device or not. Both of these readings can be naturally expressed in Carlo Dalla Pozza’s pragmatic framework for an expressive conception of norms. One of the aims of this talk is to give a concise introduction to the basic concepts of the framework. Its key feature is that it extends classical logic with a pragmatic logic of speach act types. Interestingly, there are two observations about the framework that look promising from the dynamic point of view. First, the semantics of the logic of speech act types is given in terms of justification values and the justification conditions may be seen as providing a sort of precondition for the speech act under consideration. Second, the two levels of the framework are tied together with the so called reflection principle, thus providing a sort of postcondition for the speech act under consideration. We shall briefly sketch how these aspects could possibly be accomodated in a proof-theoretic framework.