The implicature of 'free choice'

By JLS
for the GC

As R. O. Doyle notes in I-Phi,

""Free choice" is an important term in the debates about quantum mechanics and physical reality. It was introduced by Niels Bohr in his response to Albert Einstein's famous challenge to the "completeness" of quantum mechanics."

In 1935, I think.

Then there's "FC" which is "free choice" as used by (some) linguists. It refers to topics like 'any'. "Choose any theory. Not just any" (title of essay by Horn, or something similar). The locus classicus being H. Kamp for the "Aristotelian Society".

H. Kamp (born 1940). Dutch linguist. Author of "Free choice permission" (Aristotelian Society, 1974). Kamp started academic life as a student in Mathematics and Physics at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands. His aim was to become a theoretical physicist. After his B.A. he wanted to do something different for a year "before throwing myself into the black hole of theoretical physics from which, I was told by people in the know, there would be no return". He writes: "Over the years my research interests have converged ever more strongly on the question how human beings represent meaning and how those representations enable them to do the various things that people do with information, such as drawing inferences and making plans for action, and most particularly, how they obtain such representations from what we read or are told, and how we reconvert them into words when we want to communicate them to others."
---- "Because of their linguistic dimension these interests subsume most of semantics and pragmatics, large parts of logic and in view of their language-transcendent dimension they include pretty much all that belongs within a general Theory of Information of the sort that is slowly but steadily taking shape."

Refs. Menedez-Benito, "The grammar of choice": "Investigating the behavior of FC items will be instrumental in answering this ..... investigates the semantics of universal Free Choice (FC) items1, i.e., ..... generically depending on the environment they occur in (see, e.g., Kamp )
semanticsarchive.net/Archive/GQ1OGQ3O/Menendez-Benitodiss.pdf

Some of Menedez-Benito references include:

Aloni, Maria. 2003. Free choice in modal contexts. In Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 7, Arbeitspapier Nr. 114, FB Sprachwissenschaft, ed. Matthias
Weisgerber, 25-37. (http://ling.uni-konstanz.de/pages/conferences/sub7/)

Dayal, Venneta. 2004a. The Universal Force of Free Choice Any. In Linguistic Variation Yearbook 4: 5-40.

Farkas, Donka F. to appear. Free choice in Romanian. In Festschrift for Larry Horn, ed. Gregory Ward and Betty Birner.

Giannakidou, Anastasia. 2001. The meaning of free choice. Linguistics and Philosophy 24:659–735.

Horn, Larry. 2000. Any and ever: Free choice and free relatives. In Proceedings of the 15th Annual Conference of the Israeli Association for Theoretical Linguistics, 71–
111.

Kamp, H. 1973. Free choice permission. Aristotelian Society.

Quer, Josep. 2000. Licensing free choice items in hostile environments: The role of aspect and mood, Unpublished manuscript.