Abstract
There is a fruitful line of work in incorporating questions into epistemic logic (van Benthem and Minică 2009; Baltag et al. 2016; among others); among others). Based on the viewpoint that communication is a process of raising and resolving issues, inquisitive semantics introduces a uniform notion of meaning for statements and questions, thus can serve as a suitable device for this purpose. For instance, Inquisitive Plausibility Model (Ciardelli and Roelofsen 2014) is able to combine questions with the Epistemic Plausibility Model (IPM) (Baltag and Smets 2006a, b) to capture not only the belief and knowledge of agents, but also the issues they entertain. Building on this, we develop an Inquisitive Plausibility-Urgency Model (IPUM), which not only allows us to model knowledge, belief and issues, but also the urgency of the issues, hence lead us to towards formalizations of more dynamics of questions.
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Notes
- 1.
Note that this condition only applies to urgently entertained issues. The reason is, for any issue \(\mu \) that is not urgently entertained, an information state \(\alpha \) that resolves both \(\mu \) and an urgently entertained issue \(\mu '\) would be preferred than any other \(\alpha '\) that only resolves \(\mu \).
- 2.
Retrieving the fundamental issues are actually the major motivation for the original paper. However, we noticed, as was also kindly pointed out by Dr. Floris Roelofsen, this can only be done under the condition that the clusters are strictly ordered. This result is really unsatisfying. However, this model is successful in capturing reactions towards partial resolutions, and by altering our motivation, we get to the conditional definition of urgency relation, which is also more intuitive.
References
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Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank Dr. Alexandru Baltag for the course Dynamic Epistemic Logic at the University of Amsterdam. We are also grateful to Dr. Floris Roelofsen, the Inquisitive Semantics group at the ILLC, and the anonymous reviewers for their valuable feedbacks. Last but not least, many thanks to ESSLLI 2018 Grant Committee and EACL for the student grants.
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Zhao, Z., Seip, P. (2019). “First Things First”: An Inquisitive Plausibility-Urgency Model. In: Sikos, J., Pacuit, E. (eds) At the Intersection of Language, Logic, and Information. ESSLLI 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11667. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-59620-3_13
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