Vít Punčochář: Logic of Questions (Apr 9)

This lecture introduces inquisitive semantics as a contemporary framework for the logical analysis of questions. It is standard to analyse declarative sentences in terms of their truth conditions. However, truth-conditional semantics cannot be straightforwardly extended to questions, since they lack truth values. Inquisitive semantics addresses this limitation by shifting the focus from truth to informational support. This support-based perspective enables a uniform treatment of both statements and questions, and provides the means to analyse various interrogative types, including conjunctive and conditional questions. It also captures logical dependencies between questions and systematically accounts for phenomena such as presupposition. The resulting system, inquisitive logic, extends classical logic in a conservative way: it preserves classical treatment of statements but enriches the logical space to incorporate also questions. The lecture will present the basic ideas and underlying principles of this approach.