Talk by Tim Fernando
Non-Monotonic Consequences of Preferential Contextual Disambiguation
A notion |- of logical consequence between (unambiguous) formulas is
extended to ambiguous expressions through disambiguations mapping the latter to
the former. A particular system of *preferential contextual*
disambiguation is related to rules for non-monotonic consequence relations
|~ (e.g., Gabbay 1985) by ascribing an indeterminate background context
to |~, formulated as an "ambiguous" expression c that is then
"merged" with the antecedent (to the left of |~); that is, for all
expressions e, e'
e |~ e' iff c^e |-< c'
for some binary (merge) operation ^ on expressions, and
some "preference" relation < on disambiguations that induces an
extension |-< of |-. On the one hand, this interpretation
provides a representation of |~ based on an ambiguous expression of the
background conditions underlying the entailment. On the other hand, rules for
|~ suggest requirements on disambiguations and on preferences between
them.
Paul Dekker, November 2, 1995