Barker 2001 on Ross 1941 failing to quote from Grice

From online study by C. Barker, 2010:

Barker writes:

"Since Ross 1941 ["Imperatives and logic", Theoria -- discussed by Hare vis a vis Williams and Grice --], it has been clear that the logic of obligation and permission
behaves dramatically di erently than other sorts of ordinary reasoning."


(1) a.

You may post the letter or burn it

b. You may post the letter
c. You may burn the letter

If (1a) is true, then it is certainly true that you may post the letter.

Likewise, it is equally true that you have it within your power to safely burn the letter.

So an
adequate account of the meaning of (1a) must explain how it comes to imply
(1b) and (1c).

This pattern is by no means the usual case. Consider a variation on (1) in
which the permissive modal may is omitted:

(2) a. You burnt the letter or you posted it.

b. You burnt the letter
c. You posted the letter.

In this case, (2a) certainly does not imply either (2b) or (2c).

"So something
about permission talk correlates with the unusual implications we are concerned
with here."

"The puzzle posed by the facts in

(1) is known as the free choice permission
problem (Kamp (1973) attributes the choice of name to von Wright)."


"Since (1a) implies both (1b) and (1c), (1b) and (1c) are therefore both
equally true."

"Thus in many discussions, (1a) is said to imply (3a), since (3a) is
merely the conjunction of (1b) and (1c):

(3) a. You may eat an apple and you may (also) eat a pear.
b. You may eat an apple or you may (*also) eat a pear.

Crucially, however, (3a) has an interpretation on which it furnishes permission
to eat more than one piece of fruit."

"This interpretation is the one compatible
with adding also in the second conjunct. Now, although (1a) may be consistent
with a situation in which the addressee is allowed to eat more than one piece
of fruit (as we will see below), the truth of (1a) alone is never su cient to
guarantee that more than one piece of fruit may be eaten. As a result, (3b) is
a better candidate for a paraphrase of (1a): it, too (surprisingly!) implies (1b)
and (1c), but, like (1a), it does not ever justify eating more than one piece of
fruit. This is why also is never appropriate in the second disjunct in (3b) on
the intended reading.

What I am suggesting is that a complete characterization of permission
sentences must not only tell us whether permission exists and what type of
permission it is (i.e., permission to eat an apple versus permission to eat a
pear), it must also characterize how much permission has been granted. Thus
it must predict that (1a) and (3b) guarantee permission only to eat one piece
of fruit, but that (3a) can be used to provide permission to eat two pieces of
fruit.

The key insight that I would like to develop in this paper rst appears, as far
as I know, in unpublished work of Lokhorst (Lokhorst(1997)): that permission
and obligation is a resource-sensitive domain, so that logics based on (resourceinsensitive)
classical logic are not appropriate. Lokhorst suggests using Girard's
(1987) Linear Logic instead, and I will follow the technical details of his proposal
closely. The contribution of this paper will be to introduce Lokhorst's work
to a linguistic audience, to evaluate it with respect to competing linguistic
analyses, and to investigate the implications of adapting Lokhorst's proposal
for the theory of natural language semantics and pragmatics.
Resource-sensitive (`substructural') logics are already familiar in linguistics
as tools for building syntax/semantics interfaces (e.g., Moortgat 1997 or Dalrymple
2001).

"As far as I know, however, no one has yet suggested that natural
language connectives such as "or" or "and" can have uses in which they behave
semantically like connectives in a substructural logic, as I am suggesting here."


Kamp (1973, 1978) discusses free choice permission not just as a puzzle for
modeling reasoning about obligation (deontic logic), but as a puzzle for the
composition of natural language expressions. From the point of view of natural
language semantics, the interesting thing about the free choice permission
problem is that it appears to require not only making assumptions about the
meaning of certain uses of modal expressions such as may, but about the
meaning of the corresponding uses of the coordinating conjunctions and and
or. This will be true of the solution I o er below.

"Many solutions to the free choice permission problem rely on pragmatic
mechanisms for much of the heavy lifting, including Kamp 1978, Zimmermann
2000, Fox 2007, and others."

"The arguments that free choice implications are
pragmatic, and more specifcally are scalar implicatures, stem from discussions
of indefinites in Kratzer and Shimoyama 2002, as developed by Alonso-Ovalle
(2006) and Fox (2007)."

"The main evidence that free choice implications may
be scalar implicatures turns on the behavior of negated permission sentences."

"You may not eat an apple or a pear."

"I show how the analysis here can explain
the behavior of such sentences in section 5.

"In contrast to the pragmatic approaches, I will argue that the main free
choice implications, including especially the implications from (1a) to (1b) and
to (1c), are matters of ENTAILMENT [and not implicature]."


"To the extent that the analysis here is viable,
it calls into question whether free choice implications are indeed implicatures."

I discuss other entailment approaches (e.g., Aloni 2007) in section 6.2.